All it requires for evil to flourish is good men to stay silent

I've been thinking about this for some time now, but I seem to be seeing it again and again. A Facebook comment by Marc V (him, over there on the left, now a trained pastor) about a Ricky Gervais meme provoked me a little. A comment by Paul Mayers - another friend, no longer on the blogosphere - linking to this article made me see a little red and actually respond in some detail.

As Christians in the UK, particularly in the face of the madness of some sections of the Islamic world, tend to be reticent, pacifist, mealy-mouthed and cautious. It is not my nature these days to be confrontational, but sometimes we just need to stand up for righteousness, rather than keep quiet and let the wicked behave as if what they do is perfectly reasonable and acceptable.

Balanced view? How many lives should they screw up, including their own, because we tried to see their side of the argument?

T'other kind o' surfing

Not to beach about it too much.

Course des Landes

Or a bullfight without fighting and blood.

Wot, no update?

I've been using Pear linux 4 since the spring, pretty much once my long-running install of Sabayon had gone belly up again. In that time I've seen Sabayon release 2 further updates (9 and 10 - just out) Pear linux in version 5 and recently 6 in alpha, Open SUSE has pushed out V 12.2 and there have been innumerable others from various distros I've dabbled with.

What's changed?

Mostly, Pear 'just works'.

That was also largely true of Sabayon, but while I loved the interface (KDE is so much better than OSX-alike desktop environments) the tools were much more powerful and the versions of software much more up to date, it was always a bit too bleeding-edge, and stuff just kept breaking. I get frustrated that the pear/gnome file manager hides the mp3 files on some CDs, despite them being clearly visible under KDE. It's irritating to have to make do with last years version of DigiKam GIMP if I want to continue using the standard repositories and not worry about maintaining dependencies like I might if I installed new versions myself.

But I like stuff like DVD handling. Pop a disc in the drive and it appears on the dock. Click it and you're offered the option of playing the movie, exploring etc; all completely rational stuff.It's not a big deal for me to have to hunt down the disc through the media player interface under KDE, but it IS a problem for Chris, and I want her to enjoy the machine too. And then it had become relatively slow to use too (though not as slow as my Macbook running OSX 10.5, but still annoying).

So I've stuck with Pear. So it's making me dumber. And lazy. But it works.

Yesterday I downloaded Sabayon X (Apple has a lot to answer for) burned it to DVD tonight and ran it live.

Looks nice. Crisp fonts, clear colours, clean interface. But I just simply can't be bothered with migrating all the data AND run the risk of unreliability in order to get some slightly better tools and a more powerful interface.

So, no update yet for me. I shall be trying Pear 6 when it's released on evaluation, but until then, despite my son's occasionally snarky comment about changing OSs every week, pear is staying.


And sometime I'll upload the last couple of French holiday blogposts and some images.

And then maybe even sort comments.

I’ve been very impressed by many of the French we’ve met.

Not that I should or shouldn’t be, but they’ve almost all been so terribly nice. We did have one girl go all snooty when we bought stamps and cards, and on another occasion that we tendered a 50 euro note for a 10 euro item in a supermarket, but generally they have been really nice.

Occasionally we’ve obviously been a bit scary to approach after it was first clear we didn’t understand too well. The local accent is quite thick, and there’s a distinct difference between the accent of a northern Frenchman (I can hear the words ‘Il fait pleut’ along with a shrug) and the way French is spoken here. It’s faster, thicker and with a greater density to the tones. The result is that it takes us longer than usual to translate the spoken into written French in our minds (see previous post) and the poor waitress is greeted with blank looks to her perfectly reasonable enquiry as to what we would like to drink before ordering our meal.

But the amazing thing is, we’ve always managed to get drinks/food/fishing tackle/diarrhoea medicine (not needed this time, I’m VERY pleased to say) when needed.

