I copied the Windows virtual machine I’d created on the MacBook Air to my substantially faster MacBook Pro and was shocked and appalled to find it unable to keep up with my typing. I’d created a fancy curved path in Artisan to hold text the text – but some of my keystrokes were being dropped, and others were being doubled or tripled.

I thought that something had gone wrong when I copied the virtual machine, so I rebuilt it from scratch on the Pro, and it didn’t work any better. In desperation, I tried Notepad, and it couldn’t keep up, either!

A little searching brought up this thread on the VirtualBox forum; I applied the fix (changing a property in a hidden sub-application of VirtualBox), and it seems to have fixed the problem – now any typos are my fault.

We had a schedule conflict tonight – we had to choose between watching the Vice-Presidential debate or playing a previously-scheduled online trivia game. We went with the trivia – everyone who participated was trying to give correct answers, which does not seem to have been the case at the debate. Our TiVo captured the debate for us, so we have the option of watching it, but we’ve already seen the fly, so the surprise is gone.

Today has been an interesting day. We started with a blast from the past – a walk on the Los Gatos Creek Trail in Campbell. We used to go there once or twice a week when we went to the chiropractor; that fell by the way with the lockdown, but now that we’re going to the chiropractor again, we thought it was time to brave the trail.

It was a lot more pleasant than the Los Gatos Creek Trail on a Sunday in Los Gatos – it was easy to stay appropriately far away from others, and not a single crazed bicyclist tried to run us down. There weren’t even large clumps of walkers blocking the whole width of the trail!

As I mentioned on Friday, Diane’s Windows laptop is getting full; it’s suffering from other flaky behavior, too (the audio doesn’t work most of the time, for example). My MacBook Air has a 1TB SSD, so the idea of having her use it came to mind. So I installed VirtualBox, an evaluation copy of Windows 10 Enterprise and an evaluation copy of Forever Artisan on the Air to try it – it performs surprisingly well, although the fans run continuously. And if I gave her the Air, I could get an Apple Silicon machine when they announce it…oops, did I use my outside typing voice just now?

Tonight was also the night for the quarter-finals of the “Speaker Showcase” for Toastmasters District 101’s “Fall Fusion”, and I represented my club in the Evaluation Contest. I won (I was the last contestant, so I didn’t get to see any of the other evaluators), so I get to compete again in a couple of weeks.