New computer

Posted on August 11, 2010 by Ben

Is black and shiny. Lots of RAM. Is Windows 7. Is not a Mac. All these good.

It’s been nearly 10 years since the last completely new computer, and that was bargain basement stuff that ran on Windows ME and got updated to Windows 2000 as soon as decently possible. For the last four years I’ve been using a secondhand Windows XP PC, which was the bee’s knees when it arrived but since then the bee has grown steadily more arthritic. Upgrading is always at least mildly fraught and in this case it was hanging over me throughout our trip in Sweden, due to the computer arriving the day before we left.

In fact, it’s been possibly the most minimally fraught upgrade yet. Everything important has been installed, a few little-used programs remaining to be added when and as. Documents, photos and music backups all just fell into place (even if I did have to reinstate the playlists manually in iTunes, as it couldn’t read the library file “because it was created by an earlier version of iTunes”. Well of course it was, you fool; you’re the one asking me to upgrade by a decimal point every couple of weeks …). Unlike the old machine, the new (22″) screen can display a double page spread in InDesign CS4 of the Delightfully Dotty Car Club magazine that I design and edit, with fully legible text rather than grey blurs. I looked at the spread and felt that warm glow within that says there may be trouble ahead but it’s dealable with; the worst is over. That was the primary objective: everything else is gravy.

I like the design of the interface. Of course, “pretty” <> necessarily “more functional” – the TARDIS console can’t really travel in time, you know – and the computer would work equally well if the tops of the windows were solid and opaque so you can’t see the desktop behind them, and if the close and minimise buttons didn’t glow slightly as if lit from within – but it ties in well with what the machine actually does. For the first time ever I am forced to use the words “nice piece of design” in the context of Windows.

This is Windows, though, so obviously it can’t do everything perfectly. It finds new ways to insist on being helpful: like when you call up Task Manager to kill a frozen programme (it still happens), it tries to diagnose the fault after you have told it you just want it to drop the programme where it is and walk away. It also keeps asking permission to install stuff, or rather, to make changes to the hard disk. Oh, come on! When did you ever ask that before? And when did I ever say no?

I’ve had to say goodbye to some old friends which are no longer compatible on a 64-bit system. My Windows Cardfile address book, which has been with me ever since Windows 3.1, couldn’t hack the new oxygen-rich atmosphere and so perished. All the data was backed up and has been copied into Google Mail contacts, but even so. The principle. And some long cherished games have gone the way of all things, but I hadn’t actually played any for a long time. They were just junk on the mantlepiece, tedious stuff that you have to move and dust around and never use but you don’t throw them out because they’re there.

I have previously ranted about Office 2007, and just because Office 2010 is three years older, don’t think that changes anything. However, after careful consideration it didn’t really seem uninstalling it just so I could install my comfortable familiar copy of Word 2000 (which came with the ME machine, if I remember correctly). Into every life a little clunky software must fall.

Further fraughtnesses arose in finding that I hadn’t put the installation disc for the old Actiontec wireless router with all the other disks, and anyway the router was’t compatible due to its desire to connect to the main computer by USB. The new router from Virgin (also shiny, also black) has two aerials and WPA2 encryption and four ethernet ports: in fact everything is done by ethernet rather than trying to be clever with USB ports. All of these are good things too. During the installation process, run off an .exe file rather than an .html file as advised in the documentation, I only had to guess (not being told) that I had to turn the modem off and on again twice.

Round about now someone always starts trying to extol the virtues of Macs or Linux because “they just work” or “they’re modern technology” or some other equally vapid reason. What these people never get – are incapable of getting – is I don’t care how it works. I don’t care if a little goblin climbs up behind the screen every time I press a key and inks in my chosen letter (in reverse writing, obviously) on the glass while another follows behind it colouring in the pictures. And I don’t care if this process is inevitably fatal, like a bee stinging, so that having performed this task the goblin then falls to its death and is blown away by the internal fan. It does what I want, when I want it.

