There seems to be the use of power tools (Yay! Skill Saws in the morning) in the hall outside my door. Either they are installing the trim along the walls which would indicate that they are not changing the Christmas green/burgundy stripes that now exist. Or they are going to be tiling the floors, just not any time soon.
It appears that they are sticking with the clash of brown tones with the fluorescent orange and brick accents. Everyone in the halls just stares in wonder and shakes their heads. I have yet to run into someone who thinks it looks nice.
I am posting this from my new laptop. Bossman bought me a 13 inch Macbook Air 3 weeks ago. I no longer want to fling it and myself off the balcony...but I am far from being an Apple convert. The computer is fine and I like having my own machine both at home and in my classroom, but so far...not life changing. And if I had to pick between it and my Itouch, the touch would win.
I have the 2011 Office for Mac, which has incorporated Publisher (my favourite Microsoft product) into Word, which in theory is a great idea. Did you notice that "in theory"? I attempted to use it yesterday to produce a syllabus, which usually would take me about 20-30 minutes. 60 minutes later I was half done. It is really finicky and I'm working without a mouse which means no "right clicky". I gave up and went to the library and got 2 Office manuals and the Portable Genius for Air. Hopefully I'm being obtuse and overly complicated and doing something incredibly wrong. This is entirely likely because when I first got this machine, I spent 20 minutes tapping at the trackpad trying to click until I stumbled upon the fact that you actually press down on the trackpad to click it.
I also have Pages, Number and Keynote which apparently are the Mac versions of Word, Excel and Powerpoint. I have opened and promptly closed each one. I think I need more manuals.
The one program that I am enjoying is one I downloaded myself, Scrivener. It is a writing program designed for long formats (novels, text books etc.) I can tell that a writer and not a computer programmer designed this one. I am using it for Nanowrimo this month and am enjoying it. Although I am currently avoiding writing today's 2000 words by writing this blog instead. Now that I thought of that, I am feeling guilty and know that I now have to go back to work.
So if any of you who read this have suggestions for good programs for my new machine, send them along.
2 comments:
Unfortunately, no ideas for programs for an apple machine. In case you aren't aware, Word 2010 for PCs is a fresh hell. Well, I guess it started with 2007 when they changed all the nice menus from 2003 and made it difficult to find anything in the 'ribbon'. 2010 then changed these again. Personally, I don't think these companies hire business analysts that understand how people work.
Yes I use Office 2010 at work on PC and Mac. I don't mind the ribbon now that I have found everything, but it's the 6 months of looking for stuff that's the problem.And our big computer at home had 2007, so every computer has things in different spots. I guess we are old fogeys now..."in my day Word had a menu, and we liked it."
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