Who are we again?

Its not been intentional but the past few weeks have seen us visit several places connected with the birth and expansion of North America and it really didn't all click with me until we were coming back on the train from Montreal a couple of days ago.

A couple of years ago we visited Nova Scotia and Fort Louisburg, a significant port controlling access to the St. Lawrence River, and only a few weeks ago St. Louis, a city founded by west and southward traveling explorers and fur traders from New France so we've seen quite a bit of the entire landmass that contributed to the birth of this continent (albeit very superficially).

The blue bits are New France in 1713 but previously so were the purple bits that they lost in the War of the Spanish Succession (around 1710).  75,000 of the total 90,000 French settlers lived in Quebec whilst 2 million lived in the 13 pink states to the south.  Fair to say that any 'control' was pretty minimal in the blue areas. 

We've been in Toronto for just under a month and thought it would be nice to spend Viv's birthday weekend getting to know Montreal.  I'd been there for a couple of days 20 years ago so had no memories of the place at all so found a hotel in the Old Town called the Hotel Nelligan, next to the Notre Dame Cathedral, which turned out to be very nice and then set to exploring.

Notre Dame Cathedrale

First of all it rained.

Apparently this either has or has not been a great summer.  Not, if you like hot sunny weather; great if you don't like heat and mugginess which is the norm.  But the rain…

We chose the wet days for our hop on, hop off bus experience which cramped things somewhat but what they do give is a fast overview of a city that you can then hone down to what interests you.  Overall I think they are great and this despite the sogginess was pretty good.  We actually stayed on the bus for a 2nd time around because the guide doing the narrating (a Frenchman from Paris who'd lived in Montreal for 40 years) was so interesting.  

St. Joseph's Oratory

St. Joseph's responsibilities: the Universal Church, workers and sick people.  Arduous, I would say.  The Oratory grew as a place of healing and remains a pilgrimage destination to this day.

In fact the guides we met in every place we visited were good.  All different and one surprise I had was that the francophone guides were better than the anglophone ones.  No idea why.  The French in my experience (up until my last visit in 2011 actually) are deliberately obtuse if you don't at least try to speak French and if they realize (not difficult to do) that you are English, they double up on the obtuseness.  Not so this time… with exceptions, of course… as firstly they apologized for their poor English and then proceeded to describe things in wonderful, flowery detail even making jokes.  As someone who has struggled with French for over 50 years and still can understand words, but not their sense, I am very impressed by this.

And now a little history.

Montreal was founded in 1642 on a point on the St. Lawrence River called Pointe a Calliere largely because it was the furthest point up the river before a significant waterfall (the Lachine) that prevented further movement up river.  It wasn't meant to be a trading centre but a mission called Ville Marie to bring catholicism to the native Americans living there but of course it morphed into being a business centre too.  The Old Town grew up around the mission and the town's name changed to Montreal (The Royal Mountain) somewhere along the way.

New France, as it was called, grew up alongside the English colonies and it was inevitable that the old world enmities should billow over to the new world and so it was from around 1700 onwards. The French allied themselves with the Huron and Algonquin tribes whilst the English allied with the more numerous and aggressive Iroquois further south.  Strife between the colonies grew and it was the 7 Years War (the first war apparently that began in the new world rather than the old) that brought things to the boil.  

At the time New France had 90,000 colonists whilst the 13 states had nearly 2 million, a state of affairs brought about almost entirely by the systems in each settlement; the French had direct rule by the King of France with their traditional seigneurial rights whilst the English essentially gave away land to the new settlers and held a somewhat looser rein over the colonies (despite what the Americans later said).  So the law of large numbers prevailed and the French lost all of New France by 1763 (and incidentally India too) and Montreal became British (called Lower Canada).

A significant loss of territory for the French.  Mind you the English didn't enjoy much of the lower pink bits for long.  I hadn't realized we controlled Florida in this time before giving it back again after the Revolutionary War.

