Craig

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I just picked up up the post as it came through the door. We live at number 69, one of the items was for 67. I opened the door, called out to the postman and said one of them was for 67. He then went “Oh, do you happen to know where 67 is?”. I don’t know if I should laugh or cry.

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“I should really get going” *huge crack of thunder outside* ever get the feeling someone is making a point….

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OK, so I have now got myself a new phone. It is the T-Mobile MDA Vario 3 (or as others would call it, the HTC TyTN 2).

I had the version before this and it was a very cool phone, but given what this offered and for how little they were offering this as an upgrade i just had to do it. Basically, its the same form factor, so chunky phone, slide out keyboard and more connectivity than many third world countries. The highlights of the new model for me are probably the tilting screen to make it easier to see the screen when you type, the new version of Windows mobile (so 6) and a built in GPS.

I have spent the last couple of days playing with it on and off as well as moving over all my settings, text messages, calendar and all the other stuff I love these phones for.

I think it would be safe to say I like my technology quite a bit and as such my main source of interest is the GPS. OK, so I know this technology is old hat, I know that, I’ve been using it for long enough. But that still doesn’t get me passed how cool it is to walk down the road with Google maps open, and active internet connection and the location dot in Google maps actually moving as I walk along. I mean, I notices I cross the road… how cool is that!

So just for a bit of fun, I have a screen-shot of my phone while running in my room. The blue dot is drawn by Google maps and is to show where I am. I have add the red dot to show where actually was. I would say its correct to about a meter and a half.

Yey technology, just yey!

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As I dawdled back from the station seeing my girlfriend off I started to think where I see my life going. Of course I have always had dreams, ambitions and just plain ordinary things I want to achieve. For example, get a job I’m happy with that makes ends meet in the life I have become accustomed to, have enough spare time to take up some of the hobbies I want to, not to mention the money for half of them, settle down and have a family. Now I know that last one sounds like a slightly strange thing for 21 year old male to say, but it’s pretty high on my list all the same and is probably the most important to me by a long way. Now although I have always had this little list, some of the things on it seemed a bit further in the distance than others. I think I’ve finally got to the point where I can see how to do all this. I’m not even close to actually doing it, but at least I can see how I can which is very comforting. The less comforting side effect is that I can also see how little of what I need to do am I actually doing. This is made all the more complicated by missing someone very much.

One thing I do invite everyone to watch at some point is this video. I know it is long, in fact it’s very long (hence the stupid time I’m writing this) but it is very much worth it. It is basically a university lecturer in the US giving his final lecture knowing he is going to die. It is all about his reflections on life and the good and bad things from his life. It was made famous on the web a little while ago but I have only just found the time (*tries not to laugh*) to watch it. All I can say is it is very very worth the comparatively little time it needs.

Running time: 1hour 44mins

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It would be safe to say I have a lot on my mind at the moment. For starters, I have recently noticed I’m going into the IT industry… This means I can do pretty much any job that requires a computer. Thanks to my year in industry working for a big American bank I just assumed I would slot back into one of those, after all, hours are good, company is big and job security is high not to mention pay is very good. However, I could also go work for a charity and end up running their IT systems, or could go into the education industry, either lecturing or running their systems, after all I have enough experience at the latter. In fact, I’m slightly scared and at the same time very comforted by this thought, especially given I’m not exactly putting my all into my course at the moment. In fact I may be pushed into some interesting decisions soon, some that I never expected… then again, a lot has happened this year I didn’t expect and its far from all bad.

As for some of the things on my mind. Well here things really do get complicated. Basically Demelza’s laptop failed on Monday night. I arranged for a Jonner’s to go round and attack it with Linux live CD and see what he could do. The answer wasn’t much. I went up Tuesday night and had a look at it. It didn’t look good. I stayed the night and left her with my laptop to keep her working. So Wednesday night I had a bit more of look with the very proactive assistance from Will and Nick. Now we come to Thursday. I planned to get up early but clearly this conspired against me as I was woken by Will at 10:30. We made our way into Sussex campus to collect an adapter to plug the drive into. This idea also failed. Then it so happened that Fouad at the labs had an almost identical disk. So after a bit of analysis we thought swapping the controller boards over may help. However this required a screwdriver bit no-one had. So, as it was lunch time, road trip home with Fouad, Dan, Myself and Will. After a spot of lunch in he rain back on campus we made the swap. Still no luck. From here myself and Will left for town with a big list of places to ask who may do data recovery. Although many of them did this issue is fairly well beyond most of them. So with a couple of other items from the list like mother day gifts complete we made our way home where this evening we have been very lazy as both of us are pretty dead from the day (along with the rest of the house).

