What's on William Daniels' Desktop

by William Daniels

I'm William Daniels and I'm a programmer for one of the major automakers. I've been using computers for about 18 years. When I was younger my family had a Commodore 64 and also one of the very early computers by Texas Instruments. I've always found computers to be fascinating and this led me to get a degree in Computer Science.

While I do purchase some of my computers I've also built a number of them. My main machine at home is utilizing an AMD Athlon chip which I find to be quite fast. This computer also has 1GB of RAM and a 160GB hard disk. It has dual DVD drives, with one being just a player and the other being a burner and a 19-inch flat panel monitor made by ViewSonic. I've really come to prefer the flat panels and the price on this type of monitor has really come down.

We have two other desktop computers, as well as two laptops. In the home the desktop computers are on a traditional wired network and the laptops are on the network using wireless. When it comes to the look of our computers, my wife and I pretty much stick to the default Windows colors. We do, however, get into wallpaper that we create from photos we've taken. We find it nice to recall vacations and other trips by having scenes on our computers. When it comes to icons, I pretty much have my entire desktop covered in them. They are arranged loosely in categories so, for example, the programs used for graphics are all in one area. I'm used to this kind of set-up and I can find any program easily.

I'm also playing around with the Linux operating system on one computer. I'm attracted to the open nature of the OS and I've been experimenting with a variety of Linux programs. I don't know if I'll make the complete switch to Linux, but I think it's worth investigating. Can't hurt to try it out and see for myself.

My Favorite Programs

Over the years I've grown dependent upon several programs that I couldn't do without. One of these is The Bat! which is a really powerful e-mail client. It supports multiple e-mail accounts, has lots of options and to date it hasn't been affected by any of the mass mailing worms. Really a very efficient program.

To keep in touch with co-workers, family and friends I use Trillian Pro 3 because it has built-in support for ICQ, Yahoo, MSN, AIM and more. I finally resorted to this because I got tired of having three or four different instant messaging programs open at one time. With Trillian I can talk with everyone because they're all consolidated into the one program.

For doing things with graphics I primarily use Paint Shop Pro which is now owned by Corel, but I've been using it for a number of years. It does all of the things that I need to do with such a program including converting from one format to another, getting screen captures, creating graphics and so on.

I look forward to even greater things from computers and I hope that soon computers will be voice-controlled. I guess maybe I've watched too much Star Trek, but the idea of telling my computer what to do is really appealing.