Getting re-acquainted with the other 97%

Today I officially started my new contract (aka Freelance) position and was issued an IBM T41 laptop… It’s been quite a few years since I switched to Mac and needless to say it’s taking some getting used to in order to adjust to some of the differences. The damn second mouse button keeps getting tapped and the trackpad automatically being activated as a clicker are two things which have busted me continuously today. All in all, it’s not that big a deal to switch though many of my core apps are no longer around or are quite different.

Office is similar enough, but now I am in Outlook and not Apple’s Mail or even Entourage. One thing, when you are on an exchange server, you’ve got to hand it to MS, the damn thing works pretty well. I was able to defeat the IT lack of support for Palm, by using T-Mobile as my remote mail proxy for wireless access which rocks. It’s only POP3 rather than full outlook, but it works and I can easily receive mail when away from the VPN. This company only supports blackberry officially… Palm is on your own and yet it took about 10 minutes for me to rememeber tha TMO was capable of this trick. I last did it with Lotus Notes… nice.

My main organizational stuff is what I am immediately missing. OneNote looks good… have to check the demo to see if it will do what I need for meeting minutes and project organization. I’m used to Notetaker as a mainstay and will definitely miss it’s capabilities. I will also miss NetNewsWire for my RSS feeds… I’ve been messing with FeedDemon which is close in how it works, though it feels more liek Shrook to me… I may end up going over to Bloglines so I can view everything through Firefox.

One thing I like a great deal about this Thinkpad is the keyboard… it’s got excellent feedback. the battery also seems to be better than my PowerBook (not too surprising there)… have to see how it handles an extensive day of being unplugged through some meetings and using wireless.

So far so good here on the left coast…tired tough. Time for some reading and sleep.

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