It may be that they don’t get many English tourists here, and so we’re something of a novelty. And we always try to manage a bit of French. Never the less, we’ve had some of the warmest receptions, nicest smiles and helpful attitudes that we’ve ever seen in France, from the people in this area.

Why do we try to learn a language twice?

And other musings.

It is a long time since I did schoolboy French (and a little less since I tried student German) but it seems to me we always teach 2 languages at the same time.

What do I mean?

Spoken language is taught, certainly, whatever the language being imparted, but side by side with that is the written language, and they seldom seem to work side by side. I became aware of this when trying to pay for fuel to a petrol pump cashier and realised that I was trying to first translate the sounds that I had heard into written French so that I could analyse and understand it before replying.

Crazy, no?

We find it much easier – well, many do anyway – to learn a written language because it does not require us to retrain our ears, minds and instincts in order to comprehend.

My initial reaction was that this is because I’ve had to learn French by reading stuff written in French during various holidays and visits, and that’s why I have this duality of understanding. However I recall when at school that everyone found the written stuff much easier because it was real and solid and interpretable through judicious use of dictionaries (no babelfish then). I put the theory to Chris and she agreed whole heartedly (and she has done conversational French classes since school too).

Now I understand why things are done this way. You have a class of unruly 11-14 year olds, and they get French lessons for 45min maybe twice a week. They are expected to go away and learn French (or German, or Spanish, or Latin, or Chinese) on their own on the days and weekends in between. Of course they have to, because you don’t have daily classes with them, and language only comes with practice and use.

No self-respecting schoolboy will do non-essential practice – he’ll do the minimum he possibly can to scrape a pass. So that will mean covering off the written stuff and then hoping he can bluff his way though any oral sections in the class if necessary. With evening classes it’s not quite the same, but having an hour once a week makes doing the oral stuff for 30min daily impossible.

So we teach 2 languages: written and oral.

There’s another catch too.

Those beastly foreigners don’t know their alphabets properly and can’t pronounce the letter’s sounds correctly. And worse still, they mangle the letters together in ungodly combinations that no decent English tongue (I’m an Austrian, so this is written with MY tongue firmly in my cheek) should ever have to be wrapped around.

And then to make it even MORE fun, teh mynd doss thet clyvir trek ov mekking sence of ninsonce. Or we read what we think is there instead of what is really written. Not a problem when you’re in a place of quiet and study, but when you’re trying to understand things on-the-fly it makes for fun.

Took me a while to read paradillas correctly as parilladas.

But there’s hope.

When we’d finally realised that the petrol pump cashier wanted me to hand over my credit card and he already knew which pump I’d used then the transaction went through fine. Without thinking I answered “merci m’sieu, au revoir”. It seems that if the analytic process is kept firmly locked away then I can say the right thing sometimes after all.

Or maybe I might simply speak the same old nonsense I do in blighty, but to a different people group.

The weather with us.

Last night we were sitting in the apartment reading quietly, when we heard distant rumbles. The promised storm that had supposedly been due earlier had finally arrived. In the distance we could see occasional flashes, followed 10 to 15 seconds (possibly more) later by the rumbles.

After one quite spectacular flash we decided to go for a walk along the promenade by the lake, to watch proceedings in the dark and open.

Things were quiet for a long time. We stood leaning on the wooden rail, looking out over the quiet waters, waiting for the next flash. Scents of pine drifted across to us from the cooling forests that are still the main income from this area. We could also smell barbecued food from the parillada restaurants further round the lake, the lakes own warm, salty odour came to us, mingled with hints of sun oil, and in one place, fish.

After we’d been down for some time the fireworks started in the distance. They were at least 5 miles away, possibly more, and we could barely hear the thunder at all. Occasionally a yellow-orange flash would leap from the clouds, sometimes branching across between clouds too. With the dark of the night, around 9.30pm, the clouds were completely invisible to us except when lit by a flash, and the air over Port d’Albret was pretty much clear except for enough haze to block the stars.

