Sporadic update number 547

OK, I don’t know if this is the 547th post but my updates are sporadic at best.

So, what have I been doing over the last couple of weeks? Not a great deal really other than visiting people the last couple of weekends.

The Saturday before last I popped down to Rachel, Graham and Chris’ place for a nice, relaxing day with tea, crumpets and flapjacks.

This weekend, after drying out from the drenching I got cycling home, I drove up to Liverpool on Friday evening and was introduced to two cats by Lindsey and Andrew. Saturday was consumed by a museum visit, Christmas tree wrangling and decoration hanging. Whilst yesterday included human kite flying (almost) and a visit to a water powered cotton mill run by the National Trust before a drive back home again.

Hmm, what else? Oh yes, I’m now a proud owner of a 2.6GHz MacBook Pro, which arrived a week earlier than predicted. i.e. marginally less than a month after I ordered it rather than slightly more than a month. It’s very shiny, in a brushed aluminium sort of way and weighs the same as the iBook G4. It’s replacing, with the help of Bootcamp & Parallels, both the iBook and the Acer laptop, which I used for mobile Linux and, when down in Cornwall, as a games machine. I “merely” have to transfer all the data and applications now.

Oh, while I’m at it.. MacOS X 10.5’s great except for a few things:

  1. Transparent menu bar… bad idea. What were you thinking Apple? I now have to pick a desktop background which makes the menu bar usable.
  2. The X server’s partly broken.
  3. Time Machine is unusable on a G4 Mac as it will take 5/6ths of the backup run pegging the CPU at 100% with zero data transfer. On a fast Intel dual core machine it’s fine as long as you don’t unplug the external drive as it will take an hour deciding that it doesn’t need to back up anything when you next plug the drive back in.
  4. The application dock may be shiny but that and the glowing blobs to tell you that an application is running make it less useful.

Oh, and if you think that I’m being partisan about knocking Apple… Microsoft Genuine Disadvantage is the spawn of several devils as well.