Business on the move

We were relieved to hear Rachel and Jasmine had arrived safely after the ten hour flight back to Phoenix. Jasmine woke up in the afternoon and went for the briefest of introductory visits to her new school, then back home for more rest. Rachel did some house hunting, in preparation for her move into the city from deepest rural Cottonwood. It'll be great when we know they are settled in their new situation.

Meanwhile, there's a CBS office move to prepare for at the end of the week. Monday and Tuesday afternoons were taken up planning how we can keep working without interrupting the first key task of the year, mailing a hundred or so invoices out to the first batch of signed up radio users. For me it meant preparing the mail-merge data and getting it to run properly, so that Julie has an editable file to work on when she arrives on Thursday. Inevitably I hit snags, and opted to complete the chore at home. With all the admin PCs are configured to synchronise with Microsoft Skydrive, I can put its usability to the test, when Julie comes to work this Thursday on the invoice file generated. 

This  lunchtime I had a funeral at Thornhill. There was a familiar face among the mourners who greeted me cordially after the service. It took a moment for me to recognise Fr Roger Balkwill, who was assistant Curate in Caerphilly the same time as me, forty five years ago. The deceased was his brother-in-law. We've met no more than twice in the years since then. USPG sent him to work in mission in Zimbabwe after his curacy, and when he returned, he went to work in the West Midlands, which was where we next met, twenty years later. Co-incidentally, the last time we met was nearly two years ago, at the funeral of priest who was a contemporary of ours.

Afterwards, I collected Owain from home and we visited PC World together to buy yet another computer for the office. The next CBS move will be our seventh. It will place us in a building where we don't have the 24/7 access we need, so we're arranging a hire a room for a night support base in our present location, where we do have 24/7 access, and that means we need to create a clone of our radio monitoring and recording system, a necessity for continued operation. An extra PC is needed for this.

 The decision to buy a Lenovo 23" all in one machine took five minutes, the purchase took the best part of an hour on top of this, so eventually we got back to the office and Owain got Windows 8 installed and updated, updating being necessary before it was possible to upgrade to 8.1, which is why it all takes so long. NOT a selling point in the business world where time is money! Even so, it took just over half the time it took me with each of the other two PCs I've dealt with this past two weeks, a testimony to the faster BT Broadband we have in the office compared with our very flaky TalkTalk home broadband. Even as I write this, not many minutes pass without getting an auto-save error message, and most nights the signal drops irretrievably and no even a router re-boot will fix it.

With Owain working on PC commissioning, I was free to help pack stuff into the huge removers' crates delivered to our end of the office, and to pack away as much electronic gear as we can do without for the next couple of days.  It felt as if we were making little impression on the task in hand, since our admin area also doubles up as a radio workshop and is rarely tidy, but by the end of the afternoon, most of the cabinets and cupboard were empty and ready for the removers to take. We're looking forward to having extra space with our new arrangements, and hopefully that'll bring more order and calm to our work-space.
   

Final holiday weekend

Another damp miserable day yesterday. I stayed home while the girls went out to Roath Park in the morning, then traipsed into the office to work on generating the first batch of 2014 invoices ready for issuing next week. Last year I did them in November before going to Sicily. It's not a difficult task. The difficulty, when I only get to do it once a year, is remembering how to produce a decent data-set from the RadioNet client database, then getting Word's mail-merge to make use of it.

I did most of the work in the office, but when I hit a snag, I decided it was better to go home and figure it out, as background office noise was too much of a distraction. Now that I've got my home and three office PCs linked to Microsoft Sky Drive, and, it seems to be working as intended, this was easy, and it meant I wasn't late for supper. When I return to Spain it'll make it that much easier to work on things, as if I was at the next desk in the office - provided the internet connection works.

Today Owain joined us and we went to Castell Coch. Annoyingly, it was closed for the month for restoration and cleaning work, but according to the CADW website it was open. We were able to park outside the gates - not even the car park was in use, and the narrow roadside was lined with the parked cars of walkers. Not a good idea. We let Jasmine explore the outside of the castle precinct. She found a discarded ivy wreath in the dry moat, seemed to know exactly where it was meant to be, and took it back where it belonged and hung it up on the door.

Then we walked up the hillside and played with her in the woods for an hour.

We then drove over to St Nicholas and visited the Tinkinswood and St Lythan's burial chambers. 