The aftermath saw Montreal grow to dominance in Canada, first outstripping Quebec City as the most important city in Quebec then by maintaining a considerable lead over growing Toronto (Upper Canada) until the separatist movement in the 1970's spooked virtually all investment and industry into moving to Ontario as well as created an unpleasant atmosphere for the large anglophone minority who similarly uprooted thrusting Toronto into its current position as the most important city in Canada.  Toronto recently took over as third largest city in North America and is one of the top 5 best places to live in the world (according to a major survey).

One thing that surprised me about Montreal was that it really isn't that French a city.

I thought it would be far more so.  For sure French is the dominant language but restaurants aren't all French -- the 'best' ones are good but with a new, more generic cuisine -- and while we ran into some people that could have been lifted straight out of a French caricature -- ridiculous glasses and hairstyle, terrible jeans and scraggly T-shirt inside a shabby jacket… which somehow looks both chic and smart on a Frenchman or Italian.  I'd have looked like a tramp.  Most people weren't like that at all.  Architecture isn't that French either.  Of course the Old Town had most of what still remains of the French influence but change the street signs and you could be anywhere in North America.

This said, we did find escargots, cassoulet and creme brûlée… but we had to look for it.

The train ride there and back was pretty neat too.  

It costs a little less than flying but without the need to go to and from airports, through security and all that hassle.  Factoring all that in and the 4 1/2 hour train journey made pretty good sense.  Had we known where the station was in Montreal we'd have walked the 1/2 mile to the hotel there too!

The museums we went to were terrific too.  The Pointe a Calliere (architecture and archaeology), Chateau Razeray (home of the Governors), the Musee des Beaux Arts (for the Faberge egg collection) and St. Joseph's Oratory (with the 3rd largest church dome in the world) really brought the city to life for us.

We had a great time.  Thanks Montreal!

See my travel blog here on Track My Tour.

Ch..Ch..Ch..Ch..Changes

I've been coming to Toronto since 1987 mainly to attend an entrepreneur's course called Strategic Coach but also for fun.  Its a great North American city, now ranked #3 in terms of population after New York and LA, with lots going on.  In fact the Immigration officials find it difficult to understand why I like coming back here and are relatively disbelieving when I say its for fun. But it is.

This also means I've been witness to lots of things happening in Toronto, particularly the construction. But there's been lots of other change too that in retrospect seem inevitable but at the time came as big shocks.

Sam the Record Man

Who doesn't remember Sam's?  Touted as the biggest record shop in the world, when I first started coming to Toronto Sam's was a mecca for me.  I could always find hidden gems of music by artists that I couldn't find elsewhere and at great prices too. Living in Bermuda this meant carrying armfuls of first LP's, then cassettes and later CD's back home.  They weighed a ton!

Then came iTunes and downloading music and Sam's gone completely.

Other stores such as HMV made the transition to DVD's (and not music DVD's at that) more quickly than Sam's and so found a somewhat longer lease of life but with Apple TV, Amazon and Google everything, these stores are redundant.  Obsolete.  Some are hanging on but the opportunity for the mainstream has gone completely.

Some may survive in stripped down mode as niche players because vinyl really does provide better music reproduction but for the most part, the digital equivalent is well good enough… including myself.  I still have my records and a turntable but rarely play them.

Some of my records

Time has moved on and the industry has been decimated by digital with Apple's iTunes in the van now that pirate operations such as Napster have been closed down.

Book Shops

I love books and bookshops and have never thankfully made the transition to Kindles or other iBooks.  But I am a dinosaur.

Actually young people don't read these days.  Well not more than the headlines and maybe an executive summary, but certainly not Dostoevski type books where the central character, Joe the mujik, endures untold hardships and miseries before tragically dying or committing suicide on page 972. The type of books we were asked to read at school for our exams in fact (I still shudder when I think of Thomas Hardy's Trumpet Major -- a hideous book for a 14 year old).

Since Amazon sold books online and then Apple and others digitized books of all types, traditional book shops have been under pressure.  Barnes & Noble's owner is currently trying to take the company private as he figures all their high street real estate is worth more than the business.

