Coffee heat rising

Computers

Mac-Cranking…Future Tense

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So it seems to have worked, sort of: The scheme to copy all the MacBook’s data files over to DropBox is finally in place. It took half my lifetime, but there it is. All the system’s applications (and all the data files but two) are backed up on an external hard drive.

It took half my lifetime to accomplish this. And the system seems to be running slow…possibly because it’s still backing stuff up to DB. Notifications from DB keep popping up to the effect that this or that “shared file” just got stored.  But far as I can tell by looking at the DB file structure, everything seems to be up there and online.

In an hour or so, an independent Mac tech is supposed to show up at the door. When I proposed to schlep both computers to them, they counter-proposed to send their man here. Yay! And believe it or not, having him come here rather than me making two separate trips to Scottsdale to get each of two systems updated will save a few dollars. I think I’m in love with this outfit… <3

The new external drives I bought at Costco won’t run on the operating system presently installed in the two machines. So I’ll have to wait till MacDude gets here to plug those in and start them making extra Time Machine backups. Far as I’m concerned, the more the merrier.

Seriously: my plan is to back up to a different drive each week, so that at any given time should I get a ransomware attack, the files I really care about will have been backed up before the hackers could break in. If you’re just continuously letting Time Machine back up, obviously whatever is going into TM is also going to be affected by the ransomware code. Whereas if you have, say two (or even three) hard disks moving in rotation, at least one of those disks will be free of malicious code at the time you discover the code’s presence on your computer.

We’re also told that the latest versions of OS X offer a degree of protection against the current ransomware programs.

The OSX upgrade should allow me to install a cool little program called iBooks Author, which allows you to format e-books — even nonfiction books with graphics! — for sale through Apple (iTunes). This is a relatively small market. But since I’m not exactly getting rich on Google, I don’t care: I now regard the e-book publishing as more akin to a hobby than a business. And if it’s a hobby, creating an iBook looks like fun.

It also would make it possible to create attractive e-books for clients. If we’d had this option while Pete (the Mongolian Bank Magnate) was living, we could have made his book available in electronic format for all his friends, with all his photos intact and in full glowing color. Unless you decide to use an offset printer, you really can’t do a print-on-demand book with color images. He was disappointed about that, and I felt bad that we couldn’t satisfy his wishes.

He did, of course, want hard copy. But if we’d been able to produce a really attractive e-book readable on a tablet (as opposed to a clunky Kindle), he might have been satisfied with that.

So…it’s another option.

I’m also going to install Pages. This, I think, would be worth learning. Pages will convert a file to ePub, which is good. It will do for bookoids with very simple format: no graphics, just long toilet-paper rolls of gray space. That, of course, defines a work of fiction.

Additionally, Pages supposedly will now talk to Word pretty efficiently. Yesterday I came across a claim that you can do the same kinds of edits in Pages as you can in Word’s “Track Changes” function, and convert the whole thing over to Word.

Now, I’ll believe that when I see it. BUT…if it will convert and hang onto comments, and if it will bring a Word document into pages so I can read and edit it, then working back and forth between the two programs might be easier than it sounds.

I no longer edit copy in “Track Changes.” Instead, we’ve been using “Compare Documents,” which is less unstable than “Track Changes.” Instead of making edits that are visible onscreen in real time, open the file you’re going to edit and save to disk under a new name. Then simply make the changes you desire, as though it were your document, your golden words you were polishing. When done, run “Compare Documents” on the original, unedited document to generate a second file that shows everything you did as tracked changes. Save to disk quickly, before the damn thing corrupts and crashes your system… 😉

So the question is, would a document that had been edited and polished in Pages, then converted to Word, allow you to do that? I don’t see any reason that it wouldn’t. The only question is whether comments would come across intact.

If they do, then the whole endless headache of having to work in Wyrd would be resolved (assuming Pages isn’t weird, too…). And it would moot the issue of being forced, by way of upgrading my out-of-date Word program, to rent Word and put my clients’ proprietary work in the Cloud.

