When I last posted about switching, I’d just got the machine unboxed and started up. I was impressed with the experience so far, but hadn’t really started using Mac OS yet.

How did I find the machine to use? Did it just work?

Generally good, and yes and no.

The User Interface

The new interface didn’t take as much getting used to as I’d expected. The Dock is quite a nice thing to use, and I even quite liked the animated effects. I switched the interface to grey, getting rid of the blue highlights – the less colour involved in the basic interface, the better you can judge colours when fiddling with photos.

Having the menu bar fixed to the top of the screen, when it relates to the window you’re using at the time, seemed a little odd, but again, it wasn’t as difficult to get used to as I’d expected. The location of it doesn’t entirely make sense, but you always know where it is, and it’s very quick to get to.

The strangest part was finding myself having no idea how to do some quite simple tasks. I already knew that Mac apps usually arrive bundled in a .dmg file – a Disk iMaGe. It was no surprise to double-click one, and find it mounted itself on the desktop, and auto-ran the contents. I knew I had to drag it to the trash can to unmount the image. I had no idea what I had to do with the contents to install the application, though. I had to Google. Just to find out how to install an app.

It turned out to be quite straightforward. For most apps, the window that opens up contains the app itself, and sometimes a shortcut to your Applications folder. You just need to drag the app into your Applications folder, and that’s it installed. Some apps actually do need to run an installer, though, so it isn’t entirely consistent. Uninstalling an app is usually just a matter of taking the app back out of the Applications folder. If it needed an installer, though, there isn’t always a straightforward way of uninstalling. As far as I can tell, though, even these apps only commonly add a few bits to a folder of their own under one of the ‘Library’ folders.

An app is just a single ‘.app’ file. Except it isn’t really. I guessed what they really were, as it’s the same as the old Acorn Archimedes used. The .app ‘file’ is really a folder, which the OS makes look like a file. Double-clicking on it lauches the application, by running a file or script from inside the folder. Under normal circumstances, you don’t need to know or care that the app is a folder. If you need or want to, though, you can open the folder by right-clicking and selecting ‘Show Package Contents’. Probably best not to fiddle with the innards of your apps, though, unless you know what you’re doing.

Speaking of the Archimedes, the dock has its similarities to the old Archimedes bar – apps live there when they’re running, and can stay running there even when their last window is closed. Unlike the Archimedes, though, you can get any app to stay there, even when closed.

The only part of the interface I still find frustrating is creating new documents. I was in the habit of using the ‘New…’ right-click menu in Windows, and it had always made sense to me. Go to where I want the document, create a document of the type I want, then open it and start working. Many people have never worked that way, and would find the Mac way of doing things perfectly natural – run the application you want to use, start working, then save the document through the application when you’re ready, using the Save dialog to put it where you want it.

I’ve always found that an awkward way of working – the Save As dialog isn’t a nice way to get around the filesystem on any platform, and until you get around to saving the document, you have a load of data sitting there with no home. The first save is harder to do, so you put it off longer than you should, and have the risk of losing unsaved work. I’ve found a couple of neat work-arounds for this whole issue, though, which I’ll post about another time.

The Hardware

The hardware is beautiful. It all feels wonderfully solid and well-made, too. I get on surprisingly well with the tiny wireless keyboard. I mostly love the Mighty Mouse. The little scroll ball on the top of the mouse, though, gums up fairly often. Apple, it seems, forgot that there was a reason we all gave up on mice with balls. The same thing on a smaller scale, being rubbed around by your finger all day, with no way of opening it up to clean it, is a bit of a bad move. I’ve always been able to get it going again with a bit of firm rubbing with the mouse upside-down, but it feels like a bit of a design fault. On an Apple product. That’s just wrong.

Software

There’s very little software I miss. TrackMania would be nice to have back, but it’s not worth dual-booting or running a VM for.

