Nov 2007
Weblog | Dec 2007 | Oct 2007

Hardware update

11/30/2007 08:42 Filed in: General Tech
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After four years plus of six and seven day heavy usage, my Mac 15" Powerbook, Buford, is retiring on Monday as my main business computer. This thing has been across the country again and again, been dropped off airport security counters, left for hours on a freezing Alaska runway while four inches of snow piled up on its carry bag, visited the Caribbean several times, and just basically been beaten on pretty much constantly since 2003. Still works just fine, mind you, but operating systems and the graphic intensive stuff of today have left its 1GHz processor and limited graphics abilities pretty much behind. When I alter a cell's contents on an admittedly very large and complex Numbers cash flow spreadsheet, it can take five or six seconds to see the change!

I am admittedly an Apple enthusiast, but by no means a fanatic. There's an HP laptop right behind me that I've had longer than this thing that is still running XP like a champ... but it weighs a ton so you can't travel with it, the fan noise is like a jet landing, and it's got some of other lesser issues of the OS that moved me back to the Mac as primary in 2003 anyhow.

Don't know what I'm going to do with Buford, but it will remain in service around here at a secondary workstation, probably as a backup Filemaker design box on our network. I fully expect to get another four years out of it before we're done.

If the MacBook Pro that's arriving Monday is half as good as this thing has been, I'll be more than happy. Planning ahead, I bought a Fusion vmWare license for it when vmWare was still in beta early this year, and I am very much looking forward to having XP and OS X coexisting on the same computer. That alone is a good enough reason to move up, since I seem to spend more time on the road these days and I'll have a pretty complete arsenal with me at all times this way.
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Back To School (Sort Of)

11/06/2007 17:09

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Marist College's modified PolicePro 9 system for the Public Safety and Security department went live the first week of November. This is their third upgrade in nearly eight years since we started with them in January of 2000. We're currently in that period of working out bugs and procedural issues that always accompanies a significant upgrade, but already the grumbles are giving way to more pleasing feedback. We'll write some of it up here during the week, time permitting.

The growth of Marist over the past ten years or so has been remarkable. The place actually is as good looking as this great photograph from their website, taken from across the Hudson River. That nice structure at the lower right corner is the new boathouse along the recently reclaimed riverfront. The beautiful centerpiece, the new library, is at the center of the image.

You can't see the new football field in this picture, but it's lightyears ahead of what they had two years ago. There is a sort of design cohesiveness that has started to emerge on campus, ever since the construction of the student center several years ago kicked it off.

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