I do not want to do either of those. If there’s a way I can make Pages generate an edited Word file, it would keep me in business for another couple of years and spare me a great deal of aggravation.

Next: to decide whether to buy a new Mac.

The business has done exceptionally well so far this year. In fact, I could afford to buy a pricey new MacBook. And I probably should, because the one I’m working on right now has about reached the end of its life.

However, I’m put off by two things:

• Reviews of the new MacBooks have not been what you’d call stellar. The absence of USB ports: not good. No, I do not want a dongle hanging off the damn thing. I do most of my work sitting in a big leather chair that does not hurt by back, with my feet on an ottoman to further forestall back pain. Some doodad flopping around my lap is not gonna make me happy.

• And the price. When I bought the two machines I have now, I had a good job with a good income. I could afford to spend stupid amounts of money on a cult computer.

Now I do not have a decent income. It’s very hard to justify spending upwards of $1500 when I could by a PC that does the same thing for a fraction of the price.

On the other hand, there’s…Microsoft. God help us. One of Funny’s readers reports that the new Windows 10 shuts down and reboots at its convenience — interrupting you in the middle of whatever you happen to be doing. That would make me screaming batsh!t CRAZY.

Not that the Mac doesn’t render me batsh!t with some regularity.

This is not gonna work…

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This is SO not gonna work…

Among several little strategies under way just now is a scheme to transfer all the data files on the MacBook’s hard disk to DropBox, which I’ve enhanced with a $100 payment to DB’s proprietors. Copy…paste…copy…paste…

Sounds pretty simple, eh?

Right. But it’s a computer. So as we know nothing is simple. For reasons incomprehensible, some folders will not copy over. They eliciit a “-46” error message. The fix? To open the folder and transfer each file, one at a time.

But some of the 32 folders are going over without protest, so I take my chances and copy three or four at a time. Usually this takes 10 minutes or so. Sometimes less.

Arrived nearly at the end of the long, eye-glazing task (some of the folders contain hundreds and even thousands of items, whatever TF an “item” is), I grabbed the last four.

Mistake. This transfer proposed to copy 47,448 “items,” requiring two hours for the job. Shit. And of course it’ll take just one “-46” error to bring the whole shebang to a stop. And that will mean deconstructing each of the four folders and transferring each of each folder’s myriad files over to DB, one at a time.

Progress is magnificently slow.

Tomorrow morning a Mac tech is supposed to come over and help upgrade the operating systems in my so-called “vintage” machines. No joke: Apple’s post-Jobian planned obsolescence technique involves dubbing some computers “vintage” and some older ones “obsolete.” If your computer falls into the latter category, the bastards will not repair it or work on it at all!

So much for Apple’s grand customer service, eh?

So pretty soon I need to decide whether to switch back to the PC and put up with the arrogance that is Microsoft or to stay with Apple’s brand of arrogance.

Anyway, with all data, programs included, backed up to external hard drives with Time Machine and working files on Dropbox, these computers can crash and be damned. Nothing will be lost.

Except…for my time.

§

Amazon seems to have surprising little that’s worth watching among its marvelous video offerings. Right now I’m turning off a perfectly awful space opera called The Expanse. Bleak, violent, grim, and depressing.

That this fine entertainment is regarded as “entertainment” at all, I suppose, reflects the mood of the country.

I hate this kind of drivel. And that undoubtedly explains why my own golden words will never combine to create video-worthy content. My stuff is bleak, that’s so: bleak defines my view of humanity. But violent…not so much. Violence just doesn’t amuse me. I can’t stand it in movies and TV, and I can’t bring myself to write it.

Something must be missing in my character, hm?

0h UGH! We’re still told it will be “about an hour” before this copy/paste project ends. If it ends.

