Day 15 - Busy, busy, busy.

Day 13 saw me transfer my programing stuff accross from the PC and getting on with some more serious computing. It's taking me a bit longer to do things (because I'm not used to the tools) but I'm getting there. My fingers are starting to find their way around the keyboard without me having to think about it. I have a vague recollection that PC's have a thing called a "delete key" but I can't remember what it might have been for.

As the programing stuff was going well, I decided to move everything else accross, and so far most things are fine. Part of the reason for that is that most of my data was in the form of text files and common image formats. I had a few PaintShop Pro files that needed converting into jpegs but not much else to cause me any grief. The only real downer is with my Excel files.

Now I'm not a big Excel user. Not in the sense of using it a lot anyway. I use it to keep track of my credit card bill and a few shopping lists. I also use it occasionally to rip data files apart and stick them back together in a new format. Actually I did this last week with a table of 9000 product items in order to convert the data from an old database format to a new one; but it's the first time in a while and I could have done it with a script if I hadn't already had Excel on my PC. The point is that I don't use it enough to justify shelling out the dosh on the Mac version and in any case, BiL had already suggested I check out NeoOffice.

Alas my experience thus far has not been joyful as NeoOffice uses over 100mb of active memory before you open any data files with it. It seemed slow to load and updating my credit card spreadsheet had the page out figure on the Active Monitor going tick-a-tick-tick-tick (and it's not like I've spent much this month - so it's not a big file). I'm not happy. I suppose I could look for a smaller solution to my spreadsheet needs but the bottom line seems to be that 512mb is not enough memory for OS X. Why the hell Apple are shipping all three version of the MacBook with only 512mb beats me. It needs more.