Can’t say enough about this software.  I was able to start work on the VMs that I had been using in Windows without any problems–a straight copy over and I was up and running (perhaps Parallels can open VMware files–but that was enough for me to stick with Fusion).  And with the "Unity" feature, it just doesn’t get any easier to work with Windows apps while staying in OS X.

I needed to keep my email in Outlook 2007 (Entourage didn’t cut it, there’s no way I can see to make it work with RPC/HTTP, and the online commentary is that it uses WebDav–well, we don’t). I typically work with at least two VMs open, one of which is a VM of my Base Camp partition (hurray for 4G on a MacBook actually meaning 4 Gigabytes of RAM).  Voila, hit the Unity menu, and you get the screen below.  I am missing some of the cut-and-paste I got between Windows VMs on Windows, but that may just be a configuration setting somewhere.

I have had the Kensington 120W Universal Power Adapter for some time now, along with a plethora of bits and extensions–it’s the only power supply I take with me in my laptop bag, and I charge the two laptops, the Blackberry, bluetooth headset, iPod, PSP, and just about anything else I take along.  It’s slim, light, and is a great replacement for the brick that came with the Dell M90 (though the BIOS won’t let you boot off the adapter because it is less than 130W).  Then came the MacBook.  That takes a special power adapter, the MagSafe, which they have not (yet) licensed to any third-party manufacturers.  That means no Kensington bits, no iGo bits, nothing. I’m stuck with an amusing little chunk of a power supply, and nothing to work from in the car or on a plane.  I found the MagSafe Airline adapter, but it expressly notes that it will not work in cars.  I have not yet found a way to power the MacBook from a 12V port.  Little things like this remind me of the tradeoff I evaluated back in college: I picked PC’s because I could muck with them, buy pieces and parts from the local store, while the Mac folks had to find someone with that special case cracking tool.  Time to get a bigger bag.