little white truths

I wasn't able to write yesterday and there's a happy reason for that:

I have finally, FINALLY, bought a new laptop and I can't tell you how excited I am about this.

If you read this blog, you may remember that I've had my old computer for over four years now, and there have been huge problems with it for the last two - the biggest one being that I couldn't actually unplug it and move it to another room or travel with it because, if I did, it would throw a tantrum and freeze for a couple of days.

To add insult to injury, once it decided to start working again (and I use the term 'working' loosely here), it would for some reason feel the need to restart itself 564 times before it was 'ready' to offer up its services and let me write. You know that annoying screen that comes up, telling you that your computer has made the unilateral decision to update/restart itself? I got that one almost daily. And the update would always sit on 30% for AGES. (What was it about 30%? Why not 50 or 80? Hell, I'd have taken 35, just for something different.)

Annoying much?

Annoying lots.

On top of this, the old laptop was a super basic model because I didn't need it for anything but words when we bought it - it was only later on that I started this blog and needed it to do a bit more. So it always had trouble reading photos (plus the screen definition was bad), and I can't tell you how many shots I needed to take of a single product in order to get a few non-fuzzy ones that I could work with.

Actually yes, I can tell you. At least fifty and usually closer to one hundred. Per product. And not including swatches. Plus I often had to re-shoot bundles of shots because so many of the ones I'd taken were unusable.

Annoying lots again.

But let's not dwell on all that because it's boring reading (I mean, who cares that I have a new computer) and I'm not here to bore you. I hope.

What may be a little funny though is the fact that we did buy a new computer during the 2016 Boxing Day sales and it ended up being bloody useless for photos, plus it was the slowest computer I'd used since the early nineties. Not kidding. The specs were good apparently (this is coming from my husband, who knows technology and I most certainly do not), but what he didn't realise was that the model he chose was basically incapable of reading/importing photos in a reasonable timeframe.

What do I mean by reasonable? Well, it took my old computer two minutes to read/import four hundred photos and have them ready for editing. The new one? Four hours. Not kidding again. And my phone had to be connected to that laptop for the entire four-hour period (something to do with syncing, whatever that actually means in computer terms), so I couldn't use my phone or my computer during the importing/syncing process. WTF?!

Really, the whole thing's been the proverbial comedy of errors. But let's move on. Because I do have a point (promise) and I'd like to get to that while the kids are still asleep.

So yes, let's forget the numerous computer/camera/iPhone issues I've had since starting this blog because, if I listed them all, you wouldn't quite believe me and it would make boring for reading.

What I'm really here to tell you is that the quality of my photos and the look of my blog overall should be improving day-by-day going forward. I've been promising this for a while now and although there has been some improvement, there's not been as much as I would like due to our inability to finance 'non-essential' things like new technology. I'm still on maternity leave and my second child is not yet five months old, so including the dog we have five mouths to feed from one income - and I don't need to tell you how expensive having kids is, particularly in a country like Australia where everything is over-priced.

Also, with this new computer I'll hopefully be able to sort out a few layout issues with this blog (eg those damn headings at the top and the 'about me' section in Latin below): I couldn't do that with the old model and I haven't yet had time to explore what I can do with this one. It may be that I need to get in touch with the trouble-shooting team at Sora Templates (you can find free and premium versions of their templates online) and ask them to help me. And with technology, I do need help. It's just not my forte and it never will be.