Long walk between shops

Another late and lazy Saturday morning, time to complete downloading and then uploading to our Golden Wedding Anniversary web album the series of photos emailed to me by Richard Johnson over the past few late nights. He's a late bird, as I am, and we talk about computers and Linux in our email exchanges, one of the few regular users I know. 

Just after an early lunch, Clare was collected by taxi,  for an afternoon at the University School of Optometry, where she had agreed to let her eye condition be examined by different post graduate students, as part of their training. With a free afternoon, and a couple of small shopping errands, one in Canton and one in Gabalfa, I went out on a long walk connecting the two. First, down Llandaff Road to the Apothecary Shop, then along Cowbridge Road East, over the Taff River bridge and into the Castle grounds. The weather was mild and the rain stayed away, but there was a slight mist in the air, letting you know it was winter. Bute Park was busy with people walking dogs or shepherding children, taking advantage of a break in the wet weather. We're so fortunate to have this resource, right at the heart of the city. 

I walked out at the far end of Bute Park, and along the trail that leads to the retail zone, that is home to Staples, my second port of call, to buy another flash drive so I can experiment with doing a system back up, something I've not done so far with Windows 10 on any of my machines. These no longer seem to come with a separate partition for system backup/restore files. It stands to reason that a drive failure could make it impossible to perform a system restoration from a partition on the same hard disk. Yet hard drives may well outlast the usefulness of a computer in an ordinary domestic context, and maybe most offices too. Pre-installing operating system software and not setting up a recovery partition saves manufacturing costs, making for cheaper mass market pricing. 

Users get nagged about making their own system backup these days, but it's not easy. Even when using a separate hard drive, this process has a reputation for failing, and requires a certain measure of experience and confidence. I suspect many people don't bother, if not forget to, like me. I have not been motivated by anything other and wanting to learn how to do so. Any Windows operating system which fails on a machine of mine will simply get replaced by Linux, sooner or later. Anyway, I got a 32GB flash drive for just £6.99, the January sales are on with a vengeance now, shelves to be cleared to make way for new stock, with threatened price increases due to the weaker pound. Pity there's no longer anything I need.

Clare called to say she was home, just as I got to Staples, so I got back as quickly as I could, my poor knee performing better than yesterday. When I arrived, Google Fit told me that I'd done 7.2km and exceeded (for the first time) the 10,000 steps daily target, and by 10%, in a hundred minutes walk. I was pleased with that, but it's not something I'll have enough time to repeat every day. I was pretty tired and sore footed, too tired to go out to Fr Roy's 'at home' as intended this evening. I had to settle for taking it easy, preparing a sermon, investigating backup image making. The two good crime series on telly were both repeats of episodes seen a couple of times already. It gets easier and easier to spend an entire evening without feeling compelled to switch it on.

What I did discover about Google Fit, when later in the evening I looked at the day's data on first the phone and then the tablet was that only the walking time elapsed was correct and the same on both devices. The distance walked, on the phone was half what it had shown when I'd stopped walking earlier, and on the tablet, a tenth of the amount. Both devices had been in the same location all the evening, and only the tablet moved, very occasionally. Very odd behaviour indeed. I wonder why? Perhaps the GPS tracking gets muddled inside a house where it may be masked. Or not quite as smart an app as it seems?

    

Shopping around

I drove to St German's for the midweek Mass this morning and celebrated the memory of St John of the Cross, a suitable saint for this Advent season of waiting, given the part played in his spiritual teaching to longing for God and divine love. Afterwards I stopped for coffee in the church hall day centre, and met with PCSO Andy. It's the first time since I officiated at his wedding to Michelle back in the spring this year. He told me that they are expecting a baby this spring, and are planning a Christening at Saint Germans in early summer. As he's well known to parishioners, this is a celebration many people will be delighted about, me included, especially if I'm able to be involved in it.

Afterwards, I drove out to PC World to browse for bargains, but didn't see any. A young man took me through his sales routine for choosing a mobile phone. I think he underestimated my understanding of all the devices on offer, exactly what I wanted and why. He was so keen to promote state of the art stuff that he had difficulty in grasping my critical remarks relating to my actual needs and requirements for a purchase. Newest isn't always as good as tried and tested, or the issue of how much actual learning or adaptation is required to use a device as efficiently, if not more so than my existing one. 

