Just a walk in the park

Okay, I surrender: Pandora is determined to be a "princess," and heaven only knows how long it'll take before I have a functional laptop of my own. So --

Have switched to Dave's eMachine, which is a rebadged Acer with a nice big 16" screen; and the hardest decision was, which word processor to put on? I didn't want to overload this system with an office suite, because I really don't seen six or eight progs all rolled into one.

A quick squizz at Google was in order. "Best free word processor for Windows 7" ... and what a choice we have these days. Spoiled for choice. Open Office is too top-heavy -- a full-in office suite; Lotus Symphony is a "productivity package," and so forth. All I want is a word processor!

The pick of the bunch, after looking at a few reviews, seems to be AbiWord, so it's been installed already and I'm about to take it for a test drive. The first thing I like about it is the itsby-bitsy installer. At around 8MB, it's a quick download even on a connection as slow as ours. (We're scheduled to get the NBN next month.) The next thing I like is the interface: pleasantly familiar to anyone accustomed to the older versions of Microsquash. It's also a small footprint on the harddrive, and it starts up fast. All good points. All it has to do now is just be a competent word processor, do the job, save files to formats that can be read by other programs on other machines. Shouldn't be a problem ... and I'll let you know how it goes.

If anyone is interested, the link to get this open source gem is: http://www.abisource.com/.

Meanwhile, the impression of "early spring and hot summer ahead" was reinforced in the last few days, when the shade temperature rose into the 70s ... in what's technically still winter! Dave and I took a few hours away from the usual work and duty of care-giver activities...

Jen uses the Fuji HS50 to photograph Dave ...
who's using a smartphone to photograph a sequoia.

...and we revisited a little park we had utterly forgotten until something jogged my memory just the day before. This hidden gem is on  the skirts of Aldgate: a lake, a trail around it, some glorious trees, a bird hide, some small trails heading off to pockets off bushland you can hike. Gorgeous! The sun angle shows you it's winter, because this was close to midday --

Dave uses the smartphone to photograph Jen
and some truly amazing lens flare.

Right above is a phone picture, just slightly tweaked in the computer. Dang, these phones do such good photos, it makes you wonder why I carry a big camera! Dave decided yonks ago to put the camera away and just run with the phone. Then again ... I got some very good shots with the aforementioned big camera (my Fuji HS50), and rather than loading up this little personal blog with them, I'll put them them into the travel blog, come back and link to that post from here. Neat.