I still set aside time to browse and immerse myself in the wonders of book shops and always, just always, come out with a couple of new treasures.  But as I said before, I am a dinosaur.  Virtually nobody else buys books.  Even professional qualifications such as CFA disseminate their required reading list in digital form so no longer do candidates have 4 or 5 feet worth of books to hold somewhere at home.

They don't cost any less though.

Sadly the biggest bookshop in the world near to Sam's just closed down too.

Photo Shops

Time was that I used to have much of my photo developing done in Toronto when I visited.  Bermuda was very expensive for this so waiting a few weeks was really no problem at all.  Photography shops such as Blacks proliferated.

Then came the camera phone and digital camera.

The first ones weren't so great that the quality was better but the ability to have your photos lodged on your computer instead of stuck in albums was a huge step forward for the new generation.  I still have a couple of dozen albums from before 1990 at home that I keep promising myself to transfer to digital format and put onto my computer so I can throw out the hard copies.

Furthermore with old technology you had to keep and develop the crummy photos too.  How many times have you had only a couple of good ones from a roll of 24 or 36?  If you're a lousy cameraman like myself, the answer is quite often.  The ability to take hundreds of shots without fear of running out of film therefore is compelling.

So is the quality today. I have friends who are 'real' photographers and say that the old film format produces better shots and as with vinyl and music I can believe it.  But I really don't care.  The new digital camera on my iPhone produces results that are just fine for me.

Blacks recently closed their megastore near the Eaton Centre and I happened to go in there a couple of times in the last couple of weeks.  The first for a picture frame and the second to develop some photos on an underwater camera where I have no idea what the results will be.  They are now niche players in a digital world again providing more services than simple photo development.

Copying and Printing

This is more of a work in progress as legislation hasn't caught up with technology yet enabling the use of digital signatures and storage at a total level.  Someone told me yesterday that Canada last year passed laws allowing digital signatures… so the need to print and physically sign has gone.

The only thing that remains is the ability to do absolutely everything digitally via computer apps storing paperwork in someone's cloud.  That is coming.

I attended an Apple workshop today discussing the role of iOS (their mobile operating system) for business all of which centered on the growth and diversity of apps available for all types of business.

Where is Kinko today?  Not around for sure.  Again the major office supply shops such as Staples and Office Depot are still around but most printers have been relegated to niche players providing specialist services generated by someone else's digital medium.

Scary prospects for someone who keeps a hand written diary!

And as for construction, the subway is still the same size as it was 20+ years ago crazily but the view of downtown is simply canyon walls everywhere.

The lake is somewhere over there...

No rain this time

Two years ago we'd come to Toronto for the Rogers Cup to watch some good tennis and been welcomed by seemingly never ending rain and a rain policy administered by Tennis Canada that made no sense at all.  However as the men were back in Toronto this year, so were we.

We'd bought tickets for the Tuesday (1st and 2nd round) and Thursday through Sunday (3rd round through to the finals) and would be joined by friends again, most of whom would be staying with us.

Don and Margot helped us enjoy some Canadian flavored tennis

Typically the early rounds have mixed results as the top guys play the lower ranked players.  There's not much difference in the respective abilities.  What sets the top guys aside is their mental toughness and ability to win the big points.

An instructive statistic from Roger Federer's heyday shows that in his best year when his win record for the year was 85-4, looking at points only Federer won just 52% of the total points played.

Statistics, statistics and damned lies.

The welter of statistics quoted these days (courtesy of computing) often masks the important things.  With such a narrow margin, it is always possible that a lower ranked guy can cause an upset and so it was that the Frenchmen Jo-Wilfried Tsonga hammered #1 seed Novak Djokovic 6-2 6-2.

Tsonga on Centre Court -- we saw a lot of him in the week and it was good to track someone's progress throughout an event from start to finish.  He played in the day as both the Canadian Raonic and Federer always played at night for the TV… and as neither Nadal or Djokovic were around

Tsonga actually had a great week considering how bad a record he has against the top guys.  In my opinion he underwhelms much like a lot of talented players lacking mental toughness.  However Tsonga has a monster serve that gets him out of a lot of trouble and so it was this week.  It wasn't that he played much better than Djokovic, he didn't, but Djokovic chose this tournament to not turn up and play.

