It’s official, I’m a Mac user now. I say user and not “Mac guy” because I was never a “Windows guy” either. If you need to label me, I guess I’m a “Linux guy”. Anyway, my first week with the Mac as my full-time machine has been pretty easy overall. I still don’t know Mac OS X as well as I know about WinXP, but I’m overall less annoyed with the Mac (even with the unknowns) on a daily basis.

So far, I’ve been able to port over the things I use frequently like twhirl, IM (Adium), Firefox, VMWare, Thunderbird, and, since my company and customers are heavily vested in .doc, .ppt, and .xls, MS Office with Outlook-replacement Entourage. Of course, where would I be without iTunes?

I read an interesting article today that I thought summed up a lot of peoples’ apprehension or resistance to switching. The bottom line is that most people fear what they don’t know or understand and it’s just easier to avoid change since that would require work to re-learn many tasks.

To those that gasp and remark “You quit Windows?” I can only say “Windows quit me first!” My first week has been surprisingly smooth, after installing and configuring the applications that comprise most of my world (listed above). I’m able to access all the same file servers and network printers I did under Windows. With a few tips from my Mac-user twitter friends, I was able to find many of the right/best ways to set up the applications in my new home.

The only thing I lack at this point is a way to participate in Oracle Web Conferences under Mac. For that, I keep a WinXP VM image that can load the OWC launcher. I’ve heard that Beehive (which I think is the next generation of Oracle Collaboration Suite) may address that, but who knows if/when that might come around. I don’t work for Oracle Support, so OWC isn’t a do-or-die application for me on a regular basis.

If you have suggestions for me, especially from those Mac experts, please send them along either directly or via comments for all to see below.

Finally, my favorite part of Mac-land: the command prompt is a bash shell!