It was cheering to know I was missed in blog land so without further ado let's get this blog up and running again, albeit briefly as I haven't really got my act together yet.
As the regulars know, the eldest of my brothers died three weeks ago very suddenly, so it was a case of downing tools and getting the first 'plane back to England to be with Mum who was, as you can imagine, totally knocked sideways. Whatever the age of one's children, it is not in the order of things to be predeceased by them...
The process of getting him home for the funeral was long and complicated and we have had to deal with autopsies and eventually an inquest as he died at his home, but we got there in the end and last week he was cremated in Guildford on a gloriously sunny day, which funnily enough is very comforting at such a difficult time.
Back here in Switzerland, my son has been totally brilliant and I am very proud of him coping by himself for three weeks (my daughter has been overseeing operations) - he shopped, cooked and cleaned for himself during that time and although the chalet is rather muddled, I didn't get home to piles of dirty plates and tons of washing! He did admit last night that it was good to eat green vegetables again as he hasn't had any since I went away!!
I have a pile of bills/letters waiting to be opened but my new Mac arrived during my absence, so I have been twiddling with it, getting it up and running - I am trying to resist the temptation to spend the day on it, as I have the family arriving in a few days and things do kinda need sorting out here. I haven't transferred all my rubbish from the old Mac to the new one, but am busy trying to go through the files and keep the strict minimum - rather a long process but worth it in the end I hope. My new Mac has a Swiss keyboard which is virtually the same as the English one except the z and the y are inversed so my typing has slowed down - all the y's in this post started life as a z! It does have accents though, which will make typing in French easier, but no euro sign (at least not visible on a key) - only $ and £.
Quite a few remarks on England to make, but will leave that for another day! Just to let all of you off skiing for the half-term that the snow is on its way so conditions next week should be good!
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Welcome back, Louise! I sympathize with your new keyboard problems. But it sounds as if you're getting off lightly. The laptop I was using in Rome (it came with the apartment we were renting) had all kinds of keys transposed. Fortunately, I'm not a fast typist at the best of times; still, it could be infuriating.
What do you call that an 'Ayertz' keyboard? Not very elegant.
What do you call a qwertz keyboard? A Swiss chocolate one. And when you receive an e-mail, it goes 'cuckoo' (no, not really but I might just download a cuckoo song and use it!)
This new machine reads my emails to me if I want it to, so no strong language please! However the choice of voices is really strange and not really up to Mac standard - they are even worse than the GPS voice!
I now have to boot camp Microsoft as I can run both systems on the same machine - Microsoft is totally hateful but I need a couple of programmes that don't exist on Mac, so needs must. And my son is desperate to use MSN on Microsoft as it is better than on Mac - I have no idea!
Nice to have you back, Louise, twitters an'all.
I find it hard to believe that there's no euro on your keyboard. On my French laptop it's under the "e", far removed from all the other symbols.
In other words it's an
a z e/€ r t y keyboard !
Good to have you back and blogging again. We might actually get snow too, on Mont Aiguoal where I hope to don my skis next week.
I've never heard of a computer that reads emails to you - it sounds great! I want one, I want one...
How nice to come home to an unwrecked house...I left my eldest daughter alone for a week and when I came home,there were dirty clothes, plates, cutlery etc etc everywhere - I even found a saucepan of dried up spaghetti in mybedroom...
Thank you for the link, by the way :-)
I can't think of anything worse than a talking computer. Mine CAN speak (though that doesn't extend to reading emails) but I don't let it. It's like those dreadful cars back in the '80s that were programmed to tell you if the door wasn't properly closed or you were going over the speed limit "and don't forget to buckle your seatbelt." I'll make an exception for GPS guidance systems which can be a boon in a strange city. But at least you can switch them off when you don't need them.
Spaghetti in the bedroom. Keep us posted. We need to know more.
Louise
One more twitter please
Sorry - I'm not feeling very twittery today - I'm in the middle of doing loads of housework, just in case signs of dust appear on a future photo, and upset you, and also I have family coming tomorrow. I thought about twittering this morning, but couldn't find a subject - might do a book review, but might not! Anway all are having a jolly time on Salut!
What about you doing something outrageous for us?
I did something outrageous. Rather my son reinstalled my computer so now I am locked out of my blog. Decided to create a new one but it will take time.
