I have thought a few times about what all I would need to do to leave Boeing after 22 years. Boeing has taken care of many things for me over the years, now I have to fill in these blanks.
As I wrote this section the length of the post became longer than I wanted it. In part one I will focus mainly MS Office replacement and then in Part II I will look at email replacement for Outlook.
At home, my wife and son have laptops, my daughter has a desktop that I share for personal items like downloading podcasts to my IPOD. I was just thinking how many of the concepts in that last sentence would not of made sense just a few years ago, pretty amazing how quickly are technology progresses. I have used my Boeing laptop for both personal and business use for many years, so I have a mixture of files on my laptop that I need to untwine. Like I have a personal journal that I have written for many years that I would hate to lose.
Last week, I purchased a new laptop for myself and started getting it set up to handle job searching. I was able to move the personal files. Didn’t care too much about files that just a few months ago seemed so important—files about Boeing work stuff and the all important projects that I have been working on. The important Boeing stuff is already on file servers at work, so come Friday I will delete the copies that are my Boeing Laptop’s hard drive before I turn it in. I’m assuming that others will wipe the disk clean, but just in case I’ll try to clean it a bit.
I have been trying to get by without purchasing Microsoft products. They are fantastic products but the initial cost and then cost of upgrades on these is just too much. In the next release (office 2010 there business model is suppose to change, so I will look at them again in the fall of this year).
I have used the Google products for a couple years. Some are great and some aren’t quite there yet. Google Documents has most of the functionality of MS Office, but it is not quite to the point where I trust it for all my needs. I would have a hard time using it for something like creating a resume that I could hand to people. I use it for files that I want to share with people over the internet or that I want to get to from what every computer I happen to be on.
I have also built several websites on Google Sites. These are great for sharing information across a wide audience. You can house files on Google documents and share them by email address to whoever you want. You can link to these files from any Google site that you have built. I have been toying with the idea of building a profession profile website, I have some drafts, but as of yet haven’t gotten it to a point where I would feel comfortable releasing it.
Instead of MS Office and Google Documents, I downloaded Open Office and I’m trying to learn this as quickly as I can. It is not hard to learn as much as it is learning the new language for what they call things and where they put things. It can import and export MS formats, though it seems to do better with non 2007 version files. This product is open source product free to download and use and is in part sponsored by Sun and Oracle. Sun sells a product with some enhancements and support based on this platform. This product seems fully functional and on par with Office 2003. I love the new office interface in 2007, so going back to a 2003 interface is disappointing. But other than that I have no negatives to report so far, I haven’t used the database and presentation parts though the word and spreadsheet parts are good. So far I think it will meet my needs.
The last comment concerning this computer setup is with the windows 7 OS, this has been really good. I’m learning a lot about what it can do, at least for home it seems like worth the upgrade.
I’m still comprehending the idea that Friday I won’t be working for Boeing any longer—glad I never got that Boeing tattoo. Several people have checked in with me today via my various networking point (Facebook, LinkedIn, email, phone etc.) I can’t tell people how much this means to me.
My wealth has increased dramatically in the last couple of months due to going through this warn notice process. I have consciously tried to maintained connected with many family and friends, reconnected with many that I haven’t connected with in a long time, and I have made a wealth of new friends of people that are in my same boat as we are help each other through this and others that are interested in the process and in helping out. Or just new friends because I’m being more coconscious and appreciative about my network. And in the end, this is the only wealth that really matters.
In my next post, I will cover my replacement choice Outlook and new product by Google called Google Voice.
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