After about 20min the guys lighting the fireworks had clearly run out of stuff and we went back in, mocking the idea we would have rain.

So this morning everything had been soaked in the night.

It can’t have rained hard because we had our windows open for fresh air, and would have heard it. Never the less there were puddles of water on non-absorbant surfaces and the timber of the promenade was still dark with dampness.

We popped out around 9.30 to buy our bread for the day from one of the local bakers (une baguette traditionel s’il vous plait). The air was cool and fresh as we left the apartment, but even by the time we were heading back it had begun to warm in the strength of the sun and the humidity was very noticeable, leaving skin sticky.

Since we had enjoyed a week of rest and relaxation, mostly anyway, we planned to spend more time visiting nearby points of interest. It’s always good to pick up a little of the local flavour and way of life too, and France likes to display its life openly in its cities. So today we drove to Mont de Marsan, which is the Lande departments capital, having already seen Dax.

Rather than describe it in detail, it’s probably fair to say that it’s like any slightly scruffy provincial city (if that’s not a contradiction in terms) with most of the hallmark French architectural styles, just like Dax, though about 1000 years younger. The highlight, from a sightseeing point of view, is the confluence of rivers La Douze and Le Midou to become La Midouze (which flows into another river further down etc etc). There are also some old buildings and a lot of sculptures of naked people dotted around, plus pleasant gardens. Good place to spend a few hours.

We came back mid-afternoon and went straight to the beach, where I spent more than an hour leaping about in the waves, pretending to be a little heroic and behaving like a teenager. It was interesting to see I wasn’t the only one with grey hair embarking on this kind of behaviour.

There’s a curious thing one can do too; a study in herd mentality. If one person starts floating in the water with their feet sticking out then other males will imitate them. It’s almost as if it’s a signal that says “I’m so cool I can cope with these little waves and just float here unperturbed”. It’s a very childish thing to do, but there always seem to be at least a couple of other guys who will quite promptly start floating with their feet out of the water too.

We also tried our new Hawaiian Tropic sun oil that smells of bananas and leaves your fingers & skin really sticky (makes handling a book a challenging affair).

And so home.

Tonight I cooked chicken pan-fried with butter, shallots and garlic, a little oregano and Maggie , then mushrooms in a crème fraiche sauce and served up with basmati rice. Pud was an excellent pear tarte, washed down with Normadie cidre and a cabernet rose.

:-)

footnote.

One of the apartments down below has been hosting a party. There has been clapping and now there is singing. It sounds for all the world like a gallic version of a traditional cockney song – you can almost see the pearly kings and queens gyrating to their dulcet tones. Not quite ‘Knees up muvver brahn’ but well down that way.

Now they’re onto the drunken laughter stage, and Chris has shut the window. Looks like it’s not just the brits who ‘like a good drink’ on holiday.

I popped outside to see how they were doing, and from one of the restaurants further round the lake could be heard something like the sound of the ‘Captain Pugwash’ theme tune on an accordion and clapping in time to the music.

Sometimes it seems like the world passes through the Lande.

We keep seeing people that *remind* us of friends.

Like a woman on a bike who looked like a certain Dixie V.

Like a lass walking past who looked just like Ben's g/f.

Like the woman we saw in Dax that even dressed and walked like Jane M.

Curious.

The young French males have their own particular walk. When I was a teenager we all adopted a particular "well 'ard" walk that involved swaying side to side - our school masters would ask if we'd just got off a ship. The guys here do something similar that involves walking with stiff legs and short steps. Initially Chris thought it might be from wearing flipflops, but that's not the case.

Today it was supposed to be stormy, but we've seen 28'C with a light overcast sky.

TTFN.

Not a holiday diary blogpost

But an observation of people.

We've seen an amazing variety of people here.

On the beach today we saw a lass that looked like a slim and lovely Helen Mirren, in at least her mid 50s, possibly older. Chris commented before I did!

