Yesterday morning was wet and windy. I had a bereavement visit to make out in Wenvoe, and finding the house, outside the village on the way to St Andrew's Major, in the driving rain, was rather difficult, but learning about the life of a 95 year old, who like my brother in law Geoff had done his National Service in Palestine just after the war, was most interesting. His elder brother had served with the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. After Palestine, he attended to two Universities and lived in Canada and Australia before returning the Britain, marrying only in his forties. One of his many retirement projects was to curate and see re-published the work of his late father Huw Menai a Welsh poet who wrote in English, though he was a Welsh speaker. He was an avid photographer. I wonder if his daughter will one day curate his legacy of images?
After this, I went home, had an early lunch, then headed out for London, getting lucky with a 61bus to the station to get the 14.18 to Paddington, an hour earlier than planned. The two hour train rise at 125mph on the straight bits was thrilling, just like being back in Switzerland, with the equally quick inter-regional trains from Geneva to Brig. Crossing London to Wandsworth Common took an hour, but was hassle free, with a total off peak return with senior travel discount card price of just over sixty seven quid. With petrol at its current peak price and almost double travel time, I could have saved ten quid, plus the extra carbon footprint, but why bother, with train travel now such an super experience - good coffee on board too.
After supper and catch-up time with sister June, I checked out her existing computer and copied all her data from it to a USB drive ready for transfer tomorrow to her new computer. That was another for one evening. After four months of hell with dysfunctional central heating and then a new boiler installation whose Hive timer was not properly programmed despite her pleas to an assortment of engineers called upon at her expense, to fix the problem, finally one came who listened and responded competently to her request. The new generation of digital wi-fi devices are beyond the competence of the majority of 87 year olds to program correctly - a generation raised on physical switching devices, that is - and it seems beyond the ability of most gas engineers to manage properly,
Ashley and I had a conversation about this problem when I was getting ready to go to London, and he said that gas engineers he knew of were trained and certificated on boiler installation, but not trained to work on new digital control mechanisms, so if they had to deal with them, unreliable guesswork was what got them through. I wonder how many more people like June have had this kind of trouble and paid British Gas and other installers to do a job they cannot deliver competently? At least it's fixed now and the heating works as desired.
This morning, after a sound, warm night's sleep and breakfast, I unpacked and got to work on setting up June's new Acer laptop. All went reasonably well, including data transfer, though its was configured to run under Windows S, which is a restricted, simpler user version of Windows 10, not allowing you to use anything other than Microsoft products. You can fortunately, convert the system so it runs properly on Windows 10 Home edition, and then you can install any software you want. Once done, I could get Chrome and Firefox to install, and after further effort, synchronise between old and new machines, all the passwords and favourite URLs. Things fell apart however when it came to adding the Canon Pixma all in one printer/scanner.
Finding the official Canon printer driver download site among all the commercialised dross Google puts first was a matter of trial and error. Third time lucky. I rand the 45 minute installation routine five times without succeeding in attaching the printer to the system. The software stalled at the last post each time, without error message. Then Windows 10 decided to impose a system update, which took another half hour, but after this the installation routine no longer crashed. Not that the printer worked. I had to run its repair software to complete the job and finally see the printer work properly. What on earth is wrong to make these massive money making tech companies to be unable to co-ordinate their efforts in service of their users? Or is there a secret hope that if the user can't make the hardware to work easily, they'll just go out and buy a replacement? And consume more precious resources and add to the carbon footprint of all these devices which now rule our lives?
Somehow, I managed to get both the old and new computers working as intended by the time I was ready to leave, more by luck than planning. So many unforeseen obstacles.
Thankfully, a very smooth trip back, arriving home at ten to ten. On the westbound platform of the Underground the platform supervisor was there among the commuters with a wireless microphone in his hand linked into the overhead Tannoy system. The routine announcements were interspersed with his mellifluous black voice, calling out the incoming trains, telling people to mind the gap and squeeze down the carriage in the most entertaining way. He was more of a compรจre than a train announcer. I think he'd taken a leaf out of the stadium front man at this year's Los Angeles Superbowl game. I could see the eyes of masked travellers light up with amusement as they listened, and it inspired me to start a round of applause as he finished. To my great pleasure, dozens of people on the platform joined in. What a lovely moment, after a day under heavy pressure.
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