In all honesty I fell in love with Macs back before they were popular, back in the days of System 7.  My Dad used Macs every day, when he worked as a graphic designer for a local newspaper, and even then I could tell that the user interface was just so much ‘better’ than Microsoft’s offering, which back then was Windows 3.1.

Times have changed since then, of course.  Now I’m running Mac OS X Leopard on a dual-processor G5 tower.  Not new by any means, but it still beats the pants off Vista on my laptop.  Of course, Google has had its part to play in driving things forward, revolutionising web searches and pretty much anything we do online.  They’ve even brought out their own web browser, but sadly they didn’t think it worth while to port a PPC version of it, so I can’t use that.

However, I can trick out my Firefox to do some of the same things that make Chrome such a fantastic browser.

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Know the game “Fortunately Unfortunately”? Here’s a quick example:

Fortunately my wife and I are relatively healthy people who don’t get ill often.  Unfortunately Ellie and Samuel both got colds a few weeks back.  Fortunately I didn’t get it.  Unfortunately I got one a week later.  Fortunately Ellie and Samuel both made steady recovery.  Unfortunately I didn’t.  Fortunately I work from home and run my own business, so I didn’t have to use up any sick leave.  Unfortunately I still had to take a couple of days off work because the cold was that bad.  Fortunately I tend to recover from colds fairly quickly, and without the aid of medication.  Unfortunately on this occasion I was forced to take a barrage of pills to try to combat the symptoms.  Fortunately they have been working and my cold is now nearly gone.  Unfortunately I am still left with a bit of a sniffle and a rather heavy cough.

There, that was fun.

So yes, the cold is now thankfully on its way out, which is good because I really don’t like being ill.  I’m not the sort of person to admit defeat, and I definitely don’t accept the concept of the so-called “Man Flu”.  Still, the pills have been useful, if only to help me sleep.  In fact, during a phone call home my mum recommended that I take some multivitamins, just in case that helped.  So we went to Tesco and had a look at the range.  I was quite surprised at what I found on the shelf.

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Now, I’m not normally one to talk about politics.  I usually have absolutely no interest in such things, and I tend to be of the opinion that life will continue regardless of which party is elected.  Strange, then, that this year should feel so different.  Politics has been ‘the thing’ to talk about – on the train, in the car, round the dinner table, on the internet, no doubt even at the bottom of the sea.  I’ve taken more of an interest in the elections this year than any other year.  And all because of the Lib-Dems.

Our current election process works on the basis of a ‘first past the post’ process of vote counting, which works best when there are two main parties to choose between.  In the past, it’s been a two-party system, with Labour and Conservative battling against each other for people’s attention.  Sure, there have been other parties in there too, but they’ve gone mostly unnoticed.  Until this year, when Britain took the decision to host distinctly American-style Prime Ministerial Debates, and invited Lib-Dem leader Nick Clegg to join in the foray.  Suddenly the Lib-Dems rose to prominence, got people’s attention, and made it look like all three parties were level-pegging.

At that point, a hung parliament was almost guaranteed.  With three parties equally popular, no one party can have a majority, and the ‘first past the post’ election system fails.

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