Insert iJoke here.

Or ‘Macintosh Computer Day’. As the old joke goes, “How do you know when someone’s got a new iPhone? Don’t worry, it’ll be the first thing they tell you.” I prefer to think the answer should be “Because they appear to have a new phone, but they always have to have it plugged into a battery pack because otherwise the battery dies after 30 minutes.”

Daysoftheyear.com suggests you should ‘celebrate’ National Macintosh Computer Day’ by considering purchasing a new Mac computer. As far as I can tell, every day is ‘Macintosh Computer Day.’ It certainly sounds like it if you talk to their fans (and I will accept that for digital artwork, they’re the best solution.)

I’ve never been a fan of them though. This dates from back in the day that in the print lab at university we had a massive (size and price) Linotype ?scanner connected to a Mac. You’d make a scan (which would take anything up to an hour depending on the resolution you needed) and then you’d try to do something. Coming from a PC, you’d hit the right mouse button, only to discover it didn’t exist. You’d then try to make a change and the computer would say “I don’t think you meant to do that.” You’d click ‘Yes, I did’. It’d say “Are you sure?” You’d say ‘yes’. It’d say “I don’t think you mean it.” You’d click ‘Yes I do’ and it would come up with a final “I’m sorry. I can’t allow that, Andy”. Not like Windows. You type ‘Format C:’ and before you know it, you’ve got a PC that won’t start. Can’t remember how many times that happened in the lab. OK, it lets you screw things up too, but as a mentor of mine once said when an equipment OEM said “We can’t give you access to that setting, you might break the machine” replied with “It’s my ******* machine, I’ll ******* break it if I ******* want to.” (he was a beacon of diplomacy, was John.) And who invented the 3.5” floppy drive without an eject button??

I think the point I’m trying to make is that sometimes you need to do things that don’t seem logical in order to make things work – something Macs don’t like to let you do. Sometimes the best way to make something work is to do it a different way. I failed my ECDL (European Computer Driving Licence) certificate back in the early 2000s because I hadn’t bothered to do any revision. I’d been using Word for years, and being an engineer (hadn’t mentioned it yet this post) I was pretty experienced with Excel. So when we had to post pictures into Word, I knew that simply pasting them in would mean they could appear anywhere in the page, so I created a 1x1 table, dropped the image into that, and positioned the ‘table’ where I wanted it. Apparently the correct method is to press CTRL+V, and no matter where the picture ends up, that’s OK (I note that 20 year later versions of word operate rather more consistently.) So even though I had the right image, at the right size, in the right place, I didn’t pass (there were many, other, similar things.)

The official process didn’t work, but (and thinking back to my post about New Year Resolutions) this is a definite ‘Possibility Two’ (“It doesn’t work, and it never will”) but we made it into a ‘Possibility One’ (“The official method doesn’t work, but we’ve got a workaround”.)

And even though it meant I failed, and never got my ECDL (now ICDL) certificate, I’m still relatively computer literate. And frankly, I’m an Excel Whiz. Need someone to work out how to do something weird in Excel? I’m your guy. And if you’re stuck with a problem you can’t solve? Reach out to me here or at Pinovate.co.uk, or let me know in the comments.