What I've been up to recently

Hi everyone,
Just to let you know that I'm alive and well, and am keeping busy ... doing jobs
around the house and garden, photography and photo-editing, giving occasional
talks to my local computer club, and seeing family & friends.

To add a bit more detail to all the above, Mrs C and I spent a few days in gay
Paris earlier this month, and visited a few places of interest in the area. It took me
about 2 weeks to process all my photos, well the better ones, which I've put up
onto my Flickr site (over 200 of them).  The weather was much warmer in France
than in the UK, and drier too. We saw how bad the weather was during the Queen's
Jubilee-fest, on our hotel TV when we got back on the Sunday evening. A pity for
her and the Duke, having to stand around and endure the whole show. She didn't
look happy having to sit through the pop show put on in her front yard ... but then
I wasn't impressed with the show either.

As regards the house and garden, I re-painted our master bedroom, which took
me 2-3 days, and today I did some pruning of the trees and shrubs in our garden ...
having said that, it's Mrs C who does the bulk of the work in our garden, especially
the weeding (which I don't like doing).

Last Thursday, I gave a talk all about Google Drive and SkyDrive, both of which
I've used a little. I started preparing the talk on about 24 April, about the time that
Google launched Google Drive ... very rapidly, Microsoft responded by changing
its storage and pricing for SkyDrive, as some of you will have noticed.

I found an interesting review article about Google Drive, and its ongoing rivalry with
Microsoft. Will the general public carry on paying for Microsoft products such as
its Office suite and new versions of Windows?  If you're using Windows XP, support
for which is ending in April 2014 I gather, are you happy to throw out your XP
machine and buy a new one with Windows 8 on it?  My PC has Win XP on it, and
is working perfectly well ... I'm thinking about installing Ubuntu Linux on this instead.
The only reason why I'm hanging on to Windows XP, is the fact that I've got
Photoshop Elements on the computer, which is brilliant for working with RAW 
images.

One day I hope that Adobe will get round to producing a version of Photoshop
Elements for the Linux operating system.  I would be happy to buy this, as would a
lot of other people, who have made similar requests online.

Here's the link to the review article I mentioned above ...
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/networking/hands-on-with-google-drive-review/2320