Since moving from Toronto to Amherst Island, life has become much quieter. We provide a bit of local computer support to the area and keep in touch with old friends and clients, but the economic slowdown and the realities of rural life mean that the frantic existence supporting the Toronto financial community is at an end. So we are involved with other technology projects to make our lives better.
Cutting down on clutter and making things more accessible has lead into implementing a digital media server for music and video — this allowed us to pack up a lot of our CDs and other media. Windows Home Server hosts this material and provides backup services for our laptops and other devices — even those on the domain. Have setup a virtual machine to explore Windows 7 — hosted on Vista x64 together with XP. Running virtual, W7 seems more responsive than XP or the early release of Vista. The issue will be application compatibility. Am using Unity mode on VMWare, so already accessing XP application screens directly from Vista. Looks like they intercept the window manager calls in the VM and push it out to the host — there is a small performance price, of course, but usability is pretty good.
Being in a rural area, internet service is interesting. We use a combination of satellite and wireless (due to sunk costs) but failover between the two providers is tricky. And as with all broadcasts, when the weather goes bad so does the connection. So one trades off the long latency of the satellite for the intermittent high speed of the wireless link. So far the satellite is more reliable, the wireless is prone to DNS dropouts and wildly varying throughput. And VOIP is hopeless most of the time — so there is still a copper cable to Bell.
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