contracting   I have ended up spending a huge amount of time setting up my macbook so that I can use it for contract work. I had created a massive debt in setup time by relying on work laptops and machines in the past.

Mac setup (mostly using Tom Fogg's advice):

  • installed vmware fusion and setup a copy of windows XP to run inside this - (so that I can run any windows programs I might need)
  • installed my old photo processing tools inside this windows machine (an old version of acdsee, breezebrowser pro and breeze downloader pro)
  • I the bought 4GB of ram and replaced the 1gb installed - this gives me 3GB ram. Until I did this my machine was spending ages swapping when I ran vmware. It was amazing how easy it was to replace the ram, youtube videos supply all the necessary information.
  • installed skype - this is by far that best messenger client
  • installed thunderbird and associated plugs (lightning  and threadviz)
  • firefox plugins to help with tabs (aging tabs, tabs open relative, ctrl-tab, yahoo messenger for osx - but have now switched to adium. The latest version supports apple-f to search for friends by name. ( I have over 700 contacts in messenger - so visually looking though the list is not an option). I was using profiles.yahoo.com/contacts.php to search for a contact in a web page and clicking on the users messenger id to launch a web page - but this is a hassel as I spend a lot of time talking to various contacts on messenger)

I have also spent some time looking at accountants that can run the books for my company.

I read about SEO requirements for a CMS - there are loads and bascially all CMS' are poor at supporting SEO features. You just end up with the SEO expert telling the webdev what to manually change in the markup.

I am also looking at getting a 22 inch monitor that Tom recommended.