there's always a way

I stepped out of the house for just 15 minutes yesterday (there was a crisis in the wine rack, so I popped up to the wonderful local offy to replenish the white wine stocks at about 7 p.m.).

and when I returned, there was a copy of PagePlus 11 pushed through the letterbox. This has presumably been delivered by Geoff, the head honcho of the local bit of the local party organisation; he said he would drop it off, and I said I didn't run Windows, and would do what they needed in something else. I suspect desperation set in - he probably lurked outside the door until he saw me go out ...

except of course, I do run Windows, sort of - I have to, because so many other people do. I run:

• an RDC connection to our W2KAS server, which only gives me 256 colours, but as all I want it for is Ameol (for CIX, which is text only), and a quick CSS sanity check on IE6, it's perfectly adequate, and quite quick


• and a couple of Virtual PCs on this dual 2.5Ghz G5, one for the accounts and IE6, and one for IE7. But quick they ain't - roll on a) the decent Mac Intel desktops, and b) the money to buy one. The latter will be the delaying factor, I fear.

still, one must look on these things as a challenge. So PagePlus is now installed on an XP Pro running in a VMWare virtual machine on detritus, our Linux server, and I am accessing it via RDC.

and even better than that, I found a little gadget from www.Xutils.com/ which allows me to run multiple instances of RDC, which is Simply Fab.

perhaps I'll tell them all this at the meeting on Monday - that should make their brains implode, don't you think?