Oh dear, what a silly billy! If you reinstalled you should have had the option to save files, in which case your blog is somewhere. If you didn't choose to keep files, theoretically you have lost absolutely everything on your computer. Reinstalling is a very dangerous business and should never be undertaken lightly, as you have found out! Before reinstalling, I would suggest that firstly you defrag your computer memory - people often reinstall as things start going wrong when it is more a problem of defragging your poor computers' memory.
But this is kind of shutting the gate after the horse has bolted! And I suppose you work with a PC - poor you...but then there is nothing more boring than a Mac geek, fortunately we are only 3% of the computer world.
I advise you against Vista for the moment - lots of problems to be ironed out. I haven't yet boot camped Microsoft on my new Mac as I am rather frightened of the mess Microsoft makes of Macs, but if and when I do, I will stick to XP for the moment...
God, I must be desperate this afternoon, talking about computers! That's what ironing does to you!
PS If you have to start your blog all over again, instead of using blogspot, have a look at the site that Roads uses (can't think of the name offhand, but it much more user friendly - I'm going to change to them within a month or two).
We have racism, sexism, agism; is there such a thing as "name-ism?" If so, I wish to complain on behalf of myself and all of the other non-silly Billies!! (Yes, I realize I'm laying myself wide open to fatuous attacks from certain quarters.) The jollity's grinding to a halt over on Salut! Louise and, though Richard's been doing his best, the current topic, which had turned out to be a rather good one, is getting bogged down in a series of identity crises and barely comprehensible posts. But a very old friend and former workmate of Colin Randall's and mine has resurfaced, which is very nice.
Aren't Macs great? Don't be in any hurry to do anything with Microsoft on yours. At best, it's likely to make it run like molasses; very frustrating. I've just invested in an external hard-drive to keep all my files backed up but my .mac account also lets me do on-line backups of somethings, which is very handy. Do you have a .mac account? I recommend you at least look into it; all kinds of nice features and it's not wildly expensive.
Richard -- bon courage!
Yes, I've got a .mac account - as it is a new machine one gets two months free trial and when that runs out I will actually subscribe to it as I have managed to side-step the Swisscom ISP (which is desperate) and re-route through Mac for my e-mail.
The new Macs have this brilliant system where in fact you can run Microsoft but in no way can you run them together! When you install Microsoft, you allow it a portion of your hard disk, so when things go horribly wrong, you still have Mac OS up and running.
However reading through Apple's geek pages, there are people who have opened up in Microsoft and then can't get out of it, so they now have a very beautiful and expensive Mac that runs Microsoft...!
Sorry about the silly billies -quite unintentional I promise! However, if the hat fits...! No, I just thought it was one of those silly things to say to Richard who gets most angry when I come out with such remarks - it comforts him to know that I fit into the box in which he has placed me!
I'm afraid I've given up on Colin's last blog - however after his remarks we have seen a few more people posting with a name!
Colinb - you were right - can you imagine I didn't see the € sign under the E (and this is a woman who thinks she knows a little about computers!). I noticed that the symbols had changed place, vaguely identified their new emplacement and that was that - as I don't look at the keyboard when I type it took me a couple of days to discover the € sign. My keyboard is therefore qwertz, asdfg@ and yxcvv for my left hand!
I was running Internet Explorer on mine for a while, which was VERY silly! Getting rid of it in favour of Safari seemed to double the speed of everything I was doing. I also found a lot of programs were crashing in mid-use. Thanks a lot, Silly Billy Gates!
Richard - Roads blog site is wordpress.com
Nice one - Silly Billy Gates - like it!
My son did a reasonable job, he is a computer engineer after all. I just can't connect under my old e mail address and password.Stupid blogger.
I will definitely try a different software.
The mystery of the Americans is that they always write themselves as William E. Gates the fourth senior, and then call themselves Bill.
I had an American boss in Australia called Bob Stone, his secretary, an Australian, stuck up Bob Stone on his door and on his parking space. He went went bananas, had to be Robert G. Stone.
What's even stupider, Richard, is that quite often the middle initial doesn't stand for anything. It's simply there for effect. There used to be (and perhaps still is) a guy writing for the American papers who styled himself, entirely without humour or irony, Lucien K. Truscott IV.
It must be something to do with the fact that Americans don't have titles - like the 4th Earl of ..., so they have found this silly system of being Snr. or IV or whatever.
I've always regarded it as a sort of national inferiority complex. When I worked on newspapers in the States, I was regarded as a bit eccentric ("that smartass Limey," as one editor put it) because I insisted on my byline being Bill rather than William H. Taylor Jr.
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