I give up. I’m going to bed…

Nesting and De-Nesting

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So when Linda pointed out that it’s possible to disconnect the Nest gadget from Google’s spy network…uhm, wireless service, I trotted direct to the Nest’s web page to find out how to do that.

Well, on the page she references, they say it’s possible but decline to explain how. Searches of their site with every set of terms you can possibly dream up yield no result.

But there’s a phone number, a chat line, and an e-mail contact — very un-Googley. I’m going to try to reach them by phone this morning and see if they’ll help me get the thing disconnected from the Web. If so, it will save some money: the AC guys are slated to come over on Monday morning to replace the thing with a clunky box-shaped thermostat.

They claim the Honeywell round ones have been discontinued. Oddly, they’re ALL OVER Amazon. So if I can’t get Nest to disconnect me, then I’ll try to get the AC guy to tell me which model to order from Amazon and then put off his installer until I can extract one from that worthy retailer.

So that’s where we are there.

Still mightily sick, but better than before. Last night I grilled up the first full meal I’ve had in 10 days — literally I have NOT been able to eat anything in that long. But finally along about 6 p.m. I began to feel hungry. Hence: ta DA!!! two lamb chops from a disassembled Costco rack of lamb, rescued from the freezer.

In ten days, the chard had run amok, so I hacked that back, wrapped a wad of it in tinfoil, and cooked that on the grill beside the lamb. Squeezed half of one of those Myer lemons over it, for good measure. So those and some rice with plenty of butter made up a decent dinner.

This morning the fierce cough persists. I’m NOT at the weekly business meeting, as last night I was NOT at choir. It remains to be seen whether I’ll be able to go to the wedding next Saturday. But I think if it hasn’t cleared up by then, a hit of codeine cough medicine should suppress it long enough to sit through a wedding ceremony. One of my son’s best friends’ mother is getting married to her companion of many years. Friend has moved to Wisconsin,  unfortunately, so this will be a rare opportunity to see him and his family.

Meanwhile, yesterday I managed to use some of the hours broken free of the Internet in revamping the bookkeeping system. WonderAccountant groaned about the “messy papers” I inflicted on her this year, poor woman. And it is true I’m so disorganized and SO hate paperwork that I do tend to just dump it all on her.

My favorite Excel workbook had become Robertafied: a phenomenon named after a former secretary who could make a complicated Gordian’s knot out of the simplest task. That woman was amazing! Now, though, I understand that phenomenon is a function of age — she was as old then as I am now, and as easily frustrated by computers I am, too.

As a result, one workbook had something like a dozen spreadsheets in it.

So it occurred to me that really…there’s no reason for WonderAccountant (who does my bookkeeping as well as the fine tax job) to have to plow through any other paperwork than the bank statements. WHY is the beleaguered soul getting all those damn AMEX and Visa statements? What a waste of her time, to say nothing of the crazy-making factor.

We now have two workbooks, one for the bidness and one for personal finance. The business’s workbook has two (count’em, just two!) spreadsheets, one for the checking account and one for the corporate credit card. The personal workbook has six: checking account, emergency savings, medical savings (a holding tank for the flurries of checks one gets from Medigap and Medicare), Fidelity, AMEX, and Visa. Since most stores take American Express, the Visa card doesn’t get much use, so most months she won’t have to fiddle with that.

And I came up with a way to flag tax-related entries, so it will be easy for her to find them come next tax season.

In theory she should be able — and mostly does — upload checking and savings entries direct from the credit union to QuickBooks. However, the CU unobligingly fails to tell you who checks are written to. So to identify those, I have to get into the CU accounts, look them up, download an image of each check, and let her know who received check #12345 and why. If I keep the Excel spreadsheets up to date, though, she doesn’t have to keep track of those entries or put me up to finding them — a glance at the spreadsheet on DropBox will clear up any questions she has.

