Quote(s)

“Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from science.” - Girl Genius, by Kaja & Phil Foglio

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur C. Clarke

Perspective, it's all about perspective ...

10 September 2013

New Computer

I spent All The Money and now have a MacBook Air.  It still feels strange, like it's really someone else's.  And you will never know how many typos I've made so far in just these three sentences because the keyboard Is Not Yet Mine.

No pictures today because I haven't played with that yet.

I have been using AppleWorks for almost all my document needs since about 1995.  Yeah, really.  There is no more AppleWorks; it was replaced with Pages.  At some point I added Pages to my old G5, futzed with it and decided I wasn't ready to learn yet another word processing program.  Somewhere along the line I forgot I even owned it.  Right now I'm very grateful to my past self for installing it, even if I didn't actually learn it.

Through Google I found a 2011 article in MacWorld explaining how to convert all your AppleWorks files to Pages.  All At Once!  So I am not facing software hell and the prospect of copying every document individually into another program.  Hooray for Macs!  There is still the possibility that all the formatting won't be saved, but that seems minor at this point.  I will do several documents individually to see how it goes before opting for a global change.

However, I have to learn another word processing program.  Several people I spoke to at work (all under 25) have never used anything but Word.  I can't even remember all the programs I've used.  Some of you may remember Word Perfect.  I know at least one person who still uses it!  Anyway, I currently use three.  AppleWorks, soon to be replaced by Pages, so they count as one.  Open Office at home for when I need a dot doc.  And Word at work.  They all do quite well at the basic tasks, but will use different terms for the same action and hide it in different areas of the menu.

In other news, the short story workshop is awesome and we'll be discussing our first critiques tomorrow night.  Maybe I'll share how that goes; maybe not.  Don't want to embarrass anybody.

1 comment:

Phyllis Blickensderfer said...

Ha! I go all the way back to WPS by Digital Equipment (before it was even DEC) in the 1980's. Learned all that Gold Key word processing. Progressed through multiple other programs, including variations of Word that do not match what it is today. Of course, I track back to the purple-inked mimeograph machines. No, I did not actually cut words into stone. Dinosaur.