We had lunch in the excellent Duffryn House visitor centre restaurant in between the two visits. Fortunately, the rain stayed away long enough for Jasmine to make the most of the children's playground outside while we finished our meals, although the place she seemed to love playing the most was at Tinkinswood, and it was quite a challenge to persuade her to leave when we were all ready to go and eat.

We returned home for a final family meal together with Owain before Rachel and Jasmine leave for Arizona on Monday. Tomorrow we drive  them to her in-laws for a final night's stopover before the flight from Heathrow.

 

That scynching feeling

Rachel got in about half past three, tired but happy, and we all got up late. It rained most of the day, and Clare took Jasmine around to Anwen's house for another afternoon of play. With nothing better to do, I decided to update the funeral database record I've kept since returning to Britain in 2002. It's occasionally useful to consult if a family request me to conduct a service for another of their kith and kin. I was appalled to discover that I hadn't made any entries since the end of May, only filed away some, but not all of the paperwork. There were half a dozen entries to make, not counting the half a dozen funerals taken in Spain on three separate locum visits. I didn't have any documentation for those, only odd notes in my diary, and very different recollections from those attaching to the sombre routine of pastoral duties close to home.

I'm now making an effort to maintain a degree of consistency between records and documents kept on all work and personal Windows machines via Sky Drive, still fearful that I'll end up losing stuff with automatic synchronisation, because I've forgotten to configure something properly. The source of this apprehension is trouble I've had with getting X-Marks to behave synchronising bookmarks between devices, phones, tablets and computers. Not configuring something correctly at installation of a new browser extension, I find it hasn't merged, but added the same set of bookmarks to the X-Marks web server, then synced multiple copies of the duplicated set of bookmarks to other machines. I then have to spend time de-duplicating bookmarks on X-Marks web server, and browsers I use - two, sometimes three different browsers for each operating system installed, ten different uses of X-Marks on current and legacy computers. It's a tangled mess going back years. It's what you get when you allow auto-sync to rule before checking you have it configured correctly. It's good to achieve some order and consistency, but it can be dauntingly difficult. It's not the stuff of which to make New Year's resolutions, it takes too much time!

 

I also use Google Drive to shift material around between machines I use, work and personal in a rather ad hoc manner, simply because all our accounts are GMail. This system also has its virtues, though I'm not in a position where I work collaboratively on documents that can take advantage of them. In a perfect world all work and personal stuff would be backed up on both Google Drive and Sky Drive for any kind of access, but it's hard to imagine Google and Microsoft competing Cloud systems being able to synchronise with each other.  

 

 

New Year comes

It rained most of New Year's eve, but Jasmine was happily confined indoors most of the time, playing with Clare's god-child Anwen. The mums and grannies even managed to get the kids out into the park to play on the swings and roundabouts for an hour during a brief respite. I went to the office to take the newly set up 17" laptop to its new abode. Getting it to work with the office router turned out to be a time consuming nightmare, nothing to do with this machine, but with a desktop machine which was both hard wired to the router and had its wireless card switched on. I had it on in order to set it up to synchronise with Windows Sky Drive. 

It wasn't obvious at all but I suspected something was amiss when I first spotted a 'wireless available' icon flash up as well as the wired network icon at boot time. The BT router isn't the newest piece of kit, and this model has given us many hours of confusion and tribulation in the past for no apparent reason. Now and then it needs a reboot to get every device back on line, but it didn't fix the issue this time around. Eventually I concentrated attention on the desktop PC, established the wireless card was running and competing with the wired connection for the router's attention. Once I'd switched off the desktop PC wireless off the router stopped misbehaving and accepted the new workstation's wireless login. At least I learned something but it slowed me down prevented other jobs from getting finished and delayed my departure, so that I had to walk home as the normal evening bus service had be this time simply withered away - so I was late for supper again.

Once Jasmine had gone to bed, Rachel went into town to see the New Year in with some dancing. Clare and I snuggled up on the sofa in front of the S4C review of the year programme, which saw us through to midnight. We then went up to the attic bedroom and watched the fireworks erupting into a clear black sky from the heart of the Millennium Stadium just over a mile away. Quite a good spot from which to contemplate the festivities, rather than exhaust ourselves joining in. I found myself thinking a lot about the joys of last New Year's Eve festivities en famille in Taormina. I confess that dark cold rainy Sicily was a much more cheerful place to be than dark cold rainy Cardiff.