I am embarrassed to tell you this but I had to buy a piece of Microsoft software.

Since I bought my iMac I have become totally Macstoned and immersed in the wonderful new technology but I just could not deal with ‘Numbers’, which is the Mac equivalent of Microsoft Excel. I am quite sure Numbers is fabulous – but I have been using Excel since it first came out many moons ago and just could not adapt to Numbers. I am sure you know how you just get shortcuts imbedded into your brain and just cannot get rid of them. So I cracked and bought Microsoft Office for Mac.

And I must say that it is much more elegant that Office for Windows. The fundamental structure and commands are the same – which makes it easy for me to use – but it just – you know – looks better and seems to work better. One of the issues is of course that now that I don’t have Windows I do not have daily (or even hourly) crashes and do not get stupid messages saying one thing but which really mean:

‘This program has stopped working. We are not sure why – perhaps it is taking a tea break – we would look for a solution but we know there isn’t one so we will just keep you sitting there staring at the screen for a few minutes and then we may terminate the program and let you start again. But if you shout at us like you are doing now we my just hang you out to dry and freeze your computer completely – and if you continue to bang your keyboard like that we will just give you the old BSOD finger and make you search for your original program disk and that will make an ugly sight as you rummage shouting through the drawers of your desk wishing to Keerist you had done what you should have and put the fecking thing where you could find them again.'

OK so I have one freezing episode on my iMac since I bought it 5 months ago. I asked it to do something unreasonable and it told me to bugger off and I watched the spinning colored wheel for quite a long time while I tried to figure out what to do. The usual response is to ‘force quit’ a program but I could not do that because no program was running. I eventually turned it off and back on. Perhaps some Apple users can provide the answer.

What is it about cupcakes? These used to be things people made for the school fete or for children’s birthday parties. They were large lumps of fluffy (or sometimes rock hard) cake with icing on top. They cost about 10c to make and sold for 50c – in 2008 money. You can buy them in any cake shop in Australia for $3 per dozen.

Just before we left Sydney the Cupcake Whirlwind hit Sydney – and probably the rest of Australia. We had the ‘Cupcake Room’ open just near us. We tried this to see what the fuss was about.