Super sandals

I went to St John's for the Eucharist yesterday morning. I haven't been there for several weeks, so it was good to see people and wish them a Happy New Year.

The weather was mild enough in the afternoon for me to walk in my Ecco sandals, for the first time in a month or so. After walking into town and back, I had covered just over eight miles, and my feet gave me no trouble whatsoever, and enjoyed pushing back my distance boundaries.  Recently the last two miles have been painful and energy draining, no matter what other shoes I wore. The others all fit well, but after a while feel as if they are thin soled compared to my sandals, even when using cushion insoles. This is a puzzle.

This afternoon, I walked even further in sandals, right down to the Bay Wetland Nature Reserve, and then caught the bus back from the city centre. As I was walking down Neville Street, a women of West Indian origin approached me, and asked if I knew where a certain street was. I googled it and found out that it was close by. She'd taken a wrong turning on her way to Madhav one of Cardiff's excellent Asian supermarkets to buy vegetables not so easy to obtain at a decent price in one of the big supermarkets. We chatted as we walked down the street together. Bright eyed and sprightly, she looked about sixty and proudly told me that she was in fact ninety. She told me how proud she was of her children and grandchildren, most of who were in Britain, though some of her extended family are in the Caribbean. She hailed from Nevis. It was one of those delightful rare conversations that happened by chance, and brought extra cheer to my day.

Again today, my feet were fine. I'll have to cycle through the other pairs of shoes in the next few days to see if the problem recurs. If it doesn't, it would suggest I had a foot problem which cleared up. If it does, then I will have to track down some more resilient shoe insoles which are equal to the quality of the sandals. Clare has found out that there's a specialist shoe shop at the other end of the Parish. The answer may lie there. We'll see.

I've put in a couple of hours work each day on my novel, editing and adding to the story. I think I'm in the last quarter of the tale that's telling itself. I can see where it's going and how it will end. It's just a matter of bringing the ideas out of my head and into a text file.

I had a worried email from sister June this morning, forwarding the text of a message she received regarding the renewal of her subscription to Piriform's excellent CCleaner software. The free version is on her PC. I first put it there, and another tech guy who did some trouble shooting updated the free version and used it. Did she accidentally subscribe without realising she didn't need the Pro Version? Not so. The small print in the email she received revealed the response was directed to Cleverbridge Software, an American company which sells rubbish security and cleanup apps, associated with cold calling scammers.

She was duped into giving them access to her computer six years ago this month, due to a telephone scammer calling up and pretending to be from Microsoft warning her of a dangerous virus on her computer (switched off at the time) but then she smelled a rat, and contacted her bank to cancel the transaction, as soon as we'd spoken about it. I went up to London and did a security clean-up of her laptop a few days later, and no harm was done. It was an unpleasant lesson but valuable in terms of encouraging computer security caution. Once these crooks have an email address, sooner or later they will have another go at tricking a user into engaging with them. Thankfully Gmail has an effective spam filter and once the dodgy email has been flagged, its successors shouldn't reappear. It find it surprising that Cleverbridge Software's bad reputation doesn't lead it to be on a spam blacklist.

However, it's no offence to market poor software, especially if the owners can afford to hire lawyers to defend their interests. And there's nothing to stop a group of scamming con-men pushing unwary users towards a legit company, and using it as a shield for their nefarious activities.