After moaning about the tedium of sorting out photo albums the other day, I spent Sunday
biting the bullet and sorting the remaining images into the file; the best part of 500 photos mounted, plus all the
little tickets, maps and souvenirs along the way. The boredom was alleviated by two things; firstly James was over
so I had conversation/gave tutorials on setting up the Macbook and secondly I was reinstalling Windows on the WDM,
which as anyone knows is one of the devil's favourite punishments. Gladly I didn't idly have to sit in front of
the thing all day as it worked it's Windows Update magic.
Both the photo album and reinstall are complete
now, although there is still some software loading to be done but hopefully the upshot will be that things will run
a bit faster now.
There are a number of projects to get on with today, as is there a need to be making a
number of phone calls... my bill this month is likely to be something ugly.
After
a couple of months, I've finally got around to uploading all my Australia and Japan photos, which you can now see
in the galleries here...
Although still not entirely happy with the
system, the new Flash layout does give greater visual appeal. One th down side it's still not showing the photos in
chronological order (the bain of my existence) and if Flash isn't your thing, then you can use the old gallery system here (look in the 2006
gallery).
Today has been productive, and I've finally whittled my inbox down to a skeleton on six messages.
The first time in years. I've also managed to pick up a new client who I'm looking forward to working with on a
fairly short term project. Now that I've finally hooked up everything on a network it's tempting to re-format the
WDM (a huge task). Before it was a bit of a nightmare, but
since I got it talking to the Mac backing up has become a lot easier and so this could be the opportune
moment.
Still in the computer-related vein, yesterday I took James to buy a new laptop at the Apple Store. My
first Windows/Mac convert! Admittedly the thing that flipped his choice was that you could run Windows on it, but
when he had a couple of plays on mine he decided the difference was manageable and has made the switch. Due to the
bargains going on at the moment he got a pretty sweet deal too; he managed to get the student discount, plus a iPod
nano 4Gb for 30 quid, then a printer for free and Apple care for sixty more. It did knock the initial price up, but
after rebates he's rolling in it.
I took the opportunity to check out the Mac Pro while I was there, as I
have now resigned to the idea that when the WDM finally falls
over, I'm going to make the switch properly. Fortunately they had a couple set up in the shop and despite not
having Photoshop on either (?) I made the most of seeing what punch it packed. I was impressed with Aperture's
performance, as I was with the video editing, but it frustrated me not to find more example content to play around
with and so I resorted to the time old industry test (that I just made up) of loading up everything on the dock to
see if it still worked. And it did.
Aim for tonight; get the inbox down to five and hang up the phone for the
first time today.