I'm back

I've been away. Not just from the country - but yes, Sicily was wonderful, thanks - but also from my normal online activity. Instead of posting photos and writing posts, I've spent all my computer time recently fighting with my recalcitrant iPhoto library, full of duplicates and photos on their sides since my computer died and needed a heart transplant exactly two years ago, and backing up furiously as I fixed it so that my repairs weren't lost. I've been in and out of the Time Machine - and had the vapours when it too failed for a week - and I've rationalised the things I wanted to keep.

But now I'm back. I have a new machine, and am currently using the new keyboard that came with it (don't like it as well as the old one; it's wireless, which is ok, but the keys are less sensitive) and a trackpad instead of a mouse (jury's still out, though there are good things about it). I'm working on Safari instead of Chrome for a change (I originally left Safari cos I couldn't access all Blogger's features) and fighting to remember the tabs I had before. My files are rationally organised for the first time in two years - I only found out today that they were chaotic because of a saved backup when the new hard drive was installed.

I'm looking to get my photos out of the camera and the phone, into iPhoto and then onto Flickr. I hope to find some interesting things to write about instead of this self-regarding computer stuff; you can tell how obsessed I've been. But first I need to thank my pal Rob for spending so much time helping me today despite my tendency to squawk "what are you doing now?" at awkward moments. I'm looking forward to learning a bit more at the Apple store when I go for lessons - I'm interested in doing more with my photos for a start. Right now I'm off to put my grandchildren back on the desktop, and then I'm going to bed.

Rob, if you're reading this - I got the printer to work, all by myself!

Macs I have known

It was coming - we all knew that. It was just a matter of when. But knowing someone is terminally ill doesn't really lessen the impact when the end comes, not even when one has been with the person almost to the end. So it was, I think, with the death of Steve Jobs. And though my only connection with the man was the tenuous one of knowing that my #1 son had interviewed him once, I have been using Macs more or less from the start.

In the latter half of the 1980s, the teacher who had started the latest incarnation of the Dunoon Grammar School magazine left for another post, and the then pupil editor, one Neil McIntosh, decided it would be efficient if I were to take over from him. After all, I could check copy accurately, and I had a car - as well as being sufficiently malleable to run down the road in said car to retrieve any important kit forgotten by the editor. At that time the school had two Apple Macs sitting in the maths classroom that was the hub of computing in the school, and as I took over the pupil editorial team had decided they would start in-house publication of the Pupils' View instead of taking copy down to the local paper. Somehow they learned/taught themselves how to use Macs instead of the BBCs that had previously reigned, and the empire was born.

As these machines were, in theory, portable, and had custom-made carry-bags to facilitate carriage, we tended to have one home at the weekends, and gradually I became familiar with a mouse and such things as hypercard. When #1 son left school and started on a journalism course, he acquired his own - by now a Mac 2 Classic - which we still have, in its box, in our loft. Later, we substituted a Mac LC for the Amstrad we had at home and the ZX Spectrum on which the budding journo had started at the age of 10, and in the fullness of time connected it to the Internet.

The Pupils' View eventually made enough money to purchase its own computer, and a shiny blue bubble of an iMac appeared in my classroom. So desirable was it that we chained it to the desk with steel cables, and life was never quite the same again. I learned to use Adobe Pagemaker, and was able to teach other non-geeky types - literary, but non-geeky - to use it. The empire grew, as did the collection of Mac Classics, discarded by Business Studies and the like, along my back wall - still functioning well enough for the juniors to produce copy and my senior students to type their RPRs on.

Currently, we own two iMacs - one each. Still sitting ready but disused in the loft is the LCII. I have a 6 year old laptop that saved my sanity recently when my iMac needed a brain transplant, and I have an iPad. I have used PCs - they were issued to staff for registration in my last years in teaching, and I used a friend's to upload photos and Skype home when I spent a month in New Zealand. I was able to make them do my bidding - but they seemed unfamiliar and clunky and on one occasion I and the owner of the PC were unable to locate a bunch of photos after I'd downloaded them.  I was not impressed, and had not the slightest desire ever to own one.

People much cleverer than I at this sort of thing seem devoted to their PCs and don't like Macs at all. But I have never had to struggle, never even had to use one of #2 son's much sought-after Mac Guides (produced about 1990). I've found that once I'd seen something work on a Mac, I've been able to do it - or even to work it out after a word at a Teach Meet or whatever. Nowadays, I don't know how I could live as I do without the communication I enjoy with people all over the world. I'd be an increasingly grouchy pensioner stuck in Dunoon with an increasingly useless passenger ferry unable to cope with travel three seasons out of four. (Don't say a word).

So, for my life as it is, I have one person to thank. That person is Steve Jobs.

