Tag Archives: life

It’s a Mac trap, and we’ve been caught

Posted on by

There are occasional advantages to IT Support’s geological speed of response. It’s been a full four months since I was forced to submit a request for a Mac. Now it’s arrived, it took me a full four minutes to decide we weren’t going to get on. My gay trill of laughter when it looked like my email files (a) hadn’t transferred to the new system and (b) wouldn’t be compatible if they did made the windows rattle. (My recent discovery that, even though I can still use Firefox to compose this, the keystroke on my PC that made the cursor jump between words here just closes the tab has had a similar result.)

Fortunately that little giggle seems to have been resolved. After a morning’s acquaintance I have decided we can have a relationship, as long as I can go home at the end of each day and tell my PC at home all about it.

The “genie” effect, whereby a minimised application seems to be sucked into the dock, made me queasy and I’ve replaced it with the good old shrink effect that Windows uses (which, I know, it got off Apple). The fact that there’s only one toolbar regardless of the application is an annoyance but I’ll get over it. What fool thought it would be neat to swap the ” and @ keys around, and why, I will never guess.

Sadly, my biggest and loudest complaint about the Mac isn’t actually Apple’s fault. This one is all Microsoft’s. In using Word 2008 for Mac I’ve regressed over a decade. Ever since I switched to PCs from my old Amstrad, ever since, I’ve recorded a macro to swap two misplaced letters around. The commonest spelling mistake, as you may recall me saying before. On early PCs I used the Windows macro recorder. Then Word grew up enough to record its own macros and so I used that instead. Every time I have moved to a new computer or got a new verison of Word, that is the first change I’ve made.

No more. Word 2008 for Mac doesn’t let you record macros. I am flabbergasted. What do they think they’re doing?

(Answer, courtesy of my manager: they know exactly what they’re doing. They grudgingly admit that there are Microsoft users who use Apples, and they cater for the market, but they don’t make it easy in the hope that said users will see the light and switch to PCs. Easy)

You can still assign keystrokes to existing menu commands. All is not lost. And in some ways, the return to the classic Word interface after months of struggling with Office 2007 [spit] is a relief. Maybe we’ll call this a draw.

I’ll try to be positive. The overall look of the Mac is nice. I will gladly bow to Apple’s ability to make technology attractive; to slip into your life and be part of it, rather than a beast growling in the corner. The downside is of course that you do it Apple’s way or not at all. To make my point I’ve changed the wallpaper to <geek>a screen shot of the TARDIS console room</geek> (<ubergeek>specifically the secondary console room as used in series 14</ubergeek>), that being the ultimate machine where the user’s requirements are paramount.

Most satisfying of all is that once you’ve got your head back on you notice a certain strange sense of familiarity. The CMD+Tab combination to cycle through applications, which is almost like ALT+Tab … oh, and the keyboard. The keyboards of early Macs were truly alien beasts. This has a forward-delete key; the funny Apple key is labelled ALT; there’s a CTRL key too. The overall effect is … Windows-like. Okay, so it’s about as convincing as Del-Boy’s attempts to appear classy by speaking French, but you recognise that it’s trying.

Note this well. The two systems did not meet halfway. They came to us.

Hah.

But no Turkish Delight

Posted on by

Boar’s Hill on a subzero January day does a passable imitation of Narnia towards the end of the Witch’s reign.


Look close and you see that everything is picked out in lines of frost. It’s like the setting on Adobe Illustrator where you can reduce a picture down to a line drawing.



At one point we crossed over a small stream trickling down between two of these exquisitely outlined frosty banks, leading me (sorry) to start gibbering “Aslan is coming! Aslan is coming!”

The event: friend DW, who I must have known for a good decade or more (as opposed to DW, who I’ve known since about 2001 or DW who I’ve known since about 2004) has a birthday at this time of year and always organises a birthday walk with friends drawn from all walks of his life. Ten years ago the group was exclusively adult but suddenly babies started happening, all mysteriously at the same time, leading to a group of kids all about the same age (and mostly male, for some reason).


