Thinking alike

Another damp overcast day with periods of rain. The news is preoccupied with the death of Pele the Brazilian footballer, credited with winning the World Cup three times, as if he was the only player in an eleven man team game. Well, maybe he did make the decisive moves in all three, but a team is more than its star player. He's spoken of like royalty or a heroic demigod, language verging on the idolatrous. He was known to be an easy going unpretentious warm friendly guy from a city slums. It must have been a constant test of personal humility to live with such adulation.

An unproductive morning in which the only useful thing I did was download the next diocese in Europe Prayer diary for use. The Llandaff prayer diary one isn't yet published on the diocesan website. The office is shut until next week so there's nobody around to ask. Not like in the pioneering days a decade ago when you could ring the techie colleague who would have copy to share before it was uploaded for public access.

Owain told me before Christmas that he was migrating his web pages to a new hosting server from the one I first registered with and paid for during the first dozen years. It seems that Servage the Service Provider had hugely increased the rental, reclassifying Owain's blog as a business site, though he makes no money from it. His 'inn8.net' web domain has quite a large volume of content, so it's not surprising really. Anyway he found a better deal with high quality add-on services, and his last subscription is about to lapse. When I reflected on this, it occurred to me that I've used a Servage email address to register my blog for the past sixteen years, although I've never made use of it for actual emailing. I thought I'd better change this while I still can, or risk losing access to sixteen years with of blogs.

I logged into my blog site, and discovered that through chronic digital stupidity I hadn't ever added a recovery email, needed in case I should ever lose the password. Google proposed that I should add another email address straight away. I tried using a couple of my existing ones and this was rejected, I had create a new Gmail account to serve as the recovery email, no problem, but this had the effect of displacing the existing Servage email address. So it's possible to log in only through the new account. 

The Servage email shows up as the recovery address now but attempts to exchange it for a new recovery email address, just in case have failed thus far. The now mandatory confirmation code from Google gets sent to the Servage address to an account which hasn't existed for years. I've yet to find a work around. In sixteen years I've never needed one, as my blog account has always been secure. Perhaps it's time for me to learn how to migrate my blog content to another site. We'll see.

On my afternoon walk in the park just before sunset. I bumped into Peter on his evening paseo just as the starlings began to gather in thousands along the west bank of the Taff in Pontcanna Fields. The wind was blowing in gusts and it was amazing to see how clouds of birds adjusted to this, re-shaping their formation, rising up or swooping down to just above our heads. I took a couple of minutes worth of video, and later edited these into one using Microsoft Clipchamp (what a silly name for an app!) and uploaded the result to YouTube. Worth a look for one and a half minutes, I think.

There was nothing worth watching on telly this evening. Apart from my half hour of increasingly boring DuoLingo drill, and a few emails to deal with, I just pottered around aimlessly.

This morning, or was it yesterday, I can't remember, I was think how nice it would be to have waffles for breakfast on Saturday morning instead of our usual pancakes, but I forgot to mention it to Clare. As I was about to turn in for the night, Clare was standing in the kitchen, and this prompted me t think about asking her if she fancied a change, but I saw that she's already got the batter mix bowl out on the work top, and presumed it was too late to ask. Then when I stepped into the kitchen I saw the electric waffle iron standing on the work top by the cooker. The same thought had occurred to her as well, so it'll be waffles for breakfast tomorrow!