However the rest of the week had some fantastic matches.

Dmitrov versus Robredo was terrific.  Neither have huge serves, both have beautiful ground strokes.  Nearly 3 hours of wonderful tennis.

Dmitrov/Robredo on the Grandstand

Tsonga versus Murray was wonderful drama even though the tennis quality was poor.  Murray in particular led the race to the bottom in the 3rd set when Tsonga was ready to fold.

Dmitrov versus Anderson was fantastic. The battle behind classic tennis strokes and a bludgeoning serve followed up with a crushing forehand.  Thank goodness Dmitrov won!  But at 5-5 in the 3rd set tie break, it was still difficult to predict!

The crew: Keith, Viv, Judy, Martin and Gill with Nick in front

Tsonga played wonderfully well against a tired looking Dmitrov.  Gone were the fears, the lack of confidence and his general mental fragility.  He never missed.  Not even his ground strokes.  And his serve, well at 145 mph in the corner time after time I felt sorry for Dmitrov.

The Bulgarian cheering section: "Grigor, Grigor, Grigor…"

And then the final against the great man, Roger Federer himself.  Our friend Gill had bought a Fed hat for the occasion but that didn't prove to be good enough as he really didn't show up on the day.  Tsonga was nervy of course, having a 4-11 record against Feds so wasn't really expecting to win, but he served very well and hung on in all right places winning a tight 2nd set tie break on Feds' 50th ground stroke error.

Well done Jo!

And no rain.

But the food concessions were awful.  Invite a bunch of food trucks in for goodness sake.

And the transport is dopey.  No shuttles during the day until 5 pm and when they do come there's 20 minutes in between.  And 500 people waiting and waiting and waiting…

But hey, it was still a great week!

Le Weekend au style Canadien

Its been a couple of years since we visited the Muskoka region north of Toronto but our friends Daina and Byron most kindly invited us to visit for the weekend, a long weekend as it turns out.  This meant that the traffic on the way up the highway past Huntsville was very busy (on the way back too).  We found a car hire firm on the 5th floor of the Eaton Centre which was very convenient for us … something to remember for the future … and hired a Toyota Corolla, considered a Midsize car, which after all the big vehicles we'd hired lately felt very small indeed.

Amazing how quickly you adapt from small to big without making an intermediate jump through Middling.

Byron was very hospitable welcoming us with wonderful Margeritas… and kept them coming.  This was wonderful of course but did mean a certain slowness in the brain the following day.

However we also managed a quick boat ride where Byron's daughter Rowena amazed me by her skill on a surf board that danced along the top of the wake from the boat… some 6 feet behind the boat itself.

I had a go and proved that an older guy who can barely swim and is equally inept on skis can potentially do serious damage to himself on a surf board.

Going… well almost...

… Going...

… Gone

But my goodness the mosquitos were out in force.  Apparently this year they are in biblical proportions as the lakes, rivers and swamps around are all very full indeed.

We managed some tennis the following day and another boat trip where Viv this time humiliated me on the surf board (to be expected) and as Byron didn't feel like getting wet he simply stepped onto his board and generally showed off in most unbecoming style.

Mind you he fell in and Daina towed him back to the dock during which he had to hold his trunks up, hang on to the rope at the back of the boat and wave cheerily to his holidaying and partying neighbors all the way back.  Serves him right!

But again this was a lovely weekend in the country… even with the bugs.

Killer Queen

With the passage of time, all the bands that I used to follow in my teens, twenties and beyond are dying out, in many cases literally, as with Queen whom we saw earlier this week.  Minus Freddie Mercury (deceased 1991) and John Deacon (retired wealthy -- see Wikipedia!!) though so with a couple of session guys and the runner up in American Idol a few years back called Adam Lambert who did a really good job though.

I mixed him up with that guy on the current series of The Voice -- Adam something else -- which I think added to Viv's enthusiasm to go to the show with me!