Tomorrow should be interesting (well, Today now). Fouad is driving home tomorrow morning where home happens to be north London and home to the top entry on a Google search for data recovery. So I phoned them this evening and I’m going to drop the drive off with them so they can tell me just how bad it really is (I have a pretty good idea and there is a slim chance they can get the data back, but I’m not getting my hopes up in case). From there I will be going to Roehampton to find Demelza and then will be going back to Horsham for the weekend so she can finally meet my family. Her stress levels must be through the roof. As it is mine are and it’s not even my data and I know my family pretty well at this point.

A lot of my stress level is can be attributed to the fact that as a fairly OK person in the realm of fixing computers, I’m not used to not being able to fix it, especially when it’s this important (the data is what I would call mission critical).

So all in all, not great at all.

Sleep time me thinks, I have to be out at 9 when my lift arrives.

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Life is plodding on rather well in my ever so humble opinion. Well, actually, thats not true, half my life is going really really well, and the other half not so well. It seems that to get both your personal and work life just right at the same time is pretty complicated.

I’ve now been going out with Demelza and things are really great, loving every second of it… and yet I’m finding work almost imposible. To be fair, i was finding work impossible since before I started going out with Demelza. I got so used to my 9-5 job and the clear distinction between work time and the rest of my life. Work was 9-5 and then not work wasn’t. Uni is work is meet a friend in the morning, do a little work in the afternoon, then a bit of both in the evening etc. And lets face it, which is more fun, work or seeing friends etc… To make matters worse, my enthusiasm and interest in my course is almost at nothing. I’m not learning anything, all I’m having to do is show I can do all this stuff, which I can and have been able to for about a year… I don’t need to prove this, i just need to get back into the real world and start the rest of my life, none of this silly messing around with assignment etc. I’m almost resigned to that fact i may have to do another year… or go and get a job without a degree and based on my year… and to be honest, if they will take me without the degree I wouldn’t hesitate.

Anyway, now my upload on my gallery is now working i have a couple of photos from the last couple of months to show you:

Sussex Uni security camera

A billboard in Brighton near the bottom of my road

One of my housemates, Dan (just to give you an idea of what i put up with….)

All done, sleep now.

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So there myself and Dan were, working away in the small hours of the morning on a new anti-spam script when it all went horribly wrong.

(Click to enlarge dare you…)

And lo, the screen was filled with a surfeit of penis. Being the mature young men we are we giggled like a pair of school girls.

And for the second time in 2 days I find myself saying, welcome to my life.

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When a bit of post comes through your door and one of your housemates picks up and reads off who it is addressed to, and they just happened to read off “How many BLUE dresses can there be???” what would you think? Slightly worryingly for me my first thought was “what the hell?” shortly followed by “hang on, that might actually be for me”.

(I have removed part of my address clearly)

To make matters worse, said letter contained a lot of cuts out’s of blue dresses from bridal magazines.

Welcome to my life.

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Music to walk through a crowd to: Marilyn Manson - This is the new shit.

Things to do before I die:
#1 sit in clapham junction train stations inter-platform bridge and take photos of the stupid faces people make when running for their trains.

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People’s ability to judge completely and wholly without any real knowledge or understanding over the circumstances still amazes me…

Bassically a pair of goths got on a bus and got chucked off being called names etc by the driver

Link to article

Here is a selection of the more stupid comments the article:

• This pair look ridiculous! I’m not surprised the driver wouldn’t let them board!

• What idiots! What do they do when they go to work? Dress the same? Or don’t they work? They would never get past a first stage interview dressed like this.

• He looks like a work-shy scrounger to me, get a job and pay your way

• Not big on pride or dignity is she? What a sad example of womankind.

As for the article, given the information there it seems like the driver was very much in the wrong and i would like to see him point to the rule or regulation that allows his to act like this.

As a side note, the comments are from the Daily mail… so should I expect any better?

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I love this image, such a great example of how being selfish and trying to push through that bit faster not only screws you, but everyone else at the same time.

