Windows and Smiles (?!!)

While it’s not yet the end of the week, I thought I’d update you all on how things have been here at my new digs.

Quite simply, very nice. There are some great people here, I have a very cool boss (and she manages a team of one…me!), and I’m doing something I enjoy. So it’s been a good week!

There are certainly differences from AOL: for one, I’m now exclusively on a Windows box. I’ve always maintained that I use what ever platform that I need to get the job done. I just prefer my macs. However, there are a couple of cool things about Windows (I think I just heard all my linux and mac loving friends gasp);

• Outlook – while I know it’s the springboard along which many a virus is launched, I like the integration, and options within it. Mail is good, I like having the Calendar integrated smoothly, and I am utilizing the Tasks option to keep track of what I’m supposed to be doing here at work. I wish there was a decent ‘all-in-one’ equivalent for the Mac. I know, I know, there’s Entourage – but strangely enough, I never was able to acclimate to that as easy as I have Outlook. Perhaps I need to give it another look. Wish Apple would come up with an all-in-one package similar.
• Homesite – When I first started coding web pages with something other than a WYSIWYG editor (anyone remember AOLPress?), I used Homesite, created by Nick Bradbury (creator of the excellent Top Style, for those needing a great CSS editor). When I jumped to the Mac platform, there was never really one great WYSIWYN editor. Dreamweaver exists for the Mac, but for those wanting the basics, there was BBEdit and TextWrangler, skEdit, and the fabulous TextMate, among a host of others. If TextMate had just a couple of more tweaks, it’d be there…just not quite.
• SmartFTP – Don’t get me wrong…I’m perfectly happy with Transmit. But if I have to be on Windows, I can’t suggest a better FTP client than SmartFTP. It has a great functionality, a beautiful interface, and to top it all off, it’s free.

So all-in-all, being back on a Windows machine full-time isn’t quite the nightmare I envisioned… kinda having a bit of fun even. I discovered a very cool trick today in fact. I’ve been gathering a list of all the domains we own/host/DNS for, and have been importing them into an Excel spreadsheet. Somewhere in the neighborhood of about 1000 cells have been filled. It’s taken me nearly two days. After getting done, I thought that there has to be an easier way, and there is. What took me two days took me two minutes after learning you can import tabular data from a web page into Excel. Very easily in fact. Figures I learn this after I finished my task

O.o

At least I’m still smiling!