I don't need a phone with a nano SIM cards fitting an adaptor tray on the phone. They are difficult to handle if you ever have to swap SIM cards. Taking it into a shop to do that when you could do it for yourself matters to me. Also having a removable battery, rather than one sealed into the case, currently fashionable and guaranteed to make the phone redundant after a year or so of heavy use. Young sales personnel may not need to use the word 'sustainable' as part of their sales patter, but it's part of what I need to know before investing time and energy in new kit.

After PC World, I went to Staples, which has put sales tickets on all its display stock since I was last in the store. I succumbed to the temptation to buy a 11.5" Acer Aspire E11 laptop at half the asking price. At £153, it's the cheapest Windows PC I've ever bought, and is small and light enough to take with me on my travels. It's not very powerful, but its specification is adequate enough for things I need to do when I'm away.

The machine wasn't factory reset when I took it from the store, and I had a problem setting up my own user area, as the ostensibly deleted demonstrator user account control mechanism was still functioning, and it took a trip back to the store to learn that it had no password. It works fine, except the the log-in screen still throws a Staples error message, although it logs in to my user account with administrator privileges as expected. If that doesn't clear with us, I'll have to factory reset it myself. Come to think of it, that's the first time I've not had to register the operating system from scratch, so I may be obliged to revisit this if I have any more hassles with it.

I cooked a prawn and mushroom risotto for supper instead of a paella, to finish off a bottle of white wine taking space in the fridge. I was quite pleased with the result. Then we sat and watched telly for a few hours before turning in later than intended. As ever.

     

  

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.

  

Caveat emptor

First a visit to St German's for the weekday Mass this morning, then a visit to Staples to look for a new computer for my sister June. She emailed me yesterday discussing laptops she'd seen in Peter Jones' (aka John Lewis) in London. I knew what the chain has on offer, but realised that they were over specified for her modest needs. There's no point in paying more than you need to for power and capacity you'll never have use for. 

Staples had just the right thing, a 15.6" inch Acer ES1-521 laptop, no extended keyboard, simple and sturdily built. It sported the Windows 10 NOW sticker, meaning that it was an old stock 8.1 machine needing to be upgraded by the user. I've done my fair share of upgrades over the past nine months, so I went for it. Actually, it's a quad core AMD with 4GB ram and a terabye hard drive excellent value at £269. 

I took it home and started running it at two in the afternoon. Four hours later, it finished downloading and installing 153 updates. This gave me time to get rid of some of the crapware, download Libre Office and Firefox, and set the machine up to resemble the working layout of the Sony laptop I bought and set up for her in January 2009. This way she'd have minimum confusion getting used to a new slicker quicker piece of hardware. It took another four hours to upgrade to Windows 10, and it wasn't a seamless experience. No automatic pop up to say the download was available. I had to find and visit Microsoft's upgrade website in order to kickstart the process.

It's not exactly the use of the word 'NOW' that belongs in the real world, and I wonder how the product marketing people get away with this without properly warning consumers that they must expect to waste a day machine minding while it upgrades. I haven't yet heard if the Advertising Standards Authority have had complaints about this kind of promotion, even for a fair bargain of a machine.

 

Back to Chromebook

A nice quiet lazy morning goes down nicely after a busy Sunday. Time to recuperate. I seem to need more of it these days. Then after lunch a walk. I also need constant exercise to stay fit. So, I walked first to the GP surgery with a prescription renewal, and booked myself a 'flu jab appointment, although I forgot to book an doctor's appointment as requested, but as the 'flu jab is tomorrow, all I have to do is remember to book as soon as I arrive. Then I walked part of the way to Victoria Park, hopping on a convenient bus to speed up the process of returning church keys from Sunday morning to Fr Mark, and from there walked over to the Staples store in Western Avenue and back, to buy a new Chromebook.

I gave Owain my 'early adopter' Samsung model. It has served me well over the past two years, and is in good nick, although its battery life is only four hours, about 60% of its original,. He's always made a bee line for it when he's visiting because of its convenient quick access for casual use. I've had my eye on a Toshiba Chromebook 2 for some time, as there's a model with a higher resolution screen which boasts more RAM and a better processor, although a Chromebook's speed relies as much on internet connectivity as anything due to its downloadable operating system. Staples had one one display last time I was in store, twenty quid cheaper than John Lewis, so my walk had added incentive.

