Cheryl on the Web

Those were Tim’s somewhat aggravated words to me tonight, as we both sat on the couch and he was surfing the net on the Toshiba Vista laptop - or trying to, until when the Doctor entered the scene. Though the suspect Doctor application turned out to be from Toshiba and not Windows, it is symbolic of the mass of minor annoyances that Vista can cause at first for experienced XP techies. We’ve gotten to the point now with Vista that every new window that pops up brings out a sigh of, “not the User Account Control again” or “what now?”. Of course, there are those rare times when Vista doesn’t say enough: you’d think, for instance, Vista would have said something to me about the wireless network connection being disabled while I was trying for ages to search for available wireless networks?

p.s. Yes, of course I know I can turn off the User Account Control - but in the Business-as-Usual state, that’s a feature I want. It’s just not a practical feature for the first 24 hours of using Vista, when everything you want to configure involves that control feature popping up at least twice in the process.

It’s almost like I woke up today and someone said to me, Cheryl, wake up, it’s 2008! And I’d go, really, are you serious? When did that happen? Hold on a moment… I remember having a great Christmas with the US family and celebrating the year change in Toronto with Tim and two special friends .. but after that everything is a blur.

Ah, wait, it’s coming back to me: After returning to Germany at the end of the first week in January, it took a record 4 days to recover from the jet lag. Then I spent the next two weeks traveling on business, with a couple days in the weekend in between to do wash and grocery shopping. Then, on my way back from England at the end of the second week, I must have managed to contract the notorious London flu that’s going around up there, because exactly 12 hours later: wham, I’m laying down sick. As I write this two days later, I’m still laying down sick. And that concludes the first 5.5% of the year 2008!

I have to say, I had other plans for 2008 that will have to be realised in the remaining 94.5% of the time. (If only I could get rid of this flu and actually get something done; I hate laying around doing nothing, and I’m not ever usually sick this long so it is driving me crazy.) Tim and I want to do some interior re-organising, converting the old office into a bedroom and making a hobby room out of the bedroom. I’ve got to press ahead learning German, and then we’ve got great ambitions to exercise, submit our tax returns, and vacation to Italy. Not to mention I really want to stay in touch more with friends and family and try out some new recipes. And I have got to learn how to drive our manual shift car better when starting on an incline, sigh. We are also working to get ourselves better organised on the technology front; we recently managed to get ourselves set up on IMAP e-mail on the old XP computer, my Mac, and a traveling Vista laptop - that was a quite satisfying achievement. And I managed to export my Mac address book to the Vista laptop using Bluetooth (a file export didn’t work because the format wasn’t Windows-compatible), which was quite exciting.

So yeah, perhaps not the most ambitious resolutions for 2008 - but even so, the clock is already ticking and the progress meter is still at 1%…