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I think this is starting to get silly now, when I turn on my computer and start up my web browser I have it set to open 93 pages at the moment… I wish I knew what this said about me.

OK, it would be safe to say the last week has basically been insane amounts of not sleeping and developing PHP for my final year project and for a quick site for one of my modules.

The site I have been working on for my final year project is a records management tool for scout leaders called SORT (Scouts Online Records Tool).

It is basically a website that leaders can log into and get at all the details they store about the Beavers, Cubs and Scouts. So for example, the members section is a big table of the members they are allowed to see and then they can click on them and open up their profile in more detail. There is a messaging section which allows mass e-mails to be sent to parents for events and just general news. There is a section to deal with the badges side of record management (so who has done what towards badges) as well as some rather nice search features.

Well I basically started this site on Friday last week and worked on it constantly up until today when I had another site to make. You see, the SORT system has to be painfully secure due to the nature of the data it holds, children’s names, address, date of birth etc… and so this has all taken a lot of work to get to where I am now.

And where am I now… well, I now have sent an email to my test group and they have started feeding back. Most of it is very positive, not much in the way of suggestions yet. Few bug fixes and a couple of concerns over security that I have addressed, but all well so far. Got a couple of months to finish it all and get it online, so not too bothered at the moment, just getting the ball rolling really.

Now all I have to do is get through the next week and then I finally get to see Demz again for a weekend… really looking forward to that… other than insane amounts of work I’m semi doing that’s about as interesting as my life is at current. Oh, and my sleeping pattern is a big mess, should really sort that out.

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It would be safe to say that recently I’ve had a fair bit on my mind.

For starters my Family has a new media center PC which hasn’t been working quite as expected. It refuses to wake up properly sometimes and the radio part isn’t working, and before Saturday it wouldn’t record anything and the signal was very very poor. I’ve spent hours and hours making it work as best I can. It was the last thing I needed really, but I didn’t feel like I could come back to Brighton without leaving it in a state where it mostly worked. Especially as it was my idea!

Then there has been the vast amounts of work I have to do for my degree. I didn’t do enough before Christmas and I now have a huge amount to do until Easter. From Easter I’m pretty much free and would really rather be 3 months from now and passed this busy point in my life.

I’m also job hunting and applying to what I can so that if/when I finish my degree I might actually have something to go to at the end.

Oh, and then there is Japan. I have had my family bugging me to sort this trip out and really, the last thing I needed was another thing to go on my mind. My brother wants to go out there this summer and so would I. But I don’t really feel like I have the time to devote to all the research I want to do before I go. But I’ve booked the flights now, so it’s happening one way or another. Yey stress.

Then finally I want to spend as much time as I can in Roehampton these next few months seeing Demelza, but I know I will be insanely busy, and I know she will be too, but there are so many reasons I have to go up there that I’m going to hate not being there as much as I want to be. As it is I haven’t seen her in 3 weeks… this is pants.

So with all this on my mind I spent Friday night in the pub and then chatting to Demz on MSN. Made me feel a whole lot better, but still a way to go I think.

Oh, and if you get bored, a decent word game/quiz that’s actually quite a challenge and does some good at the same time: http://www.freerice.com/

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I did this last year and it seemed a bit of fun then… so why not try again and look back and see what’s changed. Should be fun.

1. What did you do in 2007 that you’d never done before?
Ate from a chocolate fountain, slept on a plane and probably a few more things…. Oh, moved out and am now living in a rented house with a few other people.

2. Did you keep your new years’ resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
I didn’t really make one, so technically that’s a no.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
Nope, not that they told me.

4. Did anyone close to you die?
Again, thankfully not.

5. What countries did you visit?
France, Malaysia and Singapore

6. What would you like to have in 2008 that you lacked in 2007?
More enthusiasm about my Uni work.

7. What dates from 2007 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
Leaving work at Merrill Lynch was quite a big thing given it took up more than half of my life this gone year. Most of my trip to Malaysia is pretty firmly in my head, lot happened on it and doubt I will forget it. 9th of December is pretty high up there, it’s when I asked Demz out. I may not remember the date that well, but I remember the time very well.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
I want to be really sad and say watching the whole of Stargate SG1 on DVD, but it think this still has to be work related. I completed a year of work without too much trouble and enjoyed it.

