There's a reason they called it Windows!

I said to my friend Paul one night when his PC died that he should take a hint from the name of his OS - open the nearest window and launch his PC as far as possible through it. A few weeks later when his replacement computer arrived he still managed to find it funny.

OK, so I use a Mac, well actually quite a few Macs, but I am not a Mac evangelist: my sister and bro-in-law bought me an 'iLove' t-shirt for my birthday and I debated with myself whether I was a member of the ludicrously small global Apple lovefest in denial or if it's just that I hate Microsoft more. I've wasted this entire evening uninstalling and reinstalling Virtual PC and Windows to test webpages, so I'm pretty sure which it is.

All I want is a reliable machine that doesn't try and (wrongly) second guess my every move. The same applies to the software - I'll be busy typing in MS Word and all of a sudden a bullet point will be indented further than all the rest. Just one bullet! Intuitive? A three year old could perform better pattern recognition.

Or I set a table column width to 50% in Dreamweaver (might as well name as many software giants as possible here) and open it in every single web browser to find that at most it's about 25%, 30 if I'm feeling optimistic, 40 if I squint really really hard and look at the screen from side on, but not 50! Why? That's all I want to know.

I open a pdf in Preview and it looks great. I open it in Adobe reader and it's all over the place. iTunes makes it's own separate copies of MP3s so I have to go chasing round my hard drive deleting duplicates, Entourage asks me if I'm sure I want to open an attachment when I was the one who just double-clicked the thing, causing me to scream 'Did you think I was checking my mouse click speed or what?'.

My current battle is one of trying to strike a balance between OSX and XP browsing experiences, and it's not even interesting. I like a challenge, but this is about as much fun as picking all the seeds out of a raspberry, with a spade, and I'd have more success with that than I'm having with webpages at the moment.

I conclude that it's no coincidence that both OS's contain the letter X. X-rated, expletive, exterminate exterminate exterminate.

Comments

  1. Unknown12:38 am

    Hey Debbie!

    Heh I find it difficult to class myself as a podcaster when its been two months since my last one. unfortunately the time I spend podcasting is now spent working 6pm-11pm in a convenience store.

    ReplyDelete

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