Wednesday 9 January 2013

Another techie day

What a relief to wake up early and find that it's going to be a blue skies day! I spent much of the morning tucked away in my little office at home installing my new HP multi-function printer/scanner on both Windows and Linux Mint partitions. The HP printer Linux software installation required far less effort than previous piece of hardware. Things have improved and the equipment works quite well, though not quite as smmothly as the Windows installation - which was slower than I'd expected. Still, job done, and now I can take the old  Samsung printer/scanner and use it in the office in College, to saving having to descend two long flights of stairs to use the network printer and scanner.

I went into College to check if any of my tutor group students were back, bumped into Phil, and stopped for lunch before going in to the office. Ashley had lost his phone and was in the throes of arranging to have it blocked and ordering a new one. I took charge of the phone which the lost one replaced to see if I could extract the contact data from it, as no proper up to date back up had been done. Oh yes, it's easy to feel superior if you're good at managing these routines, but our office is so busy we don't always get the down time.

When we make time to work on these matters, the software programs are slow, and choosy about what they'll let you do, including parting with essentials. My office laptop now has Blackberry, HTC and Samsung software installed on it, and none of these packages with their respective hardware give the end user control needed. The excuse is to protect careless idiots from destroying their data, but you can't always get at the stuff you really need most, and keeping synchronisation under control is also a hassle. It can lead to data loss rather than preservation.

It was seven by the time I got home, after my fruitless efforts at data transfer. After supper I tucked into my second Inspector Montalbano novel of the week, and read until I started to nod off.

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