Friday 11 February 2022

New kit and a favourite returns

After I good night's sleep I woke up feeling full of energy, which showed itself when I went out for a walk before lunch, covering ground at a faster pace than I have for a long time. It was the same again when I went out after lunch, totalling ten kilometres in under two hours instead of the more usual nine to nine and a half. Strange, I don't know where the energy came from. I still can't walk as fast as others younger than me. Some folk in their sixties set a fair pace when out on their daily stroll.

Overheard on the street after school, a mum talking to her four year old - "No darling the tiny bug can't hurt you, it's been caught inside the stone for thousands of years..." I wonder what she was being shown in nursery school today?

I've been getting rather frustrated with the slowness of my desktop workstation since I bought the laptop with a SSD drive and a quick modern processor. It takes far too long to start up, access apps and files, it's getting in the way of workflow. The same old story of built in redundancy. So, I gave in and visited our local tech shop to buy a cheap used Dell server running Windows 10 Pro. I chatted with Davey, the guy who runs TouroTech about old devices and he showed me a laptop brought in for repair to a hinge that was about thirty years old, one of the original small Compaq portables with a seven inch screen. It's about that amount of time since I bought my first laptop, as we were about to move to Switzerland. It's so long ago I can't remember what make it was. Nor for that matter, how many I've had since then.

The new workstation is a couple of years old, but as it has a SSD it boots as fast as my laptop. Getting started and synchronised took less time than I thought it would, perhaps because of our much faster internet connection, so it was useable in half an hour, rather than half a day, as happened when I bought my last desktop PC about six years ago. The only problem I had was setting it up to work with my trusty Swiss French keyboard which gives me all the accents and umlauts when I need them. This task used to be fairly straightforward, but now the keyboard language setup module is very hard to find, buried among a plethora of other options for things you can do either with a physical or an on-screen keyboard. One of the many frustrating features of Windows 10.

A special treat on telly tonight, the second series on More Four Walter Presents of the remarkable Italian crimmie 'Ice Cold Murders - Rocco Schiavone'. Now the Valdostano police have the full tragic story of why the maverick Roman detective inspector has been exiled in the Alps, with him getting on the wrong side of gang leaders in the Eternal City. The lust for revenge has followed him five hundred miles from home, costing the life of his wife and the wife of a close friend. The portrayal of the impact of violence on some of the police officers is thoughtfully done.  


No comments:

Post a Comment