So, looking forward to what 2020 might bring …

The murders are all in Ystad so it’s quite safe

Posted on August 8, 2010 by Ben

For anyone googling “good places to eat in Gothenberg”, we recommend the Cafe Caprese on Kungsgatan. For anyone googling “places to stay in Gothenberg”, the answer is the Best Western Hotell Göteborg. It’s reasonably priced, clean and friendly, right on the waterfront and (most of) the rooms have astonishing views over the harbour. Bonusbarn’s didn’t but who cares, he was only there one night. We were there for four.

Last year it became clear that our annual in-law viewing pilgrimage to Sweden was approaching crisis point. My father-in-law was getting more and more frail, imposing social obligations upon himself that he was unable to meet, and we had seen every single thing worth seeing within a daytrip at least once before. Bonusbarn was on the point of open rebellion. So, this year it was different. First a brief, flying visit to the relatives, and as my father-in-law now lives in sheltered accommodation we stayed in my sister-in-law’s apartment. TV! Internet! Water straight from the mains, not from a well and so laced with iron it tastes like blood! No sign of a mouse dropping anywhere near a food preparation area! (Or indeed, before my sister-in-law screams and comes over to kill me, anywhere else either.)

And then we went to stay in Gothenburg. I’ve only caught glimpses of this before now, en route to and from the airport. It looked like an exciting, historic, European town with a harbour and trams and long boulevards and wide, cobbled squares. And guess what, it’s all of those.

The squares are ideal for sitting in and partaking of coffee and sweet cardamom buns while you engage in a text conversation with your mother back in England. This being the southern end of Sweden, the ground is mostly successful at being completely flat, but here and there are outcroppings of smooth rock left behind by the glaciers. There’s no doing anything with them except living with them, so they got built around or onto or into. So, you may turn a corner off a boulevard and suddenly find yourself facing a sheer rock face, or a ramp, or a vertiginous little stairway that goes up or down to somewhere, adding exciting new and random elements to your day. Meanwhile the whole city sparkles in the sunshine – in fact, weather was quite unreasonably good for somewhere the latitude of Inverness. Short sleeves every day, short trousers most days, every meal and snack other than breakfast was eaten outside somewhere. The first drops of rain fell literally as we got off the bus at the airport, which I think is good Swedish courtesy to a T.

The harbour is in fact just a wide river, broad and sweeping and a beautiful thing to behold from ground level or a fifth floor hotel room or from the top of one of the aforesaid outcroppings.

From our room we could look right to the historic bit, or left to a still fully functioning modern shipyard.

For the culture, And There Was Light is a highly recommended experience, should it come to a city anywhere near you – a hightech, multimedia exhibition about Leonardo and Michelangelo and Raphael, put into the context of the times and politics of Rome and Florence and Milan: the things they did, the ways they overlapped. I had never realised, until seeing a lifesize replica (still haven’t seen the original), why Michelangelo’s David stands as he does in that slightly poncy pose. His left hand is holding his sling and his right hand, which you can’t really see from the front, is holding the stone with which he’s about to zot Goliath. He stands like that because he is thoughtfully sizing up Goliath across the valley, or possibly thinking “crikey, are other blokes’ all that big?”

(Un)fortunately a ticket into And There Was Light also gets you into the maritime museum, the city museum, the art museum … we were pretty well museumed by the end of it. Even before getting to Gothenburg, we passed through the Aeroseum, an airforce museum inside an old nuclear bunker next to the City Airport. I got to sit in a Saab Draken.

On the harbour front there is also the Maritiman, a static display of ships that you can walk around and clamber over and explore. These include a destroyer (I much prefer the Swedish term “Jagaren” – Hunter!) and a Draken class submarine. So I did a lot of Drakening, one way or another.

For those of a more traditional bent, this chap was moored opposite the hotel …

… A genuine reproduction East Indiaman. So, from now on, whenever CS Forester or Patrick O’Brien mentions an East Indiaman, I’ll know what they’re on about.

I love Gothenburg and want to go back. Next year, the coast and islands …