Jason Schroeder's Blog

I have been wowfully amis about keeping my mobile work / home use technology up to date and I am near a tipping point of simply being inefficient.  So, time to start a change.  But change from what to what?  Let me give you my profile to start.

We are a family of four with two boys ages 3 and 1.  My wife has her own 'job exclusive' laptop for vpn access into her work and uses our old home pc basically for browsing, email and does some digital picture type stuff.  My 3 year old is just starting to get into some of the 'educational' computer games but will quickly expand his investigation of this digital era we are in.  As for me, I use our home pc sparingly for browsing and keeping some financial stuff.  From a work perspective, I would classify as a typical Sun mobile person.  Our Sun field office is simply a drop in center - really just for a mailstop, so while I don't often travel outside the immediate area, I spend a great deal of time bouncing between a 'home office/toy room/guest room', working at various customer sites, car travel between customers, etc, etc.

Inventory:
    Wife work laptop
    My laptop from Sun (Toshiba M2 - nice) + an old personal laptop that I bought referb years ago (IBM Thinkpad 600e)
    Home PC - Dell 600e
    My work cell phone - Kyocera QCP 3035

My issues:
    -Our home Dell runs Windows 98 - and I refuse to upgrade....  <alarm, alarm>  Yeah, I know... so while I do take some elementary firewall precautions on our home network, and run current anti-virus/spyware - this keeps me up at night.
    -I rarely use the Dell, (not because of Windows) but because it lives in a makeshift closet/office/craft/junk room under the stairs that my wife loves....
    -My boys are going to quickly expand their use and need for technology
    -I want to enable better safeguards and limits to their technology use (parental control browsers /IM, etc, etc)
    -My wife enjoys working with digital pictures and movies, but is limited by what we currently have by the way of software to make this troublefree and easy
    -My work life revolves around the Toshiba laptop - in a bad, bad dependent way
    -I work from many customer sites on a temporary basis - and often don't have authentication through the customer proxies to access web, email, etc.  So, while I am at the customer, I am often cut off from the 'heartbeat' of Sun (Sun is _such_ an email driven company).  So, I spend my evenings catching up on email and mailling lists, etc, etc.
    -In my job, I tend to do a lot of proof of concepts and demos.  More often than not, those POC and demo requests today are for Solaris 10 and Solaris based software (go figure).  My core Toshiba laptop happily runs Java Desktop on linux.  I have been very happy with this, but this means that I use my Thinkpad (which has been running Solaris on Intel for 5 years) for these Solaris requests.  Using the Thinkpad for zones/dtrace/smf and the like is a piece of cake - a little more problematic for the 366mhz cpu to run Identity Manager....
    -Since I am so dependent on my primary laptop - I am very hesitent to toss on new alpha/beta stuff, change configs, experiment, etc - so my older laptop is my crash and burn / reload whatever bits I want sandbox.
    -I LOVE my cell phone.  This darn Kyocera with Verizon is simply the absolute best phone combination I have ever had.  I regularly go up and down ELEVATORS in many customer sites shielded for datacenters - and I have never dropped a call.  It's funny to watch the other people with me in the elevator just waiting for my call to get disconnected - never happens (of course that is mixed with some amount of pissedoffness that I am being very rude and talking on a cell in a multi-occupant, confined space...).  The problem is that by today's standards, this thing is obsolete - no email, very small screen, very early cut of browser based activity.

So, there you have it.  But I do have a plan to get me and our family back up to speed.  More on that next time.

/jason