Personally, I can no longer use QB at all. They’ve SO complicated the workings of the thing that  you now need special training to use it. And in fact, each year one of the several professional development courses she takes to keep her license up to date is how to use the current version of QuickBooks. But since I can’t figure out how to make QB work (and don’t trust it, anyway), I would keep my own records in Excel anyway. Sharing those with her makes it easy for her to get answers to whatever mystifications plague her on any given day.

Welp, the coffee is consumed. Somewhere a Nest employee awaits a call from me, with bated breath. And actual paying work awaits, too. And so, away…

Computers, Cox, & Credit Cards: Never a Dull Moment

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March 14, 2015, 5:50 p.m. So my computers are offline, once and for all. I’m writing this in Wyrd, planning to cut and paste into WordPress tomorrow morning, when I expect to get online at my favorite coffee shop.

Been having some strange connectivity problem for the past few days, some affecting the phone line and some the usual up-and-down connection that characterizes lovely Cox.

Cox is a hell of a lot better than Qwest. But…uhm…that ain’t sayin’ much. Smoke signals would’ve been better than Qwest. One thing you have to give to Cox is that they have decent customer service.

At any rate, the wireless connection went irretrievably down this afternoon. So I have no blog. No email. No endlessly entertaining news and “news” sites. No online games. No baroque Facebook time suck. No clients…

The horror!

Cox allows as to how the problem is on their end, and they’re sending a tech over tomorrow afternoon to install a bunch of new equipment and make the thing work. Whether this will disable the new robocall blocker remains to be seen. If it does, then it’s good-bye to Cox; I’ll have to go over to Ooma, which will save me a shitload of money and inflict a shitload of hassle.

The weird thing about being stuck offline…is the horror.

I feel utterly at sea without the email and without access to the Internet to inform the editing projects.

Fortunately, the book I’m working on now is a work of fiction. So I don’t have to look up every third reference, factoid, circumstance, or stylistic quirk. For most of the editorial work I do, though, an Internet connection is not an option.

So the whole “no email, no Internet” angst is kind of irrational, at least for the time being. As a practical matter, chances are I’ll get more done and enjoy life more without the preoccupation that has become an occupation. Maybe I’ll even take the dogs for a walk this evening!

This evening I was supposed to go to a meeting, but I’m still too sick to go anywhere. Especially not to a two- or three-hour jawfest.

Probably will be too sick to go to choir tomorrow night, and probably will be too sick to go to the Thursday meeting. But just now there’s no way to send my apologies to any of the worthies who expect me to show up.

As dawn cracked this morning, I was going to write a Spring has Sprung sort of post, featuring a passel of flower images from the yard. Not so much, though.

Neither computer would read the camera’s memory chip. As it developed, I was able to access the images on the large computer, which accepts a cable connection to the camera. Copied the images to a flash drive. So that was not a connectivity problem but a memory chip problem.

I did not want to do battle with computers this morning! Got up at 6 a.m.; by 8 a.m. all I wanted to do was go back to bed and take a nap.

Fed the dogs; ate some more leftover soup; watered the plants. The weather has been in the 90s, so the potted plants need to be watered every day and the stuff in the ground needs watering about once every three days.

Brushed down the pool. To my surprise, the mustard algae was not back!

That would be because the pool was brushed yesterday. It occurred to me that pushing the pool brush up and down the walls amounts to a good way to get some much-needed mild exercise – I’ve been spending way, way, way too much time parked in front of a damn computer.

Running the nylon brush up and down the walls again, I reflected that when I first moved into the house, I was so tickled with the pool that I used to clean it and test it and adjust its chemicals every day. Now it’s lucky if it gets cleaned and tested once a month.

When did I take to neglecting this marvelous puddle? It’s obviously an asset to the house: make that a$$et. What’s with letting it go to pot??

No answer to that one. But pretty obviously the wall moss is the outcome. Sweep it down once a day: get some mild upper-body exercise and preserve a $20,000 lifestyle blandishment.

