I'm Moving...

Ok, I’m not MOVING moving, I’m just moving what seems like my life from one computer to another.  I wish I’d bought a Mac laptop (for what I do there’s really NO maintenance), but its PCs for work and I do have a couple of Windows-only apps and projects, so I have a new Sony Vaio laptop thanks to grant funding for an aviation and EMS-related grant I applied for and got over a year ago.  Cha Ching!

Moving data and apps between machines shouldn’t be this hard anymore.  The pain is compounded, of course, when the first of the new laptops you spend a day moving stuff onto turns out to be bad (USB really is a handy tool when it works, which it did not on that machine).

Before I slipped into moving hell, I had a hard choice to make… do I or don’t I replace my TabletPC.  I’ve really enjoyed the Tablet experience, and very nearly bought another but they seem to have become something of a novelty these days, and I decided, for this project, to sit it out and see where the products go.  Its not like I won’t be buying another laptop for years and years (I have another grant funded that needs another one this coming year).  The Tablet has real advantages – and still needs to become more “mainstream”, which I guess I didn’t help it do when I bought a regular old XP machine.

One thing I regret not having done with the Tablet, and probably something I’ll keep the machine around just to try is making mindmaps.  As people who know me know, if I’m explaining a concept or relating a story, chances are I’m drawing something, even when the drawings are very, very simple.  I only figured out recently that some folks don’t like that – they somehow take the drawing and the act of drawing as a comment on their abilty to grasp the concept, or their intelligence.  Never saw that coming – the drawings generally help ME.  Anyway… I’ll post more on mindmaps when I’m actually using the tools – given the way I think and explain concepts, I think it will be a great fit, and certainly the tablet is uniquely suited to the application…