Thought I'd surprise you all with a post. (Aren't these pretty flowers!)

Sorry to drop out so completely for a while, but I just was sooo sick of my old computer speed, I couldn't cope with doing anything more than the most basic of functions like checking emails (and mostly not replying to any of them). It was kinda fun to step away so completely from that part of my life. There was virtually no output of any kind, and I really enjoyed it. Just watched lots of movies and ate out with friends and enjoyed the glorious weather.

But... be warned, now that I am armed and dangerous I may become highly prolific once more....

I now own an Apple Mac 15" Powerbook. With 1.25 gb Ram. And 80 gb HD. I'm all dizzy with excitement!

My fabulously geeky graphic designer computer buddy Rob and I traipsed around Shinjuku on Saturday in an effort to locate the best computer deal for me. Up on the third floor of one of the Sofmap stores is a well-hidden second hand mac section. We were lucky enough to stumble onto a 15" powerbook that, despite being completely unused, was being sold at a ridiculous second hand price. It's kinda cool that Apple insist on their boxes remaining intact before they can validate the warranty, because this baby's box got all broked-up and was suddenly suddenly worth about 12% less. With such a big discount, I was able to upgrade to 1.25gb Ram, the fab new Tiger OS and a 3 year shop warranty and still paid less than a brand new machine with way less Ram.

And the story gets better. Rob being the fabulous geek that he is, slipped me a few discs all loaded up with software. We spent the afternoon drinking tea and setting it up. Now, a day and half later, I have almost finished the set up and transfer of information from my old PC.

A few handy hints for anyone out there considering the change:
1. Check out Outlook2Mac to transfer your emails and contact info to Mac formats. It costs $10 but I was more than willing to spend this for the peace of mind of having my last 3 or so years worth of emails and contacts easily accessible in my new system.
2. Look at this cool open-source application called OpenOffice.org to replace your windows office applications. It's not quite ready for Tiger unfortunately, but I think once they upgrade it'll be a very handy little tool.
3. The mac downloads page is full of all sorts of very cool little widgets and other cool programs - some free, some trials....

So far, I'm really impressed by the speed, efficiency and intuitivity (is that even a word?) of the whole kit and kaboodle, except for i-photo which I am extremely disappointed with. The download from my camera was very slow and the program takes a while to load the images. I was so unimpressed with it that I downloaded the Canon software that came with the camera, I think it's much faster even though it's a huge program. Actually, I was just thinking - maybe it's not the program, maybe it's my old cable, it's probably a slow USB. Ah well, I'm still not impressed with the prgram, regardless. And I was really bummed to find that Picasa isn't made for mac.

Anyway, I have a few more tweaks to do before I can get stuck into photoshop and make some new galleries, lucky we have a 3 day public holiday in the middle of the week this week....