Read about 20 pages of the client’s novel – really a first read, a fast line-edit. The MS is only about 130 pages; at 20 pages a day, I can get through it in a week. Since I set a two-week deadline, this will leave another week to go over the whole thing more carefully, think about it, and offer some advice of the writing-coach variety.

By about 2:00 p.m. the wireless connection was down. It being about six hours past my naptime, I decided to shut down both terminals, disconnect the modem and the router, leave them disconnected, and go back to bed. Surely after an hour or two, the system would reset itself.

No. Not so much.

After a restless and generally miserable attempt at napping, I reconnected the peripherals and rebooted and…couldn’t get online at all.

Oh god.

Back and forth with Cox. Long, long story short, a technician is supposed to show up between three and five tomorrow afternoon and install a whole new set-up. I’m being told Cox is upgrading its equipment. The new stuff is supposed to be installed inside the house (oh, good: MORE junk to clutter up the desktop, MORE junk for me to dust!), supposedly free of cost to me except that I have to pay for backup batteries.

Shit.

Meanwhile…oh, yes, meanwhile…

Yesterday while I was enjoying a particularly miserable run-around in search of groceries that I never did manage to get, I stuck my AMEX card in a pocket that also held a metal doodad. Metal doodad scratched the fancy fucking “chip,” and it wouldn’t work at the Safeway. And that is why, among several other goddamn reasons, I wasn’t able to get the Kleenex and the cough medicine and the vinegar and the ClearCare and the cream despite stumbling around not one, not two, but three goddamn grocery stores.

Don’t ask.

So AMEX was supposed to have a new card delivered by FedEx today.

While yesterday’s antics were in progress, I was so sick I wasn’t thinking even vaguely clearly. Today I realized I hadn’t told them they HAVE to mark the package with a note that the address is on my street, not on the street just north of me that has the same name. Called AMEX this morning to see if a message could be sent belatedly; was told the package hadn’t even been delivered to FedEx but couldn’t get the dumb bunny on the end of the line to understand what I was talking about.

Later this afternoon I called again and reached someone who seemed to have some IQ points. She said the problem is that FedEx was pretty much rendered inert by the storm on the East Coast. They still hadn’t picked up the package.

So, could we PLEASE add a “NOT MY CRAZY NEIGHBOR’S ADDRESS” clue to the package?

Videlicet, my Amazon address is set up to read…

My Name
1234 North Erewhon Drive
Please NOT Lane!
Phoenix, AZ 85123

She at least was able to understand what I was talking about, but she allowed as to how adding NOT LANE to the address was impossible. Which is reasonable, but annoying.

But, she assured me, don’t worry (be happy!): you don’t have to be home because they’ll just leave the package there.

THAT’S THE POINT, I said. If the guy leaves the package at My Crazy Neighbor’s house, it will never be seen again!

They just don’t get it. When you explain this to someone else, they don’t want to believe that these people steal everything that is mistakenly delivered to their house. Most middle-class Americans, I guess, just don’t want to think bad things about other folks.

Oh well. If the card doesn’t show up tomorrow, I’ll call and cancel the AMEX account. I do have a Visa card, which is accepted in more places anyway.

To make everything perfect, the damn Nest thermostat runs on the wireless. No wireless connection: no air conditioning. It’s supposed to be 95 tomorrow!

Fortunately, I don’t normally turn on the AC until temps are in the low hundreds. But…what if this had happened in July? My house would be unlivable.

Enough with that damn thing! As soon as this dust settles, the AC guy is going to be invited to replace it with a NONprogrammable, NONwireless thermostat.

First thing tomorrow morning, I’m headed over to the Little Guy’s coffee house, where I can get a decent cup of café Americano and a free connection to the Internet. Post this thing there, then check the email, and then go on my way for an otherwise Disconnected day.

Brief Recovery Phase

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Still in extended day-of-rest mode after finally finishing off the large academic anthology plus a last-minute math paper. Tina is busily rewriting her resumé and trying to write a convincing statement about why she wants to go to law school. It seems like a slam-dunk to me…her background is just the thing to entice a law-school selection committee. To say nothing of a law firm’s hiring committee.

