Follow up and check up

I spent the morning completing work on the second half gig video. This plus the audio recording is for Rachel to keep and study her own performance in detail at leisure. The next task, which I then started on is making short self contained videos for each complete song she's written. These can be uploaded more easily to You Tube in a release sequence, separately publicised via Facebook, giving optimum exposure to her full range of live performance material. Useful as a musical CV for any booking agent interested in what she can do. It's a long and fiddly job however, and will take a few days of spare time, considering the mistakes I'll make, weeding out recording glitches which evade initial attention - a product of not being able to record continuously on the same memory card. 

I've discovered today that a relatively slower card has latency glitches. When the maximum video file size is reached, a new file is started automatically but the swapover takes marginally longer and can leave a gap in the data stream which shows up in playback. That few seconds gap can be edited out easily if you've not missed it, but it's annoying to find it post production. It makes sense of needing a larger faster card, matched to the speed at which the camera's video processor works. For the first time the technical details printed on SD cards make practical sense to me.

This afternoon, I walked to UHW Heath hospital for an appointment with an ENT specialist to look into my occasional nosebleed problem. It's a matter of eliminating the possibility of anything out of the ordinary going on in my nostrils. Nosebleeds a common place enough, and I told him that understand mine are usually a result of sleeping awkwardly and constructing blood vessels in my neck. Then when I turn over, pressure buildup leads to a surge that ruptures a minor blood vessel. I've had less bleeds since I started using a shaped neck pillow. They're not so frequent or copious as in year past, but it's been a continuing problem for about fifteen years, so inevitably my GP thought it best to get it checked out. I've been on the waiting list since last December, so it's a relief to get this out of the way. I must return for another specialist check-up in October.

Next week, another appointment I've waited for since last December, this time for an endoscopy, occasioned by chronic haemorrhoid condition. I know I need this hi-tech inspection. I've coped with discomfort and occasional pain for a long time without improvement, but can't say I'm looking forward to this - no least because I dread the follow up interfering with my locum visit to Montreux next month. Well, we'll find out soon enough, I guess.

I got the bus back to Western Avenue from the hospital and walked home through the Fields, which look parched and golden at the moment after weeks of sunshine and little rain. I then had to drive out to St Mellons to meet a bereaved family to plan a funeral in St German's I'm taking this Friday. The traffic across town was very slow moving due to an M4 carriageway closure beyond the A48, and I had trouble finding my way to the street due to a wrong turning shortly after leaving the A48, which meant that I went all my way around the poorly signposted housing estate ring road, before identifying the correct turning. It's not a part of the city I'm at all familiar with.

The deceased in his last job and afterwards as a retirement volunteer had been on the staff of the Millennium Centre, and loved being involved in the hospitality side of productions. He was a fan of musical theatre, and his son showed me me the garage cum storeroom, whose walls are decorated with posters for all the shows presented there since it opened. He'd wanted the exterior of his coffin to be lined with playbills, and arranged for copies so this could be achieved. The family was none too keen about this, so the playbills will go into the coffin with him, all rolled up, as a compromise. Rod, a former member of St John's City Parish, now a St German's regular is a good friend of the family, and was there to greet me. From the way he spoke, I could tell that he'd been there for his terminally ill friend, accompanying him, ready to listen and discuss with him about the impending end of his life. Lovely to know such lay ministry goes on quietly when us clergy are so thin on the ground these days.

Tech disruption, deluge disruption

I woke up with a nose bleed in the night, and fortunately it didn't last long, but as a result I slept uneasily, hoping to avoid a repeat performance. There was a repeat, however, as I was drinking coffee at the end of breakfast, and incautiously blew my nose, having forgotten about the night incident. It was a heavier bleed and took longer to quench. Most disconcerting.

