Arch with a Mac(h)| Enterprise Architecture and Mac's

I recently turned independant. Formed my own company called Agiliant Enterprises. I am currently working for a large mining company called Vale Inco in Toronto. I am part of the tenterprise architecture team doing interesting stuff. One of the comments the director of the group had when he saw my Macbook Pro -

You are the first Enterprise Architect I have seen with a Mac.

I took it as a compliment - a personal preference had turned into a differentiator.
However, let me give a you preview of life with a Mac. I have been using MS operating systems for a long long time. I started with DOS 1.1 and followed it closely. However like most windows user, I was frustrated with the stability and virus issues. Since OS X, I noticed the core Unix (Mac OS is based on BSD) underneath the pretty GUI. I have done most of my development work on Unix systems, with Solaris being my favourite Unix flavour. I was hooked. The thought that I could open up terminals and do things like gawk, grep, lexx, yacc, top..... you get the point.
So how do you use the tools that need Win to run? Things like ErWin database modeling, Rational Rose modeling etc? Simple - Use Parallels. It is an amazing piece of software - Viva La Virtualization. It evens runs faster and better than Windows by itself. No more crashing.

For some other things, I needed to get alternatives which also work great. For Visio, I installed ConceptDraw which is a great program. I also use Ms Office products on Mac.
Plus, as a free lancer, I am not tied to corporate standards for email. I us my gmail and yahoo accounts with Mac Mail application. and boy is it amazing....

he real reason for getting onto Mac - Rails team uses mac. I was hooked... here is a group of serious programmers doling out kick ass software on a Mac. I could too...

A nice side benefit - My documents look awesome impressing almost all clients ...
so Mac it is for a while....

ps: There are still things I dont like about MAc - too locked down.. but I am not complaining just yet...