Hi Marie Grace here

I have a passion for new gadgets and as soon they're launched I have to buy them.  My latest was the ipad which in my opinion, is very overrated!  I brought it to Spain with me recently and I was very disappointed as I couldn't play my favourite game (Mafia Wars) on Facebook.  The reason for this being that Apple does not support flash player on their products. 

Back to the ipad though, it has a couple of good points, first being that the battery DOES last ten hours, the Apps are pretty good and if they are not free then they are fairly cheap to buy.  It's also very light to carry around.  On the negative side, obviously the flash player is an issue, can't upload your photos unless you purchase an expensive Apple connector, the pop up keyboard is quite annoying and often pops up when you don't need it, wifi connection fairly iffy and the case which is a necessity is also very expensive. But of course me being me, went on ebay and got a similar one for £4.99.  The other thing that irritated me was that I am always downloading music from a free programme which I transfer to my MP3. Needless to say Apple don't allow this and one has to pay 79c per track via itunes.  But again me being me found a way around this.  In the application I use to download music (which shall remain nameless) in the settings option, I found a handy little box to tick...copy all music to itunes...Low and behold my ipad now contains hundreds and hundreds of my favourite tracks and albums.  Anyway enough about ipads they are cheap enough to purchase so I don't feel too hard done by. 

Apple Ireland

Just a bit of background info.  I was born in London (Irish parents) and have one brother. I did fairly well in school but in those days (showing my age now) the word College or University wasn't in my parent's vocabulary.  When I left school I got a job in Lloyd's Bank in the City.  To say it was boring would be an understatement so I went job hunting again.  Got a job in a merchant bank nearby and actually stayed there for a few years.

I met an Irishman, got married and moved to this country where I always dreamed of living as a child.

My whole point in writing this was just really to say that it wasn't until I was 47 years old did I meet my first computer, this was due to the fact that I was out of the workforce for many years raising my family.

I had got a job in accounts at our local radio station and on the first day when I was shown to my office, there it was sitting on the desk.  "what's that?" I asked.

To me that was the start of my life as I know it now.  I purchased a PC a couple of weeks later and my first  memory was sending and receiving that initial email., this to me marked an historic moment in the evolution of communication and these were the slow dial up days of course.  The email was to my brother in London, and I waited expectantly for his return email and wow!  This was pure magic to me.

The rest is history, I couldn't get enough, from someone who started in the radio station completely computer illiterate to 6 months later when all and sundry would be asking me for advice and help.

Almost 3 years later quite a few of us were made redundant, I decided to invest some money into my own business venture, so at the age of nearly 50, MG Print was born.  It started as mainly T-Shirts, Hats, Mugs and Bag printing, I would make all the designs, logo's etc myself and became quite au fait with Photoshop, self taught of course.  Later I moved on to include business cards, letterheads, comp slips etc.  It was succesful enough and I always had my regular customers coming back.  I also had a website which my brother designed, this would get me orders from further afield, which was great as I always found Clonmel people very cliquey and begrudging, they hate to see local people doing well.

Up to this time all my computer knowledge was self taught and I felt the time had come to get a bit of training.  My first port of call was ECDL which I did through a local computer training centre in Clonmel, I think I completed the exam for every module in under ten minutes and got 100% on each.  On to the advanced then, these proved to be slightly more of a challenge.  I then headed down to WIT to do the PC Maintenance and Networking course,  I loved that!  To this day I have found this the most useful, although I can get a bit irritated at work, especially when I'm busy and every Tom, Dick and Harry wants me to solve their PC problems for free of course.  The other day a lady in an office nearby was in a panic, she couldn't log on as the keyboard wasn't working.  Turns out keyboard wasn't connected to the systems unit.  Look for the simple solutions first, you'd be suprised at how many people haven't their printer turned on or removed the sticker from the ink cartridge, their monitor plugged in, the list goes on............

My next piece of training was CTP which was very enjoyable and I am now a qualified tutor (do a good bit of that free at work as well)  Don't think I'd like to be a tutor though because I 've no patience and don't suffer fools gladly and I'd probably keep telling people they were bloody thick!  I tried teaching my better half a few years ago, it reminds me of when he was teaching me to drive...IT JUST DOESN'T WORK!  Anyway when we started speaking again I told him to go and get outside training to teach him the basics.  Why is it that people who are just starting out with computer training blame the computer for everything?  It's never their own fault!

Anyway these days I have a safe proper job (well as safe as any job in Ireland is) I enjoy it very much and a regular salary is good.  The printing business is still there although I actually don't do much of that now.  I still do the odd job for a friend or if it's to help a charity, as I can't bear to see them being ripped off by outrageous prices, so I would do it for cost price.