Despite feeling like hibernation would be the best course just now, I finished off a couple of small bidness-related matters while loafing around, fooling with Facebook, cruising the Internet, and playing computer games.

Did manage to prune an overgrown rose, a project I’ve put off interminably. The climbing roses look OK, probably because they’ve had so much water over the winter…and for a change I didn’t neglect them quite so shamelessly last summer.

Still need to spray bugicide all over the west side, another project that I’m having a hard time forcing myself to do.

Last year, I learned from a Home Depot guy who claimed to have been an arborist that a particular bug spray, if applied as a soak to the ground around an infested paloverde, actually will make a dent in the supposedly invincible paloverde beetle population. So I applied it in the spring, but then was too damn lazy (and cheap: the stuff is mightily expensive!) to apply it in mid-summer, when I should’ve.

Nevertheless, only about half as many monster beetles emerged than came up in the prior year’s crop. That was impressive.

So I figured January would be a good time to apply another layer of the stuff…especially now, while the ground is very damp. Didn’t get around to it today…so MUST do that tomorrow.

How do you like the current draft of the upcoming book’s cover?

Still trying to make the background gradient work a little better…because i are a english major, i are not a artist, getting it more or less right involves endless trial and error. But I did contrive to get the spine copy and logo in place, rewrite the back cover copy (which, as we scribble, I see contains yet another goddamn error), and realize that I probably could widen the cover 1 image enough for it to run all the way over the bleed margin without distorting the cover lines. Much. Hm. That’s for the next draft.

The damn image wants to snap to grid, even though I’ve turned off that function. And…I think I’ve overestimated the width of the righthand bleed margin, so I could in theory not run it all the way to the edge of the PPt slide without risk to the subtitle’s cover lines. Maybe. Maybe not.

Nor do I feel especially thrilled about the Cover 4 copy, anyway. It’s too verbose. Later. Figure that out later…

My e-book designer seems to have tabled the ePub/Kindle version of this thing, so it looks like either I’m going to have to find another formatter who has the skills to handle illustrations in ebooks — not an easy trick — or I’m going to have to learn to do it myself.

In the course of thrashing around over that, I discovered the updated iBook Author, an Apple program designed for creating fairly elaborate formats — including illustrations — for publication on iTunes. As it develops, more recent versions will convert the finished product to ePub and will carry over fairly simple illustration, such as diagrams and simple figures, without much distortion. It looks like it wouldn’t be too hard to learn. There’d be a learning curve, a protein to which I’ve developed an allergy of late, but it doesn’t look insurmountable.

Unfortunately, I’d have to update to OSX 11. I don’t even know if this little computer would run OSX 11, nor do I know whether Wyrd will run on it. Newer versions of OSX will not run MS Office unless — in some cases — Office was already installed at the time the program was upgraded.

If I upgrade and the new operating system trashes my Word and Excel programs, I am screwed. As in royally screwed: it will put me out of business. We rely on Word’s “track changes” function, which does not translate to the Apple ecoystem.

My only choice, if I want to stay in business, would than be to buy a new PC from Costco, where I can get a copy of Office on disk (thereby obviating the need to do all my work and my client’s work in Microsoft’s cloud, which I do not want to do and will not do).

Really, I should do that anyway, so as to get ahold of that Office program while it still can be had on disk. If it still can be had. And really, I do need to switch back to the PC.

It’s just that I don’t want to. And I dread it. Can’t even say how much I dread having to relearn Microsoft’s horrible operating system and fight the constant onslaught of malware with the dreadful, system-clogging antivirus software and cope with the cheesy hardware that’s “old” after about three years. Ugh, ugh, and triple-ugh. But since sooner or later Apple is going to upgrade me out of business, no doubt it’s foolish to continue much longer without a PC.

