I recently had a couple of experiences with two of the biggest shipping companies in the world that made me laugh. In the first case, said company delayed a delivery to our office because a suite number was missing. Amazing that a company can ensure packages reach their destination anywhere in the world but cannot find a suite in a building with only two floors being occupied. Even better, the package was sent on a Tennessee day trip just to make it back to Tempe that same evening.

The second experience with a different shipping company, although this is probably not their fault, we recently bought a new computer system for the office. We have been receiving the system, one box at a time over the last three years. I felt I needed to apologize to the delivery person after the third daily delivery in a row and even offerred him something to drink for his trouble. Based on his comment, it appears it is not unusual and he told us a lot of computers are being delivered over the last few days!

I have posted a few images of the new laptop that I picked up for the office as a replacement for my primary machine, a great Dell workstation running XP Pro. The Dell has been my only computer since day one at CPD. As a matter of fact, they ordered these machines before we were hired but thanks to University shipping problems, they took longer to reach our office than expected. I worked on a dinosaur for the first few days, anxiously waiting for 6 big boxes (3 workstations and 3 CRTs) to come to the doors so we could finally get some work done.

Why am I making the change? well, with the new role at the office, I needed to have some independence from my desktop machine. I found myself taking my own laptop into a few meetings over the last few weeks. In addition, we needed access to Apple’s Intel platform for testing and development purposes a the office. I also believe Apple better fits my current needs and computing habits. I will continue to have access to Windows and continue to support our staff’s machines so I don’t anticipate losing touch with developments on that area. As a matter of fact, we’ll be testing a Vista machine in the near future as well.

This will be an experiment, an experiment on integrating this machine into the ASU infrastructure and in particular within our own department’s infrastructure. Will I be able to access out network storage shares? What about access to the SQl server given the current security policies in place?

I already know of one application that is Windows-only and it plays a pivotal role in our daily operations. For that, I am running XP on a Parallels virtual machine. What about email? I am not quite sure at this point what I am going to use, probably be testing a few programs as I go along, navigating the Enterprise world with the new Macbook. Just like the home experience was a few months ago, this should be a fun adventure.

Note: It should be noted the laptop was bought a few weeks ago and shipping was delayed a few days. Why would Apple deliver the new machine on the same day the announce iLife ’08 and will not allow me to upgrade for the $10? At least they didn’t announce a price drop, or worse yet, a processor upgrade.

It seems the last few times I come back to my blog for some novel blog post that I finally managed to put together in my head, I find myself with yet a new wordpress version update. Usually I would put it off for a few weeks unless it is a security fix and well the last couple updates I have made were because of a security vulnerability. Look at what I found tonight upon login into my blog dashboard.

Today we have two security-related releases available for both users of our main 2.2 branch and the legacy 2.0 branch

update: I updated to the latest version and address the couple security that were taken care of with this new release. I have a short cheat-sheet to help me run these updates and it took just a few minutes to run through the whole thing. Now back to my regular non-blogging!