Dell first impressions

Cloudy with gusty wind and intermittent light showers all day 18C today. More work was needed on a brief text introduction to the life of St Bridget of Sweden commemorated in next Wednesday's Morning Prayer, before I could record it. It seemed to take up most of the morning after breakfast.

I cooked a savoury lentil with veg dish with rice for lunch. I wasn't pleased with the result as I didn't give enough time to some components and too much time to others. Also, I didn't cook quite enough so we had to settle for modest sized portions. Cooking for more than two requires extra attention to detail. Anyhow, it tasted OK.

After lunch I recorded next Wednesday's Morning Prayer and Reflection, and edited it. This was the first occasion on which I have used my new Dell laptop. The version of Audacity downloaded from Microsoft's app store must be the latest. There are a few modifications to its look and feel, also changes in the layout of the drop down menus I use, which took me by surprise, but are not contentious or annoying. In order to arrange the file system to replicate my habitual workflow. 

On the Honor laptop, I chose to keep all my archived sound and video files on the device and not store them in the Cloud, as they take up a lot of space and I am determined not to exceed my free allocation and have to pay for storage, either to Microsoft or to Google. Everything I have in both cloud services is backed up on physical storage. I have sufficient cloud space for everyday tasks, the volume of new material I store other than photos, is very little nowadays. Enough is enough I reckon.

There's an odd quirk in the Dell's sound management menu which puzzled me. With headphones plugged in, sound comes from the loudspeakers, not from the headphones. The settings menu shows the opposite but if you reverse it, highlight the loudspeakers instead of headphones, sound comes from the headphones. Apart from that, the two channel stereo sound isn't erratic or broken, the sound quality is superb, superior to the Honor laptop. A larger screen is also an advantage in displaying more of a section of sound file at any time. Glad that I set aside my misgivings and bought this. It makes my weekly editing job smoother. Altogether a pleasure to use. 

Clare organised a hairdressing session for Louie with Chris at his salon in Rumney. I drove them there for a three fifteen appointment and returned immediately, leaving them to return by bus. Then I walked in the park for a couple of hours, by this time late in the afternoon, dodging rain showers under the trees, and returning in time for supper Jasmine and Louis stopped in town on their way back from Rumney and had supper there. Jasmine and I then went out for a short walk at twilight. Late to bed again.