T-Bird Anni Rides Again

I’ve booked the trains down to NicCamp!  Took some doing cos of course, nothing is as easy as it looks but I’ve managed to book seats for half of the journey with a table (and a power socket!) which makes life easier. I even managed to book a journey that doesn’t take me via London and require me to chase about on the Underground which I don’t really midn doing but would prefer not to do with suitcases and over excited child in tow!  So now I just need to nip up to Crewe and collect my tickets (there isn’t a magic machine at our local station, in fact there isn’t much of anything at our local station!!!) before Monday morning.

I arrive at Shoreham at 5pm on Monday and yes, please Nic I’d love a lift.  I’m booked to leave Shoreham at 11:44 - I know that’s a pain as we need to be out of the place well before then but it’s the earliest I can do it without going through London or changing about 10 times on the way or leaving on the very early in the morning side of Off Peak!

Just told Aprilia and she’s rushed off to get dressed so we can go and get the tickets!  Now I need to remember how to find Crewe station don’t I!!!! 

A little while ago I gave up on Thunderbird as my mail program as I kept getting blank mails and was losing up to 30 messages at a time (shriek!)  some of which were important, we aren’t just talking Yahoo group stuff here!  Assuming it was a Tunderbird and Vista incompatability I reluctantly lurched over to MS Mail.  It’s slow, the spell checker is American and I can’t convince it I’m not no matter how hard I try (Thunderbird belived me!)  But now it’s started all over again so obviously it’s nothing to do with Thunderbird and everything to do with the PC itself.  Duke doesn’t have this trouble so it’s not our router or our connection, it’s my PC.  Which means it’s either Vista or my AV software.

And then there’s my Palm.  Okay so it’s a toy really but it’s much easier for me to read books from my Palm than from a real book.  I can fiddle the font, the amount of text I get on a screen etc so it’s comfortable and I can concentrate.  It would dock with Linux with only a little fuss.  There is no driver for it to dock with Vista except on a very basic level - I can use it as a glorified diary and address book but nothing more.

And whilst I’m in a foul mood and ranting…. there’s my camera dock/photo printer.  Under XP I could print off 2 or 4 different pictures to one sheet of paper  like a sort of "Contact sheet"  Can’t do that with the Vista driver, just 2, 4 or 8 of the same picture and the photo editing software doesn’t work at all (and I liked it better than the MS photo stuff)

And it is SLOW!  I mean SLOW like a tortoise on sleeping pills.  It’s a way higher spec-ed machine than my old one and although I dont’ expect it to run as fast as Linux (as Linux is a much smaller thing to start with) I did expect it to run faster than XP really.  I mean, that’s what progress is about isn’t it?  Making things run more smoothly and efficiently?

All of the assistive software I have will run fine on XP (sadly not on Linux otherwise you know what I’d be doing…) and I should be able to get XP for well under £100, not that I should be paying to put something right like that but I think it may be worth it in the long run….. Of course, Vista will be fine in a year or so once enough people have reported enough bugs for them to get the stuff to work properly but why should I be an unpaid tester for a multi-million dollar company?

rant rage fume (oh gee, looks like I’m due on then….)