Saturday, December 17, 2011

Back to Writing

No, my world is not falling apart, although for the past 2 weeks I haven't been very confident of that.

My mother caught a bug, then had the audacity to share it.  SHE went immediately onto an antibiotic and promptly recovered.  Not being 97 years old or sharing her risk factors, I didn't get the antibiotic.  Short version:  5 days into the second week of near-immobility, I picked up remaining antibiotics from my mom's prescription.  Life has improved dramatically.

Then there's the absent computer.  It didn't die, just went off to be copied.  Now it is back at home, along with a new sibling,  The sibling is going to make life lots harder for a while, but just may turn out to be a joy in the long run.  I've been considering a larger monitor (20" or greater) for several months.  Looked at the HP all-in-one units, but ended up with the iMac version.

To understand the magnitude of this decision, consider that I learned to use a computer some 36 years ago, in the days when the word processor of choice, developed at Stanford University, was called Wilbur.  Wilbur had a brother, Orville.  As in the WRITE brothers .....   Wilbur ran on a stand-alone device that sat behind my desk and adjacent to the IBM Selectric typewriter.  We sent off multiple reels of 1" magnetic tape at the end of each business day, all the way from California to Missouri or Oklahoma where they were stored for safe-keeping.   It was the industrial standard for secure backups.  Upstairs in our building they were still using data entry keypunch operations -- in a state-of-the-art scientific research facility. 

Four years later, with a different employer, with the encouragement of an in-house engineer, the two of us brought desktop computers to our remote worksite.  The PCs came along a couple of years later.  About that same time, we spent a few months with an Apple Macintosh resident in a spare bedroom at home.  But the Mac returned to its own home, and I have been a dedicated PC user ever since.  Even stood between the IT folk and the line supervisors at work, helping supervisors learn to use the computers they were REQUIRED to use in their revised job assignments, leaving the IT folk free to do more complex IT tasks.  I don't claim to be a techie, but am quite comfortable troubleshooting and maintaining at least my own PC software.

This iMac is as different animal altogether.  I love the 21.5" monitor.  I love the color quality and imaging I'm seeing, even in the first few hours of ownership. I am looking forward to mastering the stylus tablet that we purchased in lieu of the Mac touchpad.  The graphics stuff that comes with this unit is amazing.  But -- it took several hours  to discover the equivalent of "My Computer".  The mouse works differently.  What happened to all those "right click" tasks?  My friend who said, "You're going to miss the things you control yourself in Windows, but cannot control in the Apple world," was correct.  That may change ..... 

The ads tell you that it is simple to run Windows on a new Mac system.  What they don't tell you is that getting from here to there (adding a Windows component to your Mac system) is NOT supported by Apple.  If I can do it on Apple, I'm perfectly happy to; if I cannot, I'd appreciate some help with the set-up side of that transition.  Apple says, "It's not our product, we don't support it."  Microsoft says, "Switching to a competitor?  Not our problem."  So there's a learning curve here that is going to bring some frustration until I build the techie knowledge essential to  running my Windows-based genealogy software on my new, flashy iMac.  Cannot switch to a Mac-compatible product; there is just no equivalent in the genealogical community.  Even Family Tree Maker, which has a Mac version, lacks much of the advanced capability provided by The Master Genealogist. 

Remember that little graphic of the two buzzards on a tree limb, one saying to the other, "Patience my ..., I'm gonna' kill somebody!"?  Pray that I can get beyond that response to focus on finding answers!   Meanwhile, give thanks for new toys and new things to learn.

Don't forget to pray!
*****


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