Virtually Paul

Upgrading to Auditor

February 19, 2007 on 9:27 pm | In Information Technology, The Life of Paul |

Yep… not long now before a number of people at work achieve their four year dream of getting me to wear a tie to work.  In case you missed the post, in amongst all the I-sang-live-on-stage-with-Third-Day hype… I am about to become an auditor.

I’ll be working 3 days per week, while starting part time for a Graduate Certificate in Chartered Accounting Foundations.  I’m looking forward to the challenge.

The best bit is that the firm have bought a new laptop for me to use in my new vocational capacity.  It’s an ASUS manufactured, Intel branded, Intel Core Duo 2 with 1Gb of RAM (for now), 120Gb hard drive and a bunch of bells and whistles on top of that, including a 15.4″ colorshine widescreen and a 256Mb graphics card.  Yeah… I know.  It’s not that cool… but it’s a work laptop.  What do you expect?

The best/worst bit (jury is still out) is that it’s running Windows Vista Ultimate.  I started setting it up today and to be honest all it did was frustrate me because I can’t find anything.  I’ve become very efficient with Windows XP so looking around and searching for stuff is just a hassle even though I’m sure your average home/business user will find it reasonably intuitive and user-friendly.

The interface is very Mac-ish, which is not surprising given that IE7 is very Firefox-ish… yet they’ve still retained a very ‘Windows’ approach to navigation.  One of the things I liked least about using Jas’s Mac was the weird quick-launch-on-steroids vibe it had.  Vista is a better middle ground in my biased opinion.  It’s not making me learn any transformationally different paradigms for navigation, for which I’m somewhat grateful.

Ask me if I hate it some time in April.  I’ll know by then.

P.S. Apparently Geoff invented policies.   Let’s get him.   Or seek his permission to write them.