A Couple Announcements
Two things that we have been waiting for have just come to pass in the last week. Many of you know that I had applied for a different position within Oracle a couple months ago. This new position was offered to me back in early October, but due to the bizarre approval process for these kinds of things at Oracle, I had no idea if or when I would be able to actually take the job. Thankfully, I got an email from my new manager this weekend that the paperwork had been approved! It’s effective from Nov. 12 though I won’t be actually “on the job” until Dec. 3 as I have agreed to stay on in my current position for a couple more weeks. I’m leading a project at the FDA and it’s no small task to transfer knowledge to my replacement. Anyway, my new post is in the Product Management group and while that probably means nothing to most of you, suffice it to say that I will be working on improving our content management software, doing training for salespeople and partners, and a bunch of other things related to the software direction and how it is marketed and presented. It’s a nice step for me and I’m pretty excited to be doing something slightly different, having been in consulting now for almost 8 years.
The other thing that happened was that Gretchen got a new computer! I’m guessing you’ve all seen her clunky, hand-me-down boat anchor of a laptop that she has been using for all of her fantastic photo and website stuff. It’s my old consulting laptop and since it’s over 7 years old, it’s now become famously (and frustratingly) slow and unreliable. We’ve been talking for nearly a year about getting something better and I must say that Gretchen certainly deserves it. We thought at first that we would get a newer PC laptop, but after exploring the options in the Apple Macintosh world, we were quickly sold on them. I was particularly impressed after having a close look at one at Best Buy a couple weekends ago.
So unbeknownst to Gretchen, I ordered a 20″ iMac last Monday. I worked from home on Friday, knowing that the UPS delivery tracking said it was coming that day. Aiding my sneaky plans, Gretchen needed to take a little nap (at my encouragement, of course) and to my delight, the UPS man showed up 30 minutes later. Quinn helped me bring it in and we set it up in about 10 minutes. Quinn really enjoyed waking mommy up and telling her that she had a surprise, even though he was so excited that he let slip what it was before he brought her in the office.
It’s really an amazing little unit since, unlike a PC, all the components are inside the monitor. It’s still a flat monitor, but all you do is plug it in and go. The basic USB and other ports are on the back, there is a slot on the side for CDs and DVDs, and that’s really it. What you see in these pictures is everything: no unit under the desk.
It’s got built-in wireless internet, built-in camera; pretty sweet. Part of the package we bought included a program called Parallels which allows us to run Windows on it at the same time. So there no longer is any reason to shun Macs because you can’t get the same software as a PC (which was my excuse before). I personally don’t know if I’ll ever be buying a PC again. The iMacs are that nice, not to mention how easy they are to use.
So next time any of you are over, you’ll have to check out Gretchen’s new toy. And if you thought the stuff she did before was good, she’s doing wonders with this already.