Follow-up

Despite the extra stimulus of yesterday evening, I was awake at six, and walking to St Catherine's early to celebrate the eight o'clock, and later the ten thirty. This past week I've been enjoying the exceptional warm weather and bright sunlight, but strangely it had its impact on my this morning, as I started to develop a migraine aura once I switched on the pulpit reading light to preach. My eyes deal reasonably well with sunlight and high contrast, but certain kinds of artificial light and natural light mixed seem to trigger a reaction. I've noticed it happens when I go into shops during bright sunny weather. It doesn't last long, about the length of a sermon in this case, even though I switched off the reading light immediately and carried on. It was a somewhat unnerving experience.

It was lovely to have a family lunch with Rachel afterwards, even though Owain was unable to join us, and Rhiannon wasn't with us, staying home for a teen sleepover with friends. Kath and Anto left fairly soon afterwards, and I devoted the rest of the day to audio editing and learning Movie Maker. The audio only recording was OK, but colourless in comparison to the stereo video sound recording, as it was mono only. I've got the first half gig video stitched together with minimal audio. Without editing redundant material out, it's fifty minutes long, as is the second half. That's quite long for a solo performer. And Rachel next stops smiling or looking happy while she makes music. Bless her.

Gig night

A visit to the GP surgery yesterday morning for a routine set of blood tests and an ECG. Apart from that, and sermon preparation, the day was taken over by Rachel getting ready for her gig practicing and organising her set playlist. Because of the unique way in which she uses different tuning settings for her various songs she needs to have at least two guitars set up ready to use. The one she brought with her we felt didn't really fit the bill, so we tried without success to hire one, but to no avail. Clare and I separately had the same idea, and an instrument fit for purpose was borrowed from Diana's husband Pete and fitted with a brand new set of strings. Rachel has bought lots of packets as she found a special offer in town. In any case, it seems they are less expensive here than in the USA.

Kath and Anto arrived with a car load of equipment for the gig, including a PA system leads, to add to the guitar brought last weekend, and a few essentials Rachel brought with her from AZ. At six we accompanied Rachel to the Apothecary Tea Room on Llandaff Road, and got the place ready for the gig. My role was to make a sound and a video recording. The sound job was entrusted to Clare's iPad voice recorder plus a substantial mono microphone of Rachel's, positioned on a boom stand at the back of a room about 6 metres square, with my Sony HX300 next to it mounted on a tripod on a table. This gave me opportunity to alter position and focus if required.

Disappointingly, given the effort we made in advance publicity, only a dozen friends turned up, but they were a warm and supportive audience, nevertheless, and Rachel shone, performing tirelessly, answering questions from the audience, at one point coping with the invasion of a small escaped puppy dog and a noisy avalanche of empty bottles being added to the recycling bin by the bar next door. Kath added backing vocals on a few Rachel songs she remembered from ten years ago. It was good to see them reunited in music again. The last time was when they sang the specially composed duet celebrating our Golden Wedding anniversary celebration two years ago. We are so blessed!

The recordings turned out quite well, despite the need to swap out memory cards, and the camera running out of battery near the end of the second half. Thankfully I'd been taking still photos with my Song HX50, which has an identical battery, so I was able to swap them around, without losing too much of one song. The challenge now will be to edit sound and video into a useable form which Rachel can publish on several different web platforms. But first, there's the small matter of having to re-learn how to use Windows Movie Maker. So forgettable, unfortunately. 

  

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?

    

Bio-diverse Canton

This morning we visited The Apothecary shop at the bottom of Llandaff as Clare was in search of a particular herb tea. The owners have turned their , back room into a congenial little tea room, where you can try out many of the brews on sale in the shop and sample some fine looking vegetarian and vegan cakes made by small local providors. What an interesting idea. Clare picked up a leaflet about the open day being held at the nearby Chapter Arts Centre Community Garden, so we went over there to have a look around.

 

Chapter Arts centre, once a secondary school has a large open forecourt in front of the main building once a playground. Two thirds of it have been re-assigned from parking to an area with a series of raised flower beds with bushes, trees and an enormous variety of vegetable and flower plants. There are beehives out the back of the building and a greenhouse in one corner. It's worked by enthusiastic volunteers, and interestingly isn't managed in a regimented way. All kinds of plants grow together side by side, higgledy-piggledy rather than in neat rows. I guess the accent is on bio-diversity, and showing how what are thought of as weeds co-exist, as in the wild, with flowers and edible things. 

We paid to get it, as the Open Day is a charity fund raising event, and were treated to a free drink and a piece of home made cake. An accordeonist and a recorder player were duetting outside, playing folk dance tunes and promoting Pentreffest the annual folk music and dance festival to be held next month in the village of Rudry, the other side of Caerphilly Mountain from Cardiff. We brought home a pot of Chapter honey, utterly delicious. Urban honey benefits from an environment with cultivated gardens and parks presenting much greater floral diversity to bees than rural areas dominated by agrarian mono-culture. Nature's own subtle commentary on what we've done to the land.

Owain arrived in time for supper and a good chat before heading out for a late gig at Gwdihw in town. Before bed we watched the last episode of 'The Young Montalbano' for the second time around. Next Saturday I believe a new series of  Danish crimmie 'The Bridge' is set to begin, but we'll be up in the Llyn Peninsula with Mark and Saralee, over from Seattle from a European holiday, starting in Belguim, then going to Spain, and finally, with us to North Wales. If we have tell in the place we've hired, I doubt if it will get switched on, as there'll be so much to talk about. It's the best part of five years since we last saw Saralee.