At the other end of the spectrum we can reassure those in doubt that French women do indeed get fat (contrary to a particular book!).

We saw someone who would be indistinguishable from a friend of ours from behind, even down to the same clothes, the same walk and way of standing, the same hairdo - quite astonishing.

Port d'Albret is full of 'ordinary' people from France and Spain, very different from the classic holiday destinations of many English tourists. It seems that France and Spain have their equivalent to 'the Blackpool set' too.

Meeting another English-speaking person is a little like bumping into a long-lost friend, so few are there.


Not entirely unrelated, but I seem to have been reading stuff with recurring themes that make observations on people. I quite like entertaining junk: by that I don't mean 50 shades (from the little I know of that, I think that even as a schoolboy I'd have been ashamed of being caught with it in my bag - porn to be ashamed of) but classics that have now become silly but remained entertaining. One of Edgar Rice-Burroughs 'John Carter' martian series was the first and James de Mille's A strange manuscript found in a copper cylinder was the second.

Both used similar plot devices that were as bad as if they'd been Ellis Peters Cadfael series book. However the 'strange manuscript' was interesting in it's attempt to create a society that was a deliberate reversal of Victorian England, and to a degree, present society. A people are found who reject the acquisition of wealth and power, light and fresh air, where the most highly esteemed are the paupers and the most worthless those in positions of highest authority. There was also a twist in that the poorest of all paupers was so because he had outdone all in his determination to get to the top/bottom of the pile, and was as power-hungry and vicious as we might expect any politician of a cruel society to be.

Curious stuff indeed, but well worth thinking about in a church context; both how we should be determined not to accumulate wealth and how we might re-shape society based on raising others above us.

The preset reading matter is a Nicky Gumbel book about revival, but it *feels* like it's aimed toward a post-alpha audience in the NG style, and is also a little dated, drawing most of its references from the late 90s and earlier.

More all about people stuff then.

When I get back I also want to obtain a copy of Frank Viola's Pagan Christianity for another take on the church in society (or possibly a take that lines up with stuff I've thought for a long time).

Anyway, that's enough blogging. Time to do some work.

A little retrospective, but....

Holiday blog (wot – anuvver?).


Oh the joy of rising at 3.30am!

What time should we get up? Well, lets work this backwards. The flight leaves at 8.10am and gate closes at 7.45. We have bags to check and want to try to get decent seats (this is easyjet, with it’s free-for-all, but old habits die hard) so need to be there 2 hours before departure. So meet & greet (these days no more expensive than long term onsite parking) is arranged at 6am. Gatport Airwick (thanks Jeremy) is about 85 miles away, so allow around 1hr45 – 2 hours travel time in the small hours (3 hours during the day). We want a shower before departing, so allow 15min each, plus 15min to assemble everything and pop it in the car, check it all off etc.

So the alarm went off at 3.30am and we were on the road around 4.15am, arriving about 5.45am for a better than expected journey. Great.

Then the plane was delayed 30min waiting for ‘paperwork’ to arrive. easyjet are slipping.

I’d slept around 30-50min the previous night, and manage a few mins on the plane too, but the flight time was only about 75min total, which again was great (and it was a real sardine special, so a short flight was an even bigger bonus). We went straight from the plane to dragging luggage round Bordeaux Merignac airport while hunting down the car hire desk.

Bordeaux to Biarritz/Bayonne was a shorter journey than I remember it, at around 200km-ish, though we had started off fairly well south of Bordeaux already. On the 2 previous occasions we’d done it I seem to remember getting to Bordeaux around 4am (one year we had a 90mph blow out just before reaching the ring road!). The Gironde estuary is enormously wide, and the main road crossed over on a huge suspension bridge with spectacular views. Once past the city the road then became dual carriageway, threading through pine forests and sandy excavations until just before Bayonne and the peage, when it would open out to reveal housing that was more Spanish than French and industrial units etc. We would arrive at the camp site around 7.30-8am.

