A day of updates

Yesterday, morning, Clare and I went to our solicitor's office on Llandaff Road, to go through the revised draft of our Wills, and sign them. The last time we did this was November 1992, just before we moved out to work in Holy Trinity Geneva. Co-incidentally, we're flying to Geneva on Thursday, on our way to locum duties in Montreux. I've already been busy with arrangements for a wedding blessing and a christening on top of the regular services. It's going to be an interesting time.

 I went over to visit my old friend Graham Francis, who's living now in retirement just down the street from St Saviour's Splott, where he has been helping out during the interregnum, in the same way I was helping out at St German's. Recently he's been undergoing chemotherapy prior to surgery to remove a stomach cancer. He's facing up to this life threatening challenge with confidence, realism and good humour, and continues to busy himself with worship and ministry in whatever way he has energy for.

A secondary reason for visiting him was to give his Windows 7 laptop a servicing, and decommission his ten year old desktop machine, which still runs, but astonishingly slowly. Fortunately, many years ago I set up a back up program to auto-run - Syncback. The computer hasn't been used much since the advent of tablets and smartphones, so backups an external drive have only ever been partial. Even so, given the time, it successfully completed its routine, so that now he has a complete and up to date archive of his files of the past decade, if not longer, which can be attached to his laptop when needed. 

Sadly the intermittent use of this device also has created problems with updating, and it runs very slowly, due to congestion which the use of CCleaner took ages to sort out. The anti-virus library was 520 days old and there were scores of other Windows security updates. All seemed to be competing for internet attention, and after four hours, I had to walk away, leaving the machine running in the hope that in the course of time, days if not weeks, it will sort itself out. I recall a similar problem with the office PC over in St German's taking weeks to update, although that problem was compounded by a flaky wi-fi connection.

Bringing machines back to working order after increasingly longer layoff, due to the ease of being able to do basic everyday tasks on a tablet or smartphone, is a great disincentive to using a Windows computer, so it's no wonder their market share is falling. This adds to the perennial problem of built-in redundancy, caused when older operating systems are no longer supported with security updates, or drivers not provided to enable older hardware peripherals to run with a newer operating system. Good equipment going to waste, causing electronic waste pollution when disposed of wrongly, and all due to the illusion that newer and fancier, with more options available is really desirable. It isn't, so the big computer businesses play tricks to force us to give up on old kit. What a foolish world!