Faith and expectation.

And having put a title I now don't want to write.

And when I started writing, the words I wanted to put didn't bring life, but reinforced a negative message. Which I shall not accept.

In many ways it's been a really good afternoon, putting together the maps and directions for our trip to Canada. That was a challenge in itself with one particular place requiring me to 'drive' 42km from Jasper along highway 16 with google maps to find the place we're staying.

The Macbook (my travel computer on this journey) has just finished updating, and I'm getting the Kindle app to download the latest books. Next will be to sync Kobo app and delete unwanted information from the drive to make space for photos.

I think that I shall leave the office shortly (and a little early) to go for a run so that I'm recovered in time for dinner, followed by packing. Going through clothes >24 hours ahead of departure is always a good plan to avoid panic.

Sorry things are quiet here.

That's just how it's going to be for now. The important things are still in process, and there's no will to talk about the trivia.

So I've been doing a little route planning just now.

We shall shortly visit a friend who lives in a field (his expression!).

For someone who grew up in the greatest city on Earth (;-)) and lives in a 300 year old house just up the lane from a chapel that was recorded in the domesday book and where every local route, track, thicket and pond has been named, probably several times over, it is astonishing to look up a house by map reference.  Road names are highly descriptive: Township road 442, Range road 230, 231 etc, and with the highlight of Highway 822 running through the middle. Of course we have some long, straight roads here too, just like them, but they were built by the Romans......

I'm really looking forward to this time in a different place. I've a sense it's very different from the places we've been before, even if people are the same everywhere.

ALL Dell computers are called Dellboy round here. ;-)

Quick summary - glad I bought it, not perfect, an equivalent Macbook pro was not worth an additional £800.

So I'm getting used to windows land.

Having a Mac has made me lazy, dumb and careless, partially because OSX is so well set up that you don't have much fiddling to do when starting fresh, but significantly because there is so little of the annoyances you can fix that one loses a will to get under the bonnet and tinker.

The things I miss MOST about the Macbook is the really excellent trackpad, time machine backup software and less pastel colours in the OS interface (see above comment - I've been too lazy/sheep-like to even think about changing them). The trackpad on this *looks* like apple's track pad, in that it's the same size and rocks at the front edge to provide a positive click. However it's covered in black rubber-effect coating and just lacks reliable sensitivity, occasionally glitching or scrolling in jerks. When the 'forearm protection' setting was turned on originally it was bad to use, where as now it's just not as good as something that is best in class, but quite useable. The keyboard is also a little less good, but that might be because it's located further away from the front of the device.

Dell have included their own backup software, which I've yet to explore fully. Again, Time Machine is a remarkable product, and I'm hoping to get something with this that is useable, but with reduced convenience compared to TM (as long as it will do incremental backups and I can actually recover if I need to then that's all I need). It did allow me to create a USB drive to return the laptop to it's factory-fresh state, and that's a brilliant bonus to have when it doesn't come with installation media. Drive created and stored!

The pastel colours I am becoming use to - the ribbon menu was an unfamiliar blur to begin with, but with customisation (that I should know ALL ABOUT as a Linux/KDE user) it's become quite useful. The ribbon menus are definitely a backward step from a traditional menu system, but were designed for touch-screen control, so no surprise they're a bit of a backward step. Ribbon has also happened on the Mac, so even if I'd bought another Macbook I'd still have been stuck with the same old silliness, and I would have HAD to get a new version of Office because 2008 was not working properly under Mavericks.

So outside of that.

Most of the time it's a brilliant upgrade. A lot of stuff 'just works' like it 'just worked' on the Macbook, sometimes better. Networking is a great example, where I can see things on the network that were hidden with the Macbook. There's a shared printer in the next room, for example, that windows will automatically connect with and print to if I want. I also really appreciate that it will run several applications at once without getting its knickers in a twist, and it's nice to be able to watch DVDs or video clips online without the internal fans sounding like a hurricane. The only time it sweats is when creating smart previews under lightroom, where it's manipulating a lot of data and really causing the processors to run flat out for a period. But even then it will still manage other tasks, rather than slowing to a crawl. It did have a hiccup with a crashed application seizing control of the cursor, and that was fixable through the start page.

Battery life is a bit better than when I first bought the other Macbook. It will do around 4 hours of surfing with the wireless on, about 5 hours working in outlook, word and excel, and probably about 3 hours working in Lightroom. By comparison the Macbook would do about 3 hours surfing, about 4 hours with wireless off - wireless and especially bluetooth really hammered the battery - in office.

