Program progress!

Let joy be unconfined!

     The booklet making program has been successfully installed in my major computer.  I would like to say that I was fully in control of the download, and I knew what I was doing.  But that would be a lie.  I don’t really know what I was hoping for.  I think that I was hoping that there should be a sort of sympathetic osmosis, and that the program that I installed in my laptop would gravitate toward installing itself in my upstairs computer and that all things would be well.

     But that didn’t happen.  I even considered buying another copy of the program because it is so insanely useful for my purposes.  But there was always the nagging memory that in part of the documentation that I printed out for the program there was a mention of it being available for six other family members.  If that was true, then there must have been some way in which I could have downloaded it onto another of my computers.

     The problem as I saw it, was that the program interacted with my printer downstairs, and I wanted it to work with the computer upstairs.  (And, yes, doesn’t everyone have more than one printer?). But there was no clear indication of how to transfer the program from one machine to another.  I even downloaded the receipt from the Apple Store to see if there was some sort of code or registration number that I could use to extend the program to another machine.  But there was nothing useful that I could see.

     In a wistful attempt, more to show willing, than to show that I knew anything about how to install the program, I loaded the information about the program and, lo and behold, there in the top right corner was a little download symbol.  On which I clicked, and which did as it suggested it might do, and downloaded the program.  And it worked.

     I have worked with (those last two words are probably only an approximation of professionalism) computers for decades, as I am an enthusiastic early adopter of digital technology.  But I cannot say that I know much more about the actual workings of the programs that I use, in the sense of how they have been formulated, than I knew when I started, starry eyed, wondering about the possibilities of what could be achieved with such magical machines.

     In the very early days of personal computers, I did waste a great deal of time pretending that I was interested in programming the things before the eventual realization that I was a User (with a capital ‘U’) rather than a programmer.  I would have spent the time that I wasted on creating mindlessly simple programs that did nothing far better by paying more detailed attention to what a program could do.

     It is a truism, accepted by virtually everyone, that most Users use only a tiny percentage of the capabilities of any program.  Time would be more productively spent in learning what a program can do than trying to work out just how it does what it does.

     As I am working on a chapbook of poems at the moment, the importance of the program that is now working in both my computers is that I can complete the whole process of creating of the raw poetic material to the production of a completed chapbook ‘in-house’.

     And this new program is even supposed to indicate the optimal spot for the placement of the staples when I have folded it, and it is ready to be assembled!

     This is just one of the multitudes of ‘features’ that the program offers, in a list bewildering in its expansiveness.  I will, like most Users, find a simple path to get what I think I want, and then stick to it through thick and thin, not venturing into the rarefied regions of professionalism that the program holds out to the unwary buyers.

     I wonder if I can get a rebate for only using a tiny percentage of the possibilities.  A 50% return on investment might be encouraging.  But I know that I will count my blessings and be grateful that I will no longer be hurling vituperative invective at the printer as it fails, yet again, to do what I want it to do.

     For 22 euros, it is a small price to pay for peace of mind and a clean mouth!

Here we go, again!

 What’s the right time?  There’s never a ‘right’ time.

            That could be the questioning start of something very serious, but it’s only me, thinking about how to phrase the restart of my blog.  

I have been woefully remiss in my writing of something that used to take up a part of every day and satisfied that Puritan part of my writing mind that felt that I had to Do Something every day.

I have written books since the last entry in the Blog, but it doesn’t seem to compensate, in my mind, for the dutiful entry day-by-day that together formed an opinionated diary.

I sometimes dip back into the entries and am amazed by how much I have forgotten about so much that I obviously felt so passionately about at the time.  At times, I read the entries as if I were a stranger – and very enjoyable they are too, though I am not always in agreement with the person who wrote them!

 

One of the reasons that I have been hesitant in putting fingertip to computer key is my feeling that I ought to wait until I had something significant to say before I was able to justify starting up the blog again.  But I have concluded that is the wrong approach.  Or perhaps the word ‘wrong’ is itself wrong, and I have been using the concept of significance as a way of justifying my inaction.

I, more than most, should take my Family Wisdom to heart and recognize that “Anything is better than nothing!” and simply get on with it.

 

And it’s not as if nothing has happened in the intervening years, or however long it has been since I last wrote.  But the idea of ‘filling in’ the Lost Years is foreign to the impulse that started the Blog in the first instance.  It was to record my move from Cardiff to Catalonia and to note my impressions of the experience of moving from one country to another and to record the differences in day to day living in Catalonia as opposed to living in Cardiff.

I have now been living in Castelldefels for years, and it feel like home.  Certainly, a recent visit to London for a friend’s ‘significant’ birthday celebrations did not make me homesick, and the weather alone was enough to make me wish to be back by the sea!

So, this return is not necessarily to record quaint differences in living styles that mark the differences in Wales and Catalonia that I experience, but rather to provide me with a daily opportunity to indulge my inclination to pontificate and digress.

 

As a non sequitur to everything that has gone before I would like to indulge myself with a mini rant.

As well as being the only teacher I know who has used the OHP (Overhead Projector) throughout his teaching career (from the Training Year to his Retirement) I was also the manic exponent of the booklet approach to dealing with aspects of my subject.

The start of my teaching career pre-dated the use of computers in school and the use of personal computers, and the photocopier and the reproduction of teaching material was difficult, and we used Roneo machines and Stencil machines and all sorts of messy ways of getting our thoughts onto multiple pieces of paper.

The first plain paper copiers revolutionized the whole way of producing teaching material.  And I photocopied with a vengeance!  

Of course, in the early days, the format of a booklet had to be done in rough, each of the A5 pages printed separately and then counted to see how many pages were in the booklet, and then stuck onto the pages of a blank same-sized booklet so that all the pages were in the right order to be photocopied page by page, to make the final finished product.  Time intensive, but very satisfying when completed.

The computer made things much easier, and when I discovered that the printing program had a ‘booklet’ setting my delight was complete.  This setting took a booklet composed on the computer and sorted out the individual pages so that they were printed in the correct order.  All you had to do was collate and fold and staple and the job was done.

And that was true, right up until the time when the program didn’t work.  The instruction is there in the choices you get before you print, but it simply does not do the job.  And no one has been able to explain to me why that is.  At one time I had experts in Mac, Brother and Word all working at getting the program to work.  And they all failed and did not know why they were failing.

Usually, I have found a way to getting around the obstacles that the non-working program has put in my way, but, as time goes on, so the program becomes more and more skittish and even the work arounds that I have found which compensate for some its vagaries fail to work themselves.

So, I have bitten the bullet and bought a program specifically designed to work with all the programs that I use to print the damn things.  And I resent the fact that I have spent some twenty Euros to do something that used to be bundled with the printer program.

The bought program does work, but my next problem is finding out a way of getting my desktop computer to get the program as well as my laptop.  There must be a way of getting more than one of my machines to have the program, but I have yet to find a way to get my other computer to recognize that I have bought the program.  Of such concerns are paranoia made!