Tuesday 2019_01_15
As predicted, I’ve been slaving over a hot laptop all of today. There was an amount of administrivia to do. This wasn’t helped by the University’s VPN being very slow, and something deleting a calendar invitation to all researchers at Merchiston.
This may have happened as I was trying several alternatives to using Outlook via the VPN. It turns out that Outlook for Mac 2011 doesn’t sync with my university calendar well (or at least not quickly enough). Nor does Thunderbird. And the current freely available version of Outlook for Mac doesn’t work on my MacBook Air (early 2015 13″, running MacOS 10·13·6.) I refuse to pay a subscription for Office365. (A one-off purchase would be acceptable to me.)
The rest of the day was spent refining interview questions and focus-group questions. I can’t shake the feeling that this should be a quick process. However, logically, it takes time to work out what should be asked, then even longer to work out how it should be asked to avoid ambiguities.
Ah well, time to relax with a beer and for my personal side to blog about Brexit. Nighty-night!
Bruce's IT-ish world 
I felt similarly about an Office 365 subscription, until I realised the licencing allowed me to share it with 5 (now 6, I think) family members, which suddenly made it a much more appealing prospect. Throwing that in in case it’s useful.
Make that 4, now 5 – I was including myself in the counting.
Thanks – will look into this.