The screen is still a wow factor, while on the Macbook it was a disappointment, even at the beginning. Startup no longer feels astonishing, and I'd guess has slowed to around 15-20sec from a sub 10sec time on a virgin machine. I may replace the 30GB cache mSATA card with a proper SSD at some stage, reinstall from scratch for improved performance.

Anything else?

Updates. People get reallygripe about windows updates, but stuff for the OS only comes out once a week as a few meg, and is no trouble. I also get daily downloads for windows defender - which is great - who wouldn't want regular updates to virus definitions?

The start window is useful. I really don't mind hitting the windows key on my keboard to be taken over to the start page if I want to run an application not pinned to the taskbar. It's possibly less hassle than a conventional start menu, and certainly no worse.

Well the carbon fibre bottom of the case feels nicer against the legs when you first sit down with a cold machine compared to an ali case, and the sheer skinniness of it still surprises. The front speakers are also clear, loud and fuller sounding than any laptop I heard before. As long as it keeps up this good behaviour then I shall be very happy indeed.

This is my 3000th post.

Not that I want to say much particularly.

And although blogger records this as my 3000th post, not every post has actually made it through to publication*, sometimes because I'm not read to say that, and sometimes because you're not ready to read that.

Chris and I sometimes joke about things we might say on here - but you're DEFINITELY not read to read those things!

So for better or worse, this is post 3000.


*I've just remembered TBOTAM that was a temporary haven while this place got sorted out, so overall I've posted fully 3000 comments.

What do you feel when you read?

This morning I read this article on the BBC website about a Christian Palestinian family who are being persecuted by Israel in an attempt to drive them from their land.

The article has been written with some spin (replicated in my opening statement) to provoke anti-Israeli feeling while showing the Palestinians as represented by this family as being essentially good, peaceful people. Clearly not all Israelis are rapacious, landgrabbing and evil, while clearly not all Palestinians are peace-loving, Christian and gentle. But it made me proud to be part of the same family as people like these, who continue without malice or violence and plotting to resist wickedness perpetrated by those who should stand for righteousness.

We had a discussion in housegroup last week, about the return of Jesus and Israel. I very seriously wonder if the present nation of Israel have disqualified themselves from the blessing of God through their treatment of the gentiles around them.

Downloading.....

Linux Lite 2.0, based on the latest LTS Ubuntu version (what ever number that is now).

I've been running Mint 17 with Mate on the little Philips laptop, and it's simply too demanding to run well on an old 1.6GHz dual core with 2Gb RAM. Which is crazy really, but hey ho (tempted to pop, say, windows XP on there). Mint also behaved a little odd with some of the hardware, whereas LLOS always did well.

46min left.

*edit*

Installed. Twice as quick as Mint/Mate - it's fluid & doesn't keep pausing - and prints OK. bound to be some teething somewhere, but all seems good thus far.


Now.... bed.

That was the day that was.

To slightly corrupt a line from Alan Wicker.

Fathers day is my most un-favourite of days of the year. I can never lose the sense of failure as a father, of having lost a child, of feeling I've not done as well as I should with our son, and these days starting to feel old, tired and futile. God has been gracious to me, giving us children that we didn't raise, and one of the high points of the day was a text from one of our God daughters to wish me a happy fathers day.

My friend Randall posted an amazing picture of 4 generations of men in his family, each of whom led the people of God in their own generation and illustrating the heritage that he walks in. This is interesting for me, because the Austrian side I most naturally identify with had no such Christian heritage, yet the English sides have a strong line of leaders and preachers in the church, and it seems I have inherited some of that after all through my mum. My English grandfather would speak at a number of different churches covering quite a wide area, but by the time I might have known him as an adult he'd buried 2 wives and was not at all the person he had been. My own father has been dead more than 20 years too, and memories of him are more like photographs than videos these days.

It's a very mixed time emotionally, and mostly either neutral or not good. Right, maudlin time over for another year - on with something else.

I've been borrowed.

Someone has used my home email address to spoof the 'from' address field in a spam/malware email, and I'm getting large numbers of bounced emails as a result.

I know it's not from an infected machine because it started while my usual computer that receives that address was offline for a few days, and I'm running Linux so none of the usual windows email tools will work. Tedious, but not hard to deal with. All the bounced are coming from German addresses, presumably that's why my address was selected, in order to look German, so at least it's unlikely anyone I know will be getting infected junk from 'me'. Just hope I don't end up blacklisted.

