Creeping Me Out

Well I’m back from Scotland..

Not that i mentioned I was going there in the first place. Elizabeth met her sort-of great grandparents, went to the beach, had walks around woods and stuff. I took a load of photos and will upload them shortly.

Watched 30 Days Of Night and really liked it.. Watched the remake of The Omen and wondered why they bothered.. Hmm..

Tried to help/teach an elderly person how to do normal word processing in Vista. Wow. I’d only really used Vista for gaming, UnrealED, Blender and Firefox, occasionally loading Internet Explorer (ugh).. Vista Word is crazy.. I hadn’t realised the extent MS have obfuscated all of the options into “hidden” places. That doesn’t make it simpler! Having a microscopic graphical symbol that makes no sense unless you understand the symbolism or mouse over it, with the alternatives being 2 levels down a clickable menu IS NOT how you make things easier to use.

I quite like it for personal use, by moving the options off to a corner sub-menu its more like Linux, oddly, which seems like the exact opposite of what I imagine MS were trying to do, but yes.. It’s ok if you’re the sort of person who’s comfortable with and enjoys poking around.. It’s great if you like learning new systems – but I doubt I’m in the majority there and i don’t think this new way is more intuitive than the old one; a new user who’s not good with computers having to learn /this/ system has a significantly harder struggle ahead of them than they would with XP..

I’m pretty sure (well, I hope!) it can be customised to be much more “friendly”, with persistent text labels and bigger icons etc, but I wasn’t supposed to be reconfiguring Word to look completely different..

Oh well.. I’m very glad for Pages and OpenOffice.

I just got a big load of paperwork from uni.. I go back on Sept 25th. Just a few more months and I’ll have a degree! It’s going to be potentially complex to juggle with Eli stuff but I’m really looking forward to being back there again.

– Mushroom is really dumb. She followed us up the road when we went to the shops with Elizabeth.. Then hid in the hedge of one of the gardens for about 5 hours.. On getting home I just assumed she was out, but eventually went searching for her and found her the last place we saw her when we were heading out..

Aren’t cats supposed to be good at this stuff? No wonder there are always so many “Have you seen my cat?” signs around, she was less than 30 seconds away from the house and had been there through a torrential downpour. Silly.

batkat‘s earwig was actually pretty strange. Yes, it did come out of a peach she was eating.. Then it climbed into Elizabeth’s car seat.. So, Kat called me upstairs, where I spent 30 mins convincing her that she’d imagined it, because it seemed pretty unlikely.. I mean, living in the stone? Climbing up something to escape rather than just wandering along? Surely they don’t just jump out of fruit? Sounded too bad to be true.. (also, she didnt know it was an earwig, and her explanation sounded pretty nasty as she’d only seen it fleetingly and it caught her off guard..) .. Until I found it in the lining of the car seat. I wasn’t going to leave it thinking there might be something in there so took it apart to be reassuring – totally not expecting to find anything. So, there you go. Earwigs DO live in the middle of peaches. Google agrees. Weird. Freaked us both out. I’m pretty useless when it comes to insect stuff but just put him in the garden.

Oh, and finally photos of the Lake District holiday: Mixelmagic / Flickr / MobileMe.

Previews:

Since I last posted a lot has happened. Before I last posted quite a lot had already happened that I was putting off mentioning.. So, yeah I have a lot to write about.

Elizabeth grew a lot.. She’s much more easily entertained now, but she needs constant stimulation. Which is fine, its cute how easy it is to make her smile/laugh at things.

We went to the Lake District for a week with batkat‘s family. I took >800 photos. Need to sort through them all. It was a good holiday anyway. Lots of rain and walking and relaxing and ducks. And learning the highway code.

Photos of all this stuff forthcoming btw.

My other “baby”, my new iMac.. Is wonderful. Throws things around at crazy speeds. It makes less fan/buzzing noise than the 24″ Samsung monitor it’s using as a second display, and it’s slimmer than the Samsung. Pretty funny. The Samsung IS a much better display, but still, that’s some pretty engineering.

Should last me another 4-5 years, maybe more.. Unless Apple do something really weird to make the old machines suddenly less useful (again? hoo, intel transition) .. The G5 now lives in the girly room where it’s a TV recorder and Jukebox. It’s almost the right size to be a real jukebox.. Originally the plan had been to sell it, which would make a lot of sense as I really probably can’t afford a new machine without doing things like that.. *BUT* I’m way too attached to it.. I’ve not had that sort of rappour with a machine since my first Amiga 1200. Need to keep it around as a failsafe! Nope.. That’s a crap reason. Can’t think of a logical one, though at least it should get good use by Kat and Eli, eventually.. I’ll be able to pay off my credit with my student loan anyway!.. Replacing debt with debt, yay!

Really though, the iMac wasn’t too frivolous a purchase, neither my Athlon64 Windows PC nor my PPC based Mac were powerful enough to work well in Unreal Engine stuff, which is what we’ll be using in Yr3 of the course. Also, you can’t (without hackery) do iPhone development in PPC based Xcode, so my main machine needed Intel.. And.. Speed is good. I have a pretty long “why I need this” list, but for the first couple of weeks I still felt a bit uncomfortable with it. Now, not so much, it’s already performing way over my expectations and making my life a hell of a lot simpler.

And… SOUL CALIBUR 4 in SIX DAYS!