Netherlands - Round The World Tour 2003 T-37

pre-departure

Kerkrade

Tuesday 4th February

We are now back in Kerkrade and are resting from the arduous drive through a snowstorm. It really is winter here. The visit to Hans & Wanda was all too short but we enjoyed seeing everyone again nevertheless – except Chantal, of course.

I had a hell of a time with the laptop whilst there. I wanted to oblige Wanda with some of our Paris photos. Not sure whether she was really serious about pretending that the photos we had taken were from a trip that she made to Paris, but either way it seemed like a nice enough idea to leave her with a CD full of our memories. Sounds simple doesn’t it. OK, so Hans gave me a blank CD that I promptly inserted into the slot loading drive. And then … nothing! No disk icon on the desktop! That’s strange. This has never happened before. OK, it’s possible it could be a bad CD so I’ll just eject the thing and try again with another disk. Pressed the eject button and … nothing! Shit!! Not only has Hans lost a CD but I’ve now lost a CD drive! How do I get the damn thing out now! After about 30 minutes of exhausting all the tricks in my technical arsenal, I’m still sitting there scratching my head. Somewhat embarrassing actually, especially after my spiel about how handy and useful the Mac is. A few minutes searching on in the Internet reveals the answer of holding down the track pad button whilst restarting and, sure enough, out pops the disk. The disk was a CD-RW disk and I am assuming that the Mac cannot deal with disks of that type. So, along comes Hans with a regular CD-R disk and I’m ready to try again. Unfortunately, this disk, and the next after that, would not burn. I don’t yet know if the problem is with the disk or with the drive. I’ve burnt disks before but I’ve also had sporadic problems with the odd disk now and then. Later I’ll try with some of my own disks to see if I can figure it out.

I ordered the iLife application set today at Apple over the phone. At €57.32 it’s about the same price as in America. Since I already have the iPhoto, iMovie & iTunes applications, I only really need it for the new and improved iDVD application. It will be interesting to see if the new functionality is worth the expense.