Day before yesterday I installed Parallels on my MacPro; it creates a virtual machine to enable me to run Windows.
Ten years ago, something like this would have had maybe a 25% chance of working, and when it did, it would be as slow as snails on valium. And it would have taken four hours with many wrong turns to install.
Parallels was as easy and user-friendly as they come. Windows runs on my Mac faster than it did on my ThinkPad. I have yet to read the manual. I am a happy camper. And that’s why the photo of the dancing bear.
In The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, Alan Cooper compares software to a dancing bear. You don’t look for the bear to dance gracefully. The amazing thing is that the bear can dance at all.
Switching topics, does anyone know of a company making good use of e-mentoring? A student writing her dissertation on the subject needs to know.
And switching again, the cover story in the current Fast Company is about ning. Amazing growth rate. When I posted a question about some glitch I couldn’t figure out when we were starting this community, Gina Bianchi emailed me an answer in about ten minutes. I replied that her level of service blew me away. You have to admire a Stanford MBA, serial entrepreneur, investment banker who works in the trenches. It reminds me of the early days at AOL when Steve Case personally answered the questions and gripes.
Ning’s software is another agile dancing bear. Essentially, a community-in-a-box, Ning is a snap to set up. We’ve used it to run the Internet Time Community for a year now. Ning’s missing a few tricks (I still have a tough time find new posts), but by-and-large, it has provided discussion forums, blogs, albums, member pages: not bad for something that took five minutes to set up and is free. We have 200+ members.
The gremlins have just punished me for being so chipper. I had about an hours’ worth of unsaved code (don’t ask) in a web app when Firefox froze on me. WTF? This happens several times a week around here, and I’ve never been able to isolate the problem. Argh. Some bears don’t dance.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Which version of Firefox are you using? When I switched last year I found that FF2 is buggier on Macs than it is on Windows, so switched to Safari.
I swapped back to FF once v3 got to Beta 4, and so far it’s been rock solid (now on Beta 5). I came back because I missed a few of the extensions, but some need a little help to work with the betas.
Barry, I’m using version 2.0.0.14. I’ll give the latest version a whirl. Thanks. You may have just saved me weeks of frustration.