DW isn’t actually giving them communion, just chocolate coins which are of course renowned for their warming effect.

From the Fox, through some fields and frosty woods that are still primeval Oxfordshire and where wolves really ought to prowl, up to Jarn Mound to look at what would have been quite a view if the mist hadn’t been there, then back to the Fox for a warming luncheon. Hardier souls continued with part 2 of the walk, less hardy or those with some serious blogging to do peeled off and headed home.

It just wouldn’t have been the same without the frost, but now we’ve done that, we can have the warm weather now, thanks.

Indigestible

Posted on by

A distant memory stirs like some sluggish primeval beast. It’s been so long that for a couple of seconds I was even taken in by the envelope: “72-hour notice of document delivery”.

“Wow,” I thought, “this must be important …”

… plus (half a second later) “so why not just send the important document now …”

… plus (finally) recognition. “It’s them. They’re back.”

I am one of the 2% of households in Abingdon invited to take part in the Reader’s Digest prize draw. I could shortly be the winner of £250,000! The envelope came complete with a certificate that a total of £300,000 has been deposited at the NatWest to cover all the prizes. First prize: £250,000. Number of prizes: 2058. Do the maths to get the average runner up prize.

If past form is anything to go by, they will send me six personal numbers which might just might be eligible for entry into the draw. I have a sneaking suspicion they will be eligible. It would be an awful lot of bother to go to just to send me a load of duff numbers.

There’s a picture of the large orange envelope that will fall through the letterbox. It has all the usual seals and barcodes on it to make it seem Very Important. (What exactly are we to make of “This communication to be delivered to named addressee only”? Who else is it likely to be delivered to? Is a busy postman expected to ring the bell and wait, shivering on the doorstep to press it into my eager hands?) The envelope will positively shriek that if just one of those numbers wins then £250,000 could be mine. Much the same way as I could walk down the road where I live and heave a brick through each window. “Could” does not equal “probably will”. In fact the brick-through-window scenario has a greater chance of happening and I like to think I’m a model neighbour.

Even in the unlikely chance of my not winning anything, I will probably be invited – just because it’s me, you understand, and they like me so much – to purchase one of RD’s publications at a knock-down rate. In the past I’ve purchased their road atlas and maybe a couple of other things, knowing this would just make me a mark for further top priority hands-only mailshots. I have always declined their offers of Reader’s Digest Condensed Novels. They would have more luck offering Jamie Oliver a supersize cheeseburger with extra fries, cheap.

Back in my day the prize draw manager was the improbably named Tom Champagne. Nowadays it’s the slightly more plausible, blokey Nick Shelley. There’s even a brief paragraph assuring us he does exist. At least he has a likely-sounding name.

Oh, balls, it’s all so bloody Daily Mail. It’s Hyacinth Bucket. It’s a relic of a time when the middle classes were busting out like never before and craved respectability. The intent was to fool them into thinking they had it. How better to seem respectable than to have rows of condensed classic works of literature lined up on your stone clad bookcase, gleaming in their leather binding with gold embossed text? Sniggering at us? Who’s sniggering?

And they’re still doing it.

The last time I got one of these, I think, I had never heard of (or indeed received) a Nigerian spam. Now it finally dawns on me that these wastes of treeware are Nigerian spam’s only slightly better good twin. Okay, they’re not invitations to criminal activity but they are equally insulting in their own way. Not by a blithe assumption that a large enough sum will induce me to participate in serious fraud; just by thinking that all the bells, whistles, seals, certificates of authenticity, strident letters assuring me I’m through two out of three stages but could fall at the third so don’t delay, act now and the general good simulation of personal attention will actually make me take them one atom more seriously.

Spam makes it money by costing only pennies to hook in one sucker every few million. It’s all they need. I don’t doubt that Reader’s Digest is actually legal and genuine; someone somewhere will be winning that £250,000. But to fund that, and to pay the considerably higher overheads, they must have to sell a lot of condensed novels, and that’s the most depressing thought of all.