I'd never seen them other than on video unlike Nick who'd seen them at Wembley in the 1980's when they were in their pomp -- he said they were brilliant, so I was interested to see for myself.  A bit morbid I know but I'm ticking off bands I missed out seeing from years ago who've restarted touring to make some money now that nobody's buying their records.

Playing at the Air Canada Centre, they were very impressive indeed.  They'd played here only 2 weeks ago and the demand and response was so strong they added another show at the end of the tour ... this one.

Older of course and interesting to see how the two remaining original guys would take to having someone else singing ... and taking much of the limelight.

Answer was to have extended drum, bass and guitar solos, the last particularly lengthy.  In the old days bands used to stretch out on long solos of course but that was because they didn't have many songs to play so they just strung them out.  Cream was the first to do this so their concerts could last longer than an hour and a bit.  Queen didn't need to do this as their song list is very impressive indeed and could have easily taken up the 2 hours or so with just great song after great song.  Here's the setlist:


Now I'm Here
Stone Cold Crazy
Fat Bottomed Girls
In the Lap of the Gods... Revisited
Seven Seas of Rhye (the first song they played on Top of the Pops incidentally)
Killer Queen
Somebody to Love
I Want It All
Love of My Life
'39
These Are the Days of Our Lives
Bass Solo
Drum Battle
Under Pressure
Dragon Attack
Who Wants to Live Forever
Guitar Solo ...endless segueing into...
Tie Your Mother Down
Radio Ga Ga
Crazy Little Thing Called Love
The Show Must Go On
Bohemian Rhapsody

We Will Rock You
We Are The Champions


Interesting too the way they integrated video of Freddie Mercury into the show in the key songs you cannot imagine anyone but him singing -- Bohemian Rhapsody being a standout of this (see video from first ACC show, great stuff).

But as for the 4th original guy, the one who wrote that fabulous bass intro to "Another One Bites the Dust" and Freddie's coming out song "I want to break free"... well they didn't do them at all and didn't talk about him either.  Wikipedia's recent chit chat about this is quite revealing.

But as for my bucket list, well another one has bitten the dust.  And very well they did it too!

Yes, everyone was on their feet singing "We Are The Champions"

Not the French again...

I overlooked this post from a couple of weeks ago as I couldn't find any pictures.  Now I have so here it is.

It seems to not matter where you go but there grinning at you is likely to be some Rene or Thierry smirking away because they got there first.  Or at least that's what they say.

So it is in that vast tract of land in the middle of the USA called the mid-west.

Its all about two guys Pierre Laclede and Auguste Chouteau who in 1673 took their little canoes thousands and thousands of miles over many years from Quebec across the width of half of Canada through the great lakes and then down through various rivers until they hit the motherlode, the Mississippi, which in an instant whirled them down to the confluence firstly of the Illinois River (north easterly direction towards Chicago) and the Mississippi near a town today called Grafton, Illinois where they and their comrades carved a cross out of the rock for all to see next time they passed.

"Now listen Mr. Lewis, this is what I want you to do... see the big question mark?  I want you to fill that in..."

They didn't stop there though but carried on down the Mississippi until they came to the confluence of an even greater river system, namely the Mississippi and Missouri just outside modern day St. Louis.  There they did stop and started an encampment that they called St. Louis after Louis IX, the patron saint of France.  That was in 1674.

Other French Canadians carried on down the Mississippi until they came to the Gulf of Mexico where they founded yet another settlement called New Orleans (actually Nouvel Orleans if you want to be picky) where a whole bunch of French Canadians ended up after they lost the 7 Years War to England in 1763 and gave up all of Canada.

Fast forward 40 years to beyond the War of Independence and that other upstart Napoleon who had run the French treasury dry by his endless wars but was now at peace for a short period when the slave revolt in today's Haiti destroyed the French presence in the Caribbean.  It made him realize that (a) there was no chance France could support a colony that far away from France without a navy that could challenge the Royal Navy, and (b) that maybe as those Yankees had asked to buy New Orleans, perhaps he could actually negotiate a better deal before he lost the territory altogether.