9. What was your biggest failure?
Not grasping some moments with both hands as they passed and not doing as much Uni work as I should have since starting back there.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?
Not more than the usual colds and badminton related stuff. Managed to pull my shoulder a couple of times, but I’m used to that now.

11. What was the best thing you bought?
Anything from Computer (well, lots of new bits for it) to Digital SLR probably.

12. Whose behaviour merited celebration?
Can I be really self centred and say myself? I think I have grown up a fair bit this last year. I still do a lot of stupid things and I’m still lazy and childlike half the time, but I feel like I’m ready for the real world now and want it to happen.

13. Whose behaviour made you appalled and depressed?
US and UK governments, as always.

14. Where did most of your money go?
Probably in the following order: Computer, Holiday, Camera, train fairs!

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
Going on Holiday

16. What song will always remind you of 2007?
Probably Linkin Park - What I’ve done, although Ludovico Einaudi - I Due Fiumi is a close second

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:

a. Happier or sadder?
Happier, and if some things stay the same and at the same time I’m not in the process of failing my degree then I will be as happy as I can be.

b. Thinner or fatter?
Probably about the same.

c. Richer or poorer?
Still richer I think, although I now don’t have any money coming in and I have a million ways to spend it, so it won’t take much longer to be poorer.

18. What do you wish you’d done more of?
Uni work (notice a theme yet?) and visited friends.

19. What do you wish you’d done less of?
Being a lazy arse, sitting on trains.

20. How did you spend Christmas?
At home with my family as per usual.

21. Did you fall in love in 2007?
Yup

22. How many one-night stands?
none

23. What was your favourite TV program?
Has to the legend that is Top Gear

24. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?
I don’t think so. This hasn’t really been the year for hating people.

25. What was the best book you read?
I think the better question would be did you read any books. I have however been given 211 things a bright boy can do for Christmas and so far it does seem rather good.

26. What did you want and get?
Love. Oh, and work experience.

27. What did you want and not get?
Can’t think of anything specific at the moment, although I’m sure as usual it was lots of little things.

28. What was your favourite film of this year?
So many to pick from this year, Probably Hitman, Die hard 4, Borne ultimatum or Blades of glory would have to be high up there.

29. What was your favourite game of this year?
I will have to say Burnout 2 on the GameCube, still. I still play it more than anything else.

30. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
It was my 21st birthday and I spent it on a rainy campsite as a Scout leader setting up a huge music concert in a marquee tent with a sound and lighting system. That has to be fairly original…

31. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
More spare time and more time with friends.

32. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2007?
Half of it as the modern city worker in decent shirt and trousers, the other half as a returning student in brown trousers and t-shirt.

33. What kept you sane?
Well, it certainly wasn’t my housemates, work colleges or the travelling. It s a bit of a push, but it may have been my friends in Roehampton. Of course this suggests I’m sane. I make no promises.

34. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy respect the most?
I actually can’t think of anyone at the moment. That doesn’t bode well for the world really does it.

35. What political issue stirred you the most?
The usual “war on terror” still winds me up.

36. Who did you miss?
Demz (although if I’m allowed to pick more then pretty much all my friends….)

37. Who was the best new person you met?
I can’t think of that many people new to this year, although a few of the guys that started at work were great. What has happened though is I have got to know a lot of people a lot better. Mainly people at Roehampton thanks to my millions of visits, although clearly my housemates fall under this list too. I knew them all before I moved in, but know them all a lot better now and they are a great bunch of friends.

38. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2007:
I’m not sure it’s possible to work on personal life or work life at the same time. For one thing to succeed the other must fail. I hope to try and disprove that this year.

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Why aren’t more people using Media centers in their homes? I really don’t understand this at all. (and yes, I know that’s the American spelling)

For those who don’t know what this is I will try to give a simple explanation. This is a computer that connects to your TV and receives TV signal. It then provides the interface you see when using your TV and gives you a remote to control it. It adds a huge number of features to your TV and provides a home for all of what you class as your media.

For example, you can pause live TV, because it records to the hard-drive constantly, you can record something just by selecting it in the programme guide and hitting the record button. You can set things up to record upto 2 weeks in advance. Also, for a TV series you can tell it to record the whole series and it will record it without fail. This is great for people like me who would love to watch top gear every week, but often forget or are out. That way you don’t even have to think about it, just go to the recorded TV part of the interface and select the newest one. One you have the whole series you can then archive it off to DVD if you have a DVD burner (and there is no excuse not to have one these days!).

