There is always a silence when I am asked for my passport. Usually it’s for security purposes to establish identity, along with a request for a utility bill, which is paid paperlessly on-line so non-existant, equally non-existant is a DSS benefit/pension book. No matter that I have a pocket full of credit cards, driving licence, library ticket, RAC membership, blah, blah, blah. They are never counted as being good enough even though they give access to my total liquid wealth.

The reply I give is never expected – I don’t have a passport, never needed one and cannot see any point in spending the best part of £100 in getting one. After living all my life in holiday resorts, what am I going to do on holiday? The beach is at the end of the road, as are shops, historical buildings, art galleries and all the bars, theatres and clubs I need. The surrounding county supplies the greenery, forests, vineyards and open countryside, plus I’m self-employed, work from home and pretty chilled -out all the time.

By the same token, I have been a “computing professional” for over 20 years and have never used a Windows computer. When I started out Windows 1 and 2 were, well… complete rubbish. CPM and GEM, the Mac-like graphical operating system, were leagues in front. Then a move to Mac proper kept me ahead of Windows-using contemporaries for 10 years until Windows 98 made the operating system look at least a little interesting. So much so, it ran in an emulator on my computer for a while. That is the total extent to my Windows experience and from what I observe at a distance Microsoft seems to go out of its way to make life difficult for their customers. Plus there is nothing I need to run on Windows I can’t run on my Macs.

That is, until last weekend when Microsoft changed how Local Live operates. Until then, I have been using it’s excellent birds-eye views to look at potential new property to buy. Where Google Earth gives a reasonable over-head view of the land, albeit from a high altitude, it’s coverage of the areas I’ve been searching has been patchy. There must be a permanent bank of cloud hovering between the satellite and the south coast of England. Whereas Local Live was able to zoom in close to houses, almost to the point of seeing fish in the garden pond and washing on the line. Ideal for house-hunting, it became the home page of one of my web browsers.

So it came as a shock to find Local Live no longer works, not just in one browser but seemingly, all Mac browsers. This is including Opera, Netscape and derivatives and even Internet Explorer. Most just show two search fields and at best produce a map but only if both fields are completed. So entering, for example, Birds-Eye View and a postcode, gets a list of all the frozen food retailers and a tiny, useless, location map. Finally, I discovered that there should be some toolbar showing. Firefox, with some persuasion, was able to display this but all Local Live produces now are black screens with pushpins where the aerial view used to be.

The same thing has happened with iView Media Pro. It used to be a British, Mac-only media browser and cataloguing tool. Microsoft bought it, made it cross-platform and ruined it in the process so that it crashes all the time, corrupts catalogues, makes poor thumbnails and is generally less usable than the two versions preceding it.

Sounds a bit like Vista.