Monday 28 May 2007

Bank Holiday Weekend

Had a fairly uneventful Bank Holiday weekend.

I was in work on Saturday night, applying datafixes to the system. This was only a four hour job so I was home by 20:30.

Much of the rest of our time was taken up with more Macfoolery:
1) Setting up NeoOffice. This is free open source software based on OpenOffice, but with more regular improvements targeted specifically for the Mac.
I use OpenOffice for Windows and find it perfectly adequate for my needs.
Novelist Supermum is a more demanding user however, and was unhappy with the way it tracked changes, comments and notes. She's ordered a copy of Word for Mac.
2) During trying out the above we discovered that:
There is no DEL key on the Mac. Solution - Use Fn Backspace.
There is no right mouseclick on the Mac (we did know this, obviously as there's only a single mouse button. We didn't know how to obtain the equivalent functionality in an application). Solution - Use Ctrl Mouseclick.
3) Seeking out, downloading and installing the latest printer drivers for our ageing HP psc 750 printer/scanner. Printer is still stuttering and stopping. Need to understand how to access and troubleshoot the printer queues in Mac OS X. Perhaps I should just get down to the Unix shell and use lpstat?

Sister phoned me on Sunday to check that I'd got the Birthday card she sent me earlier in the week and for a general chat. Chatted for half an hour, but was cut short by having to deal with Samwise who had gone to the toilet in his underpants (He's still got L plates when it comes to remembering that he's no longer in nappies - but he's getting there).

Entertained the hobbits with two trips to the Aztec play area.

We bought Spiderman 2 on DVD, and then sought out a copy of Spiderman 1. Looped through both a couple of times - the hobbits were only really interested in the action sequences. Samwise liked "The Green Gobbler Upper" - he refused to say "Goblin" for a while. Frodo's favourite bad guy is Dr Octopus - I got grabbed by pretend robotic arms a few times afterwards.

Typical Bank Holiday weather on Monday. First of all a hailstorm. Later a downpour with a single flash of lightning and a rumble of thunder.

Blogging before bed. Back to work tomorrow. It's half term, so I'm going in early so that I can get back sooner to assist with unruly children.

5 comments:

Kaj Kandler said...

Sounds really uneventful. For a little more spice to your bank holidays, try out Plan-B for OpenOffice.org

K<o>

darkdwarf said...

Sorry but I'm a geek and not a "real person" therefore your product is not for me.

Anonymous said...

Any reason I should swap to Neo-Office? Rather than carry on with Open Office?

darkdwarf said...

Neo-Office claim that since they are only concentrating on the Mac operating system, and no other platforms, and they don't have to go with whater agenda Sun Microsystems have then they can provide more frequent bug fixes an responsive support than with OpenOffice.

See the Neo Office FAQ

I guess that if you're happy with what you get from OpenOffice then there's no need to swap.

cha0tic said...

Ahh. stupid me. I wasn't paying attention. NeoO is only for the Mac. Oo I can use on both. Ta.