A Simple Life of Luxury

I’m sure you have all heard the news about the bombs in Dahab by now… Terrible news of course and terrible timing as far as I am concerned as I was looking forward to my first ever foreign windsurfing holiday to Dahab, leaving on Saturday.

It is amazing how your thoughts on world news change when they directly affect you. Normally when I hear of such stories on the news and then see people heading to the affected area I think ‘Yep, I’d still go. It’s unlikely that it will happen again in the next few weeks, security will be tighter than ever and we can’t gve in to terrorism etc etc.’. But, now that it is for real and I am supposed to be going to the exact area that the bombs exploded in I have to think a little harder about whether I go or not. It certainly isn’t so easy to just say, ‘Yep, I’ll still go’ now that it is real.

It isn’t just me I have to think about either, I have a wife and son to think about too. They are staying here in Wales while I’m in Egypt, Morgan is too young to know anything about it, but it won’t be nice for Anna sat home here worrying about my safety. I’m just glad, for her sake, that I wasn’t out there this week.

I guess the only thing I can do now is to wait and see what the foreign office advise is about travelling to Dahab in the next few days.

Well, its been a while but we finally had some LBJ (Little Brown Jobs) visitors to the bird table today. A Robin and some sparrows to be precise. Nothing too exciting but it is a start.!

Off to Egypt next week and I’m getting quite excited. I’m not exactly a seasoned traveller, but who would have though there was so much to do as far as organising a week off was concerned. Flights, accomodation, taxi transfers in Egypt, trains to the airport here, sunscreen, shorts, passports, travel insurance, various other bits of paraphenalia that I need to take etc. etc. None of that takes into account any of the things that I need to do as far as running my business goes either. There’s just so much to do and I’m already dreading coming back to the mountains of e-mails and answer-phone messages that will be waiting for me. Catching up after a week off will be a nightmare.

Still, the week away from it all should be good. I just hope its windy while I’m there.

It is rare that I get to ‘play’ with some of the more creative applications on my computer. I generally use the same old applications day in day out and the usual suspects are:

• Photoshop
• PageSpinner
• Firefox
• Mail
• Netfinder
• Word
• FileMaker Pro
• MoneyDance

and maybe a few things like iTunes, some OS X Dashboard Widgets and SuperDuper! to back everything up each day.

However, this weekend I have had chance to ‘play’ with a few of the iLife applications that came with my new version of the Mac OS. I decided it was time to make some DVD’s from the miniDV tapes we have recorded on Anna’s Camcorder. iMovie HD was therefore my first port of call. It took a while to get iMovie to ’see’ the camcorder but once it did all was plain sailing. Instead of making my own movies I decided the first thing to do was to simply copy everythin from the tape onto a DVD using the Make a Magic Movie option….

How easy was that?? OK, it took longer than I was expecting but it imported all the clips from the camcorder, applied a theme to the movie, created a title sequence and a meu of all the clips, then sent it to iDVD encoded everything and burned the DVD for me… I then stuck the DVD into the DVD player attached to the TV and it worked perfectly. Even with my DualCore 2Ghz PowerMac it took a few hours in total meaning I didn’t get time to really play with any of the apps myself, but now that I have a copy of all the clips on DVD my next task will be to make mini-movies from the best clips within iMovie HD and then make a DVD from those.

Overall, I’m sure these applications are a little dumbed down and only provide limited options for real video-editing, but the results are good and for DVD of your home video they are ideal.

Tax return time looms, so I thought it was time to re-assess the way I keep track of my business finances. So, I have recently spent some time on the not very exciting task of finding some decent accounting software to help me keep track of my business income and expenditure. I just couldn’t find anything that would do everything I wanted it to:

• Keep track of time I send on each project and bill accordingly
• Print invoices, reminders and receipts for me
• Allow me to customise those invoices etc.
• Keep track of exactly what I earnt and spent on each project and within certain categories
• Produce repts that I can use to fill in my tax returns etc.

I still haven’t made my mind up fully, but t looks as though I shall have to use a combination of either TaskTime4 or TimeNet to track the time I spend on projects and MYOB business basics to keep a track of the financial side of things. I’ll probably use TaskTime as I have been using it for a while already and have therefore already paid for it so no changes there, but MYOB should be a better option than manually producing invoices, receipts etc. and it should keep track of my finances better than the home-made FileMaker Pro database I have used in the past.

Of course, I’m still open to suggestions if anyone knows of a better solution.

There were three main reasons why I didn’t plump for an Intel based Mac when I bought my new computer a couple of weeks agao

• Everything was just a little too new for my liking and I wanted to wai for version 2 of the IntelMacs so that any problems wold have been ironed out.
• Many of the everyday apps I use would have been running under Rosetta emulation.
• I use VirtualPC to check my website on Windows based browsers and VirtualPC wouldn’t work on the Intel based Macs

Well, with the announcement of Apple Boot Camp which allows Intel Based Macs to boot up Windows XP natively I shoudn’t have worried too much the lack of support for VirtualPC as booting in Windows is now possible However, I do like the way I can run Windows in a separate window with VirtualPC without having to reboot which for my needs is a more elegant solution. Mor info on Apple Boot Camphere.

As far as running apps under Rosetta emulation goes then it probably would have simply meant I woulnd’t have gained any performance enhancements over my old system within those apps (mainly Adobe Photoshop). It probably wouldn’t have been any worse.

And, as far as any problems with the Intel macs go, then there seem so far to have been very few.

