Snow Leopard Upgrade

I upgraded my main mac to Snow Leopard just over a month ago :-)

I eventually setup Time Machine a couple of weeks ago which is quite good for my piece of mind.

Have spent a lot of time with iPhoto 09 naming faces in it's face recognition - I'm not really sure how wonderful this will be.

What is great is another feature of iPhoto -- the one-touch uploading of photos to the internet. You get severl host sites - mobileme -Apple's own web hosting, Facebook and Flicker. I don't think it's got Picasa though... You just select the photos you want to upload (I did it with my Facebook account) click the icon for the host and POW! it uploads them to an album in Facebook :-) no more browsing for each individual photo and waiting for it to upload before you can pick the next one. I went to town a bit and uploaded selected photos from the past 6 years into about 60 albums.

It was easier than transferring photos to my digital photoframe.

Carrot Cake :-P

Made some carrot cake this evening :-P

A female colleague has been pestering me to make and bring in to work since I did in March for my birthday. I finally caved in and made because I had carrots left over from buying a bag to go with supper on Friday night. So, all I needed to buy was some cream cheese for in the icing.

Made 3 separate cakes by dividing the mixture between three one pound loaf tins - it also has the advantage of the cakes cooking more evenly in my ancient and clapped out oven. Got in a bit of a mess when I was making the icing as I kept adding too much icing sugar at one time and it getting everywhere which meant it got all-over my clothes as I was sitting on the couch in the lounge watching TV as I made it.

Am giving the female colleague one of the cakes as she's meeting a friend who's visiting from half a world away -- can't recall if her friend is from Oz or N.Z.

I'll take another one in to work to slice and share with other colleagues -- it wont last long there!

And the last one, which had a slight accident (it fell on its side and covered the kitchen worktop with icing - which tastes lovely! - you didn't expect me not to taste the icing that stuck to the worktop?) but I managed to repair its icing, will go with me to R's on Thursday night to share -- he enjoyed it the last time I made for him.

I do enjoy baking when I remember to do some -- I just wish there wasn't so much washing up to do :-(

Xmas Myth

I’m always reminded of the Sermon during Advent that our Church of Scotland Minister gave when I was in my early teens which he called “Taking the Christ out of Christmas?”.
The Press had been banging on about using the abbreviation Xmas was replacing Christ with an X and attempting to secularise the feast.
He went on to explain that the abbreviation of Christmas to Xmas originated many centuries ago when it was common place to refer to Christ with the Greek letter Chi which looks like an X.
So, in fact, people when abbreviating Christmas to Xmas are still keeping irt Christian!

Run-up to Christmas

How ready are you for Christmas?

I finished buying all my presents last weekend and wrapped them too.

Wrote all the cards that have to be posted and posted them on Saturday this weekend past. All I need to do now is write cards for workmates but, having changed jobs in July, who do I send to? Do I send to my immediate colleagues and all the cute younger men in the office? (Even those who are married?)

The office Christmas meal is on Wednesday 10/12/2008... The team I used to be in there was a lot of drinking the past few years and last year I was too drunk to have gone home on the bus and got mugged for my mobile phone which made it an expensive night out. And a very traumatic experience and a lot of worries for my loved ones as they made abusive phone calls to my family before I got the SIM card blocked and saying that I was in hospital and they'd beaten me up etc.

I don't intend to get that bad this year and have been made to promise my partner that I will get a taxi home if I do. He lives 170miles away and was very worried about me last year.

Success in merging gmail account with blogger...

Just had to post this as it was so useful:

how-to-change-blog-owner

Was on the google groups help for blogger and found a guy called panther's reply to a thread asking how to move a blogger blog to a different gmail account.

link to thread

His answer was great and now both mes are one me according to Google and blogger :-)

Looking forward to camping...

Going camping in the New Forest this coming weekend with R and a friend of his.

Main thing for me is will be going to the Mini Cooper event at Beaulieu so I can get some trim parts for my classic mini :-)

Hope the weather will be good as there have been some rather wet days recently. We had it a bit wet when we were camping with OUT near Uffington.

Macified update...

Unfortunately, the loads of memory was DDR memory not PC100 or PC133 that would have been compatible with the iMac :-)

Just won an ebay auction for some 256MB PC100 DIMMs so can make the iMac Snow have double the memory. Currently bidding on an iMac which has a DVD drive in it as an external DVD drive on the Snow isn't fast enough for playing DVD movies. should get it on Saturday if I win the auction...

I'm all macified :-)

Received my MS Office:mac 2008 DVD today and was worried how the upgrade would happen had heard it would be easier than a similar upgrade on Windose.

Backed up my Entourage identity just in case then installed -- it was easier (and strangely VERY much FASTER) than a similar upgrade in Windose...

It even asked me if I wanted the old office 2004 removed and offered to transfer my identity to the new version for me.

Must start Entourage 2008 to see if it cocked it up or not...

Now have my (newly bought on ebay) iMac snow cabled to the bedroom and my (also newly bought on ebay) iMac tangerine cabled to the kitchen (for browsing during breakfast (better than spilling milky cereal on the mac Mini).

Had decided that it would be cheaper to buy a couple of iMacs off ebay rather than buy a new laptop for internet in other rooms -- R has had my laptop since his went belly up about 6 months ago. Got an iMac Tangerine last week which I picked up near R's home for £40 which was a bargain considering the installed software and the upgrades it had done to it. Got an iMac Snow SE Summer 2001 spec for £45 pn Tuesday it will need more memory as only has 256MB but I know a man who has loads :-)

I hate Skype

I have just managed to get my mac working again after what Skype did to it.

Here's the message I sent them:

"Skype trashed my mac OS X installation

I downloaded Skype for my mac mini which uses mac OS X 10.4.11...

I installed Skype and tried a test call to test my headset.

I got no sound on my headset and clicked the red phone icon in Skype to hang-up and Skype crashed itself and crashed mac OS X and trashed the installation.

I had to wipe my mac's hard drive and re-install mac OS X.

I will not be attempting to use your program again as it is obviously flawed in a major way."

I can't understand how anyone would use such a program when it's so flaky as to cause irrepairable damage to a computer installation.

Scottish Banknotes -- Queen Mother

And a £20 note commemorating the Queen Mother's 100th Birthday.