There were rain showers as I arrived at the store. The rucksack I'd taken to carry home my purchase was too small for the containing box, and it slipped out and fell to the floor as I was leaving, fortunately not on a corner, so there was no damage to the box and none to the computer when I unpacked it. It was wonderful to set it up and be using it in under five minutes with all my Google account details and bookmarks in place. I'd waited a month before buying a new one, just to find out what it would be like to do without it, and rely just on the Asus Transformer for quick casual usage away from the office desk. 

Well, if you keep the Transformer switched off it takes minutes to book up and re-sync its registered accounts. The native browser is unbearably slow. Chrome and Firefox user interfaces are not fully consistent with desktop or phone versions. The software is showing signs of age in lacking user interface updates, and offering no convenient path to acquire them. I found I was repeating keyboard errors when writing or editing as use of certain keys is not the same as that acquired from habitually using other keyboards. While the keyboard itself is not that bad, the speeds of interaction of both keyboard and touch-screen with the display seem to fluctuate in practice. Such a relief to get back to the simple consistency and responsiveness of a Google Chrome device. Touch screens aren't always as precise as they need to be to avoid error, a good trackpad and/or a mouse is superior in my experience.

The other thing I like about Chromebooks is that the time from switch on to work is half a Windows 10 device and delivers a fully updated operating system. What Microsoft ads don't tell is the amount of time that has to be spent machine minding, either as the PC syncs filesystems, or while updates are installed, either at switch-off or start-up, and this can add a five minute delay to whatever you're doing. Time is always of the essence when you need information from an internet device. Closing many PCs while performing these essential routines may lead to it switching into sleep mode in the middle of updating, and that carries the risk of error. No problem if you rarely switch off your computer, but a risk if you're conscientious, and always switch off, to save battery or isolate from network hackers while unattended. 

Will Microsoft ever be as good as Google in delivering devices that address these issues at source? I find it very interesting that Microsoft partners are now marketing basic PCs in the same price bracket as Google Chromebooks, and with similar specifications. But, sales promoters always have to offer internet security packages to customers, to cover the glaring design deficiency in Windows operating systems, exploited in so many ingenious ways by global cyber criminals.

I notice that Five USA is currently promoting the launch of new CSI series on cyber crime. It'll be very interesting to see what kind of product placement (both hardware and software) features in the laboratory mis-en-scene.

Desk exchange

Today, I took Clare to the Heath hospital for an appointment, and browsed for bargains in Staples while I waited for her. My working habits have changed considerably this past few years, since I began using a smartphone and equally significant, a Chromebook. More routine tasks are achievable without needing to sit at a desk nowadays. Yet, I've been thinking of acquiring a higher resolution monitor, if not an all-in-one desktop PC to support viewing and editing photographs better. Browsing didn't get me far before I was summoned collect Clare and return for lunch, but it did get me thinking.

I still write sermons at a workstation because I need to print them, but create fewer documents that need printing, as so much more of my work is now done just on-line. I have little need of a better computer workstation when my existing one, running both Linux and Vista is adequate for my purposes. A better display is one possible improvement, and now I have to admit that faster broadband has become more desirable with so many internet connected devices in the house, as many as eight at a time calling upon the services of an existing standard set-up peaking at 100mb/sec, and these days often faltering. It's a few years since I upgraded Linux Mint, so this much I decided I should do first. This time I decided to back up my Home partititon first. It took many hours, so upgrading Mint from an installation disk which I made last week from a download has to wait.

Late afternoon a courier delivered the new office desk Clare ordered for me from Amazon. It's much smaller than the existing one, and will help give my home workplace a more spacious feel. But first, how to remove the existing desk from the study? The removal men carried it upstairs in one piece and it just squeezed into place before bookshelves were erected. Since then the shape of the landing at the top of the stairs has changed with adjustments to floor levels and a new corner linen cupboard. What went in won't come out in one piece.