Despite today's torrential rain, Owain decided to come over from Bristol to see us on his day off. After his phone call, I took Clare by car into town for her swimming session, then drove out to Staples on Western Avenue to get a spare flash drive and SD card. The one I took with me on my Spanish trips this year is already full with backups of the photos I took there, and I still hadn't replaced with spare card I carry in my wallet as  'insurance' against forgetting to replace one extracted from a camera and accidentally left inserted in a computer when leaving the house on a photo expedition. It's something I have done three times, if not more this year. Distraction? Forgetfulness? Ageing? Who knows. It's taken me long enough to remember to buy one. 

I got two Toshiba branded 16gb flash devices for a tenner. Two 4gb devices for the same price would have been reasonable to pay two years ago. The same flash drive in Spain cost just under €5. Here, also on special offer, £2.99. How quickly the consumer technology market is disrupted by innovation, demand and pricing changes! Perhaps you wouldn't notice this if you only changed computers every 4-5 years, but now phones set the pace, with the expectation of changing devices in 18-24 months as battery life diminishes. 

There's now an array of sub-£200 windows laptops, using flash memory rather than mechanical hard drives, due to increased capacity, faster silicon memory chips flooding the market, at a lower cost than cheap mass manufactured mechanical hard drives. Will more people acquire the habit of exchanging these every couple of years? Especially as hard wired battery death approaches? The consumer PC market has shrunk much of late. People aren't buying, even when they can afford to. Phones and tablets can be effective replacements, but I believe there's more to this reluctance.

Apart from price, average consumers have limited needs, invest time and energy learning to use their PC well, why change it if it's not broken? New operating systems and software upgrades demand extra time to set up and re-learn, getting in the way of quick and easy habitual usage. This is confusing annoying and a deterrent to upgrading. Cloud storage makes data access equally possible on different devices. It doesn't do the same for software use learned a decade or longer ago, still serviceable. I believe tech innovators are in denial about this where mass markets are concerned. The business world showed significant reluctance to move up from Windows 7 to Windows 10. Quite apart from the cost of upgrading, there's a cost of improving the skill-set of the work force with ever costly training. Speed, capacity, security, a reproducible user interface experience are all to be welcomed and invested in, but innovation in the sphere of usability has a bigger impact and requires investment which may not be seen as worthwhile if it disrupts business workflow. When will tech innovators learn? 

I left the store and headed out into the traffic, which was unusually slow moving, and no wonder, as the turning that would take me back in the direction of Cardiff Central Station was partly flooded. It's that time when drains need clearing frequently of falling leaves, and if they get washed off the pavements before they can be collected, they soon cover and block roadside drains when rainfall is this heavy. All the way back into town the gutters were awash, making it hard for motorists and for pedestrians even harder to get about. I was most thankful our venerable Golf didn't react badly to the excess of water.

Owain texted me his arrival time but it was impossible to reach the Taff Embankment where we were to meet before him. I was only a few minutes late, as traffic flow improved a little. Sensibly Owain had an umbrella with him, and was standing patiently where I could see him and collect him. Clare wasn't far behind us returning by bus from her swim. It was good to spend the afternoon together. Owain's been learning how to use Google Analytics in the course of his web content management work, and looking after his own media music and culture blog as well. He showed me me how this worked, which gave me a insight into what kind of information about us and our browsing habits is collected from each and every web page visited.

Unfortunately he couldn't stay for supper as he had things to do back in Bristol in the evening. Later on the news I heard that Bristol Temple Mead railway station had been closed temporarily, as there was passenger overcrowding, caused by delays on services where lines had been flooded in the South West. He texted to say that his train had been subjected to a long delay in getting into the station, as a result of unaffected services having to wait outside the station. A story no doubt repeated in many other places around the country. No doubt, some will grumble about apparent national unpreparedness for the impact of 'extreme weather events', but regardless of present ability to predict and warn about coming severe weather, nobody can precisely determine how it is going to affect specific places and what the knock-on consequences will be. Emergency planners work to cover every kind of scenario, but in the end expecting the unexpected is as much an art as a predictive science.