Just a Blog

Hi again,

Started the day by managing to get most of my audio files (mainly iTunes) saved across from the old laptop onto a backup hard-drive, and then copied across most of the good tunes to the Mac (currently at around 3Gb....thank God for the 80Gb still spare!)

Went to a Gordon Ramsey restaurant for a celebratory lunch - just got a promotion and wanted to feel special for a few hours! We went to Maze over in Grosvenor Square - the restaurant itself is sort of 'posh tapas' - with a fairly heavy fish bias to the selection available.

We (g/f and I) both had the SIX course set lunch with a different 'wine flight' each (basically a good excuse to charge us £10 a glass for wine!) - it went something along the lines of: artichoke veloute with duck ragout to start, then carpaccio of tuna and swordfish (with oriental petals), then the most divine scallops with a heavenly pork parcel. Main was a decent slice of daurade (like sea bass?) with a lobster risotto. Two deserts: a sherry trifle(!) and a rice pudding/custard dish to finish.

We finished off with a lovely cocktail each in their bar - i went for strawberry balsamic caipirinha which was better than I had hoped for! The other half had a rhubarb mule...which also went down well!

We decamped to an All Bar One near Selfridges and spent the rest of the afternoon discussing life while drinking Guinness (me), Wine (her) and gobbling olives!

An expensive, but interesting day - but I seemed to have developed a little headache, so I'm off for an early night!

Ciao!

I've had a Flickr account now for about six months - have put about 1500 pictures up there so far (including a lot of old, restored family photos that have restricted viewing at the moment), but I need to move across so many more!

I think the real trouble is the workflow that needs to happen between scanning in the picture, and the resizing, resampling and tweaking of the picture before it hits the Web - I never seem to be able to get 'happy' with many of my photos, but at the same time I don't think that I can work on a single picture for more than an hour!! It drives me mad!

Anyway - have a look at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/macjewell

Cheers!

Firstly, I decided to make a change - move away from cheap Dell laptops and buy a decent Mac.

Mac users seem to have all the fun?

Enjoying the install process - pretty painless.

GarageBand - great fun. Reminds me of the old Dance Ejay 2 days on the PC.

Installed Photoshop Elements 4 - haven't really played with it yet. Also got iWork '06...not sure if that was a waste of money, as there are so many free editors out there.

Major order of business was to get Firefox 2 over Safari - nothing against it per se, but its good to have some familiarity, eh? Plus the plug-ins are great.

Currently enjoying the 3 hour install that is World of Warcraft - quite pleased that my CD-ROMs from the PC are installing - but dreading the painful patching process over our Virgin Broadband setup.

More later!