General Musings for the week - 21st November 2010

Today was a frustrating week. I've been waiting to upgrade my Macbook operating system. Unfortunately one has to purchase a copy of the OS to be able to do this. I initially purchased a copy (through a colleague of mine) in the summer. Through various timing reasons I was not able to get hands on that copy at the time. So, at the back end of last week - I decided to contact him and have the software sent through. It appears that he is now also not able to put his hands on the copy of the software and has ordered me a new version of it. The good news is that it is actually a more up-to-date version than the one I would have had if I had used the earlier bought version. The bad news is that it is at the mercy of the Post Office delivery system. I have been frantically looking out of the window trying to see the postman appear at the end of the road. When he does appear I have to strain to see if he is carrying a box-like package which would contain my software.  The postman did turn up on Wednesday with a software sized parcel in his hand. But it was for my neighbour who had ordered something from Amazon. Thursday was no less fulfilling and Friday appeared to be the day the postman missed my house altogether.

In the meantime I have been preparing my Macbook for the upgrade. I have downloaded the latest version of iTunes ready to install. I have run Onyx to deal with all the little maintenance jobs that need to be done (Clearing caches, erasing log files, etc) and I have also used Carbon Copy Cloner to make a complete copy of the hard drive as a back-up in case there is an issue. With this being Apple software I am not really expecting anything major to happen, but I am also by nature a fairly cautious person and want to make sure there isn't an issue.

In other news...

You can now by the Beatles on iTunes. Whoopti-do! Unless I'm missing something here I have to believe that most people who are Beatles fans have already ripped CD's of their albums onto iTunes and are listening to them on their iPods as we speak (I know that's what I've done). So why the big announcement? On the subject of music I have a bit of a gripe/issue with this. Many years ago I bought one of my favourite albums 'Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs' by Derek and The Dominoes on vinyl. A number of years later I purchased the same album on CD. This was subsequently stolen. I can now purchase the album on iTunes, but my thought is 'Why?' Why should I have to pay for it again? I've already purchased the intellectual property twice. I'm only changing the format on which I have the intellectual property. Why should I have to pay again for the songs? Just a thought.

Today's video of the week is a parody of the Old Spice advert that was popular a month or two back,  this one's from Sesame Street . You can't beat Grover. Mooo...

As an extra bonus this week you also get the absolutely brilliant 'Dawn of the Ted' zombie spoof from the BBC. (Warning, contains horror(!))