2007 — 11 Mar: look out, Wombourne!

Not one, but two, excellent films last night. Trust the Man was a funny, enjoyably twisted rom-com set in New York — one of the DVD's deleted scenes (although quite correctly deleted from the final cut) was a hilarious visit by the Duchovny character to a doctor. The visit was occasioned by what you could call a "phone sex testicular problem" — not something you routinely encounter.

The History Boys is vintage Alan Bennett, and quite possibly the best film I'll see this year. Marvellous stuff and very strong ensemble cast. Plus nice tour diaries on the DVD, too.

And so it's time to placate the Mater in the Midlands with another visit. We'll be up there again with eldest niece in another couple of weeks, too. I shall take the camera, and see if I can persuade the dear ol' thing to smile for me. (I'm guessing not.)

iMac's premature demise department

I just crashed the iMac. It froze in Firefox, on a Wikipedia page, and all I got was a rotating coloured hourglass. No ability to force quit, either. The mouse would move the pointer around when outside the Firefox window, but nothing else would activate. No applications would start. So, Big Red Switch (actually, elegantly concealed white switch hidden round the back since, I suppose, you're hardly ever supposed to use it) and 30 seconds to cool its heels did the trick, but this isn't what I've been led to expect. I did put on, and restart afterward, last night's MacOS updates. This is 10.4.8, fully updated, and otherwise almost as "out of the box". This is not what Unix is supposed to do!

Thing is: does this mean the honeymoon's over? (Or, as chum Tom G put it: "welcome to the World of the Mac, which is really just a bunch of different frustrations, which look so much better".)

Thanks Tom, for the pointer in the direction of NeoOffice, which is an OpenOffice port to Mac OS X that now nestles safely, along with the "dash 15" set of patches to the NeoOffice 2 Aqua Beta 3 code, somewhere in the mystery that is the iMac's filing system. Here's its sample desktop appearance:

NeoOffice desktop

I wonder why the iCal application on the Dock shows "Jul 17". Is there some Apple history I'm unaware of? (Well, I'm sure there is — I just idly wonder if this is a particularly significant date.)

Back!

And in time to watch "The Trap" on BBC2. What a long day.

Day 128