KEEP THE MONARCHY!

A poll has just been published which appears to say that New Zealanders want to ditch the monarchy

God forbid! We would get someone like our damned politicians. Better to have someone born to the job, trained for it, not political in the slightest degree, someone with a broad world view and experience of all matters, and remote enough to be independent and seen to be independent. Someone in the job for life, not someone voted in at enormous expense of money and argy-bargy every few years. Someone not in the least open to even a hint of political interference or bias. All that is the black blot on America's ridiculous system of so-called government.

If it ain't broke don't fix it.

But as the article shows, the 'poll' was loaded, the question put was not neutral, and the figures were jiggered to give the republican outfit that paid for it the answer it wanted.

And to say that the Queen is a British Monarch, although true, is also a lie, because she is a citizen of every country in which she is monarch, which includes New Zealand. She is British, Canadian, Australian, a New Zealander, etc., etc. That underlines how loaded the question was. It was, to put it bluntly, a lie looking for a lie in answer.

The uninformed people who want to dump the monarchy do not understand its fundamental importance. In New Zealand law, for example, one of the most important statutes is the Imperial Laws Application Act 1988, which sets into modern New Zealand law the great laws enacted by royalty, stretching all the way back to the update in 1297 by King Edward I of Magna Carta. And section 29 of that update, which is the section enshrined in the Imperial Laws Application Act 1988, is a great promise: 'we shall defer or deny to no man either justice or right.' It is the right of all those in New Zealand to claim that promise when confronted by official wrongdoing.

Section 29 in full is the fundamental of all the rights and freedom we enjoy in New Zealand, and in all countries where Queen Elizabeth II is head of state: 'NO freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or be disseised of his freehold, or liberties, or free customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or any other wise destroyed; nor will we not pass upon him, nor condemn him, but by lawful judgement of his peers, or by the law of the land. We will sell to no man, we will not deny or defer to any man either justice or right.' [disseised means deprived of, have taken away]

We owe a great debt to monarchy, a debt of centuries of rights and freedoms, and a debt to a system that serves us superbly well. Ditching it out of ignorance and replacing it system riddled and raddled with politics would be grossly stupid.

UPGRADE TO WINDOWS 10 WORTH IT

For a long time I put off upgrading from my desktop PC from Windows 7 to Windows 10, despite the fact that it was free, partly because I was busy with other things and thought it would take a lot of painful hours, and partly it does not impresss me that the blurb that said it combined the best of 7 and 8. Windows 8 was one to be avoided, and what Microsoft called 'the best' made me apprehensive.

I am also chary of upgrades, because so often they mess up your machine by taking it into their software heads to do things that you neither wanted nor asked for. In short, I never expect a smooth ride.

But when I saw that the free offer of Windows 10 was going to expire on the 29th of July 2016 I decided to bite the bullet, first with a nibble by upgrading my backup machine, and if that went well, carry on.

To my delight it did go well. Very well. And not only did my machine look pretty much the same as it had in Windows 7, but I was able to make some judicious tweaks to make to look and behave even better. That included taking this advice to make the colour-scheme more pleasant. The palette of colours in the standard offer is a bit limited. But using Run and Control Color enables very fine tuning (note the American spelling, because it does not accept English).

Do I like Windows 10? YES. Do I like it better than 7? YES. Would I uninstall and go back to 7? NO. It does seem to run a bit slower in some things, in some a bit quicker, but overall about the same, and it is nicer to use, it has some nice features.

The revamped Start Menu has been done very well. You have to prune out of it the stuff that Microsoft wants you to have there and pin to it what you want, but that is easy to do quickly. And it is very configurable. For example it is easy to resize the icons so that they do not shout at you, and to get rid of that silly, distracting transparency, but it is very nice.

At first I missed the Windows Classic look that I had been using for years, but 10's look and feel very soon became familiar and preferred.

The upgrade went easily. A download of about 2GB then a small number of hours chugging away, and it was all done.

The only thing to watch is that near the end of the process it asks you if you want the Express Installation, which invites you to use a big button down on the right, but in small print down on the left it says Customise. If you select express you get a heap of Microsoft applications hurled at you. It is a sell.  I chose Customise, unticked everything, and carried on using the applications that I had been using, which were mainly not Microsoft offerings.

I think the one to avoid is Photos, because it organises all the photos in your machine in way that is not what anyone sensible would want. But some who like what it does. I ignored it all created a Desktop shortcut to my main photos folder, to make it most accessible, because it opens exactly what opens when I Pictures is clicked on in a system menu.

The only little annoyance in 10 is that although the weather in the Start Menu is brilliant–truly 10 out of 10–and can be set to Celsius for temperatures, it insists on reporting the wind-speed in mph and there is nowhere it can be set to km/h or kph. That is silly enough, but even sillier is the fact the the weather button in the Start Menu can somehow show kph, sometimes, but when you click on it the full display still shows mph. That is fine if you live in one of those backward countries that have yet to go metric, but a pain in most the world.

There is a bugbear if you are using Chrome, in the area where you manage passwords, and which you go to if you have forgotten one and want to change it from hidden to show it. Windows 10 annoys by insisting, every single time, that you enter your Microsoft Account password before it will show it.

But, those points aside, Windows 10 is superb. Well done, Microsoft!