I carry with me a Thinkpad T40, issued through my company. Apparently the T40s have system board issues after a few years. Mine failed in the summer of 2005 right after a vacation. At home, there is also an HP Pavilion laptop, usually in the kitchen and a HP desktop upstairs. I use a Seagate 5G portable drive for almost all personal work, which allows me to work on any computer through the house. It's easier than having a shared drive on my home network, since I can also take the drive with me wherever I go. I backup this drive almost once a week.
At work, I also use two monitors - one desktop monitor and my laptop screen. The desktop monitor is driven via my laptop too and I use the Windows-desktop-on-two-screens thing - so I actually have a virtual desktop that is two monitors wide. I just started doing this about a month ago and really like it. I can be working on one thing on the desktop monitor, and do whatever on the second monitor. The addition of more screen real estate is very useful. I actually got the idea from an article about how Bill Gates works.
For a browser, I use Firefox, of course. I use a delicious plugin for saving bookmarks and I have greasemonkey installed and run a greasemonkey script to add Technorati tags for blogger posts. I customized it to do 85% size and double colon, just because I can.
Gmail for personal email - I get about 5-10 emails per day. I'm a big fan of gmail labels. Lotus Notes for corporate email. I get about 150 emails per day, most of it is noise. I use Notes Agents since some of my email are automated messages that help monitor some systems - those emails are automatically moved from my Inbox to designated folders. Our Notes retention is 60 days. Mostly, even though I know GTD says not to do this, I just work out of my Inbox. Also, when I am not near a computer, I check Gmail over my phone [I just got a Motorola E815 today - not a Razor, but I like it a lot already and it's a company phone] a lot. Do I need therapy?
Lotus Sametime and Gaim for Instant Messaging. There is also a Sametime plug in for Gaim, so that you can use AIM, MSN, Sametime and YahooMessenger in all one software platform. I tried it a few months ago and had some issues, which might have been due to a Sametime server at work. And Google Chat sometimes.
Windows Explorer2 for file management. It's nicer because it allows three window panes - one for folders, and then two for the actual files/content.
GIMP for graphics work - but I'm no expert. To just view images I use Irfanview. It is a very lightweight graphics viewer and has some extra tools, like thumbnail images for long file recursive file paths and a fully customizable slideshow viewer.
MS Office - I've been a long time lover of Excel - think 3-d charts.
Skype for VOIP - and am interested in getting a webcam to try the video.
Flickr for photos - I almost always upload via email.
Bloglines - for anything RSS related. I have about 200 feeds. Sometimes I add feeds of comment threads for posts that I want to follow. I have folders in Bloglines too.
Palm Desktop for contacts and calendar. I would like to move to Google Calendar, but I'm not sure anyone has figured out exporting from a Palm file into Google Calendar. I also used to carry around a PalmPilot (IIIx and then a Vx) but then decided all that info wasn't that important to have at any moment's notice. Although, if I traveled more, I would start carrying one again. A Treo or something would be nice too, since I just typed in 171 contacts into my phone today. [And I can't figure out who Sam is...]
Putty for unix terminals. The only thing is you can't print very well from Putty, but otherwise, it's great. [I'm required to be a geek sometimes.]
VIM for any text files on my Windows machine. vi on UNIX, - like, of course.
Technorati tags:: How+I+Work
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