(Note - a couple of days after arriving we did this final section of the journey in reverse. To my shock it took almost an hour to get back to the place where we turned off, confirming my memory wasn’t far out after all.)

The apartment is located in Port d’Albret, Vieux Bocau (old Bocau) that are having been a quiet fishing village before being developed heavily for French tourism. There is a large marine lake (I want to write marin lac) surrounded by apartment blocks and complexes that look like they were built in the 80s and early 90s, so around 20-30 years old, mostly in decent condition and refurbished some time in the last 10 years, some manky on the outside.

Our map of France (a large volume) didn’t have enough detail of the actual town, and even the map I’d printed courtesy of google wasn’t really cutting it – Port d’Albret is a network of small, often one-way streets, named using tiny signs and full of similar looking accommodation. At first we couldn’t make head or tail of where we were, and since check in for weekly stays was after 5pm (!) we parked up and wandered a little (just round the corner as it happened). Come the time we drove round a couple of times before finding a sign to our apartments and squeezed into the carpark of le Boucanier (well buckle my swash etc).

First impressions are the ones that last: the check in process made me think that this was Butlins a la Francais, but the girl on reception was so nice and so enthusiastic in a genuine way that we were pleased to be here. The apartment itself was, as the lass on reception described it, really nice. 2 balconies (1 in sun, 1 in shade pretty much all the time) spacious, clean and even with separate loo and bathroom.

We were really tired after our journey and the last few weeks of having so much happening, so didn’t really want to do much. There was however a large market going on in the main town, and after dinner we wandered round, more than a little dazed, marvelling at the prices (so high) and the sheer quantity of stuff being sold.

Bed was welcome.

Sunny skies and a sea at 22'C

A loving woman by my side and not too much to do. Does it get better than that?

Clear skies and cool days

Make for chilly mornings. 4'C this morning, one cat refusing to go out.

I've cut out comments

Since Haloscan are going belly-up shortly. Apparently no-one knows the answer to why google comments don't work. You'll know if I get them working again.

Oxford 26th August.

There might be more later.

Do you ever wonder about marketing people?

Especially when they are trying to shift computer parts etc?

www.aria.co.uk carry a range of base units and mini systems that someone is trying to sell just too hard. They are just a bunch of slightly dull black and grey boxes, somewhere between the size of a shoebox and a midi tower, so how do they get names like hellspawn, hellscream, punisher etc?

It's just a grey and black box with some commonplace electronics inside designed to run Windows beige-world 7.

Even the kids that live in their parents basements and play WoW and MW3 are going to be cynical, let alone anyone who has actually had a job. Sometimes it feels like people actually believe the things they invent.

And there's a penny dropping moment.

Men have always wanted to invent things that needed to be worshiped, creating rules and scenarios in which to frame and sell their ideas. Only now instead of worshipping in darkened caves and temples, it's spare rooms and cafes.

I'm quite torn about the whole computing and the internet aspect of modern life. There is so much potential good, and yet there is such a strong draw, and I very much recognise my own weakness to that, to spend too much time just on the computer, not talking or sharing face to face, but in simulated company. There's a side of me that would love to just ditch computing completely, but it IS so useful.

Of course the challenge is to handle these things well, just like food and drink, just like reading and socialising. For those things society has created expectations and training from a young age, and we can see the effects of their failure in obesity as much as alcoholism, in those who live to escape and those who cannot stop themselves talking. Would future generations develop their own social limitations to internet use, if the internet were to be around for another 150 years?

So we just went to dinner.

Last night, after a day of stuff.

Up at 6.30 (as always) putting songs together for worship at the church.

Into work at 10am to print off sheets about forgiveness.

In church at 10.30am, setting up for the morning meeting (not too hard, since cups already out and urn on).

Around 2.30 Chris out for cream teas and networking at a local village event, me cutting grass.

