9 posts tagged “computer”
i really wanted to write a post today in which my new computer didn't feature. but i don't know quite what to write about. today i was going to work on my arrangement, find some new poems for a second walt whitman song, bake some muffins before the last apple goes off. instead, i spent most of the morning feeling ghastly due to getting barely any sleep for the past two nights, then spent most of the day battling to get parallels to do what i wanted it to do, then most of the early evening revelling in the fact that i did get it do what i wanted it to:
the speed of photoshop on the mac just makes a world of difference and i hope to have caught up on all my six months' worth of backlog by the end of next week. i tested pshop under parallels, just to see what the speed difference was as pshop is probably the most resource-intensive of all the programmes i'm currently running on xp, and the difference was pretty negligible for the most part. a little slower in saving, but compared to what i'm used to, it's still lightning-fast. finale wasn't so keen on parallels though - it was quite happy to open and work, but with garritan personal orchestra wanting a full gb of ram minimum to process playback sounds, playback was quite choppy. so i guess i'll use bootcamp for composing in finale (until i upgrade, and finale was always going to be the first thing to be upgraded), longer sessions in photoshop or indesign, and of course games :-) and parallels probably for anything else.
but enough about the computer. the next batch of photos will be from the london mela in august...
soooo awesome. and soooo much of it! we took our friend up to ealing broadway to catch her train to heathrow (with crossed fingers) and then frolicked in the park taking photos.
then we came home and frolicked around brentham taking photos
and then, as one does when one encounters a day which most londoners greeted with a hurrah for not having to go out, we crossed the entire city to go to the thames barrier and frolicked around taking photos
djelibeybi had heard somewhere that the thames could flood in the next couple of days, so he was hoping that the barrier would do its thing (it didn't) and/or that it would be covered in snow and therefore a one-off photo opportunity (it wasn't) but it was good to see it nevertheless and we found some first-rate low-tide thames mudflats which was a bit of a compensation.
and of course a new computer on which i have finally managed to install windows and photoshop means that i can actually sort out the photos *on the same day as i took them*!!!!!!!! yesterday i prepped nine photos from the ones i took in the isle of wight last july in the time it took me to just open, rotate and apply auto-levels to 2 photos on the old computer. and parallels turned up today so that's the next step - running windows from within the mac os.
it's been interesting, having played with the mac os for a week before being able to install windows, and the experience has made me realise that windows is bossy. it's been bossing me about for two days now. do this, do that, set this up, get a .net passport account, do you really know what you're doing here? i'd never really noticed it before. the mac os is so polite. heh. i find this quite amusing, myself.
anyway, totally totally loving the new computer - so fast, so shiny, and everything works. now that i have finale set up on it as well as pro tools, i can start actually working on it too. yay!
so i thought i'd pass the time by giving a plug to this book - mac os x: the missing manual which is proving a fantastic investment. it's practically heavier than the computer itself but i've already picked up so many little bits and pieces from it that i never would just by foozling around on my own. the funny thing is that i've found out a heap more about windows too - i'll be sitting there reading and come across some neat little trick and read it out to djeli, all in an excitement. he then says "windows can do that". heh. i guess this is the bonus of actually reading a book about your operating system. i never bothered with windows - there didn't seem to be much of a point. but heigh ho.
been exploring the few things i have on the mac for now and have come up with a few more fabulous bits and pieces:
- appleremote for playing dvds (given that yesterday was a sick day, it was awesome to be able to watch danger mouse in bed without having to have the computer on my knees and without having to brave the internal pain involved in crawling over to the computer to do something like pause or adjust the volume. awesome)
- two-finger right click!!! this one has me totally besotted. it seems that the chap in the apple shop was talking through his hat when he said the mbp had a two-button trackpad button (it looks like one but seems to rock so it was plausible, but i think he actually didn't know and was just inventing), which was driving me a little nuts, but yesterday i discovered the setting which identifies when you have two fingers tapping the trackpad and treats that as the right click. way better than having to hold down a key while you click.
- two-finger scrolling. love this one too. i may never go near the trackpad button again :-)
- exposé. can't wait to give this a go - it sounds fantastic
djelibeybi's disc of windows xp is the wrong one! it doesn't include service pack 2 so it won't install under boot camp - and without it, i can't install any of my software except for pro tools. omg the frustration - you wouldn't believe it. so we are having to cast ourselves upon the mercy of someone he used to work with who also subscribes to the microsoft action pack (djeli subscribes, but all his discs to go australia so we won't be able to get at them for six weeks) and hope that he will take pity upon my plight and let us use one of his spare installs. oh golly golly golly. so much for being all set up and running within a couple of days.
and to top it all off, my innards have gone on strike following two evenings of trying out new recipes that were perhaps a little higher in fat than they ought to have been (and in spite of my halving butter quantities and using half-fat crème fraîche instead of full-fat) so i am somewhat confined to quarters today with an intense ache in the region of my liver. grrrrrrrr.
update: woohoo! djeli's friend has come through for us - we're going to head out to oxford tomorrow to pick up the disc. huzzah!