A little recent output.

I live in the country, so photograph what's around me.

The sun can do some magnificent things.

For new life there often needs to be a loss of beauty.

Where are you looking?

PoMo the bear - embrace the doubt.

From The Sacred Sandwich. Those who know me will appreciate the humour for me in this even more.

No bears were harmed in the making of this image.

Ever wanted to read a new Bill Watterson cartoon?

Y'know BW: the man who wrote & drew Calvin and Hobbes?

It seems he has just done a few small cartoons.

Yay - my old Firefox is back.

FINALLY managed to import my Firefox profile from the Macbook into Windows, not helped by Apple's inclination to hide things that might be useful, and inconsistent behaviour (so it seemed) of the Finder when trying to find the hidden Library folder. Nuts.

Being without the various add ons I'd installed made me realise just how much adverts mess up the web, with even this (new Dell i7 based) machine being slowed at times because of streamed flash movies. Advertisers - your golden goose is dying a slow and unpleasant death.

In other news, my face is miserable. Forgot to bring analgesics with me today, and Ibuprofen has now worn off.

Grump.

And my mouth feels/tastes horrible still, with the roof sore from the injections.

I've just re-read that - it's almost funny, me grumbling away - life could be SO much worse!

It wasn't the micky what got extracted.

Yesterday I had an upper left molar out, and while modern dental practice is excellent & relatively pain-free compared to how it used to be (I've had a fair few extractions before) it's left me feeling traumatised. Maybe I was tougher when I was younger?

Hopefully it will stop seeping blood/wound fluids today and the mouth will settle down around the injection sites. Injections used to be more painful than the extractions (but still a good trade-off) and often had longer lasting soreness.

Hopefully the aches & thick head will dissapate during the day.

Do you ever?

Have something (many things) you want to say, open a page in which to write, then discover you don't want to say them after all?

Hum.

Just evaluating Linux Mint running Mate as desktop environment as a possible alternative to openSUSE. None of my ordinary base units are working right now, so using that little Philips freevents laptop I picked up cheap a year ago to take to Africa. Thing is that it's fairly old now and not terribly quick/highly specified, so can struggle a bit, and the Mate desktop is meant to be lighter weight than Cinnamon. Mint is a little slower than LinuxLiteOS, but there were no problems getting the printer up & running whatsoever, which was really important since I've not been able to print here for a few weeks.

Just had an interesting time moving the menu panel across from the laptop screen to the external monitor - it was moved automatically when running from the live DVD, but not when running fully installed. alt-click & drag worked, but weird not to make it default to the default screen.

In a few min I'm going to start taking pictures of guitar-related stuff to flog. Chris observed we have too much, and I quite agree with her. It would be nice to release some cash too. So 8 pedals, 2 guitars, maybe an amp or 2 and a bass as well. It's all stuff I've used and enjoyed at various times, but aren't doing so now and can't see a need for it in the future, and maybe it's also a little of the anti-consumer in me coming to the surface.

Is that out of focus?

Last week I sent back the Zeiss 16-80mm lens I'd bought the week before through ebay, because the front barrel was loose and flopping around. Only by a millimeter or so, but still loose enough to let me feel the 'clonk', through the camera body.

So this morning I put my old standard 50mm f1.7 lens back on & went to take some pictures in the garden before leaving for work. I just imported them into lightroom & after examining some at 100% magnification, began deleting them because they weren't sharp. After I reached the 3rd image I realised it wasn't the camera that had failed to focus, but that the 'standard' minolta lens was simply much less crisp than the Zeiss I'd returned, and I was binning the images because they simply weren't at the same standard I'd become used to.

Looks like it will need replacing like for like then.

A Natural Death

Chris found a complete skeleton while on a litter pick at the end of the winter - it's now disappeared under herbage again, but I did manage to get some pictures before the plants covered it up.

Useful guide to digital camera cleaning

See here.

Following from the last post - 1 week on with Dellboy.

This will not surprise anyone if I say that, after going back to a concentional PC running windows and all the hassle it's been moving from Mac to PC, I have wondered whether it would have been better to have stayed with Apple, even with all the performance compromises, real or imagined.