Oddly, for a machine so rooted in design and photography, image editing software is the one area I haven’t quite got settled on yet. On Windows, I used to use The GIMP. It’s available for the Mac, but it isn’t a pleasant experience. It runs under X11, so it doesn’t get its own menu bar, and doesn’t act like a Mac app. There are a few decent independent attempts at making image editors native to the Mac, so I tried pretty much everything I could find. Once I had a few options, I tried making the same set of simple edits to the same source image in them all. Photoshop Elements stood out as being much quicker and easier than the others. Making a selection was much easier, and making changes to the selection ended up with something that looked right, while the others ended up looking a mess.

I haven’t quite taken the plunge and bought it yet, but I probably will soon.

I actually do very little editing of the sort that needs a real image editor, though. On Windows, I’d been trying out Adobe Lightroom, but really didn’t get on with it. It felt slow and awkward, and seemed to have real performance problems when dealing with the number of images I had. I could get around it by splitting into multiple libraries, but switching between them would be more hassle than I wanted. I bought Aperture at the same time as my Mac, and loved it from the start. I still do. Almost everything I want to do with my photos can be done without leaving Aperture, and with a neat little plugin, I can export directly to my Flickr account.

The Result

I’m glad I made the switch. I still use Windows at work, and switching between the two every day makes things a little harder, but there are far more things I miss from the Mac when I’m using Windows than the other way around.

A colleague told me he’d bought a Mac because he hates computers. I told him I bought one because I love computers.

Two of my favorite Secrets of Adulthood remind me to Be Gretchen: “Just because something is fun for someone else, doesn’t mean it’s fun for you – and vice versa” and “You can choose what you do, but you can’t choose what you like to do.”

People also assume that they in fact do enjoy what they think they should enjoy – e.g., they enjoy going to the theater, because going to the theater is a fun thing to do. Nope! Not true. There are so many “fun” things that I don’t enjoy one bit, like skiing, drinking wine, going to concerts, eating pasta, shopping. And I love to do many things that other people dread doing – cleaning out closets, for example. I beg my friends to let me help them clean out their closets.

My friend Michael Melcher wrote an outstanding (and quite funny) book called The Creative Lawyer; he also has a terrific blog. The book is aimed at helping lawyers find more job satisfaction – whether within law or outside of law – but it’s also a valuable resource for anyone trying to understand himself or herself better.

Here’s a quiz, lightly adapted from The Creative Lawyer, to help you figure out your interests. Not what you wish interested you, but what actually interests you.

Before I have a go at answering Gretchen’s questions, let’s take a look at her advice on how to approach the questions…

You need to pay close attention to yourself. The better you understand your true likes and dislikes, the better able you are to make decisions – in work and leisure – that will make you happy. It’s not possible to build a happy life, filled with enthusiasm and engagement, based on the way that you wish you were. For better or worse, we’re all stuck with ourselves.

OK, time to give it a shot…

• What part of the newspaper do you read first?

I very rarely read newspapers, to be honest. But when I do I normally flick through the newsy bits and get straight to the entertainment section and the funnies.

• What are three books you’ve read in the past year?

“Things Ain’t What They Used To Be” by Philip Glenister

“He Kills Coppers” by Jake Arnott

“A Clockwork Orange” by Anthony Burgess

• As a child, what did you do in your free time?

Hehehe – I used to go up to my room, put my records on and imagine I was performing in little shows. And I hafta confess that when I have the flat to myself and the mood takes me, I still do. I just call it “exercise” these days.

• What’s a goal that has been on your list for a few years?

Lose weight, to enable me to perhaps pursue some more interesting ways of spending my time.

• What do you actually do with your free time? [This is perhaps the most helpful question. I finally switched careers from law to writing when it dawned on me that I was always writing books in my free time.]

Mostly immersed in various online worlds – chatting with friends on Facebook, or Luigi’s and doing a lot of daydreaming.

• What types of activities energize you?