it's here! it finally arrived! and i've unpacked it and fondled it and yes, it turns on. unfortunately i'm still waiting on djelibeybi's test of his winxp disc copy to see if it's the right one to install with boot camp, and until bc is installed and working i don't really want to mess too much with installing other things, so it's a little frustrating for now, but i can surf the internet at least! i'm writing this on the old one though because it seems that vox doesn't yet support safari for the compose feature (but dibs for the helpful message telling me this - thanks, guys, for not just leaving it broken!)
so, a few random first thoughts on my maiden voyage (albeit just once round the harbour) with my mac.
fabulousness (aside from random gorgeousness):
- packaging
- the powerpack has two flip-out-able doovies that you can hook any spare cable around so it doesn't trail
- the keyboard feels nice
- starts up in under 30 seconds!!!
- we had the wireless network functioning within ten minutes (this would have been shorter, but for pro tools' sake i had to switch off the auto-system-updates so it didn't update itself past the version approved by digidesign)
- built-in calendar
- rss-feed screensaver
- you can get a dashboard widget showing what state the london tube system is in, and - best of all:
- it starts up with the wireless network working!!!!!!!!!
- turn on computer. wait 2 mins or so till it decides to wake up (if it doesn't hang, in which case, start again from the beginning and wait for scandisk to do its work)
- wait for a message about wglu something or other throwing a hissy fit (this happens about one startup in four). if this appears, start again from the beginning because it's not going to find the network at all. if it doesn't appear, proceed to step 3
- push in pcmcia wireless card and wait for it to be recognised. sometimes it won't be recognised, in which case, stop it and try again. if after 3 tries it isn't recognised, shut down and start again from the beginning. sometimes (about 1 time in six) it won't offer you the option to stop it at all, in which case you generally have to just hoik it out and deal with the blue screen of complaint. shut down nicely and start again from the beginning, probably including a scandisk episode)
so may i reiterate?
- it starts up with the wireless network working!!!!!!!!!
some oddnesses i am finding:
- there's no # key on the keyboard??
- gah! right mouse click!
- how do you open a new window from a link in safari?
- the enter key is about 1/8 the size of the ones i'm used to at the point where i'm used to clicking it. i keep hitting ' instead
- the feel of the wind in my hair
hoping that tomorrow i'll be able to install boot camp and windows and then embark upon installing pro tools. once i'm happy that that's working, then i can set about plonking on photoshop, illustrator (the rest of cs will have to wait till we fish out the original disks when we're in australia in about 6 weeks), finale, dreamweaver and flash onto it. oh, and set up email and stuff.
after a fairly hopeless week last week, which was all messed up by the computer dramas and my not being used to djelibeybi being at home all the time, i seem to have managed to pull myself together.
i got a ton of stuff done yesterday - bought some nice filing boxes to deal with the piles of paper floating round the house, a couple of refills for my lamy pen which i use to write my morning pages, investigated books on OS X because the one i got from the library is very out of date, it seems, rather than just quite out of date, took the broken stockpot back to M&S (the glass lid shattered into a million pieces so it constituted a safety hazard but now of course this means that i once again have no stockpot) and - most importantly - i went to turnkey and picked up the first of my new toys:
once i get the computer that is. which could turn up any time now - they sent the notification that it had shipped at 11am on friday. the estimated delivery date is now 31 january, but i figure if it was sent on friday via tnt then in theory it could turn up today or tomorrow. needless to say, the street now seems to filled with trucks and vans coming and going. i'm doing my best to not leap up and check every one to see if it's the courier, but it's hard work!
nevertheless, i have actually managed to get back to my work today and have finished my walt whitman song that i started a couple of weeks ago. i suspect i may need to transpose it and make it for alto voice rather than tenor because it has quite a wide range - using fully the limits of the range of a choral tenor, and i'm not sure what's going to be best for it. but i'm going to wait until i've written another one or two songs to go with it and then see what i end up with, whether i should adjust this one to fit the tenor voice, or whether everything would be better sung by an alto and adjust as necessary for that. but it feels good to know that it's fundamentally finished, especially as i've had trouble finishing the last couple of pieces i've worked on.
my new toy is on its way!!!!
If you could only save one thing in a house fire (thing, not person), what would it be and why?
Submitted by donnunn.
well, for a long, long time it was my copy of dante's inferno, in the original 13th century italian, signed by peter greenaway, but as that's far away in sydney now, i guess i need to rethink... i think the hard drive backup would probably win - or the computer. tragic to think of hardware at a time like this, except that that's where, firstly, all my scores live - all the work i've done in the past 15 years or so - secondly, where my email lives and thirdly, where my archive of photos lives. i'm a terrible digital hoarder, and while i might pick out only a couple of photos to post to flickr from any given event, i still keep the other 153, unable to ditch any but the most appalling (e.g. those ones where one left the lens cap on). jacques-etienne would of course be struggling for my attention and i feel horrible saying it, but i think the computer would win. maybe i could cast j-e from a window into a waiting trampoline-thing while i carefully carried the hardware out by hand and thereby actually save 2 things...