Of course, my DualCore G5 is still a pretty mean piece of kit, but it was in a way out of date the day I bought it… It still does everything I need it to though, and hopefully will continue to do for years to come.

Being able to run Windows on a Mac is pretty big news though, some people think it is an excellent step forward for Apple, others think it is a travesty! The verdict is open.

I’m sure the my life as a freelance web-designer isn’t the best for my health. I’m getting RSI from long hours using a mouse and keyboard, I’m sure sitting in the same office chair all day isn’t good for my back and no doubt my eyesight isn’t getting any better staring at these computer monitors all day long either. And that says nothing about the lack of physical exercise I’m getting and the numerous cups of coffee I drink whilst sat here.

It isn’t all bad as it can be quite challenging mentally so at least my brain gets a bit of a work-out, but to be honest I’m sure thinking about web-sites, HTML, PHP and other scripting languages doesn’t really do much for my overall sanity!

However, all is not lost as I am not your run-of -the mill website designer. As many will know, living here in West Wales often means you have to be versatile, so, while I was at university I used to help make ends meet by doing various ‘odd-jobs’ for local people. Most of whom were ME sufferers. When I left university I continued doing some of these. Now, I’ve been helping some of these people out in their gardens and with the odd bit of painting and decorating for 10 years, so I can’t just stop doing it and let them down, so I still spend some time each week doing manual work.

We’ve just had a couple of glorious days here in Wales, so it was my first chance this year to mow some lawns. I spent all day outside working in peoples gardens and despite the blood and sweat, it was, I’m sure good, for me. Physically it has to be good for me, good old-fashioned hard work and fresh-air, what more could a man want! I’m sure it was good for me mentally as well. Lawn mowing, hedge trimming and other such tasks are quite meditative in a way, giving me a chance to either switch off completely or just simply think. I’m sure I end up solving many of the little web-based puzzles and problems that present themselves to me whilst doing such work.

Of course, I’m sure by the end of the autumn I’ll be looking forward to a few months out of the gardens and a little more time in my nice warm comfy office, but at the moment, as long as I am on top of my web-design workloads then mowing lawns and other gardening tasks are actually quite inviting.

I took Morgan shopping last weekend to get his first pair of proper shoes. He’s had a few pairs second hand but to be honest I’m not sure it’s a good idea to mess with his little feet so off we went to get measured. First of all he feet are huge! I know babies 6-8 months older than him with the same size feet and believe me they grow quickly. The shop suggested we go back in 6 weeks to see if he needs another pair!

Anyway, the shop assistants were lovely and Morgan let then measure his feet. He did seem to like all the pretty girls shoes best but I managed to convince him that boys shoes were best! £26 poorer and with his new shoes on that was it. The shop took a picture of Morgan in his new shoes (to follow when I get Al to scan it in!).

I know £26 seems like a lot of money. I don’t think I spend that on my own shoes but I haven’t had to buy many clothes for Morgan as we have been given so much stuff second hand so I don’t mind paying out to look after his feet, I think it’s worth it.

I’ve never been into genealogy, but I’ve been scouring the Apple downloads site for software updates for my new computer recently and while I was there came across a few nice looking Family Tree programs. Anna’s mum is into genealogy so I thought I would check them out.

To start with none seemed to quite fit my needs. The program that first interested me was Family, but this turned out to be a simple way of creating a graphical family tree, but with no backend database for holding the information. It works well but wasn’t what I was after. I then tried lots of others that all had good database backends but left quite a bit of room for improvement as far as the graphical output was concerned. What I really wanted was a program that allowed you to enter peoples details into a robust database back-end but would then draw ‘pretty’ family tree diagrams based on that data.

I was just about to give up on my search (I wasn’t that interested after all) when I came across Mac FamilyTree, which does seem to suite my requirements perfectly. The database side of things allows me to store more information than I will ever find out about anyone in my family. Actually I probably don’t even know that much stuff about myself! It then has numerous options of different graphical charts included a Family Chart, Descendant Chart, Genogram and even a world map of events related to the people in your database.

On top of all that there is even a ‘publish’ feature that allows you to save your family tree to CD or automatically generate a complete family tree website… Watch this space as I now have the genealogy bug and will no doubt be subjecting you all to a family tree section on this site soon.

I still haven’t sorted out my broken laptop but will be sending it off for an independent fault report soon. I’m still under the impression that a £2000 laptop should last more than 20 months and that my statutory rights under the Sale of Good Act covers me for such eventualities over an above any warranty provided by the seller or the manufacturer. Hopefully the independent fault report will show that there was an inherent problem with the machine and I will be entitled to a repair/replacement.

Trouble is, all of this has taken ages to sort out and actually getting the machine to someone capable of carrying out such a report from here in rural Wales isn’t easy, so in the meantime I have been forced to buy a new computer so that I can continue my work as a Freelance Web Designer.

The new computer has arrived and setting it up was surprisingly straight forward thanks to the Migration Manager software that came built into the Operating System. When I first started it up it politely asked me if I wanted to transfer files and settings from an old computer. I said yes and off it went and did it. It worked perfectly as well which surprised me as the old computer was running a much older Operating System than the new one is. The new operating system (Mac OS 10.4.5 or Tiger as it is known) has a few nice little improvements over the older one, some visual enhancements and some new functionality. Some of which such a ‘Automator’ I haven’t tried yet, but I like ‘Dashboard’ and the ‘Spotlight’ search facility is extremely useful.

I only hope this computer lasts longer the laptop… It had better do as I can’t afford to buy a new one every 18 months!