Solutions and services for business and home computers

Two posts ago I mentioned that I have a collection of paintings done by a Miss A. Peel. Since I wrote that, I’ve been doing some more research. It’s become quite an interesting hunt for more information about her. I’ve learned, for instance, that her name was Alice Peel – she was the second daughter of Jonathan Peel. They lived at Knowlmere, in Lancashire. I’ve found the name of the tutor she was sending the paintings off to as well – or, at least, who she sent one painting off to. His name is William Callow. There are also a few pieces painted by another member of her painting circle. Apparently she liked them and purchased them – the prices are on the back. This artist’s name was Agnes Holding. I’ll post more as I find out more.

Here’s an odd thing that I’ve been meaning to look into for some time. At least two clients have an issue where logs are either not being updated or, if they are, they aren’t showing up in the console. I need to start by checking  to see which of those is the case – shouldn’t be that hard to do that. My guess is the logs aren’t being updated. Permissions?

Years ago I was given some paintings by my grandmother, Audrey Heriz-Smith. They were given to her mother and father when her father was the Estate Agent at Heaning in Yorkshire/Lancashire (it used to be in Yorkshire, after county lines were redrawn, it’s now in Lancashire). They were mostly painted by a “Miss A. Peel”. I’ve got close to one hundred of these. They were painted between 1862 and 1897 or so. Nearly all of them are dated, and many of them have comments from a tutor on the back. It seems that she would paint them, and then send them off to be critiqued. Sometimes they seem to have had a showing, where other people in their “Mona (?) Art Society” would vote on the paintings. I thought I’d post one here and continue to do some research. I’ve photographed 61 of them so far.

This painting is dated, “June 1878″ and the comment on the back reads, “There is much attention to nature. A great effort to represent it correctly but harm has been done by the introduction of [illegible] into the foreground grasses which interferes [with] the faithfulness of the drawing generally.”

A very interesting article at The Atlantic about the Conficker Worm.

I just spend my first hour helping a client with an iPad. It’s very pretty, a wonderful thing to hold. I did run into some things that stumped me:

1. Audible books in iTunes didn’t seem to sync. They didn’t show up in the Audio section of the iPod app. Couldn’t get them to sync by putting them in a Smart or ‘regular’ playlist. Must be missing something.
2. Couldn’t get a new Bluetooth keyboard to sync. Also odd.
3. Looking for an easier way to move files from the Mac to the iPad other than email. I see that Dropbox will work. Have to look into that.

Back when I upgraded to 10.6 last year the only problem I ran into was that all my calendars in iCal got left behind. Since I schedule my visits with iCal, this was something of a nuisance, but after a day or two of scrambling, I was back on track.

Last night I updated to 10.6.3. This morning I opened iCal to find lots of events entered twice. I looked back and sure enough my calendars pre-10.6 were there too. Huh – I wonder if this is 10.6.3 related…

I did a remote install of OS X onto a MacBook Air today for the first time. I’d just had to install a new hard drive in it so I had to use the CD in my MacBook Pro to do a remote install. A little reading lead me to believe this might take 4-5 hours. Perhaps Apple have dramatically improved this somehow since the article was written, or perhaps it was due to the more efficient Snow Leopard versus Leopard, but this only took less than two hours.  To make it even more impressive, I was doing this over an old 802.11g network using an old Airport Extreme. Pretty neat.

I found this post by Craig Mod linked at Daring Fireball. Very interesting and something I’m very curious about. The potential of the iPad to change our reading habits is nearly as interesting to me as how much easier it might be for some of my clients to use  than their computers.