Me And My Rig, Part One

NOW, THEN! The garden shed door is ajar, mind how you go walking by the delphiniums -- they're a blighter to grow, you know.

Pull up a cracket and help yourself to the mug of home-brew and a twist from the tin of Old Holborn. It's the first in an occasional series of interviews where we ask our guests to discuss their personal computing arrangements in a spot we call Me And My Rig. Our first guest is Joe Baguley, global product director at Quest Software.

Q Hey Joe, where you goin' with that gun in your hand? Or is it a mobile phone/smartphone/PDA and if so please could you describe it and your opinion of said item?

A It's a Blackberry 8800. Just about to merge my voice contract with my Blackberry contract and get rid of my Nokia 8800 as this Blackberry is the first I have found to be up to the job. The Blackberry's GPS feature is surprisingly useful in my travels plus I can now watch videos. If I could surf the web on it properly and plug it into projectors I could possibly do without a laptop most of the time. Only complaints about it are that the headphones suck and the screen is very easy to scratch.

Q Would you describe yourself as a gadget freak, that is, a consumer of gewgaws and electronic fripperies, some say nerd?

A Total and utter gadget freak, pretty soundly falling into the category of raven. Even working for a high-tech company surrounded by techies I am known as a gadget freak. It has been said that if it has flashing lights on it then I'll buy it. Sadly, I spend a lot of time on Engadget, amongst other websites. My loft is a graveyard of PDAs, PCs, hubs, universal remotes, routers, keyboards etcetra, and the requisite rat's nest of cables and unattributable power supplies with strange connectors. Must spend a weekend photographing stuff and putting it on eBay. Anyone want to buy Philips Nino running Windows CE, or a Palm Vx?

Q Nah. What's the coolest item in your rig?

A At the moment, my Garmin Forerunner 305 allows me to track my running and cycling and upload what I've done onto the web, see where I've been on Google Earth and track my fitness progress including heart rate. It's great fun to use as I travel round the world. My wife swears that my latest health push would be non-existent if I weren't able to turn it into some form of video game in this way... It only just beats my Nintendo Wii in the cool stakes though.

Q Blimey. And the one you feel ashamed to tell us about, omitting no detail, no matter how small?

A Electrisaver wireless household electricity usage meter. I bought this as, due to my gadget addiction, my bills were getting way too high. This thing tells me how much my house is costing me to run per hour and enabled me to find two old servers in my loft I had left on and forgotten about for over two years. Initially, friends and neighbours mocked me but several have now bought them. Not many people can tell you that their house idles at 3.3p/hour. Unless the fridge kicks in when it goes to 5.5p/hour.

Q Too true. What else have you got in that part of the house you call your study but your partner refers to as "the utility room"?

A Two old Compaq desktops running Linux and operating as file servers. Dell laptop with screen that has died. 17-inch Apple G4 PowerBook that is my wife's machine and used for photo editing. G4 Mac Mini, used by kids for surfing CBeebies. Canon flatbed scanner. Epson R1800 A3+ Photoprinter with unbelievable quality. HP All-in-one cheap printer used for plain paper printing and copying. Two Wacom graphics tablets used with Photoshop. About 4TB in USB storage. Apple Hi-Fi speaker, outstanding piece of kit. Cable modem as I'm waiting for Virgin Media to upgrade my 10Mbit/s connection to 20Mbit/sec sometime soon. Router and Apple Airport Extreme base station. Plantronics wireless headset for landline, essential for those long conference calls with APAC and the US. Large amount of digital photographic equipment and lights. I also run my own photography business, hence some of the above.

Q To have a desktop or not a desktop - discuss.

A Not a desktop, that's a no-brainer for me. I'm not into gaming that much and travel a lot so the portability of laptops far outweighs the benefits of desktops.

Q Are you a lunatic, style-obsessed Mac zealot or sober, Harris tweed-wearing PC man?

A A peculiarly pertinent question as for my main machine I switched to a MacBook Pro with OS X last February when they first came out and am currently one of a couple of Mac users in a Windows company. It's the first laptop I have had where after over a year I have not re-installed the OS. It has only crashed a couple of times and it's been fun to use, plus it's shiny and has flashing lights. However, because I am a gadget-obsessed freak and I have had the same laptop for over a year, I am just about to change to a ThinkPad X60t tablet PC running Vista just for the experience and because I want to play first-hand with some new cool Microsoft enterprise stuff like Office 2007, LCS, Unified Messaging and Groove. I will miss the Mac though with things like Newsfire and Quicksilver, and it will be retired into the photography business and used for Photoshop and holding my iTunes collection to sync with my iPods. I'm looking forward to using Vista in anger as I've played with many betas and I don't think we'll be switching to Macs as a corporate standard anytime soon.

Q What sweet piece of kit would you like to purchase next once your dependents take a break from raiding the bank account for so-called necessities?

A Unrealistically, from a financial perspective, I am waiting for Canon to announce the replacement for the EOS 1Ds Mk II, the holy grail of digital SLR ownership and a real dream item. Outrageously expensive and I am sure my wife would rather have a new car. More reasonably, I am looking to finally upgrade to SkyHD when I am allowed to. Also, I wouldn't mind an iPhone to play with at some point, though will probably wait for the v2 of that piece of kit.

Thanks Joe, that's a lot of rig you've got there. µ