Anyway, given that the PC purchase can’t be put off much longer and at least one of these two Macs needs its operating system updated anyway, I might as well buy and learn iBook Author and the ancillary programs you have to buy to run beside it. That way I could not only do my own eBook formatting, in theory I could do it for clients, too. And I could produce bookoids in iBook format, which can be pretty darned classy.

I see that iTunes has some blandishments for first-time uploaders. I never did load the Fire-Rider volumes or the cookbook to Barnes & Noble or to iTunes, mostly because I don’t have ePub versions. Supposedly they exist, but my friend has never sent them over. It would be fairly easy to create iBook versions of the novel. The cookbook, not so much. But…if I could extract the ePubs from the formatting dude, it can be imported into iBook Author. For that matter, supposedly things can be imported from a decently formatted Word file…but there’s a wind I’ve heard blow before. 😀

Well, it’s nearly 10 p.m. I’m hungry. And tired. And so, away!

Time to Skip Out of the Mac Fan Club?

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macbookWell, I have to say…I’ve loved my two Macs. It was a big transition — moving from the PC environment to the Mac environment is not an easy thing, and finding workarounds to get your Mac to do things that were SOP on the PC is a time-consuming PITA. Once you’ve accomplished all that, you really don’t want to go back. The rock-solid reliability, the seemingly infinite lifespan, the relative immunity to malware and hacks (not 100%, but at least you don’t have to keep the works permanently gummed up with anti-virus software), the general whimsical charm of the Mac…they’re hard to beat.

But the wonderful little MacBook is aging. I’ve actually worn the characters off the keyboard. Though it still chugs along, sooner or later it is gonna have to be replaced. Guess I’d rather have a computer in place and running before this one falls apart like the Minister’s One-Hoss Shay.

Given the shrieks of dismay from the Apple Fan-boy Legions over the latest Macs, my plan to buy a new MacBook Pro met with a serious pause.

Apple  has gotten rid of all the MacBook’s USB ports, leaving only one hole into which to plug any and all external hardware. And there’s no SD card slot or adapter.

Well. Right now mine, which annoyingly has only two USB ports, is fully occupied with the hard-drive to which Time Machine is backing up these very characters as they’re typed, along with everything else that happens on this device, and with a device that talks to a rodent, should I choose to use a rodent instead of the touchpad. Which I occasionally do. And I often back stuff up for clients onto flash drives.

It looks like plugging in even the few external devices I use is going to consign me to Dongle Hell with the new MacBook. Plus…yeah, it is tiresome not to be able to use Quicken, and yeah, it is tiresome that an e-book designed on a Mac ends up with Kindle-unreadable table of contents…and things. And the new version of iPhoto is annoying, and the weak photo editing software: annoying. And…the fact that Apple has raised the MacBook price significantly is especially annoying.

For about $1400 less than a new 15-inch MacBook, I can buy a pretty damn spectacular PC at Costco, one that has a screen comparable to mine and a built-in numeric keypad (a blandishment whose absence on the Apple machine is another annoyance), and my very own, NOT-rented-in-the-cloud, up-to-date version of Office.

It’s true I’d have to do battle with virus-checkers, a constant annoyance. And it’s true I’d have to back up to Carbonite, which I’d druther not do. BUT I could use Quicken for PC, a mixed blessing because over the past few years Quicken has apparently gone to Hell. As a practical matter, Excel is far better, except for the fact that it doesn’t talk to your bank…and that may not be such a bad thing…

It will take some doing to relearn Windows. But I have a friend who’s a PC Magician, and I think I also can walk into the computer commons at the junior college and ask to be shown how to operate it. Really, all I’d need to do is sign up for a yoga class over there to get access to the computer commons hardware.

So…I dunno. But I’m thinking that without Steve Jobs, Apple is just another computer maker. Apple is no longer Apple.

Welp, speaking of Excel, I need to do some bookkeeping. And so, away!

What’s your thought about the new MacBook? And about the prospect of retrograde movement from Mac to PC?