4.00 through the shower and quickly out to see our good friends and amazing people of God Mike & Liz Beaumont before they left for 9 months in Vancouver. We both come away, having met some of the other guys in leadership in Oxford Community Church realise what we've been missing - the wisdom, the depth of faith, the family and the trust between men of God who have chosen to walk openly with each other. It was just as if we'd never been away, and some of the guys we were only passing acquaintances with.

6.05 (oops) back at Heyford Park for the evening prayer meeting. A good time sharing stuff - almost too much sharing, then prayer where I really became aware of the Spirit of God moving, and catching a bit of His heart.

7.45 Done for the day and into Bicester. So we just went to dinner at Anica (I want to call the place either Arnica or a knicker) which is a decentish curry house. We've been out to dinner a number of times recently, which is unusual for us, since money has been tight, but there has always been a purpose and always in company. It's good to just be the 2 of us, together. No need to make conversation, but able to talk about almost anything that we want to. I need times like this with my wife, who is also my friend.

Chris has been asking when I get a sabbath, and the answer is that I get by. Sabbath has begun to happen, even though I have lots of work on in the lab right now. Tuesday night there's another meeting, but it *feels* like sabbath has already started in preparation for the holiday.

Ben might be home tonight, after HIS holiday. That will be nice.

Confession and forgiveness

Sometimes messages are easy to write, and I have felt almost guilty to be completed in 2 or 3 hours.

Sometimes they just don't flow *easily* and require some real work.

So I'm speaking on confession and forgiveness tomorrow. This has been real work. I hope it is actually useful.

And maybe they'll forgive me. ;-)

I'm having trouble enabling blogger comments

As can be seen, the Haloscan comments that I used for the last 9 years are being discontinued in October. I have enable google comments in the settings, but cannot see anything that suggests they are actually working. Do I have to use a new blogger template for them to work, or are comments exclusive (i.e. if I have external comments enabled does that disable blogger comments)?

Suggestions welcome.

Y'know how some mornings the sun shines

.........and it's all great.

Cat sick on the kitchen floor, and it was raining first thing.

We just feel really battered this morning, mostly because we went to bed last night feeling battered. We did the 'Are you OK. Yes, are you?' thing, but the feelings obviously remained, though for me they are seeping away now I'm starting to do stuff.

Some stuff isn't fixed easily, but one thing's for sure; we're not getting any more cats.

The Stainless Steel Rat

.... can rust in peace.

Goodbye Harry Harrison.

A week on, I'm pleased with the SSD upgrade.

I'd been thinking about doing this for at least 6 months, and wish I'd done it sooner, although prices have plummeted in that time. It's simply a much nicer machine to use, and everything just seems to work better. How much of that is Mountain Lion, how much the SSD I'm not sure, but it doesn't go all jerky like it would sometimes before.

One thing I should say is that it is NOT amazingly quick. Applications do open much more promptly than before, but the OS feels like it's deliberately slowed down so that everything is greasy-smooth, rather than 'instantly' snapping open.

As for ML, the changes of 10.5 seem quite small really, and mostly cosmetic. I know they aren't, but apart from a couple of 'change for changes sake' alterations, it works very similarly to the way it did before. It seems there is a monitor control issue in ML, and hopefully that will get patched soon. Battery life is likely to be quite a bit shorter, though it's hard to tell because the time remaining in hours and minutes has been replaced with a % remaining value, and that's meaningless. The machine gets VERY hot when connected to an external hard drive (even when idle) but that would also cause heat with 10.5 and degrade performance noticeably too as it ran out of RAM.

So if you're considering the upgrade I'd definitely recommend it. If you own a Mac then the recommended drives are the Crucial M4 and the Samsung 830, maybe an Intel 520 series. Prices have dropped a long way, and I wonder now about one for a home computer.

Ever come home from work with your head full of crapspeak?

What?

