MetaCatholic

Despite the facts that

1. St Stephen the Great Charitable Trust appears to be a company which is applying (very dubiously) for chapter 11 protection in the US, although a registered charity in the UK, and
2. The licence for St Stephen the Great to use the SPCK name was withdrawn as of November 1st 2007

as of the time stamp of this posting, the website of SSGCT is still inviting innocent and gullible punters to part with their hard-earned dosh. They make this request still as “An Appeal of the SPCK Bookshops”.

Is this just being careless and sloppy – “Oh sorry, we haven’t got round to updating our website in the last nine months” or is it evidence of deliberate deceit? Do not believe the following image taken from the same page:

Yesterday I offered you Jim Hacker’s guide to the British press. But one of the ways in which the press creates stories is the use of opinion polls (increasingly ones they commission. It’s surprising how many people will believe a poll, even when as in this one (which Jim West picked up on a German version of) so much basic information is missing. (How was the sample made up? Who commissioned it? How were the questions worded? What choices of answer did people have? Were the “Protestants” church-going or cultural? What was the age profile? … well, you get my point).

So, for all those who are tempted to believe the polls, here is Sir Humphrey Appleby’s guide to getting the answer you want.

It’s three months today that I bought my Mac. For those daft enough to want to follow my thinking so far, see this series page. For those more sane, I must say that this is a decision I have considered periodically when replacing a computer, but hitherto not taken in twenty-odd years of making such decisions. At the beginning of May, I took the plunge. Or at least, the first part of the plunge. I still have to replace my ageing HP laptop, and some of the key software I want, most noticeably Adobe’s Creative Suite. I’m currently running that as needed in VMWare Fusion, along with Bibleworks.

So, what do I think of it so far? To be honest, the biggest change has been the reclamation of a large amount of space in the study. With no big CRT monitor and no big system box, life is both more expansive, and considerably quieter. The next biggest change has been the speed with which I can send the Mac to sleep and wake it up again. That’s not bad on newer Windows machines, but on my old one, where hibernation had gone wonky (I suspect a driver issue), it was very annoying.

I can’t say the changeover has been revolutionary, however. It’s not been too difficult to get used to changing keyboard shortcuts and the like. A great many features are simply different, neither inferior or superior between the two systems. Among the other features of the Mac I really like:

• Quick Look. This is brilliant, and almost worth the price of admission alone. Being able to have a quick look into most common type of files without opening them is a time saver. It’s particularly effective for email attachments (in Mail. not alas Entourage). But also, if you use it on, say, the first file in a folder, it will stay open as you select subsequent files and preview them for you also.
• OSX’s drag and drop is more thorough than Windows, although Windows is fast catching up.
• Now I’ve got used to it, I think the Finder is better than Windows Explorer, although what I’ve seen of Vista’s narrows the gap. For graphical files, Cover Flow is a real bonus.
• Of the free software. most of the Mac’s bundled utilities, especially Mail, Address Book and iCal.are better than their Windows equivalents. (I’m counting iLife as a separate suite.) On the Mac I can get by without Entourage. On Windows I needed Outlook.

There are, however, some niggles.

• Most irritating is that emails between (as far as I can tell) Outlook Express and Apple Mail do weird things to the font-size.
• I think that by and large, I’m missing the usability and versatility of the Taskbar.
• The extra move of having to unmount a flash drive before removing it is annoying, and initially was very easy to forget.

A word about word-processing. I’ve been surprised by just how different Word is between the two platforms, and generally I find it far more annoying on a Mac than I ever did on Windows. I have increasingly been using Pages, but I think I’m going to have to buy Nisus Writer as well. I have no idea why, when text documents remain the most basic sort of file we exchange, Apple had to come up with yet another proprietary format. Incidentally, although Word and Pages boast layout features galore on the Mac, until they’re capable of some basic page imposition, they’re going to be very limited. That’s a shame, Pages is so very nearly excellent, and surprisingly capable, but I need a WP that will automatically save to a format I can send to others and which they can use also.

So, a brief end-of-term report, which also, incidentally is my 700th blogpost. That reminds me, I quite like Ecto, which I’m now using nearly all the time, and which was very reasonably priced, but there’s nothing on the Mac as good as the brilliant and free Windows Live Writer, one of the few pieces of software I’m really missing.