About a year ago, I broke free of the evil Bill Gates at home, using an iMac as my main computer and a MacBook Pro as my road machine. At work, however, I was still obliged to muddle along with a Windows XP machine. Yet, while procrastinating one day by roaming the interwebs, I had discovered lots of articles about connecting Macs to a Windows network.
This led to massive pleading on my part, which culminated today with the arrival and installation of my new Mac setup at work.
That's a 27-inch iMac on the right and a 24-inch LCD display on the left. I'm using the latter as an extension of my desktop. I swapped the standard Apple keyboard for the extended one with numeric keypad (why Apple thinks most people would prefer a keyboard without the numeric keypad is beyond me). I also swapped out the Apple mouse for a 2-button mouse.
I revel in the massive amounts of desktop real estate. I love not having to remember two sets of shortcuts, menus, etc.... The clarity of the screen is amazing.
I've added a couple of utilities that I've found useful at home. Sizeup is a shareware program that gives you features comparable to Windows 7's snap feature:
SizeUp allows you to quickly position a window to fill exactly half the screen (splitscreen), a quarter of the screen (quadrant), full screen, or centered via the menu bar or configurable system-wide shortcuts (hotkeys). Similar to "tiled windows" functionality available on other operating systems. Additional features include moving windows from one monitor to another, from one Space to another, and restoring a window to its original size and position (SnapBack).
I use Chronosync to sync my network files to a USB drive and the USB drive to my home and road machines. It's very transparent and easy to automate.
So a big shout out to the good people in the UCLA law school IT department -- especially Albert, Scott, and Jason -- who made this possible.
Me so happy.
