Linux deployed

Another day of showers, though not as heavy as yesterday's. There was still more shopping to do for Sunday's party, so we walked into town and back before lunch. We needed to be back again to open the church, to give access to a guided tour group, telling the story in period costime of la Belle Epoque in Montreux, extending down to Territet with its once prestigious Hotel des Alpes, and links with Empress Elizabeth, aka Cissi, who stayed hereabouts several times in that era, before she was assassinated in Geneva.

After switching on the Christmas tree lights and making an awkward move to avoid knocking off a bauble from a protruding branch, I slipped, fell against the front pew and bumped my head. It wasn't a hard fall or blow, but rather an annoying surprise. Luckily I was still warm and relaxed from the best part of an hour's walk, and so avoided collateral damage, hopefully.

Later in the afternoon, we walked along the lakeside promenade for another kilometre after a stop at the Migros in the Metro Centre to enquire fruitlessly about the lost earring. We looked at a further sequence of animal sculptures made from woven fir tree branches, along this section. All of these seem related to figures in a series of First Nation American tribal stories, with which neither Clare nor I are familiar. It was the first time Clare had walked this part of the promenade, as we didn't get around to it when we were together back in the autumn. We also took time to look at the bronze figures of famous musicians in the Montreux Palace hotel garden. It was just a shame that by then it was getting dark and starting to rain again after several hours respite.

We stopped by the ferry station to check the boat timetable. The usual digital information display had crashed on booting up, for lack of a network connection, and it was displaying lines of boot-up reportage, which indicated the device was driven by Raspbian Linux, an operating system devised to run on the Raspberry Pi series of miniature PC motherboards. It's the first time I've seen this in the wild, so to speak. It's free and open source, and the powerful device can be used to perform a variety of specific computing tasks, driving equipment that monitors, processes and displays information in a tiny computer package that can be built into other devices.

Mince pie making suffered a setback tonight with the discovery that there were no small pie baking trays in the houses. A couple of phone calls however let to Clare obtaining the loan of some trays from Caroline, who will kindly drop them off tomorrow.