The sort of activities a woman my age shouldn’t be wasting her time doing. But, as Gretchen said, this isn’t a quiz about what should make you happy, it’s about what does make you happy. And dammit, dressing up as a bloke and playing the fool does energise me. I love putting together costumes and skits and whatnot. Always have done. Many years passed without me doing this sort of thing, but then I fell in with the right crowd and it’s all coming back… much love to my girls the Lu-Las for not just accepting “The Guv”, but for encouraging him.

• What famous people intrigue you?

I’ve got to say top of the list is French and Saunders, simply because they did the ‘dressing up and playing the fool’ bit so damn well.

Also my lovely friends at Luigi’s including Jack and Mickey who have their wonderful comedy project The World of the Absurd – a project so joyful I can’t help but think “Ooo! Ooo! Can I play?” every time I see it.

So Gretchen, you ask…

Have you found any good ways to understand yourself better?

Yeah. But nothing I haven’t heard before. As my gorgeous, daft-as-a-brush husband once said, I’m silly, and it’s a great thing to be.

Thanks for the quiz, Gretchen.

To read more from Gretchen Rubin, visit The Happiness Project. She’s also on Twitter, under the username @gretchenrubin

And of course, I had to raid the dressing-up box again. Well, something funny was going on at Slimming World, and someone had to go in and investigate.

So, ably assisted by DI Drake, a raid took place on the 5pm group in the hope of finding out why people go to these meetings and gradually disappear, and to raise a bit of cash for Red Nose Day.

Of course, we know why people who go to these meetings gradually disappear. I’ve been gradually disappearing myself for a while now (let’s just gloss over those bits that reappeared…). As for the cash, we raised over £200.

Big thanks to everyone who helped made this a success – particularly Annabel, who came over from Dorset to play DI Drake and cover The Guv’s lines when my voice, like the people at the meeting, gradually disappeared. Damn lurgy.

Meanwhile, on the subject of DCI Hunt, the wonderful Philip Glenister did a fine old job of bringing the funny for the money on Red Nose Day. Check out his fine turn as Pierce Brosnan in French & Saunders’ parody of Mamma Mia.

Regular visitors to this here site will no doubt be aware of my occasional weird and wonderful adventures.  I’m at my happiest when doing things that at best could be described as ‘eccentric’, and in recent years this has included attempting stand-up comedy, writing a book about a fictional boy band and more recently, turning up at my Slimming World meeting dressed as legendary nonce-kicking TV copper Gene Hunt.

Well I have to admit I’ve developed quite a taste for the latter. So when the ladies who frequent the web’s best Ashes to Ashes Fan Forum and virtual trattoria Luigi’s got together for a bash last weekend, it had to be done again.

This time, though, I wasn’t in the company of bewildered Slimming World members, but fellow A2A fangirls. Fangirls who often find it difficult to control themselves when faced with The Guv in the suit, the coat, and the gloves. Most managed, some didn’t…

… I was fighting the ladies off in the end. God knows how Philip Glenister copes!

But this wasn’t just about donning a suit and posing for the camera. A few of us decided to put on re-enactments of our favourite scenes from the show. And here, captured on video for your viewing “pleasure” are a couple of scenes brought to you by the Luigi’s A2A Players and sponsored by Bollinger…

A2A Players present… Showdown Outside Luigi’s from Sam Randall on Vimeo.

Clip of the original scene can be found here.

A2A Players present… un-bloody-breakable! from Sam Randall on Vimeo.

Clip of the original scene can be found here.

All players are available for parties and corporate events.

No mullets were harmed during the making of these clips.

I look back on these and think… I’m 35 years old. Happily married (yes, he puts up with all of this and still doesn’t divorce me!). Surely I should be doing more sensible things with my time, in the ‘real’ world? Then I look at the real world and think, you know what? Stuff it. We’re grown-ups now, and it’s our turn to decide what that means.. So sod it, I’m gonna keep on playing. I suggest you do too. It’s a hell of a lot more fun than worrying about the recession.