Of course, being a media center, these things don’t just do TV, you can use them to watch DVD’s (hardly smart, but it’s still nice), record, browse and search your music collection and go through your photos. All of this with the remote and a nice easy to use interface (even my mum agrees the interface is very simple).

Of course, this is meant to be the center of all your media, so this really isn’t enough. It acts as a server to anything else in the house that can pick up other media. So you can watch recorded TV on another computer on your network and with the fairly low bandwidth requirements it has you should even be fine on a laptop with wireless.

Thanks to the rise in popularity of these things, (although not as much as I would expect) there are lots more devices springing up to communicate with them and serve media. For example, this little device connects through wireless and accesses your whole music collection and allows you to play anything using its remote. Set up a playlist, or just tell it to go on random through the lot.

To give you an idea of what you can do with this stuff, I will explain what we are going to be setting up in my family’s house.

A Sony VGX-XL302 media center, a separate amplifier as it will be taking the place of the Hi-Fi as it does CD’s, Radio and recorded music which is about all you need these days. The something like the Logitech that I showed a second ago is going to go in the kitchen with a pair of wall mounted speakers. This of course then has full access to all the music we have despite that the TV is in use, and maybe the same CD is being played on a computer upstairs on a different track.

The usefulness of such systems just can’t be underestimated. Maybe I get in 15mins after a TV programme I want to watch has started. Then I can go up to my room, connect in on my computer and start watching from the start, despite that it’s still being watched downstairs, a quarter of an hour advanced.

Now maybe a year ago I would have understood people not being as interested in this kind of technology, it was a bit too noisy, it wasn’t quite fast enough, it still cost a bit too much and to top it off, we were left with the considerable more clunky interface of Windows XP Media center. Oh, and there were almost no twin TV tuners around, so you had to watch whatever you were recording.

Things have changed a bit since then, not least you can get boxes that are under £500 that will do all this (although I will admit you will have to spend a bit more if you want something that looks a bit prettier). Yes, they still have a way to come yet, I would like to see a few more devices to plug into them and better support for some of the newer technologies coming out like HD, but they really are ready for the real world now.

And if you want to be a smart arse, do what I’m doing and convert an old PC into network storage and shove it in your loft out the way.

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The internet has to be the greatest distraction that was ever created. I mean, computers are bad enough on their own, but no, it had to get taken another step further and be connected to everything else!

Take now for example, I currently have 72 web pages open on different tabs in 7 separate browser windows. I have spoken to 7 different people on MSN today, 3 of which I’m still speaking to, not to mention the 22 online right now that I could talk to. I have my phone plugged into my computer and has been getting text messages throughout the day (when MSN doesn’t seem to work!). Then there is Outlook constantly checking my emails and my RSS feeds .I think it has been about 20 emails today so far, although 3 were duplicates from the same person who for some reason known best only to themselves they thought they should send me the same email to 3 different accounts of mine.

Then there is Facebook! Now don’t get me started on that. As great a thing as it may be, and as much as I love it to bits, it doesn’t half eat up my time. Yes, I now know my friend who crashed his car the other day has not written it off as he suspected, I also know someone is going to bake a cake tomorrow, that it’s snowing in Colorado right now and that Crawley cinema has 7 tills with not enough staff… all of these from my friends statuses (or is it stati? That would fit with the iWorld we seem to live in (god I hate that!)) But is all of this information (relevant or not) really worth me refreshing the page every 10mins that I’m online. I can’t help it now, it has become an addiction!

Unfortunately I am left with a bit of a problem here. I can complain all I like about how I’m “too connected” with the world and how I’m becoming addicted to the instant source of information I have before me, but as soon as the power goes down I’m like a crack addict who can’t get a fix! I connect up on my phone instead, I use the mobile version of Facebook, and I check my emails almost as often.

There is of course a very simple reason for this. I now rely on this stuff. Of the people who I have talked to on MSN today, one is Cornwall, another is Brighton, one in London, 2 just outside London, another in the USA and I don’t even know where the final person is! I haven’t seen my girlfriend in almost 2 weeks (not that I’m counting) but I’ve talked to her in one form or another almost every day (and the ones I didn’t she was out of the country).