Health update on a Mac

The blog's gone a bit quiet recently, I know. Partly it's been my need to keep up with my father's Letters from the Past - there have been quite a few recently, and I'm trying to keep them to the dates on which they were written 66 years ago. Soon he will go on leave to attend my birth, and the strange journey will be over. There are no letters kept from the time after that - I suspect my mother my have had her hands full in the months till my father's demobilisation, and the wonderfully evocative letters which the ones I have hint at perhaps dried up - or were replaced by phone calls. I don't know, but I shall miss them.

But another reason for my unblogging is the fact that my desktop iMac has ... well, died. It's been staggering a bit for some weeks now, but I was managing to cajole it along with frequent emptying of the cache and so on. Yesterday, however, it turned up its toes and wouldn't let me past the sign-in stage. It's going to the doctor in the Apple Store this week - just in time before my Apple Care runs out - and I shall be able to report on the experience.

Meanwhile I am relying on the laptop I bought (a PowerBook G4) when I retired six years ago. This blog began on the laptop, and I used to feel totally at home on it. Now, however, the screen feels small and dim and the angle on my desk is all wrong (though it is crammed in front of the iMac) and I keep reaching for a mouse. The fan keeps whirring alarmingly, and as I type I'm aware that what is on the screen isn't keeping up with my flying fingers. The various apps tend to be out of date and there are too many things I can't use. Worst of all, I had promised myself that this would be the week I would do my tax return. Last year's stuff is all ... on the sick machine. I can't bear to start on this one. I shall procrastinate further.

And before you ask: yes, it's all backed up.

The shock of the new

A second trip in one week to the Apple Store in Glasgow saw me and Mr B staggering to our car with my shiny new iMac in its box after its memory upgrade. It is currently sitting in the hall, challenging me to get it out and do something sensible with it. But I can't face it tonight. Deeds of such magnitude need to be undertaken in the light of day, when one is in full command - not in the last remnants of post-prandial stupor and the onset of must-get-to-beditis.

And although I am looking forward enormously to the newness and the speed of it, I can't help feeling the usual trepidation. Will it go? Will it find and love the Airport? How will I feel about a full-sized desktop machine with a 20" screen after four years of a laptop? (Notwithstanding the urgings of my physio friend about the postural hell of laptop use...) And what about all the things like Firefox that I've downloaded over the years - will the new one really speak to the old one and transfer stuff? Like Data in Star Trek?

Enough already. I shall sleep on it and dream troubled dreams of change.

Bereft

It's amazing how disconcerting it can be when your computer becomes sick. My laptop (a 4 year old G4 laptop) suddenly started to flash up little messages telling me that my startup disc was full, that I should delete files to free it up. I deleted some old stuff, tidied up a bit - no good. It was still groaning quietly, occasionally huffing and puffing, performing tasks at a glacial rate - a real oldie with a severe case of memory loss. And now it's in Intensive Care, being operated on by my good friend Mr Heathbank, having its marbles removed entirely and replaced - I think that's the plan - using my backup drive and the results of Time Machine. Sounds too clever to be true, but I'm hoping.

Meanwhile, Mr B is letting me use his machine, a big beast which sighs dramatically, purrs powerfully, and zips about at great speed. The keyboard makes the clunking sound I found so enticing in the movie "Wargames" - when the teenage geek hacked into the Pentagon war simulator: remember? I can't type on it with anything like my usual speed or accuracy, and I keep feeling for the non-existent track-pad. I've lost all my former mouse-dexterity - it has, after all, been four years - and I can't get used to looking up at the screen instead of down, though I know this is better for posture.

I'm contemplating buying a desktop to supplement (and I hope it is that rather than replace) the laptop, but there are so many drawbacks I'm beginning to wonder. Feel free to comment! And in the meantime, I need to sort out the conflicting calls on the mail front or Mr B will repent of his kind offer ...

Skype babe

Skype babe 2
Originally uploaded by goforchris.

Now this is what all grandmothers need - especially if they live on the other side of the country from the object of their affections. As befits the daughter of Edublogger, Catriona has made an early foray into the world of VOIP, appearing on her father's webcam this weekend. Now I'll have to get one - can't have her staring at a blank screen - or was it the same pic that I was seeing? - while she talks to me!

But isn't Skype wonderful? And aren't computers just the bizz? So this post is for all the saddoes out there who think people don't interact if they're stuck in front of computers. I said I'd never quote the Blessed Margaret again, but I'm going to after all:

Only rejoice!

Apple Heaven

Apple Heaven 2
Originally uploaded by goforchris.

Paid a quick visit to the new Apple mecca in Glasgow today - after walking past it not once but twice! Somehow we failed to notice the big white apple above the doorway. Perhaps it was because in this magnificent building the portico itself is so imposing that the apple seemed merely an addition, perhaps merely because we were blethering - well, what do you expect?

Anyway, it's a lovely space, and this is a much better use for it than the previous occupancy - all candles and kitsch tat. It was delightfully peaceful - more black T-shirts than customers - although I was told that last night it was full of screaming girls and a live band. I had a poke round what is promised for the new OS (coming in October) and told a T shirt I'd be back for it.

And I will.