A taste of Palestine

The only Methodist student remaining in College, Cath, who's in my tutur group, led us in Morning Prayer from the Methodist service book this morning - a refreshing change. I didn't plan to work for long after breakfast, but there was enough new stuff to last me several hours.  I also received email from the Team Viewer software company in Germany, aware of the antics of software scammers mis-using their freely available product to access people's computers for no good purpose. They cannot easily prevent a few from doing this as free availability of their product is a channel for them to make known and offer paid service, support and business software licenses around the world. 

The message was a response to the one I sent them reporting what I found on my sister's laptop. It described how to recognise the modus operandii of several common scam enterprises, and who to contact to spread the word when there's an outbreak. If a pattern of fraudulent sales is detectable, the internet financial service provider processing the transaction will be contacted with a request to deny the misuser banking access. It's complex, but not impossible to tackle the problem, as long as people know what's happening and bother to co-operate.

After  lunch at home I was driven to Thornhill Crematorium for the funeral of a sixty year old who'd died of drink - an occupational hazard of those who've worked in the licensing trade. A friend gave a brief and respectful tribute that didn't mention alcoholism as such, but wrly referred to his genial optimism saying: "With him, the glass was never half empty, it was always full." Afterwards, I was dropped off at College in good time to complete my morning tasks before the Eucharist started. 

In giving out a few notices before the service, senior student Lorraine mentioned that the wine to be used came from a bottle Tom and Sam brought back from their pre-term Holy Land visit to Cana in Galilee. Sam raised a smile declaring "It was water when we left!"  That tiny sip of suntanned Holy Land Merlot instead of the fruity Port ordinarily used for Communion was special - the smallest taste of land in which the Lord walked. "I didn't know how much water to add." Lorraine exclaimed afterwards. Instinct guided her, nevertheless - just a few symbolic drops for the commixture. As Port is so much stronger, it can take dilution without losing character.

I didn't get into the CBS office today, but Ashly and I were on the phone for an hour dealing with the details of decisions needing to be made. He's still chasing after an Asus Transformer Infinity to use on his rounds, and maybe at last has tracked the rare best down.  A great product, but the marketing and delivery of supplies is very poor. You'd think a product as slick as the iPad and more versatile would merit more competitive promotion, but at the moment the company seems to be playing it as a best kept secret and letting word of mouth do the rest.