Still Waiting... Oh the anguish!

I continue to eagerly await the arrival of my MacBook Pro. It was at one point within arms reach of my front door... but not for long--  the FedEx man was much quicker than my wife, who apparently was in the back yard doing some chores hoping to hear the truck's arrival. No such luck.

However, since I just got back from a trip in Orlando, FL a few days ago, it wasn't a huge deal since I have several things to catch up on. I think the neighbors may have been worried that my yard was going to turn into a jungle. Case in point: I had to set the tractor cut depth to 5" and still had clumps. Don't even ask about the weeding.

In an effort to self-soothe, I figured I would do a quick post on some of my upcoming plans. This will also serve as a "todo" list so I can refer to it later.

1. Figure out what I'm going to do with my current desk space so I can make room for the MBP. Right now I have dual monitors and not an inch of desk space to spare, especially with the recent addition of a speakerphone for my MagicJack. Most likely, I will utilize one of the PC monitors for the MBP, but I still need to figure out how to make enough room on my desk. I also need to get another power strip. This is probably something I should do sooner rather than later!

2. Choose VMWare Fusion or Parallels to facilitate the install of Windows 8 Developer Preview. I am still not sure which version I want to go with yet. It seems like most blog entries or articles I come across are Fusion users, but Parallels released a new version and I like the idea of having a more seamless experience (+1 for Parallels).  We'll see. I found both  VMWare HOWTO guide and Parallels that seem simple enough. The VMWare one is linked directly from the blog, whereas Parallels doesn't seem to be as forthcoming (+1 for VMWare).

Another interesting observation is that the steps to install on a Mac seem to be somewhat less complicated than installing on a PC in a virtual environment. I remember doing all this with Vista and Windows 7 previews, so it's not rocket science, but I know a few .NET developers that are still struggling with it and not having much success.

3. Get a good external backup drive and utilize Carbon Copy Cloner (free software). My laptop comes with Snow Leopard and I want to upgrade it to Lion (free upgrade). Before I do that, I want to make sure I have a bootable backup.  I also eventually want to get a drive that is faster than 1TB, but is also a Hybrid SSD like the Seagate Momentus. Right now that drive only goes up to 500 GB so I may hold off for a bit.

4. Play around with some video footage so I can familiarize myself with Final Cut Pro (video editing software) and Aperature (photo editing software). I've been watching a few good tutorials on Youtube to help get me up to speed.

5. Build out my dream video editing rig. This will require the following:

a) Getting an external closure and pulling out the internal super drive to make room for an internal drive
b) Utilizing the space for a "raw footage" drive, SSD or SSD hybrid, 1 TB
c) Thunderbolt Raid 5 (striped, backed up) with at least of 2TB of space for video editing and rendering.

One can dream, can't he? :)