T-Bird Anni Rides Again

on the grounds taht Merry says SAge is no good in Vsita, I’ve tried 2 other ones and they are no good either (or at least I can’t get tehm to do waht I want which is the same thing isn’t it?)  So, waht do people use?  it needs to be SIMPLE you understand…

Got a new pair of Hi-tec Trails today as the last pair have stopped even pretending to keep my feet dry.  I love Trails, they are probably my favourite light boots ever and this is my 3rd pair - they last a good 5 or so years which doesn’t sound a lot but I destroy shoes within a year usually so they get my vote.

Been feeling decidedly peevish today so took it out on some of the stuff given me by the ex Rainbow lady.  I really don’t think i need colouring pages done by girls who left Rainbows before Aprilia was born…. 7 years worth of permission slips I can live with, 7 years worth of accounts I can understand but colouring pages from 1995 is just silly.

The final TMA for my course is being a real sod to write.  It’s supposed to be a practice for the final part of the exam but I hve no intention of using Byron for the final part of the exam which sort of means that it’s not much use to me as the question says to use Byron plus 2 others to demonstrate something about changing social or political conventions.  Byron was a naughtly little boy who had a wife and a lover who he sired a child onto, had a fling with his half sister and then ran away to teh continent until the dust settled writing an autobiographical poem as he legged it.  The poem is somewhat like a blog, it’s his rambles about life the universe and everything.  I have no problems with that, it’s at least as disjointed as my blog.  I do have a problem studying it in depth - heaven forfend that 200 years from now some poor sod gets to analyse my blog as an example of a fine literary piece of it’s time….

Tomorrow is a Big Day…. I should have a working dishwasher again by late afternoon (I’ve blogged about that elsewhere…it wsan’t fit for my main blog!) my baby should be home round 5-ish and I’m then going to have to rush off to Oulton for overnights.  I’m with the most loonatic paramedic of tehm all though so I doubt he would notice if I smuggled Aprilia with me for an hour or two tehn got Duke to come and get her. 

right, I have passwords, I have my e-maill address book, I *think* I hvae all my files but I’m going to check in a bit and I have all my several million bookmarks that I really need to spend some time sorting out.  I’m getting there.

I don’t have a working copy of "First Class" which is the conferencing software for the OU - I downloaded it, I installed it and even accessed it but thsi morning it won’t work   However I am laying this one directly at the feet of First Class cos it’s always been a law unto itself, I reserve the right to blame any other pains in the neck on Vista though (at least til I work out how to use it….) 

So, the new PC….

I think I like Vista, havent’ found everything yet and the file structure isn’t what I’m used to - Linux has a thing down the side where all your programs are sorted by type so all the Office-y things are in one drop down menu, the toys are in another, the useful bits are in another etc.  Getting used to hunting in teh Start menu for stuff is going to take a while (then again i suspect I’ll just shove the stuff I use onto the quick start bar at the bottom and have done with) 

I didn’t like the new Internet Explorer for all that they have taken some of the good ideas of Firefox etc, it’s still just not for me but Firefox is running fine and I’ve even installed a Twitter thing so I can tweet from my side bar. 

Wasn’t keen on MS Mail either which is the Outlook Express replacement.  It’s dog slow and i wasn’t keen on the format.  Thunderbird to the rescue but I’m missing Evolution which is a Linux only thing which has built in callender, task list etc as well as mail.  (Yes, I know ther’s a callender in Vista, its just not wehre I think it should be )

Office 2007 looks pretty.  Couldn’t find the print command in Word for a a good 10 minutes but I’m putting that down to me being dozy, it just wasn’t where i think it should be therefore I couldn’t see it.  My mum says Dad does that all the time….

 The printer is a basic Epson which means that it is run by 2 cave men who bang rocks together whilst it prints.  Good quality print outs though and quite fast, I’ll jsut hae to remember not to set long print jobs going when Aprilia is in bed

Not had a proper play with the scanner yet but it looks very efficient and Tech guy showed me the OCR bit which impressed me so much!   

Read and Write Gold is very, very cool.  I haven’t scratched the surface yet of how it works but what I have used is great.  it read out a whole instruction manual to me last night meaning I could get on and use the thing without constantly losing my place in the instructions (just pause the read out) and hence I got the job done in half the time.

New dicataphone looks like it should have a Star Trek logo on it and options to stun or kill.  Have got it set up (thanks to R&W telling me what the instructions said) and can see it beign very useful for life in general (recording memos for me to do things, taking phone messages rather than scribbling stuff down and losing the paper, "taking notes" at Red Cross, may even use it for studying!)

And now I am going to play with Inspiration, my new mind mapping software, in a vain attempt to get my last TMA written.  It’s got to be in by the end of the first week in Sept and I have not got a single word of it yet…. Ho Hum.