Looking forward to…

24th January

The Red Balloon Gang at Luigi’s Ashes to Ashes forum are getting together for a late Christmas bash in London.  It’s the friendliest branch of fandom I’ve encountered since the demise of Slashaholics Anonymous, and I’m really looking forward to seeing everyone again, and meeting a few new folks too.  This time Michael’s coming along to capture the evening in photo and video.  Since this event is going to include some very dodgy attempts at re-enacting scenes from the series, there’s bound to be an amusing video or two available for viewing afterwards.

Slimming World’s 40th Anniversary Celebrations

Looks like there’s going to be lots going on at Slimming World this year as the company celebrates its 40th Anniversary.  And I know Katrina will be making the most of each and every event to make this slimming lark as fun as possible for everyone who goes to her groups.  More on that over on my Sizeable Rump blog as and when they happen.

Easter

Good Friday is when the Grand Western Canal area springs to life again, with the Tea Gardens and the much-loved Ducks’ Ditty re-opening for business.  And trips on the Horse Drawn Barge start up again.   We’re so fortunate to live so close to such a beautiful and fun place.

All the stuff we don’t know about yet

Half the fun of life is the stuff we don’t know about.  Happenings that just take us completely by surprise.  That’s how we ended up down here in Devon, it’s how I ended up joining Slimming World, and back in 1996, it’s how I ended up meeting and falling in love with my best friend.  What’s this year going to bring?  Stick around, and we’ll find out together.

Wishes…

• To get out to the coast more often this year.

• To go to a wine tasting.

• To go on holiday to France.

• To take on another course of some kind.  Last one was Delivering Learning in 2006, maybe I can find something I can practically use this time.

• To go on a shopping spree with some of my girlie chums at Cabot Circus or better yet, London.

• To find a job that I enjoy.  Hm.  Might be a tough call this one…

Here’s to a great year.  Chaz to the Luigi’s lot, cheers to everyone else!

Although my weight loss adventures have gone a little off-course just lately, I have to say that my proudest achievement of the year is sticking with it in spite of how easy (and tempting) it has been recently to jack it all in. I have managed to keep off the majority of the weight I lost during 2007, which I think is worth celebrating. The journey will continue as ever during 2009, and will be documented regularly over at my other blog, A Sizeable Rump.

Honourable mentions also for finally getting rid of our old house up north, working in a major store on the run-up to Christmas and experiencing the chaos from the eye of the retail storm, travelling alone to London to meet up with the gang from Luigi’s.

Experience of the Year

Which brings me quite nicely to my experience of the year. The 2008 National Television Awards, which I spent in the company of a group of girls who I didn’t know this time last year. It was one of many meets organised by the Luigi’s Ladies, and it was a pleasure to be there, to spend time with people who I had only known by user names at that point. The night of the awards ceremony was a delightfully surreal experience, and gave me a chance to play paparazzi for the night. Didn’t get many good shots, but I did manage to get a decent photo of the man we had all travelled to London to support.

Winner of Sam’s Squee Award for 2008 – Mr Philip Glenister. Better luck next year, Slash.

And as if that wasn’t enough to make my squee gland go into overdrive, actually meeting him and getting my magazine signed should have just about finished me off.

Product of the Year

Also probably the biggest surprise of the year. Both Michael and myself now have Macs. After years of contemplating making the switch, Michael took the plunge in October, and I followed a couple of weeks ago. Still loving it.

Album of the Year

No contest… Death Magnetic!

This is now my favourite Metallica song. Excuse me a second…

This I swear! This I swear! This… I… SWEAAAAAARRRAHHHH!

*cough*

Women of the Year

As previously mentioned… The Lovely, Lovely Ladies of Luigi’s…

Featured here are the lovely Kimi, Sarah (aka GG*) and Blue-Jackal, without whom I’d still be petrified by the London Underground. Just a few of the wonderful wimmin propping up the bar at my favourite virtual trattoria.

Honourable mentions for Katrina Barker, Frankie Pankiewicz, Kate Kennerson and every other Slimming World bod I’ve met this year for their never-ending efforts to help me stay on the straight and narrow even when the road ahead has been nowt but wide and bendy.

