State of Alarm - day thirty

Six weeks today already since I left the UK for Mallorca on my way here. The world has changed so much in that time, and the future has shrunk to 'grateful to still be alive, just one day at a time'.

After my walk in the afternoon, I took the car, to dispose of a large box of recyclable empties to the roadside receptacles just past Es Cuco supermarket, closed for the afternoon. The area was deserted.  It was good to get out again. Now Easter is over, I think I'm relaxing and adjusting to this situation a bit more. Going out in the car didn't feel quite like an ordeal. It's not a matter of confidence, but I have been reluctant to push myself for fear of coming adrift and making mistakes - probably a legacy of a year's confinement, minimising the physical stress on my wound. Things have improved a good deal, pleasingly enough, since I have been here. Feeling less uneasy in myself is a sign of putting all that trauma behind me, and feeling more at home in myself and in my environment, uncommon though it is.

Yesterday evening, I got around to examining the redundant Compaq laptop in the study. It has been stripped of personal data, still had some software on it, but ran so terribly slowly it was unusable. It had AVG on it and flagged up virus content but struggled to rid the machine of malware. It was also a low powered consumer Windows 7 machine, unsupported now by Microsoft. With Dave's consent I tried to install a live bootable version of Linux Mint XFCE edition on it from the installation flash drive that travels in my digital tool kit. It booted to a functional desktop of sorts, but not install on the laptop.

It took me a while to remember it was a version for 64 bit devices and the Compaq is so old it's a 32 bit device very under-powered. I downloaded  a Mint 32 bit version ISO to another flash drive, then used a spare SD memory card to make a live bootable disk to use. It wouldn't book from the laptop's card reader, but I had a USB card reader in my tool kit. The live version of Mint 32 bit booted nicely from this and proceeded to install perfectly on the laptop, giving it a new lease of life as a fully working machine. It's not lightning fast, as the hard drive is slow, but it's quite usable for all but complex demanding task like video and audio editing. That too cheered me up no end.
    

Software - built-in redundancy frustrations

There were ten of us again for the Eucharist at St John's Canton this morning. I had a phone call from the GP surgery late yesterday afternoon telling me my prescription was ready, so I walked there to collect it and have it made up at the pharmacy opposite before going home. 

After lunch, I went into town and met with Ashley to catch up on CBS affairs. Then we went hunting for a copy of MS Publisher, to make ready for the autumn newsletter publication, but we couldn't find a Microsoft Office bundle which includes it. 

It's ages since we last needed to change software. For the most part we use Free Open Source material. I've worked with an old copy of MS Publisher 2000 for the past fifteen years and never needed anything else. I doubt if it can be installed on a Windows 10 machine, if I could lay hands on the original disk, as 64 bit computer hardware running Windows 10 can make it impossible to run older software. It's not often I need to use Publisher, but it's inconvenient having to spend time learning to use an alternative program that's unlikely to be compatible with MS Office generated files. I need to do some research to find a sustainable solution.

Early to bed tonight, faced with an early walk to Sophia Gardens bus station for a 07.15 coach to London to see my sister June.

    

  

Aberfan remembered

While eating breakfast this morning, I listened to BBC Radio 4 on the Nexus tablet, first the news and then Sunday Worship, as it was from Wales, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Aberfan disaster. The Reverend Roy Jenkins presented it, a Baptist Minister who trained in Cardiff Baptist colleague at the same time as I was at St Mike's. We've known each other since then. He's worked for BBC Wales as their religious affairs guy for decades, and continues in retirement to present programmes. 

When I was at St John's, he involved me in a broadcast round table discussion programme, and every now and then we bump into each other at the opera, or on the street in the city centre. Coincidentally, earlier this week, I received an email from him, after a weekend visit to Malaga, where he'd gone to the Harvest Festival Eucharist at St George's. He'd seen a mention of me on their website, and was curious that someone else was there instead, so I replied, telling him that I'd been redeployed since.

This morning's broadcast was a real tour de force, with hymns and readings which were important at the time of that tragedy, which occurred in a village in the neighbouring mining valley to the west of where I was born and grew up. There were also interviews with several ministers and lay people from the community, some of whom had lost children attending the school inundated by slurry from that unstable coal tip. I was especially impressed by a lay woman and a minister who spoke of how it was prayer that kept them going and enabled them to survive the aftermath of this disaster, and do more with their lives.

I left for the Mojacar Sunday Eucharist thinking about this, and resolved to introduce my sermon on the theme of persistence  to getin prayer, by speaking first about what I'd heard. It made the sermon a bit longer, but as most of  the congregation were my age, if not older, their memory of this event, and its repercussions all over Britain and the world, drew looks of recognition from many in the fifty strong congregation.

I succeeded in leaving home without any reading glasses, but was able to borrow a pair from Fr Alan to get me through, even though they were not my prescription. My driving glasses would not have been up to the task. It's a long time since I last left home without reading glasses. Perhaps I was still preoccupied with what I'd been listening to on the radio.