I manhandled it out of the room, and was able to detach the very heavy desktop, but there wasn't enough room to manouvre the base, because of its size. So, reluctantly, sadly I had to cut it into manageably sized pieces to get it down the stairs. This desk is probably as old as I am constructed strongly enough to serve as an emergency air raid shelter, and last several lifetimes. Such a pity for it to come to such an end, but what else could I do, knowing we have no space to store it even for the few days it would take to find someone to take it away and re-use it. The remains will go to the tip tomorrow.

Then, with much loving support and organisational aid from Clare, I built the replacement desk from the flat pack kit. After four hours of physical labour altogether, I was satisfyingly tired. It is indeed tiny and flimsy in comparison to the old desk, and has half the amount of storage, so work has to be done on re-arranging office contents tomorrow.

Owain expressed shock and regret when I told him about the demise of the desk, protesting that it was a sort of family heirloom, as it had been among our domestic goods and chattels since before he was alive. For most of its time with us since it was originally bought second hand, it helped fill space in Vicarage offices with far larger rooms than any we now have. Sometimes, such desks stay where they are housed. At one time, both Clare and I had such large desks. Now both are gone. All part of the task of down-sizing as you get older. One day, I'm sure Owain will understand, and be grateful this wasn't a furniture headache he inherited.
   

Touching adjustment

Thankfully the rain stopped by the time I headed out to Thornhill Crematorium for an early afternoon funeral. Because of the holiday season the bereaved family had to wait seventeen days before they could lay their loved one to rest. Notification of another funeral for next week came in this morning. The death occurred on the same day, but this family will have had to wait twenty six days. How hard it is for anyone, except perhaps the smaller children, to take the usual pleasure in Christmas and New Year while waiting for a final farewell and closure.

Later in the afternoon I went out on another office tech' acquisition trip to Staples and PC World for a smaller more travel portable sized laptop than the one purchased a few days ago for a workstation. Nowhere to be found were any Windows 7 machines, so I had to settle for ordering a Windows 8.1 HP Pavilion with 14" screen which will be home delivered, so that I can set it up without the distractions of work going on around me. It won't be quite the nightmare the last one was, if I've learned from that awful experience, but it will take time to re-trace steps that will give me a setup I can live with. 

This computer will have a touchscreen. Since I started using the Android toting Asus Transformer Infinity with its slick touch interface and keyboard, I've become sufficiently habituated to the basic moves to find myself unwittingly stroking the non-touch screen of my little HP Win 7 laptop. It's going to be interesting to see if I'll get on better with Windows 8.1, designed with touch in mind, than I did on a Windows 8.1 machine that didn't have the touch option. Am I becoming a slower learner, reluctant to change my habits, I wonder?

 

Better than telly

An uneventful Saturday, apart from a brisk afternoon walk across the fields for tea at Jasper's in Llandaff. It was bitterly cold, albeit just above freezing, but a persistent wind chilled us to the bone. I took my camera, but only managed a few photos of a heron hunting for fish just below Blackweir bridge. I wasn't too pleased with the result, but at least I have an indication of what settings I might try out next time I go out snapping wildlife at 50 metres with a telephoto lens.

I drove to Abercanaid to celebrate the Eucharist and preach this morning. At the end of the service a bright eyed old lady came up to me to tell me about the snowdrops under the tree behind the church, urging me to go and look. So I went out, camera in hand, and shared in her delight.

 

On my way back into Cardff to pick up Clare from St Catherine's and go to the Riverside market for veggies, I called into Staples and bought an Iomega network drive at a bargain price for CBS office use. It also has a facility for remotely accessing files over the internet, invaluable for me to keep up to date when working from home, and for Ashley when he is out and about. 

The forthcoming review of the life and work St Michael's College has been on my mind a good deal of late. With time and leisure on my hands after lunch I, worked on a brief reflection to share with students about the life time value of a diverse and holistic education for ministry when it's my turn to speak at Tuesday Matins. The coming week is reading week. I thought I was due to speak the following week, but it turns out that I'm not due until the last week of term, so there's plenty of time to refine what I want to say. I enjoy tasks like this. It helps me to find out what I have noticed, and to develop what I think. Getting to a place where I'm satisfied can sometimes be a tortuous and lengthy process. I find this more satisfactory than watching telly, even if it's less relaxing.