Finally on Monday morning, the phone I ordered for my sister from the Easy Life Group website arrived with the postman after a two week wait rather than the two days promised. What a relief. It's about the size of a smartphone with big keys, but its operating system is of the previous era of mobile telephony, so navigating menus and keying in the phone book data provided by June, with a plea to do it for her, was a very fiddly job. Three dozen names and numbers took me more than an hour to enter. I hope that none of them are wrong, as that will cause endless frustration.
The phone has a USB linked charger, and immediately presented some of its file system areas for examination by a PC. But there was no indication that there might be software for uploading a digital address book file from an external source, and no internet capacity, only free memory for music and pictures to display on its small coloured screen. It has other facilities that make it an attractive prospect for older people, like an alarm button and hands-free cradle. I hope June will have the patience both to maintain it and use it, after I've handed it over to her. She doesn't have that much patience with more technological innovation than she's already struggled to adjust to.
Tuesday morning Clare went off to her regular study group in Dinas Powis. I drove out to pick her up afterwards, and we went to the Fig Tree restaurant on Penarth sea front for lunch before taking a walk to Lavernock Point along the coast path. On the return leg of the walk we bumped into Sue, walking with one of her grandchildren. It's the first time we've met since my retirement dinner nearly five years ago. How time flies! We stopped at the Leckwith retail park for some shopping and had tea in M&S on the way. A pleasant change in our workaday weekly routine.
Today I had lunch with my old friend and partner in publishing the Spiritual Capital report over seven years ago, Roy Thomas. He now runs his own public relations company Redefinepr, and is about to become a domain name registrar for recently approved .wales and .cymru URL handles. I wish him every success in putting the Principality on the global internet map in this way. When I went to the office later on, Ashley and I agreed that we must act to register our enterprise immediately, as a matter of pride. Besides, British Telecom has let us down very badly.
Having registered our web domain with a .co.uk label, BT insisted on controlling the linkage of the domain name with our web-site which is not hosted in webspace hired from BT. It worked for two and a half years and then was unaccountably disconnected. So far BT has failed to reinstate the link or give a reason for not doing so. BT is so big, so complex an operation, it often seems that the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing.
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