I'm very much hoping that as I become more familiar with this set up - and the change is as big as any I've experienced moving to a new Linux distro - that the difference between OSX and Windows (and openSUSE/Pear) will stop being obvious, and it will just become another computer used for work. In many ways I like the new toolbars in Office 2013, and I've begun tinkering to optimise them for my workflow. At the same time they are suffering some bad design/styling choices, with the text and icons in soft pastel colours that make them fuzzy and indistinct when you're hunting for a function that's not familiar. I may well find this is customisable too, but haven't dug beneath the 'hood' enough yet.

I'm still really aware of my initial feelings as an experienced windows user returning to windows on a 'nice' machine and comparing it to my earliest experience with Apple. Also interesting to note that Apple are a hardware manufacturer that happens to sell software to support its hardware, while Microsoft are a software manufacturer that has never really managed a successful hardware business.

When starting a Mac for the first time, the new user experience is good, with well-considereed choices and pleasing introductions. The bad choices and bits of frustrating stupidity, though present, are well concealed. With Windows the reverse is true, and it takes a couple of hours digging and fiddling to end up with something that's fit for use. This makes no sense to me: if I were a new user, or not technically able and I'd just bought a new laptop, why should I need to know about how to configure screen settings? Why load up the Windows start menu/metro interface with all the stupid and unfamiliar junk in bilious purple squares that most users will want to junk anyway? Why not make software that looks good, guides the user to begin with and works right out of the box? Almost every new Linux install has hardware detection built in, so why not include this by default (or encourage manufacturers like Dell to include the right drivers etc) so that everything is great from the start.

This is turning into a rant, which wasn't the idea, but someone has badly failed to understand how to make their products friendly and desireable, and it's killing an otherwise good business.

As for the new hardware, as one would expect, it's a mixed bag.

The positives:
That screen is superb, really, and the finer dot pitch (and possibly some upscaling, though I'm not aware if it's happening or not) makes watching DVDs much nicer than on a bigger low res screen. Detail is crisp and sharp, colours clear and the whole very pleasing.
Weight - the XPS15 weighs slightly less than the 13" Macbook (itself a light machine at the time).
Fit and finish - seems very good. There's no creaks or rattles, the ali bits are blemish-free, and although it's a little flexy, important things like USB ports are snug and work right every time (not something that could be said for my Macbook with poor USB port reliability).
Quiet - even when the fans are going flat out, it's still quieter than the Macbook in the same condition.
Quick - despite using spinning rust for storage, boot is fast (about 1/3 the time of the Macbook using SSD) and nearly everything happens *quickly*. It also copes fine with several applications open and doing stuff.
Battery life - I've already seen around 4 hours of doing things that worked it hard enough to get hot.

The less good:
That superb screen - can also make things a little small sometimes, and 16:9 is a stupid consumer video format entirely out of place for business use. Screens should be 3:2 for optimal document handling.
Fit and finish: everything you touch in normal use has a black rubberised coating. Looks good when new, gets shiny fast. This coating is also on the trackpad, and since that's distinctly less good than the apple equivalent, I wonder if this is why?
Temperature - since I mentioned fans. The Macbook would remain cool unless asked to do something demanding, at which point it would warm up. The Dell is warm all the time, though sometimes it will get much warmer too. Different cooling plans and the downside of a thinner, lighter casing?
Quick - but not all the time. It too bogs down a little after processing a few images through lightroom. This I did not expect. Some of it is likely down to the conventional hard drive, and I could hear the drive being accessed each time a block of data for image was re-rendered in Perfect Effects.
Size - after a 13" machine the extra 2" takes a little getting used to, and I wish the keyboard were further forward instead of being near the screen.

Sofa so good - none of the above is show-stopping, and generally it's a great replacement.

Finally - my address book has been uploaded.

One week on with the new computer.

Initially I tried the obvious thing: export contacts from Entourage as a tab-separated file, which was then imported into excel and converted toa comma separated file (.csv) before re-importing into outlook. Except it didn't work.

All the names came over, and just 1 field with phone numbers: all the rest were blank.

OK, not to be put off, I deleted all those, then created a new contact with all the appropriate fields filled in: emails, various phone numbers, postal address etc. Export to a .csv file - all I got was a name and 1 (mobile) phone number. All the right headers were there, but none of the additional data I'd entered. Nuts.

So back to google - in more than 1 sense of the word.

Microsoft will import data from Google - if you link accounts (Meh, but OK for now) - which in retrospect I probably didn't need to do, but it DID make it easy for me to find and access all the contacts Google stores from my phone (you can imagine how much I don't like this because of privacy, though I DID know Google stores ALL my information anyway). There were a LOT of duplicates there (>1100 contacts) and I spent 2 hours this morning going through and editing, deleting and combining contacts to get down to a list that STILL has duplicates, somehow (Randall - your details are listed 5 times!). The final step after the editing was to export contacts as.... you guessed it.... a .csv file. The option was there to export as a .vcard file too, so I did that straight afterward).