2008 has been another cracking year down ‘ere in the luvverly county of Devon, but that’s enough looking back. Time to look forward to 2009, and all the fun and games that’s coming with it. Cheers (or ‘Chas’) to you all and a Happy New Year.

Imagine my horror, then, when on Sunday evening I returned home to find my PC wouldn’t start up.  Checking as thoroughly as we could without taking the thing apart and breaking the seal that would void any warranty, Michael concluded that it was, in his considered technical opinion, knackered.  I’d had the thing less than three months and wasn’t impressed that it managed to crap out so quickly.  Apparently, it’s something to do with bathtubs – which is funny, because I was using a very similar sounding word when trying to make do with my little Aspire One netbook as a substitute PC, a machine that’s fine for using in bed or while travelling but a total pain in the arse to use as a main machine.

My husband took pity on me, bless his heart, and told me to pay a visit to the Apple Store in Exeter and choose myself a shiny christmas present.  So here I am broadcasting from my very own iMac.  

I am by no means an expert with computers.  At best I’d call myself an enthusiastic novice… happy to try anything as long as there’s someone on hand to help me out if I get stuck.  I was surprised at how quick and easy the Mac was to set up.  Within half an hour of opening the box, I was up and running.  As millions of Mac enthusiasts before me have said, it just works!

Love it to bits, and I’m looking forward to exploring, playing and finding out more.

Neither of us fell off, and we managed to go from rolling along with our feet on the ground, to riding a little way along the road and back. We’ll probably do something similar again tomorrow, before we start working up to actually riding in public.

Once we’d done riding, I took the chance to get some photos of the bikes and Sam:

If the slideshow doesn’t work for you, you can just go and see the photos on Flickr.

Along with getting Sam’s bike serviced, we wanted to buy a bike for me.  There would be limited fun to be had in Sam having a bike if I couldn’t come along too.  We’d popped into the local bike shop to have a look, but they had a rather limited range – plenty of options if you wanted a Land Rover branded bike, but very little else.  Halfords had a good range to look at, and were open at nice convenient times.  So we booked the bike in to be serviced and fixed up.

I spent a fair bit of time looking at their bikes, and reading up online.  I spent some time chatting to one of the staff who seemed quite knowledgeable, and settled on their Carrera Vulcan Disc 08.  I was planning on ordering it as soon as we knew Sam’s bike was fixed up and working, just in case there were any nasty surprises there.

The service was booked in for Monday, so we took it along on Monday evening, to collect on Tuesday evening.  When we arrived on Tuesday, it hadn’t even made it to the back room – it was still sitting with the front wheel removed, on the shop floor.  The staff there couldn’t tell us why it hadn’t been done, just that they’d probably run short of time.  A bit annoying that we hadn’t been told, but we’d hardly gone far out of our way, so it didn’t matter too much.  They said it would definitely be done the next day, so we could pop back in then.  We said that was ok, but we’d probably leave it until the weekend.

We decided to go and collect it on Friday evening.  This time, they didn’t know if it had been done or not, only that the wheel wasn’t on, so it probably hadn’t.  We said we’d come back the next day.

This afternoon, back we went again, and it still hadn’t been looked at.  So this time, we took the bike back, put it in the back of the car, and took it to the local bike shop in the town centre.  They’ll service it quicker and cheaper.  That means they get to sell me a new bike too.

I went for the Land Rover G4 – it’s a hardtail mountain bike, with front and rear disc brakes.  It has Shimano gears, and a SunTour fork, which is the sort of thing that seems to mean something to people who actually know about bikes.  I have a helmet and gloves, and a cable lock.  I’ve just ordered a handlebar mount to attach my torch (LED Lenser Police Tech Focus) to it.  Now I just need to find a nice soft surface somewhere so it won’t hurt too much when we have our first try of cycling in many years.

Everything you need to know about my everyday comings and goings in handy bite-sized chunks. From how much time I spend at the gym to exactly how much time in my day I spend squeeing over DCI Hunt. Fab.

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