There is nothing like having to resort to your ancient Windows laptop to take the shine off the whole internet experience. There I was on Friday night, downloading the first episode of Supernatural’s new season (legally I might add) when I noticed my battery was running low on my Mac. I reached for my power adaptor, plugged into the wall, heard a worrying crackle sound and watched as the LED died on the cable. Hmmmm…. I was hoping it was a fuse but I tried every fuse in the house with no luck. The power cable is dead as a dodo.

I’ve been having bother with a dodgy wall socket for the past few weeks and thought the problem had been resolved. My brother took it off the wall and checked all the wires thoroughly before giving it a clean bill of health. It seemed to be okay after that, then I noticed my hair dryer plug was getting hot again after use. I really should have listened to my instincts and plugged my power cable into a different socket and the poor thing probably would’ve survived to live another day. Alas, I was too anxious to watch the new SPN episode and ignored the sound advice. Result: one dead power cable and one pretty useless Mac because the battery is almost down.

Being the canny person I am, I transferred the episode to my old laptop only to discover the green screen of death on iTunes. Somewhere along the line, technology has moved on in the Apple world and my old laptop graphics card has resigned itself to defeat. Not to be thwarted, I went online and tried every hint I found to no avail. My laptop officially sucks big time but I already knew that when I realised it wasn’t even good enough to play The Sims 2. The laptop was bought from my brother before the wonders of Apple were revealed to me.

Again, not to be thwarted in my endeavour, I transferred the episode to my iPod Touch where it played perfectly, although I did have to sacrifice all the other content on it. Not to worry, as soon as the Mac is back with a new power cable, I can restore it all. Methinks there is some irony in there somewhere when you think a tiny wee iPod can play a TV show better than a big laptop.

Not only that, since the Ancient one has been resigned to the shelf for the past few months, I’ve obviously missed a few updates and it has spent all weekend downloading them. I’m so frustrated with it, I’m going to scream. How many fracking updates do Microsoft need? Oh, wait, stupid question.

No Prison Break eps as planned, no Sims adventures… Oh, Mac, how I miss thee…

As continuing proof that I’ve sold my soul to Apple, I decided to test out Mobile Me at the weekend and have signed up for the two month trial period. If it doesn’t work, I can cancel and it will have cost me nothing. Once I updated and synced everything on my Mac, I attached my iPod Touch and let the magic updater do its stuff. It was all rather painless to say the least. Now, all my bookmarks, contacts, calendar dates and e-mails are automatically synced with Mobile Me, provided I’m online of course and have my iPod attached. I’ve set up my cable e-mail account to run via Mobile Me and so far it is doing a sterling job of keeping out the spam. I get spammed horrendously on this account and am thinking of eventually phasing it out. It’s just such a pain changing account details on various sites.

I tried to access Mobile Me at work this afternoon and nearly fell out of my chair laughing when it said my browser wasn’t compatible. We are still in the dinosaur era with IE 5.5 at work. I’m so used to seeing that message on sites that don’t suit the Mac, it was rather refreshing to see it the other way around for once.

Speaking of Mac goodness, I downloaded some family tree software at the weekend as somewhere to keep a backup of all my data should my website go belly up. I don’t know how I ever lived without drag and drop before - I love it so much. I just drop all my documents into the relevant ancestor slot and everything is peachy. The only trouble I’m having is with the virtual globe which seems to think Elgin is in Canada and Leith in Russia. LOL! It certainly made my globe more exciting but I edited them manually and the red dots went back to Scotland. I do have Canadian and Australian links to add at a later point but the majority of my tree is firmly rooted in the UK.

I’ve had my Mac for less than a year but it has totally changed my way of thinking and I detest using my Windows laptop now. And it gave me back The Sims!

I’m taking a couple of weeks off in August and am going over to Ayrshire to spend a week in my parent’s caravan. I’m not exactly thrilled at the prospect because there is no internet and a long weekend is usually about all I can stand at once. However, my mum kept pressuring me with promises of taking me to historic places in the area, so I caved in.

I usually take a bag full of books, my iPod and my DS to keep me amused but this year I’ve decided to take my Mac. I don’t need the internet to make use of it and it plays DVDs into the bargain. And then that’s when I decided to get The Sims 2 for it. My old laptop couldn’t play the new version of the game because the graphics card was too old and I was really bummed so I’m quite excited about playing it on the Mac. My Mac has more power than any computer I’ve ever had and the picture quality is always superb.

Do you think it is extreme buying an iPhone to get the internet? *grins*

Sidenote: my blog is being spammed something terrible at the moment so it looks like the spambots have found me. So far, Akisment is capturing it all but it is still really annoying. *growls*

I started taking a few pics last night of things I thought would be good for my first Show and Tell which is hosted by Kelli Ann but I hit a snag. It was the first time I’d uploaded photos onto my Mac and I was chuffed I didn’t even need to load any software but it was a different story when it came to editing the photos.

I downloaded a trial version of Photoshop Elements and I couldn’t even work out how to resize the photos. It seemed easy enough, Image, Resize, select Size and there you go. Every time I did it - nothing happened. I’m so annoyed Corel are wearing blinkers and refusing to make PSP compatible with Macs. So, now I have to do it all again on my Windows laptop unless I can find a better graphics programme.