So went back as usual, did the 'import as .csv file' and was offered for the first time, choices over what fields I want in my contacts list. Hit OK and bam, there's all the contacts, addresses, multiple email addresses, phone numbers, the lot, all where they should be.

I wonder if I'd have been better off just sertting down to plug them in by hand (the answer is yes, in that I could have got the lot in - 700 odd - in a working day, though it would have been mind-numbing). But at least now I have contacts it feels like I can continue to work properly: being contactless is unsettling.

Today is a moist and cool day.

So in sympathy with the weather, here are some representative images.

Last week Chris had to get up very early one morning, and being 'good' I kept her company. The expectation was that I'd arrive at Trow Pond around sunrise, but when I got there it was tipping down. So instead of beautiful, inspiring sunrise shots, here'S Trow pond in the wet and chill.

Earworm

Is what the Germans (so I've been told) call it when you have a song in your head that won't go away.

This morning we sang and player this song, and now, both Chris and I can't quite get rid of it. It's cool, but not that cool. ;-)

I'm not sure whether to be pleased or not

But I am grateful.

The little Philips laptop has a VGA-out socket, and that together with an old Acer 19" monitor means that I can work on a desktop system again. A little tweaking, a bit of fiddling and *bazinga* I can work in clamshell mode with less hassle setting it up that with the macbook when I first had it

Debating now whether to set up the NAS tonight or wait until next week, so I will have a data store for backups. I have both drives from my desktop machine still intact, and apparently readable, so I really should make copies ASAP. Not sure yet whether I will actually ever get another desktop, since I have 3 laptops available now, and don't *want* to spend more money.

Grateful?

Oh yes, that I have a wealth of gear here I can use when I need stuff.

It never rains etc.

So, in the middle of the transfer of all my business data to the new Dell, my home computer has hardware failure.

I've been increasingly aware of issues: once I was sat in the livingroom having just started it on the windows partition, heard a 'click' and then seen it go directly from login to blue screen of death. The Linux side has been reasonably OK until this last week or 2 when it suddenly refused to print, and then I started seeing warning messages about USB failure.

My initial assumption was that openSUSE had received a bad update & was struggling a bit (actually that started a while back) but when I then found that I couldn't copy my files to another drive I became much more concerned. Various attempts with drives formatted different ways and connected through SATA, external USB etc all failed, as had using a live linux OS for copying, so I decided to do a fresh rebuild using the old machine I'd had until a couple of years back.

Used PC components apparently don't store well.

With fiddling, I could get the old machine to post OK and access the bios, but it wouldn't get as far as actually searching for a boot drive (Stopped at the DMI line in posting).

So I have a small stack of hard drives sat on my desk waiting for data recovery to archive drives, then wipe & reinstall, but that will be AFTER the hardware issues are fixed. And I'm getting too old to enjoy crawling on the floor un-plugging & replugging stuff for the 7th or 8th time. I still have 3 working laptops (Dell Boy, the Macbook and my old Philips knock-about machine) but none have the multi-terabyte HDDs inside that I want for backup purposes. I do have an HDD to UBS drive caddy and there is a D-Link NAS device upstairs, so I could use the Philips as a pass-through device to transfer data to the NAS I guess (about 1Tb of data at 10-20Mb/sec, wonder how long that would take?).

Meh, as Johanna C would say.

Trouble likes company

So in the middle of the great work computer migration I realise that my home computer situation is a little parlous too - time for a rebuild. Unfortunately openSUSE has become so flakey that it's struggling to copy files & write to discs, so it's rebuild time all over again too.

So rather than email, I'd like to say 'thank you' to certain people at this time, especially the creator of the image 'hard ottage'. You know who you are. ;-)

Day 4 of new computer ownership.

No comments yesterday - I spent the morning at the John Radcliffe hospital with my mum for her appointment with the heart specialist. She is now regularly been taking morphine (amongst a vast array of other drugs) and that seems to have reduced the problems of the heart both racing and skipping that she found so distressing. They were sufficiently pleased that she's been given a year until the next appointment.

So back to the laptop and Wait - how I've begun to read my abbreviation of Windows 8. That's not at all appropriate, and after the pedestrian Macbook this thing generally flies.

