OSes

I am very much loving this whole VMWare Fusion thing I've got going on, especially with the extra RAM I added a couple months back.

It's taken me a while to really trust it, but I am starting to trust it more and more, now.  I woke up this morning, dying to write some documentation for Microsoft Word, IN Microsoft Word.  My own little cheat sheet, if you will.  I didn't feel like using my work computer because I also wanted to check mail and have options in case I changed my mind and felt like working on pictures instead.  This is precisely why the VM was created in the first place!

So, I fired up Talon (who was sleeping) and checked mail.  Then I bypassed photos and went into Windows 7, where I have Office 2010.  I fired up Word, which came up faster than it normally does on my work computer.  Of course, there are other factors besides the 64 bit OSes at play here, but still... wow.  I began jotting down some thoughts and was immediately annoyed by the "Normal" style and its multi-spacing BS.  So I decided that was what I should start documenting - how to change that default behaviour once and for all.  (It drives me nuts at work, too.)

That of course meant some quick research.  The research turned up nothing, so I set out to figure it all out myself.  THAT was not NEARLY as difficult as I'd expected.  You simply right-click on the style, modify it, and whammo, done.  Forever.  Then I got fancy and decided to completely get rid of the "No Spacing" style.  I saved everything as my own quick set then figure out how to set THAT as default.

I is a happy camper.

The funny thing about all this is that I was using Windows on my mac and nearly forgot about that bit of trivia while I was working.  It's quite seamless... the only thing I feel uncertain about are the keys, because I know they're in weird spots - alt, for instance, is not next to the space bar, and so forth.  I suppose I could map those, but I like learning the default locations of things because otherwise it causes me issues down the road when I reformat things.  Four years from now if I do that, it's gonna cause me headache if I've fully customized everything!

On another note, though... I have figured out that writing "how to" documents is also a good way of documenting your personalizations.  I added a section in there for default save locations, so I know where to find my quick style and back it up.  I could then copy this quick style to my work computer and presto, the same working environment.  Go, me!

I love computers this morning.  But I'm off to work soon, so we'll see how long that holds.  After all, I'll be dealing with a bunch of non-vm's running only Windows 7, 32-bit.  Huh.  I wonder if the Windows I just created an image of happens to BE 32-bit.  I may have inadvertently made a 64-bit image.  That would be bad.  BAD!!  (So far it's working so I'd guess it's 32-bit.  Otherwise the printers would not have worked.)

~nv