Necessary Hardware & Software
Hardware
In case you are interested, here is the list of what we all need:
a. Mac laptop. There are two kinds of people in the world today - 1. Already Mac people and, 2. Soon to be Mac people. With the new Leopard operating system, it is super simple to run both the Apple OS and Windows OS at the same time. The huge advantage with this set up is that you can run Windows virtually inside of Leopard, thereby saving you the headache of dealing with the viruses, bugs, etc. that are impossible to fend off regardless of any anti-virus system you throw on a Windows box. The speed of the chip you invested in is what you will experience at any point down the road - with no interference.
“Which laptop / desktop Mac do I get?” This is the mega question based on your unique work habits, where you see yourself headed in work / ministry in the next couple of years (Windows machines last two years at the most realistically - Macs will last at least 3 years if not longer - then they hold their value amazingly - kind of like Volvos - in fact the two markets tend to blur together - make that used Volvos!)
NOTE: Prices of all Macs dropped in this past March by close to 10% and they released a significantly faster processor.
- would not recommend less than 1 gig of RAM
- would not recommend less than 100 gigs of HDD
If you see yourself writing a lot, consider moving up to a 17″ though it is pricier, think of this similar to a car purchase; when you consider the daily huge increase in pleasure of leather over vinyl seats, and you are paying like $4 more per month (if it were a car payment) this is a simple matter to resolve. Sometimes our fear of “not enough” overtakes our better judgment and we don’t get what we really need to do what is needed to do life right!
I evaluate purchases based on the question of “What do I need in hand in order to do a professional job with what really counts?” Amazingly God always shows up with what is needed to underwrite those thought through matters! Think it through. Get what is needed. Let God be God and throw caution to the wind. Let someone else fret over the number of beans that are in the bowl!
Backup Strength
In light of my current back up configuration, my system does a back up once an hour in the background beyond all else that I’m doing.
While that is happening, I have between five and eight programs open at the same time. Like never before in the assembling of a laptop configuration, “Choose wisely my son” as goes the famous line in film history. If you know what you are going to do, how often you will back up, choose the right amount of RAM as well as plenty of Hard Drive. For me, I will always default to a 17″ with an LCD screen (never fades), with four gigs of RAM, and as much hard drive as is available (as of today, one can get 300 gigs).
b. Digital recorder. We are living in a time when a record of conversations is now a standard operation procedure in nearly all businesses that intend to stick around for the long haul. When you hear the recording, “This conversation may be recorded” really means, “This conversation WILL be recorded…” If you check into policies of businesses, nearly all medium to larger businesses, all calls are recorded - incoming, outgoing, as well as emails of course. Nothing is confidential when done in the name of or on company time. Maybe we are not living in the time of “Big Brother” but we are close to that in terms of the technology. Some of this is not all bad. More than a few times I have wished I had a record of what took place. How about you?
All things considered, Olympus makes the greatest array of models and tends to offer the greatest bang for the buck. It is now possible to get small-ish, stereo recorders that pick up in MP3 mode. Why record in MP3? Mainly because this mode (there are several dozens of modes one can record in that are popular now) is the most common of all modes. Plus, it is easily put onto websites. As well, in the MP3 mode as a user you can choose a low quality mode for conversations - what I record 99% of the time. For example, I can record a 30 minute radio interview I have done, then send that as an attachment to my web guy to put up on a website for people to click onto.
Check out Recorders.com for a decent selection and good prices.
A recently released Olympus MP3 model to consider investing in is the LS-10.
To easily record phone conversations that are important you want to have a record of, invest in the Olympus TP-7. At less than $20 (at Amazon and many online locations) this is a great investment.
c. “Point and shoot” style digital camera - in light of the Mac syncing factor and cost issues, I recommend you confine your search to Nikon (I research this all the time - just make sure you are getting an American made Nikon, not “grey market” one that is greatly reduced in price - they carry no warranty). The cameras you are looking for run about $220 to $250 and take SD memory cards. I recommend you get a couple of these cards - you will be glad you had one reserve card. We will be taking LOTS of shots - of your family, spouse, things happening, etc. We will be really glad we took the time to bookmark all of this in a few years - believe me. Our website will have lots and lots of pictures - smiling faces of people loving people. To find great deals on SD cards at a great price check BensBargains.net for just a day or two and you will find some great prices. Keep in mind - many of these types of cameras don’t take cards that are super inexpensive or that don’t specifically say they are made for high speed digital cameras. Also, don’t get cards that store more than 2 gigs worth of information - some cameras don’t take cards larger than that, FYI.
d. Smartphone that will sync with your laptop. If you are a Mac user I strongly recommend you skip the myriad of syncing issues connected with a Windows phone and get an iPhone.
Heads up for all who are considering an iPhone purchase in the near future - though Apple, Inc. are the masters of new product release secrecy, some products they are moving toward releasing are fairly easy to spot. Be aware of this… Sometime between mid-May and late-July it is highly likely that Apple will release a new hardware version of the iPhone. This one will likely have some very “tasty” features - the option of either a 16 or 32 gig hard drive - a new system for sending and receiving data that will allow users to conduct real time video conversations to other iPhone conversations… plus the new third party applications that are coming out right now are making the iPhone helpful beyond words and stunningly innovative.
e. Headset that will allow you to hold Skype conversations. I recommend you invest in a slightly more expensive version than the entry level ones. We will all end up finding more and more uses for headsets in due time. Stenheiser makes a number of spectacular versions. As well, a couple of the better higher end Logitech versions are worth considering.
f. High Speed Scanner. Fujitsu has released a scanner that works with both the Mac and Windows OS at a very high speed of 18 pages per minutes. It scans both sides of each document into the Adobe PDF format.
g. Back-up systems for your vital hard drive information. Notice the word â”Systems” plural.
The most recent innovation you might consider is a combination of hourly backup with Time Capsule (an Apple application) and high speed wireless set up. The cost - for a 1TB it runs $499. The range for this is significant. If your house has a significant amount of internal metal / steel you may need to pick up an expander to help push it out a ways. Our home is decent size and we can pick up the wifi signal out to the edge of our lot. Outstanding coverage.
In addition to this, I recommend you ponder picking up smaller, portable back-ups for subsets of your system. For example, if you are a writer, it is a brilliant idea to back up all of your documents on a flash drive every day or two of just your word processing documents.
If your primary focus has more to do with accounting matters or databases, do the same with Excel documents.
Bottom line, just one means for backing up what is irreplaceable is not a reasonable plan.
Highly Recommended Software
Journaling Software.
We are all going to be blogging at least twice a week of our learnings / journey from before the time we start our services. The software I recommend, MacJournal, allows one to go right from journal to our blog. This also allows for one to have several journals - very handy. It is perhaps the most amazing and helpful piece of software I use.
WinJournal is made by the same company. It is similar but used for Windows based systems.
Several Word Processing Programs
Beyond MS Word, explore other approaches. I am not necessarily against Word. Word has some features no other word processing programs offer. Truthfully, however, when it comes to transferring articles / chapters I have carefully written in another program, when I put them into Word, it is a common occurrence that the Word application crashes in the few minutes it is open.
Mellel is a German based software company that is widely used. It is worth checking out if you have not done so. This is the processor I use nearly all the time now. There are a number of aspects to this that are advantageous over Word that make it worth checking out.
