Bloody PC world
Working from home this week I’ve realised just how annoying working on a PC is. At work I tend to use Hummingbird Exceed in full screen mode with only firefox being used in addition. Yes, I use my expensive PC as an xterminal (and it still isn’t as nice to use as my old colour Xterminal *sob*). Anyway, I’ve been using my lurverly Apple Powerbook while working from home and it is sooooo much nicer than my PC. I plugged it into my monitor at home and up it came in dual head mode. No faffing - it just worked. However, using my Microsoft keyboard with it was a little more frustrating. It works fine it’s just that some of the keys don’t quite do what you’d expect (windows key becomes apple cmd, alt-3 is needed for a hash as the hash key prints something else etc etc). I rapidly decided that I needed a Mac keyboard. A quick look at the apple store suggests that they are only 20 quid. Excellent. I’ll have one. They also have a new mouse - the rather stupidly named Mighty Mouse which has touch sensitive buttons. Touch sensitive buttons??? I *have* to have one of those ;-).
Anyway, thinking rather wishfully I nip into PCWorld (I know, I know). Bloody hell! They have a stack of Apple keyboards! No price shown anywhere though. I take one to the till where after several attempts at typing the barcode number in it won’t accept it. “Sorry, can’t sell you that as it won’t scan”. Riiiiiight.
The other bloke at the till then comments that he doesn’t understand why they have them anyway as they don’t sell Macs. I point to the EMac, the two IMacs and the Powerbook sat there showing off their screen savers. “Oh yeah” comes the response “Still, we haven’t sold many of those keyboards so I still don’t understand why we stock them”. I attempt to suggest that maybe they haven’t sold many as they refuse to sell them but the two “assistants” now seem more interested in attempting to work out why the vending machine won’t give them any chocolate. Sigh. I gave up at that point and walked out. Great. Oh well, it gives me an excuse to nip upto Bluewater to check out the new Apple store. Whether visiting armed with a credit card is a good idea or not I’ll have to report later 
Still, not all bad news. I finally attempted to update our tax credit to tell them that Jake is no longer at nursery. Apart from the slight problem that the system sits there with a messages saying “Redirecting you to the secure server” when it is blatently doing nothing of the sort (in fact, it is blatently doing nothing) a bit of url guessing and game on! I update the info, hit submit and *IT ALL WORKS*!!!! WOOOOO! Not only that but my replacement Drivers license turned up this morning as promised. hurrah. Maybe these computer system thingys will catch on afterall.