The REAL challenge has been how to import emails from the previous computer, and frankly, it's made me get a bit sweary inside my head at times. Back in the bad (read 5 years ago) days Microsoft offered Outlook for windows and entourage for OSX, and although in many ways they were similar, they stored and archived emails in incompatible formats (this may still be the case, but Office:Mac now uses 'Outlook' too, and I've not seen conversion tools for that).

So Outlook on windows uses the .pst file format and entourage the .rge archive format.

I was loath to pay for a converter program if I could help it for a one-off use (ain't NEVER going back there) so tried some of the various web rememdies and free conversion tools. Apparently it's possible to extract emails in .eml format from entourage by dragging & dropping on the desktop, but there's an upper limit of 200 emails per operation. I have >20,000 emails in 132 folders (yes, I do file them inbox is bloating at around 2500 emails) so that would mean probably 150 drag and drop operations with the chance of missing something important or creating multiple copies of junk.

Uh-huh.

Spent a couple of hours yesterday afternoon, then another couple this morning. I'd found a 'free' package that promised to convert emails for personal use from a few different formats. Entourage wasn't listed, but Apple Mail will import entourage email and it was, so off we went. That was a curious experience, because there were no progress bars available so had no idea if it was working until the fans started running hard on the Macbook for about 25 min. So the program was installed, 3Gb of exported Apple Mail .mbox files copied across and comnversion process run.

Outlook 2013 does not import .eml files. it would open them from individual (randomly named) files, but not import them.

Now in theory I could have attempted to im,port them into outlook express/microsoft mail/whatever they call it these days, but after multiple conversions between formats and stories on the www of corruption & reformatting happening, AND the time all this was taking for little forward progress, I decided to call it a day.

So about £22 bought me a tool that would stop me playing silly beggars any more - well, mostly.

See, when you import an entourage .rge archive file into entourage it brings across all the calendar appointments and address book too. Not so here. Next workaround then.

Entourage will apparently export contacts in a.csv file, which turned out to be a tab-separated file, and again, not compatible with Outlook. Now the quicker-witted will know that excel can import and convert tab separated files into excel spreadsheets, then export them as .csv files. Neat. Except where someone was too lazy to type contact phone numbers with spaces included into contact information - then in some contact detail cells Excel removes the first '0' and treated the rest of the number as a big integer. So my present task is to go through and put the '0' and spaces back in, checking through hundreds of contacts and thousdands of phone numbers.

Fun.

This has made me a little more sympathetic to the W8 haters, because trying to find and work with unfamiliar tools when you're under time pressure isn't fun, and I'm very grateful for the space to learn & set up the new OS. I'm also getting used to a new keyboard, which is odd after the previous apple-specific device (different spacing, different placement of some keys, much longer key travel) which adds to the sense of a different environment. I have to say too, that settings in the new office suite are enormously extensive and complex, and while I admire the sheer sophistication built in, I can't help but feel this is all quite un-necessary for most people at work. It's made setting up mail accounts in Outlook more involved (messages can now be saved to unique outlook archive files for each account) and I sapent an increasingly angry 10min looking for 'undo' on the ribbon in excel, only to find it's on the title bar.

Learning and having unique experiences should keep a mind young - I hope it's true. It IS nice to use a computer that doesn't make you want to cross your arms and start humming while it sorts itself out, though.

I also notice the previous post about this was full of typos and spelling mistakes. C'est la vie, and this one probably will be too.

And so the migration begins.

There were a small pile of boxes waiting for me when I got in this afternoon (taking my mother to the hospital this morning for a visit to Cardiology: 2 hours for a 10min interview with a specialist, but at least they considered her well enough to come back in 12 months).

It is very disconcerting to spend a couple of hundred quid & receive a small empty box. Medialess software is horrid, even if it's less wastefull, because you never feel like you have anything for your money, and it's all far too subject to the whims and success or failure of the vendor. Even worse, with Microsoft Office and many others there is no chance to download and burn a disc, since you download an installer that then installs direct.

And it's slow, subject to the slings and arrows of connection speed. Nasty.

Software vendors - if you're reading this, if you sell software as download only and a competitor has an equivalent product with physical media, I shall always choose the physical media option. Download & direct install only = no sale, as far as I can manage it. King Cnut? Sure (and that's not an anagram:-( )

So I've exported all my emails to an entourage archive file and now am transferring across all my data to the FAT disc partition on my backup drive ready to upload to the new machine. I wonder if Outlook will import Entourage mails?