I remember being in project meetings where people (well, the boss) would talk all sorts of old rubbish, and the language would worm its way into my head. When I got home sometimes I'd talk to Chris about implemention something or trajectory the other, then apologise for the crapspeak I'd just inflicted on her tender ears.

This episode of the BOFH brought it all back.

Eventually said boss was 'let go to pursue other interests' and we all breathed a sigh of relief. He wasn't stupid, but he was a nasty bully, inclined to emotional blackmail. I'm told that outside a work context he was a lovely guy, kind and generous to a fault. Wonder what drove the work persona?

Day 4 of OSX 10.8 AKA Mountain Lion

Monday I mentioned having put a Samsung SSD in the Macbook instead of the original drive (now nearly 4 years old, although for 1 year not in use due to 'upgrading' with a Western Digital drive that wasn't much faster but vibrated and made a lot more noise and then failed in use - the warranty replacement vibrates even more!).

It's been an uncomfy 3 days since.

ML downloaded overnight (4.4 Gb) and after saving the application, ran the install which took about 30min. I then restored my data from a Time Machine backup, keeping a spare so I could revert (Apple updates will work in 1 direction only, and they will not let you go back) restoring data only but no applications.

Initial reactions were mostly along the lines of 'why did I bother' except that updating now might mean holding off obsolescence for another 18 months. Macbooks made in August 2008 were already too old and no longer have an OS upgrade path. Not necessarily a big deal unless you need to use a more recent piece of software or hardware, in which case it becomes a very big deal indeed. There are a couple of features that seem neat, like reminders of calendar dates, and I can see the cross over with iDevices.

I've not really figured out the point of mission control yet. There presently seem several systems for displaying applications, open windows etc spread across the desktop, all of which are a mess and don't work as well as a windows style taskbar for finding open application windows. I can see these making more sense on a small device that doesn't have a mouse, where you won't run many apps open at the same time - it makes no sense on a desktop and never did. The application icon is shown at the bottom of each window, again confirming that this is designed for a device with a small screen so you can see which window is a browser, mail, calendar etc. On a 20" monitor where you have 8 spreadsheets and 6 word docs open it may not be so useful. Choice is good, but only where those offered are intelligent and useful.

Some have complained about short battery life and overheating. For the first day it was running really hot, fans humming away and battery capacity dropping rapidly. Yesterday that seemed to stop, and it was running cooler (not checked battery life again) an explanation from the Apple forums being that the OS was indexing all the data for spotlight, and that would seem reasonable.

The app launcher is OK - familiar from Pear Linux. For reasons that I've not yet investigated, all the Microsoft applications have been placed on the second launcher page while other apps like Firefox and Libreoffice were added to the first page (where there's still a lot of space). I keep Office in the dock, along with any other apps I'd normally use, so it doesn't matter, but it's an odd thing to do. That side of things all seems to work normally and just like it ever did, so no problems there.

Hiccups?

I mentioned an uncomfy 3 days. Well getting it to talk to my Samsung 2043NW monitor has been difficult. Initially the monitor would occasionally flicker if monitors were set to mirror, showing the same resolution as the laptop screen despite being set to 1680X1050. When set up as a separate monitor behaviour was erratic over resolutions and in any case that was not how I needed it to work. After much hunting I found a piece of software - SwitchresX4 - through a link on the apple forum where other users had seen similar problems with 10.6.3. This enabled me to adjust the individual sync settings for the monitor - so now it would remain on, but the Macbook signal was sent mirroring the screen res at 1280X800. :p  Sometime after the first day the icon for screen control in the top toolbar disappeared too. Finally, trying to start it in clamshell mode was totally ineffective - it would display the grey 'booting' screen on the external monitor  for a few seconds, then the screen would go black and the macbook would go to sleep.

I'd wrestled with it too much and eventually gave up, just using it as a laptop sat on my desk because I needed to be productive, promising myself that I would find a replacement as soon as Windows 8 was out.