There is always a lot of talk about what we call “social networking sites” such as Facebook, Myspace, Bebo etc and how people can’t get enough of them. I’m not sure people are addicted to these sites, nor are the so called “crack-berry’s” really addicted to their blackberry phones, I think we are addicted to other people and now that information is just getting quicker and quicker and so we are expecting it faster all the time.

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Hello.

Seems a bit of a plain start, but I have to start somewhere….

Some of the more astute of you may have noticed this is not the worlds most active blog. If all is going to plan then this should change from here on in. I have come up with a master plan to update this once a day, and at the very worst once a week. Ok, so I admit that isn’t really quite enough to constitute such a grandeur in the title as “master plan”, but half of the web is about exaggeration isn’t it?

So I guess what I’m trying to do here is state my intention for a “re-birth” of this blog and also at the same time to warn anyone who has me as a friend and who just ignores the few and infrequent posts I make that it’s about to get a lot more crowded in here. If you don’t really know me then I invite you to stick around a bit longer in case I’m worth your readership, you never know, I might say something interesting from time to time. One can hope.

To bring people up to speed a bit on who I am and what I’m doing, my name is Craig and I’m a 3rd year student in a computing degree in the UK. I am your fairly traditional lazy student and spend a lot of my time finding new and more inventive ways of procrastinating away from what uni work I should be doing. My hobbies are things like photography, camping and walking and all things outdoors. I play a lot of badminton although not as much as I would like. I spend what feels like the rest of my time travelling to visit friends. I am regularly found showing just how bad the train service can be sometimes. I have also very recently started going out with the most wonderful girl called Demelza who is no doubt reading this and has (quite correctly) assumed I’m sucking up… but such is the way.

Given that I’m one of those strange people who is into computers it does mean one of my main taking points is the web and all its ins, outs and strands. If you don’t really care for that I still suggest you stick around, if only to prove to yourself I’m that boring. I do however like to think I can (and do) talk about every subject under the sun, so it might not be as bad as you would expect.
Given the late hour in the day I will end this little beginning now before I drop off.

I think it would be fair to say this isn't exactly getting my full attention.

So, things that have happened... Well, for starters I have finished working for Merrill Lynch. In fact I finished working there before the summer holidays, but we all know this is one of the most up-to-the-minuet blogs around.

I have therefore been having a summer off and getting ready for going back to Uni and moving down to Brighton.

Some parts of this summer have gone to plan, others have not. I made the mistake of saying I would do some work for the local YMCA (building a website) which has taken up a fair amount of my time (maybe a bit more than I wanted it to) and is still hanging over me and I'm struggling to find the motivation to finish it.

The main events for the summer were actually just summer camp and family holiday.

I went away as a leader again on the explorer scouts camp. Twas all good fun and I really enjoyed it. Made lots of friend and had a good time. would rather be there now to be honest.

I also went on a family holiday to La Rochelle in France. They all went for a couple of weeks, but I decided I couldn't take two weeks of France again, so I booked some flights out there and back and did a week. Which was just long enough for me to miss home and the real world and the English language, but not too long as to be pointless.

The other week I also upgraded my computer in preparation for this year. Thought it would be fun and now means I can use all 3 monitors which is a big change. I have moved to a $core Intel, 4gig of RAM, dual graphics cards and then added another hard drive and a TV card. This bring me up to 1140GB of disk space and also meant I didn't have to take my TV with me to Brighton....

So, moving on, next thing. Brighton.... I'm now here. I have been since yesterday, but my transition down here is far from complete. I have some stuff here, but I have a lot more at home still. Which is a good thing because I need to be home on and off for the next 3 weeks fulfilling various promises to people.

All going to plan this week I should be up in London on Thursday, Out in Horsham Thursday evening, getting my hair cut on Friday (yea, really helpful information here...) and then playing badminton in the evening. Then Saturday and Sunday I'm going camping on a scout leaders training camp, then Sunday evening doing SNYF (church group) and then back in Brighton on Monday I expect....

Get a Mac?

Macs have been getting a lot of press over the last year or so and have been making some big gains in the computing world. What I am going to try and do is talk about my experiences with my Mac.