*edit*
I am naive in my old age. Of course outlook won't import files from an Apple computer, even one running microsoft software. Suggestions on the internet instruct that one can drag emails into suitably named folders on the desktop, however there is a limit of 200 mails per drag & drop, and I have >20,000 emails (and that's with regular culling of junk)

Apple's Mail program will however import entourage emails, and while reluctant, will export them in mbox format, albeit slowly. I can hear the fans spinning up now as it labours with the conversion. From there I may be able to use a 'free' program to do the conversion, or may have to import into Thunderbird and then convert. I did find one converter that would charge me $30 and claimed to do the job OK, but that seems a bit steep for a one-off conversion (even if my time is worth more than that) so it will remain a last resort.

I won't say 'never again' but it's not terribly likely I'll go back to a Mac. Maybe. ;-)

Chris wanted you to know how virtuous she was.

As you can see, spending Saturday morning ironing (and doing EVERYTHING) gave her a halo.

Day 2 of the new lappy.

And it should be a non-event, right? Just another computer.

Mostly.

I had trouble ordering software yesterday, and the same problems repeated today, with the corporate CC being rejected. I *think* it's just run over the credit limit (which wasn't ever very high) and will begin to work again next month. At least MO is on the way now.

This afternoon's adventure was persauding it to work in clamshell mode.

I can see why some commenters have been so vitriolic about Windows 8 now - the control options for many functions seem to be legacy running right back to windows 2000 in some, but not all, cases. So working through control panel, when selecting power settings and behavoiur when the lid is closed you never quite know what kind of dialogue you will need to deal with, and in the case of behaviours when the lid is shut, there are 2 lots of dialogues, both covering the same things anyway.

What is even odder is that some of these dialogues resize to match the screen resolution and some don't, so one moment the dialogue with be screen-filling, while the next it will be so tiny it's hard to interact with at all. Is windows code now so vast that it's not possible to go back through and provide a unified look and behaviour? It certainly doesn't look professional after OSX, and TBH looks pretty bad compared to XP. Having Dell and Intel panels too doesn't help, because they also look as though they were made to look a bit like native windows controls, and then a bit not. Nvidia also has a control panel, but they do their own thing and there's no confusion.

The good, the bad and the yellow-ugly.

There are 2 things that are really striking about this laptop. One is the low weight and slim construction, so that there is the same weight as the Macbook, but in a thinner & wider body. It's a really skinny minny, and that makes for less thick metal therefore more flex when handling. It's not horrid and creaky like so many ligh (and not so light) laptops, but the flex is still there. I DO like the low weight though, and it's a good trade off.

The second is that screen. At native 3200:1800 it's incredibly sharp, clear and lovely. There's a setting on the 'Mobility' control panel for colour called 'Splendid' which makes anything with yellow or orange in it look like it's had WAY too much artificial tan sprayed on, and turning this off helped enormously. There's also a sort of monitor calibration feature that allows adjustment of certain factors, but that doesn't allow one to save different profiles. S'okay, I can live with doing it 'right' once & leaving it.

There are 2 things less good. The screen is REALLY glossy, to the point where there is always a reflection behind your head, but even that wouldn't matter if the screen didn't have a yellow cast to lighter areas when moving ones head up or down - even top & bottom of the screen look a bit yellow compared to the middle.  Not a problem for normal use, not so good for image editing. Oh well.

Overall I *hope* it will be good & well-behaved. It seems a decent device, so lets hope.

The Macbook replacement is here.

In the end I bought a mid-level Dell XPS15 with the 3200:1800 screen option, i7 processor and 16Gb of memory. It came as a refurb from the Dell outlet at around 70% of normal retail price, and that may be a good thing for more reasons than the obvious one. More later.

First off, there were hiccups with Dell actually taking payment, and the credit card (business) was refused. Then there was an email from someone in Dell that had clearly been pasted together from several other emails, all in different fonts and with spelling & grammatical errors, so that I thought my details had been passed outside & I was being scammed. After best part of a week when I'd tried phoning (I HATE calling call centres where I can't understand a word due to poor hearing and speech processing) I'd almost given up and begun to look around for something else. Then I had a call from someone at Dell, we went through the CC details again, payment went through & I got an order confirmation.

Whoopy do.

