Dad Goes Back to Mac

For years, Dad was a two-OS guy, with two computers (a Mac and a Windows machine) whirring away on the desk. I was multitasking before multitasking was even a word, but I did most of the day-to-day computing on a Mac. In fact, all of the business accounting still happens on an ancient PowerMac G3 that I've dredged out of the closet annually for the last decade or so. But, at some point it just made more sense to only upgrade, backup and power one computer, and since the day job involved building Win32 applications, there wasn't much choice in which OS I wound up with. Until now. The new Intel based Macs run Windows (via Parallels) very efficiently, especially the latest Xeon based Mac Pro towers. In fact, according to the PassMarl benchmark my new Windows XP environment under Parallels is 300% faster than my old physical computer, and Visual Studio almost seems pleasant to use now. All of which means, I'm still on one computer, just one that is mostly sane most of the time now. And I can create and destroy virtual Windows machines for work projects at will. Bwahahaha! Having exiting the Mac arena prior to OS X coming on the scene, most of Dad's Mac skills are sadly out of date. But fear not! Several years of UNIX programming on several projects along with a recent tour of duty building a Django site on a SliceHost partition has certainly been helpful, and ultimately it's great to have a real shell again. I mean, just in case you wonder what I'm really doing all day. Anyway, the latest worksheet refresh was built on the new machine, and involved porting the Python project over. I'm continually amazed by Python and the only snag I ran into was in places where I'd hard-coded some file system paths. The worksheets now generate faster than ever and I'm looking forward to getting more content up soon! It's good to be Mac!