You do not know the power of the dark side

So... I got a Mac. A MacBook, to be precise (the white one). I wasn't planning on it, but when I went into the shop it was on clearance (it was the display model, in fact), making it the cheapest laptop in the place even though its specs were on a par with the higher-end jobs. So I bought it.

To be honest, most of this Apple thing seems to be marketing. It's a good laptop. It works well. It is not particularly "more intuitive" than Windows. Nor does it "just work" - well, it does if you only want to use the basic applications, which are very nice indeed, but installing anything new involves disk images and buggering around dragging icons into folders etc etc etc.

I'm picking up all the keyboard differences pretty quickly, though.

One thing did occur to me. For all that Mac evangelists crow about their computers' superiority to PCs... do they really exist any more?

I mean, what is a PC? The definition is a bit hazy nowadays, but could roughly be described as "a computer able to run Windows"... or something. What's a Mac? Er... well, it's what Apple make. But what if Apple made a PC? Would that be a Mac? No. Probably not, anyway. A Mac would be something that runs Mac OS...

Except the current Macs don't run Mac OS, they run OS X, which is Unix. So you've got an Apple computer that runs Unix or Windows. It's basically just an Apple PC with a fancy marketing campaign, only one mouse button and a class action suit over the LCD display.

GarageBand is cool, though.

Was that it?

I appear to have shifted all of the books in the current range ("language arts" supplementary textbooks) that I was working on. Sort of a bit "oh, what do I do now?" Well, actually, there's already something to do.

Now I get to move onto the additional texts for the website - comprehension sheets and stuff, basically. This is actually rather good, because I no longer have to get frustrated by writers. I can now be frustrated by my own inability to write.

On the other hand, it could be fun. I have to come up with a variety of poems, songs, short stories, etc. for all the various age groups and then put comprehension questions to go with them. Creativity in the workplace. Hooray!

Fresh Air

I had a fairly subdued birthday this year (it was on Monday - I'm 26 now).
I didn't finish work until about half past seven and I don't know enough people in Hong Kong for a party, which I didn't really fancy anyway, so... a bottle of wine and Blackadder on DVD it was. Mum phoned, and apparently will bring presents when she and James come to HK at the end of the month.

CK sent me a parcel containing chocolate cake/biscuit things, which were very nice, and a pair of sandals. Rather nice ones, actually, the sort of sporty kind with velcro straps and all that. They're also in the sort of Roman legionary pattern, with ankle straps, which I wanted rather than flip-flop type things, so that's good.

Now, sandals are somewhat de rigeur on Lamma, so I've been outside the trend a bit, mooching around the island in shorts but with trainers on. Thing is, the last time I wore sandals must have been... I don't know, when I was ten? I didn't get round to wearing my sandals in anger until last night, when I wore them out to buy some teabags from the shop on Main Street. It felt decidely unusual having my toes exposed to the elements like that.

They just don't get much play in England. It's not weird to own them, but unless you've got disposable income you really want to throw at shoes, you're not going to wear sandals often enough to buy them.

In an interesting contrast, things are apparently the other way around in Indonesia. When CK went back there last year, she only had her trainers with her - and people stared at her in the street because of her outlandish footgear.

Also, where we Westerners deride the sarong as a skirt for blokes, CK finds the idea of a girl wearing a sarong hilarious. Different strokes etc.

Don't knock sarongs, by the way. They're very comfortable in warm weather and have the added bonus of protecting your legs from mosquitoes. Thanks to mother-in-law gifts, I have two of them.

So, I'm probably not going to drop dead right away

Finally got round to going to the doctor's on Thursday to ask for advice on a heart murmur that had been diagnosed in my pre-work check up in December. This doctor said he couldn't even hear it. The first guy, who I got sent to by work, was a GP but specialised in paediatrics - apparently paediatricians "like to hear heart murmurs".

It's always interesting to hear those sort of intramural stereotypes, like the reputations of viola players in orchestras.

Oh my God, I just found a note from her saying "pls note that if the material used is not an original one [sic], we need to sort out the copyright issue. [also sic]" -- the material in question? Hiawatha. Yeah, I think we're probably OK there.

Good grief.

Don't be such an idiot!

Oh, my supervising editor is annoying me so much right now.
I'm meant to be finishing off a book by the middle of next week and she just dumped revisions of another one, which she's ignored for a week, back on my desk with a deadline of tomorrow.

That's not what's really ticking me off though. The annoying thing is that this revision-loaded MS comes to me from someone who's so awful at her job. She wants me to change "letter-opener" to "paper knife" to conform with British English but misses the word "mail" rather than "post" in the same sentence. And both are valid BrE anyway. Oh, and letter-opener doesn't have a hyphen, she says - "always check the spelling of tricky words". Tricky words? Fuck off and die. You just tried to make kids describe a character's "Personalities" rather than "Personality" because the header had three boxes under it for them to fill in. You fuckwit.

Same page, two lines down, she reveals her Passive Nazi failings. She crosses things through with an "Avoid passive" so often she should get a stamp for it instead of writing it out by hand, yet suggests an active verb be replaced with "is used" in a question. Are we avoiding the passive or not? Sorry, I mean is the passive being avoided by us? You don't even know, do you? It's just on some poxy little style list your English 101 tutor gave you at the beginning of university, which you subsequently laminated.


*deep breath*

It's sad really. She just does everything by rote. She can't cope with anything unusual or new, and seemingly has little understanding of how the books we produce will actually be used. I think the problem is the corporate model where promotion means doing something other than the job you've got settled into and are good at. So, for example, perfectly competent editors (which she probably is, in all fairness) get put into a role where they have to supervise content (which she is tragically inept at).

Planning

It was a holiday in HK on Tuesday, so I finally got round to booking a guestroom for Mum and James, who are coming at the end of May. Unfortunately, I couldn't seem to find a twin room anywhere and thought they probably wouldn't want separate rooms, so James is on a sofa bed. I'm sure it'll be fine.

Now I just have to plan what to do with them for a week. Definitely on the itinerary are a walk around Lamma Island and to the beach, the Peak (a classic, weather permitting), Ocean Park and Macau. Possibly we'll stay overnight in Macau, I don't know about that yet. The Big Buddha's a bit of a hassle and only impressive if you're from Hong Kong and therefore haven't seen a big Biddha before, so we'll probably give that a miss. Random tours of Central, Kowloon etc are probably on the agenda.

Of course, it will be nice just to see them. I haven't seen any of my family in over two years, which... well, it's not great, I have to say.