Exciting day

Today it has been an exciting day. While preparing my presentation about software cost estimation I got a call by the school of our daughters. Janina has had an accident during the gymnastic exercises. While she tried to get a basketball she noticed a crackle and a pain in her rear. So they called an ambulance and she's been driven to the hospital. Meanwhile I fetched my wife and we drove to the hospital, too. She stayed there during the medical examination and I drove back to work. Fortunately it seems to be nothing serious. But we've been scarried.

So the next thing has been my presentation. The feedback has been good. First I stumbled a bit and lost the thread once. But then it got more and more fluent and I've been able to add some side notes out of my experience. Like at my last presentation about requirements engineering if noticed that the motivation part and the theoretical informations are ok. But I need to change both presentations into a more practical approach with more real life examples to demonstrate the advantage of the usage of the described techniques. I'll now first fix some smaller bugs in both presentations, a kind of minor release, and then think about how to better communicate the ideas and necessities behind them. The last step will be a translation into English and a migration from PowerPoint to my new Keynote layout. I'm currently designing it for an upcoming presentation about the risks and opportunities of changes.

The last event yesterday should have been the Apple keynote. Ok, the new MacBook Air is a nice peace of hardware. But currently not for me. I've got my MacBook for six month now and it's still very good. So I think I'll change in about two years again and then will get a system with a quad core, 4 GB RAM and a 200 GB SSD for 1.500 Euros. *smile* Now I'm awaiting OS X 10.5.2 which is expected to be released soon.

New MacBook arrived

The last days I've had a lot on my plate. The school year is ending and we had to write the regulations for the election of the parent representatives in the steering committee. This is a new construct all schools in Lower Saxony establish with the next school year. I've also had several customer visitings, a training for my role as a team manager, and a refinancing of our house. Oh, and by the way, I've had my birthday last week. Now my age reached the answer for all questions of the universe. *smile* But now this stress reduces and we slowly move into our summer holidays (OK, the childs do, I've got to wait until august).

Last saturday my new MacBook arrived. I've got the 2.16 MHz with 2 GB RAM and the 120 GB HDD. After now about 32 month my PowerBook will be sold. It has done a good job but now it's time for the new one. And it's a great piece of hardware again. I compare it to the HP NC4400 I'm using in my job. The HP is slower, it has fewer memory and a smaller HDD, and - what really disappoints me - is very bad manufactured. Advantages where the docking station, the external button to switch of WLAN and Bluetooth before the OS is started, and the weight. It can also be upgraded to a larger RAM size than the MacBook.

Additional advantages of the MacBook are the very good manufacturing, the bright screen, the track pad, the included DVD writer, the camera and the microphone (I've allready used it for a video chat, really nice), the MagSafe power connector, FireWire, and Front Row with the remote control. But most of all it's the software I allready know from my PB. OS X and the Mac apps I use are easier to handle without loosing power or flexibility. So I can just repeat the reason expressed of many Apple fans: "It works.".

The next steps will be the testing of VMware Fusion with images we're using at work and with the simulated Linux environment I've installed on my server at my hoster. So I can better test changes before they go live.