Ever the pragmatist Napoleon figured out that $15 million in 1803 money meant he could pay his armies for another couple of years to enable him to move against Austro-Hungary, the German states and Russia in a series of shattering campaigns that catapulted him to total supremacy in Europe, and promoted him to the position of Emperor.

It also doubled the size of the USA and prompted Jefferson to ask his personal secretary, Merriweather Lewis, to head west out of the new US city of St. Louis along the Missouri River to find the Pacific Ocean, meet and deal with Indians, chart maps and any new flora and fauna he may find, and generally enable the US to lay claim to more of the Pacific North West to bring Jefferson's vision of the USA 'from sea to shining sea' to fruition.

Doesn't sound much today but Lewis had the boats built in Pittsburg and sailed them down to St. Louis.  Took months.

Lewis contacted his former Army CO, Captain William Clark, to ask him to accompany him on the trek.  Clark had opted out of the army so agreed.  He it turned out was the practical one whilst Lewis was the botanist, zoologist, and general all round recorder of the trip.  Clark was an experienced cartographer and his maps of the journey were amazingly only 40 miles out.  No GPS to help him either.

Rather like at Jamestown, this was not an unplanned trip even though big.  They took over a year to plan things out with a blank cheque from the President.  Trouble was they didn't know what to take and why... all into the great unknown.  Rather like planning a road trip today.

We started our voyage of discovery at the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, a national park with security like any international airport (for goodness sake), where there was a museum dedicated to this journey only and its import in the expansion of the USA to what it is today.

Built in the 1970s this is a monster edifice. Great views.

There's an interesting chronology of events year by year that follows the US between 1800 and 1900.  In 1800 the population was not much over 2 million, by 1900 it was nearly 100 million.  In summary after Lewis & Clark, other expeditions went out in other directions both further north and south as one main objective was to find a practical path through the Rockies.  Lewis & Clark's expedition nearly died of starvation in the nightmare winter crossing as where they chose to cross was not that wise.  Others found easier routes making the great westward treks more easy (they were still tough of course but not impossible).  By 1850, the far west was colonized, Indians displaced and annoyed, and settlements were starting to put down real roots.

Amazing how quick it all was after that start.

We then went to the museum at the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri -- 2 huge rivers which simply joined up north of St. Louis.  Lewis & Clark kicked off from there in their great adventure and the museum made much of it (very well indeed).

Missouri to the left, Mississippi to the right.  

I'm always amazed how people with nothing more than a hope and a prayer and (in this case just as with the case of the Jamestown settlements) over a year of planning with the specific and direct assistance from the US President (Jefferson) can achieve such amazing results.

Only 1 person on the trip died -- soon from a burst appendix -- and unsurprisingly given what was to follow, there were no Indian incidents other than a couple of Blackfoot who stole from the party and were shot and the numerous incidents of STD's that the party picked up from the Indians who according to Lewis' journals were riddled with it -- not a point that is usually highlighted.

3,700 miles there and back over 2 and a half years.  Sounds like a good road trip for us sometime soon! Hopefully in less time.

The great cocoon

Apple doesn't call it a cocoon of course, the euphemism they use is 'environment' or 'eco-system', suggesting that within the world all is well but beware outside, it is a free for all.  Anarchy.  Chaos.  Nothing is ordered or more importantly works.

First of all I am an Apple fan.  Since I first bought a Mac, I like the fact that when you plug it in everything just works.  Having owned PC's for many years you do know that that is simply not the case with them.  They crash all the time.  Of course Apples do crash too, but far more infrequently but annoyingly when they do, you don't actually realize it all the time.  It takes the form of something not working quite right and you simply don't know why.

I put it down to my ignorance.  Being an older guy I don't intuitively understand tech things as well as the young uns but unlike them I do try to read the manuals and how-to guides that Apple annoyingly doesn't produce.  However that does mean that the manuals being written by Mac fans respect the glitches and deal gently with the stupidities within the Apple systems and provide a sensible and practical series of suggestions how to get round things.  In short, they are pretty good.

But they don't always answer all the questions that you have.