Firstly, to let you know where I'm coming from, I'm a Windows use no doubt about that. I have used pretty much every version since DOS 4 and know each system pretty well. I will admit I don’t know everything about Vista, but that’s because I haven't got it yet. In terms of computing experience I'm 21 and have been playing with computers since I was pretty young really. I do everything from web browsing to video editing and most things in between. These days I mainly specialise in MSSQL, MySQL, PHP and C#.NET, although my biggest skills come from MSSQL. I have a fairly wide, although limited experience with Linux and I not a huge fan of getting into code on my OS, hence none of them have really ever sat very well with my. I'm sure one day I will find an rpm that just works, but we are a way of that me thinks.

Anyway, so about a year ago I decided I was going to get a Mac. Now I was looking into a Mac min as they are about as cheap as they come and let's face it, Macs are not cheap. Given I was buying this to play with and to test I was not going to go the full whack and get a G5, much as I may have wanted to.

A friend at the time was selling his powerbook and offered it to me, so what I actually snapped up was a PowerBook G4. So its PPC and it has half a gig of RAM. I agree not top of the line, so I will let it off for being slow sometimes. It is running OS 10.4 fully patched. As for additional software, it currently has iLife, iWork 06, Office 2004, Firefox, Adium and Skype on top of the original install base. It also has Synergy installed in a GUI form, although this has stopped working for some reason.

First impressions of the system was it looked very impressive. I would probably call it quite quirky. Things like the password box shakes if you get the password wrong. Not that cool, but quite funny. Getting used to the look and feel is quite easy. As far as a lot of people will be concerned it works very much like windows. You have icons, you can doubt click on them, they open. Not hard.

At the bottom of the screen you have this shortcuts bar called a dock. This is in short a whole load of shortcuts to all your application. If you have something open it sits on the dock, even if you don’t keep it there, and when you minimise something it goes to another side of the dock. You get a little black arrow under any application that is open which I guess is one way of doing it.

At the top is the apple menu. Well, I guess that’s what its called, I don't actually know. This has an apple in the left which you click on to get to system preferences and to shut down etc. It also works like the top bar of any application you have open. So it changes. It contains the file menu, the edit menu etc. So in other words, when you have word open, the file, edit, view, insert etc menus are not part of the window, but sit at the top of the screen all the time. Again, just a different way of doing it. I'm not that keen on it, I find it a bit annoying as if I'm working on two things side by side, I have to click the application window to then move back up to the top to get to the button that’s now there because the right window is selected.

The top also acts like a system tray, although this is unimportant.

System preferences are quite easy to use, works close enough to the control panel not to care really. Most things you would expect are in there. No way to remove programs from there, nor does there seem to be any firewall. If OSX does have a firewall built in, I don't see any options for it.

The biggest issue I have with the desktop is there is no one place to get to all your programs. Either you have it in your dock, or you have to go off to your applications folder and find wherever the file is to open it.

The window manager is one of my biggest complaints, especially given its rather hard to get away from. For example, you can only resize a window from the bottom left and you can only drag it around from its top bar. So the other day when I changed my screen resolution to fit on a data projector I could not get to the bottom corner because it was off the screen, and I could not drag the window up because it would not let me take my mouse past the screen top. I had to change resolution back down, resize the window and then change back again. Also, of the tree buttons, close, maximise and minimise, maximise doesn’t actually take up the whole screen. Different, but I can live with it. I do find myself resizing windows quite a lot of the time and it has to be said this is not very impressive how hard it is.

Next, the most annoying thing the window manager does EVER is its so inconsistent. For example, look at a folder and what's inside. If you are viewing with the tile view then you can use both The apple key and the shift key to multiple select icons. Now change into the list view and you will find the apple key still works as it did a second ago, but the shift key now does list selection. I have yet to work out how to do list selection in the tile view.

Ok, the right click. Possibly the single most annoying thing you have to get used to. You see, OSX has a right click. There is a whole right click menu for many many things. They have mice with right-click and for years you have been able to plug in pretty much any two buttoned PC mouse in and use the function. Yet for some reason they make their laptops with only one button. I thought the idea of making both the hardware and the software was so it all fitted together nicely and just worked. Seems like they missed something to me. Yes, you can control click, but trust me, its annoying as hell.

I think I will stop there for now, and actually I haven’t even got onto the bit I wanted to. I have my fair share of Mac horror stories, but I will write them later I think. Some of you know the issues I have been having, but I thought it might be fun to write a few of my impressions having been going with it for about a year.