So it arrived this morning. Small, plain brown cardboard box just big enough to hold a 15" laptop and power supply. And apart from 2 tiny leaflets (quickstart guide and warranty info) that's all there was in the box too - no 'case candy', discs of any kind, letters from the chairman thanking me for my purchase, advertising bumph etc etc. The laptop didn't even come in a plastic bag. Packaging manufacturers nil, environment 1 I guess.

Now, in the past I have already set up several W8 machines, so though I had a pretty good idea of what to expect, but it was with great trepidation that I took it from the box. This is still an expensive bit of kit for me, and if I didn't open it then it could still be returned.

First impression was very mac-like with nice aluminium lid, however flip it over and the carbon fibre bottom is pure Dell, with little vents, slots, rubber feet and all the lumpiness and weak design values that seem to be typical of PC manufacturers everywhere. After a Macbook, every PC seems to have been made by people who a) love plastic and b) have to design stuff with visible crevices and protrusions. It does, however, look very pleasing from the top and not so bad underneath as many models with its carbon-fibre base.

Weightwise it's pretty much exactly the same as the unibody macbook, but feels slightly lighter because it's larger and thinner (and distinctly less solid) kind of like a gigantic Macbook air. A look at the edges showed 2 USB 3.0 ports, headphone socket, mini-display port and HDMI ports on the left, 2 more USB ports (1 X 3.0, 1 X 2.0) plus SD card reader and security socket on the right. There's no RJ45 network port, but wireless is nearly ubiquitous now, and much less of an issue than it was 3 or 4 years ago.

The one bit of design that seems VERY dumb is the power cable, because the connector is a skinny jack that sticks straight out about 3cm before becoming flexible. Making this with a right angle so it protruded no more an a single centimeter (ha ha - Safari doesn't recognise the word centimeter) would have been sensible for a machine designed to travel, rather than sit on the MD's desk all day. Apple - your magsafe power connection wins this one with ease.

So, first start up.

The machine was created with a disc image that simulates the final steps to set up W8.1 after installing, so we go through the basic info about user ID and password, location, language and time, security and making sure all my personal data isn't sold to microsoft and Dell associates, then the screen where microsoft try to force you to create an account before letting you bypass the account requirements in a nasty and devious manner.

Finally the start screen appears.

It seems a bit small.

And there are large black bars either side too.

Hum.

Bother.

Where's control panel.

It is, however at this point that I become grateful a second time round for buying a refurb, because all the cruft and junkware that normally goes with a new machine (Bullguard aniti-virus? Bullsomething ;-) ) is absent. All of it. There's a Dell utility package to supply hardware-specific updates and the various Intel and NVidia driver specific packages, but outside that no symantec malware, no Norton stuff to slow the system to a crawl and crash legitimate apps. Just virgin W8.1.

So we re-size the screen from 1024:768 to 3200:1800 and I have to find some reading glasses to enable me to read text on dialogue boxes. But darn, this screen is AMAZING in the quality of images and resolution it presents. moving back to my main monitor - a Dell U2412M, itself a very good budget screen - I can see pixellation in the text and coloured fringing around fonts.

Eventually, somewhere along the line windows realises that I've changed screen resolution and re-sizes everything to make it readable with the naked eye.

Then we do 900Mb of updates, which downloads far faster than I'd have expected, but installs as slowly as one might have feared. ;-) While that happened I went through and set up the trackpad & so on - the default setting (middle of the slider) is really insensitive, and adjusting it to near max sensitivity makes it much closer to the Macbook trackpad, though still not quite to that standard. At least it's exactly the same size, which is really good (wouldn't have bought it otherwise - small trackpad is a dealbreaker)

After the updates, as I was starting to change the programs in the start menu to ones that might be useful a black box appeared containing and orange arrow and information telling me to swipe in from the side of the trackpad to control different aspects of windows.

Great, that's useful.

I demonstrate that I have read and understood by swiping in from both sides, top & bottom, flicking between start and desktop etc.

The box does not go away.

I restart. No box.

30sec later box reappears.

I run through every setting I can find, looking for a way to remove this B*st*rd box that's occupying my screen. No amount of clicking with various combinations will remove it.

Nothing will get rid of it.

I am quite cross and about to google for an answer when it just goes. Weird.

Setup continues, unspectacularly now. My credit card is refused again by Ebuyer when trying to by microsoft office - never had that happen before, so maybe dell have started a trend.

There's nothing else fun or entertaining to report - just the routine of installing software, printer drivers etc. Hopefully once Office is on there & I can move emails across (I sense a 'story' coming up there) then I can settle down with it for work.

Signing off - from the macbook - for now.