Isn't that always the case though?  If you don't know things then you don't know what you don't know and you're sort of happy as a result... geeks call you ignorant and sneer when they say "Oh yes, well this is how you take care of that... go into Settings, then Preferences, then...."

I can't go through more than 2 layers of stuff like this before clicking off which is why I like the manuals.  You just re-read it.  The geeks don't repeat themselves.  They just sniff and smile sympathetically.

But being in Toronto for a bit there's a nice Apple store in the Eaton Centre where they run workshops explaining things in layman's language... well that's the idea anyway.  So we signed up for some classes starting with iPad before moving onto the iCloud.

I realize things are moving away from storing everything to do with your life in one place as there's just too much (what DID we used to do before computers?) so things are moving to the Cloud.  Got that but why can I not put my photos from my computer onto the Cloud when that is the most data hungry thing around and when everybody takes photos on their 'devices'?

Seems dopey to me but apparently this is changing with a new thing iCloud Drive in a few months enabling mega-something of storage in the sky to include photos.  However I talked to an Apple store guy somewhere recently and talked just about this and he suggested Flickr as the better suggestion.  A non-Apple product that works, he said.  Well I dutifully signed on and it didn't.

That brings me onto another thing.  Why is it that when the PR blurb says that such and such is the greatest thing doing X since sliced bread and when you say OK, here you go, it just doesn't do X?

For a tech ignorant this is eternally annoying and also makes you question if its YOU, not the other thing.  That's when I found the chat pages and blogs devoted to just stuff such as this.  The Flickr rants were endless and made me realize that it wasn't me but Flickr's foibles.  Quite a relief but it actually didn't help out with a solution though.

The classes Apple provided were very informative with a college age person providing very patient answers to endless dumb questions -- "Now that's a really good question..." as a start to any reply always gives it away.  It wasn't but they are making you feel good.  The answer was so obvious... "Go to Settings, click on Preferences, then...."

Aaaaaggghhh!

The iPad course

But both courses were informative and answered many annoying little questions we had (and of course created some more that we didn't know about before). We've signed up for 3 more in the coming week!

My current struggle is with a new iTunes feature called iTunes Match, a service that enables you to store your music in Apple's cloud and connect from any Apple device you have, iPad, iPhone or Computer.  It costs $27.99 for a year's subscription and was THE solution I was looking for so I connected and made all the Settings changes suggested and pushed a few buttons.

It is a simple 3-step process.  The first is Apple gathering information about my iTunes library.  Tick, all done.  The second is Matching all songs with songs in the Apple iTunes store -- this is a nice feature as if there is a match, then Apple simply upgrades any matched song with the Apple format which is probably better quality than what you had to start with.  Finally, it matches all the songs not on the iTunes store, including any pirated tunes you may have from various sources.  Well my installation is currently locked at 3313 out of 6570 songs in stage 2.

Based on the original reason why I like Apple (it works), this isn't the way its supposed to be.  It should just work... like say Apple TV, for example.  So I looked at the blogs on the subject and find that it is entirely normal to be hung up in stage 2.  The rants again are again endless.  One caught my attention because it did the full geek things, "go to Settings, click on Preferences...."  There's no escape!

Russell, an IT consultant at my company, always told me that most issues can be resolved by turning the machine off then on again. So I thought I'd do the same with iTunes Match so I 'stopped' the download (which of course has already stopped but the button says STOP) and then restarted it.  The first time it jammed the number of matched songs was 2500 or thereabouts.  Its taken 5 resets so far to make it to 3313 so I'm getting closer.

Locked at.... 3311 this time!  Aaaghh!!!

I could of course call online support, but then I'd get a geek who'd tell me it was a great question and then tell me to go to Settings, then Preferences...

And now a disclaimer.  I am a shareholder of Apple and they have done very well indeed.  So thank you for your efforts, Mr. Cook and Apple staff. As the world has sold its soul to the IT devil, there's no escape from these things that it appears that we cannot now do without.  So you have to own the best.  But then again I am a Mac fan so don't take this as a stock recommendation or anything like that.