My personal memories of the Aberfan disaster are twofold. Firstly, in the week after, there were people out in the streets of Bristol city centre, where I was working in a Shell-BP office at the time, collecting for the Aberfan appeal, a sign of the national sympathy that emerged. Secondly, it was, I think, the first Friday of my first University half term weekend, so Clare and I, married two and a half months went over for the weekend to my parents in Ystrad Mynach, ten miles from Aberfan. Little else was on our minds apart from what had happened that morning.

Late the same evening, Archbishop Glyn Simon, who ordained me three years later, appeared on the family black and white telly to give a late night epilogue attempting to interpret the disaster, since he spoke about where God was in the midst of this unfolding tragedy. Afterwards, I remember my father, who'd worked in mining most of his life, who kept faith with reservations about the church, and was skeptical about many things, commented approvingly on what the Archbishop said. As an aspiring ordinand, this was a relief, given how skeptical Dad was at that time about me being ordained!

After the service half a dozen of us stopped at a popular Heladeria on their way home to have a drink and chat together. This is a regular occurrence here throughout the year, and the proprietor expresses his appreciation by sending us tapas - not just olives and crunchy nibbles, but also salchichon, cake and ice cream. Amazing generosity.

After a late lunch, I settled down to transferring photos of yesterday's visit to Garruch from the camera SD card to my laptop for editing and uploading. Disaster struck when I sent to delete several poor quality images, and ended up deleting fifty, because Windows Explorer, with its little tick box options for every file, doesn't behave the way I'm used to. I tells you how many you are about to delete, but in small print it's easy no to read in the middle of a routine file management operation. 

I downloaded one of the Windows recommended file u-delete program, installed and ran it. Deleted files were identified for recovery after a time consuming scan, but the program wouldn't allow me recover them without first paying for a subscription. OK, except that the download failed to mention it wasn't free. I did another search, found a free Open Source software package which downloaded and worked fine. This revealed that just four of the fifty three photos lost were recoverable, for no explicable reason, as I'd done nothing with the SD card since deleting the photos. I can only conclude the file damage was a consequence of the Windows 10 file deletion routine.

Hateful little tick boxes against every file managed by Windows Explorer by default work in such a way that you can leave boxes ticked, navigate beyond view of them in the files window, and forget that you have more ticked than you can see. Where you're copying them somewhere else or deleting, this is a recipe for havoc. It's totally untrustworthy, as a file management tool in this context. You can reconfigure to dismiss the hateful boxes, but why on earth this dangerous facility should be enabled by default is a mystery to me. One more thing which designers and programmers of user interfaces think is helpful when it isn't.

Thankfully, the batch of photos are all of Garrucha, taken yesterday. I can return, walk the same route and reproduce them, for my own interest, if nobody else's. Strange to say, but after I'd realised there was no option but to re-take the photos, I remembered another occasion when I had to do this. It was during a study visit to Jamaica in 1982, with a couple of film cameras - a Practica SLR and a Ricoh pocket half frame camera. I still have the former, but don't recall what happened to the latter. 

The high humidity level caused the SLR's shutter to malfunction. I developed  photos while I was there. When I found I'd lost a lot of valuable photos of my journey across the island, I was able to re-trace my steps and take another batch with the Ricoh. Thankfully I had time and a hire car, having saved money from my travel grant by having local contacts offering me hospitality. All those photos are digitized from the original slides and reside somewhere in my archives.

This evening I went to the beach nearby to watch the full moon rise and take photos. Unfortunately there was too much cloud and too little to capture anything of any interest. Very disappointing, but a pleasant hour on the sea shore, listening to the waves on a mild evening, waiting to see the moon, nevertheless. Maybe tomorrow.

 

Office at home and at work

Thunder and rain today. At least it lowers the pollen count, but there's not much incentive to go out. The new antibiotics are slowly conquering my infected sinuses but improvement is slow. Thankfully there are matters I can deal with from home, as my office work environment can be accessed and contributed to whatever computer I have, wherever I am. It's not yet perfectly seamless but it's adequate. There are always legacy issues to be dealt with when it comes to software compatibility, as we are running machines with three different operating systems.

Every software giant seems to want to 'improve' work tools are already fit for purpose in the eyes and under the hands of the regular user. Creating a need for upgrades meant to enhance user experience keeps companies in business, but this can backfire if users don't agree, as has been shown by the fate of Windows Vista and Windows 8 in less than satisfactory user uptake. Reliability, consistency and compatibility are what most concern busy long term users. Stopping to learn how to use a new operating system or new versions of software you rely on heavily makes life worse for the user not better.

The version of MS Word we use in the office and at home dates back to the turn of the century. I installed and used Open Office as well MS Office when it was launched in 2002. I've used Libre Office since it was launched in 2010 as a Free and Open Source alternative to Open Office. It has continued to improve and add new features with each upgrade, and yet its user interface has remained consistently the same. It means learning new things is always an incremental extension of what you already know. It's a tribute to the way the Open Source design and programming community learns from user feedback. Why does Microsoft thinks it knows what's best for us. Consistency is every bit as important to users as improved speed and reliability.