This morning I came in, thought "wonder if I can get that screen control icon back" and started it in clamshell mode again. The monitor went grey, then black & I thought it must have gone into sleep mode. Suddenly voila! There was my desktop, a bit fuzzy and with wonky colours, but back at native resolution and the Macbook running with closed lid. It's nice to have enough space again, to give my eyes a break too. I've since recalibrated the display but fonts are just plain fuzzy, almost certainly due to screen sync, but I'm reluctant to adjust further since it does actually work.

As for the SSD, it has made the system more responsive, although I've noticed that after a couple of days programs open less quickly and boot no longer seems so strikingly rapid - probably just all part of the way an OS slows down after first install and updating. there is distinctly less beachballing, and the machine is less frustrating to use. So that's good. Definitely an upgrade I'd recommend.


*edit*
Worth putting some context on this - going from Leopard to Snow Leper made the machine almost useless (i.e. printing was no longer possible). Guess I should be grateful this particular service pack for OSX has been so well behaved.

Haven't posted a pic for a while.

Sanity

Restored!

But a time is coming for an update.

Talking of which, it's nice to have the Macbook boot in around 10-15 sec instead of a minute+, when it can finally get its backside in gear. Just installed Office and now going for 198Mb worth of update. It seemed like a better idea to do that first, so that when Hill Cat gets added the latest version is already waiting for it. The installs were nice and snappy too, with 10.6 going on in about 30min instead of 50min and Office in around 5min instead of 10.

The install is happening

1.3Gb of updates for Snow Leopard now happening. This is like downloading a whole new Linux distro, and in many ways, that's very likely just what it is.

Why do I need several hundred meg of iTunes? 

Ever thought you knew what would happen?

When you allowed something to update?

Blogger.

Update template.

Irreversible.

Tramsmash.

Pox!

I'll try to repair the damage over time, but blogger tools seem to be total poo compared to editing directly into the full HTML template. How stupid am I?

It's here!

The Samsung SSD 830 for my Macbook.

Now I want to know, why are Macs so slow using USB devices these days, and why do they seem to infect USB devices with slowness? I'm backing up to an external HDD and it's running apparently at around 10Mb/sec. I've only got 77Gb on the drive, but it seems to be taking forever.

The *plan* is that I'll pop the SSD in, create a fresh install of Leopard, then update, then install Snow Leopard on top, then update again to 10.6.8, then download & install Mountain Lion + updates. Then install Office 2008.

At that point I will have to decide whether to system restore from Time Machine, putting everything back as it was, or whether to reload manually. Right now the last option is looking favourite, simply so I can ditch some stuff that I'm sure is cluttering the Macbook up, hopefully losing the memory leak at the same time and keeping the benefits of a fresh install.

For security I will have the original HDD & 2 Time Machine backups, 1 at work &1 at home, so that IF I choose the restore option then I still have 1 backup that is compatible with 10.5.8 and can defeat Apples scorched earth policy to legacy.


In other news, I'm still trying to recover strength. A couple of weeks back I did a cycle ride that completely exhausted me, but probably made me fitter. Now the same thing is happening with my mind, being stretched and pulled to the point where, sometimes, it's just exhausted but cannot relax & rest. Greater mental fitness will come, but it's a painful uphill struggle, and the body is tired too. We'll get there.

Curious how things go - wonder if I've used that title before?

2 Sundays ago I spoke about salvation and the choices we make: how we can chose the things that line up with God, that do us good, help us live in freedom and at peace. It was in the context of working out our salvation instead of waiting for God to just change us spontaneously.

A name has recently come to my attention through a professional contact system, and it still makes me shudder a bit.

So I find there is unforgiveness in my heart, sitting there beside the scars. So I'm thinking about what choices I can make to undo that, to be free of the hurt and to see them as they are, separate from the history we have. Even if no-one else listens, hopefully I can preach to myself.