Long Weekend

It has been a long weekend, we had a half day on Friday, which I supplemented with a half day of annual leave, which meant I did not have to go into work at all, and today is a public holiday.

Accordingly it has been a double weekend, though having more time has hardly translated into getting more done. In fact looking back, I don't really know what I've done.

I have done a bit of pottering in the garden, a lot of pottering on the computer, reading though the papers for a change, drinking tea, the usual sort of stuff that you enjoy doing at home. It has been nice to have the time to do this or that, as the mood takes, rather than needing to pile through a great long list of stuff.

Also a weekend of being the Tech Support for the house. Trying to figure out how to do stuff with RapidWeaver and the growing host of plug-ins and themes that I am building up. There is a limit to how much you can do by just playing around, after a while, playing around has to be supplemented with some actually reading the manual.

I have also bought QuickTime Pro, on the basis that it was only twenty pounds, and should be useful. I will however be dis-chuffed if I need to re-purchase soon to cope with an upgrade somewhere. Purchasing QuickTime Pro let me download Soul Train by Swansway to my iPod, and just as I loved it on vinyl, I love it on iPod too, what a splendid track.

I read somewhere, that one of these football games is being given away free, but you pay small transaction costs in the course of the game. There is a certain psychology about pricing stuff so that it qualifies as an impulse purchase, and gets past your parsimonious and sensible side. There is also the psychology of building up relationships with customers, who are then more likely to purchase stuff. A lot of my spending is now online, and I am gradually buying software online. I cannot imagine that I would pay £500 for DreamWeaver, but buying the odd addition to DreamWeaver seems entirely okay. I suppose some of the major software packages were already doing this years ago, and it also happened with the sale of fonts, etc.

I also got the girls started using iMovie, with some encouragement they are now making a video. Even with software this easy, it is amazing how much support, encouragement and prompting is required to get them going. It has been sitting there ready to use, for as long as we have had the computer, but they have never experimented. Likewise with Garageband, they have never really got into that either.

They are now however embarked on a movie making career, so I suppose they will find plenty of use for the computer once it transfers to their room, even without a broadband connection. Making movies does rather stretch the computer, not impossibly, but the usual mantra of save often, and let it take its time, applies. Much work got lost following a crash, but having posted a message on a forum, got some advice on how to recover the situation, and the prized work was retrieved.

Also on the IT support side, my 1998 Bondi Blue iMac has expired. Nothing more than a slight hum when the power key is depressed. Another posting to the Forum suggests that it is not worth repairing, the money could far better to put towards something newer. I suppose it has served us well, and in depreciation terms, it has now depreciated away to nil value!

All the same, I have looked after it, and I cannot quite bring myself to binning it. Although now useless, it is an attractive lump of glass and plastic.

Also much work on my website, although in a non-linear tinkering about sort of way, rather than a rigidly project managed approach to development. Now set up a blog for the garden stuff, and some pages for garden stuff, and used some more of the YourHead plug-ins which seem to work very well indeed. However I will need to get to know them better to use them to best advantage, as with RapidWeaver itself.

I would not say that there is a steep learning curve, with either RapidWeaver or the iMac itself, but the sheer range of what you can do on your computer nowadays, does limit how far you can go without ever reading a manual. Simply having the time to play around and experiment is invaluable.