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We arrived in Australia. In comparison to last year (or even last week), it all went smoothly. The taxi we booked arrived a little early but waited until we were ready. I wasn’t sure the driver was going to get us there by the estimated arrival time but, thanks to a little speeding, we did in fact arrive 80 minutes or so after we left the apartment. The airport itself was extraordinarily stress-free. We were able to check-in almost immediately and once that was done everything proceeded smoothly. The only real difficulty was in getting Rowan to lie in a manner that didn’t result in his feet reaching over into the personal space of the passenger who was seated beside him.
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The trip since then has similarly progressed pretty much as scheduled. We for our Santa photo, bought some last-minute presents, attended the Christmas family dinner and otherwise have had an enjoyable holiday. The weather has been a little too wet and cloudy but I feel bad writing that given the conditions we had to endure in 2019.
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I live in a perpetual dilemma of wanting new computing devices but detesting throwing away computers that still work. My solution is typically to offload them onto a family member. It’s for that reason that Dad has been using the iMac I owned from 2013 until 2017. Unfortunately, the latest version of macOS that it can run is Catalina and since it hasn’t received an update since July 2022, I’ve been feeling uncomfortable at the thought of Dad continuing to use it ostensibly as his ‘main computer’. Since I upgraded to the Mac Mini in May, my venerable MacBook Pro from 2017 (AKA the MacBook Escape) has been languishing unused in a wardrobe in our apartment. The solution was obviously to bring that to Australia and give it to Dad. (I was disappointed to belatedly discover when setting it up for Dad that it isn’t compatible by with macOS Sonoma and so will likely become unsupported sometime in 2025.)
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All of this is a very long-winded setup to explain that because Dad isn’t going to be using his iMac any more, I threw caution to the wind, wiped it and tried to install Windows on it. After at least three failed attempts, I reset the PRAM (or maybe the NVRAM?) and wouldn’t you know it but that actually worked! I’m not sure what we’re going to do with a 2013 iMac running Windows 10. Because Apple’s Boot Camp software isn’t able to make the Fusion Drive in the iMac visible to Windows, it creates the partition for Windows entirely on the spinning disk. And boy, do you feel it. My father—who regularly uses products that are broken because he doesn’t like wasting things— tried it for a day before declaring it was too slow.
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Switching gears completely: I thought Ken White of Pope Hat fame did a good job identifying what bothered me about Substack’s response to requests that it remove far right content from its platform.
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I neglected to mention earlier that on Saturday we attended a concert by the Wiggles that’s part of their current national tour. We’ve seen the Wiggles once before (in 2019) and while that concert involved my preferred configuration of the band (i.e. Anthony, Simon, Lachy and Emma), they played a lot of songs from their then-current album. This time around it was the new, ‘double-up’ configuration (two performers for each colour for an 8-member band). I don’t like it anywhere near as much but I was very happy that the setlist for Saturday’s performance was weighted heavily towards more of their ‘classic’ tunes. That included a rendition of ‘Rattlin’ Bog’ (Apple Music) that I was relieved elicited a hoot from at least one other parent who, like me, evidently has no shame.
