Time wasted

After breakfast I knuckled down and made a couple of efforts at a first video service recording. The first was too long and that meant pruning texts I'd prepared yet again to get them the right length. I second try was OK, but with a second or so of irrelevant footage at the end I wanted to trim away. No a problem in a video editing suite on my Windows 10 PC, except that the rendered edited file wouldn't play full screen on a phone and was a tenth of the size it needed to be. It tried every rendering option I could think of, to no avail, and wasted hours trying. 

Just as annoying was the fact the the PC wouldn't recognise my phone. I had to save the edited video file to a SD card, to transfer it to my Linux laptop, which has no trouble at all recognising my phone and its supplementary storage. As a result of losing so much time, my daily walk started mid afternoon and finished in darkness, and it was even colder still today, so tomorrow I'll go out in my ageing ski jacket and wear gloves. Time to give up wearing sandals for the winter too.

I tried every method I could think of to trim the end of that video without success. I have wasted so much time on this today, without success. That imposes even more pressure to record each service in one straight take. I'm dreading it. Only late this evening did the PC finally decide that it could and would recognise my phone, long after I found a workaround and gave up hope. I wonder if it will remember again tomorrow,

Sub zero days

It was around freezing point when we walked energetically to St Catherine's Sunday morning, where I celebrated the eight o'clock Eucharist. We returned home, and didn't go out for the rest of the day, although the weather was bright. With such a chilling wind neither of us felt like venturing far. Even though the days are lengthening noticeably, even though we have plenty of warm outdoor clothes, we seem to lack the motivation to go far. Except in imagination that is. My mind drifts south toward Málaga, where it's eighteen degrees by day at the moment.

Monday morning, I had to take the car in early for its pre-MOT diagnostic at our Golf specialist garage N G Motors in Splott. If it needs lots of costly work doing, we really will have to make the effort to buy a new one in the coming week before I leave for locum duty in Málaga. I caught the 61 bus back from Adamsdown as I couldn't establish where the nearest stop was over in Splott, so I had to walk about a kilometre to where I knew I would find one. There were three women waiting at the stop, and I let them board the bus before me. The last one, a lady about my age turned to me as she got on and said: "Thank you there aren't many gentlemen around these days. No please and thank you either" lamenting the lack of common courtesy that seems to pervade some aspects of life today.

Tuesday morning, I had a phone call from Mike's widow Gail, in response to a letter I'd posted to her yesterday with my written personal tribute to my oldest friend. She said she'd like it to be read at his Memorial Service, as she felt that I'd well captured the person she knew and loved, and expressed it beautifully. Indeed, as part of my mourning him, I put time into crafting and editing the text, so it would be beautiful. As a poet and writer, he so loved words. It was our shared delight. I wanted to do him proud. 

I suggested making a recording of my text for use in church. Gail liked this proposal, so I did just that, using the Windows 10 voice recorder app, and the Audacity sound editor to render the output into an MP3 file. I tested in on PC and Smartphone, and played it through my office HiFi, to check sound quality. I was pleased with the result, and emailed it to her straight away. Happily she thought the result was fit to use, and asked if I'd be willing to contact the Vicar, Fr Andrew Todd to arrange it with him, once she'd obtained his email address.

Later in the day, the garage called to say the car didn't need as much attention as I'd feared, given that it's 23 years old. With one minor welding repair, it passed its MOT and is fit to be re-insured and taxed again for another six months. This gives us longer to consider a replacement, and find a keen DIY enthusiast who might be glad of it for a restoration or race 'modding' project. After receiving the call, I had call from Fr Rufus to bring me up to date with his parish news. We chatted for so long that I no longer had enough time to go by bus and retrieve the car before the garage closed, so it had to wait until this morning.

I had to be out of the house and on a 61 bus by eight thirty to make the 45 minute trip to Splott, amid flurries of snow at minus four degrees. Still, the bus was warm, and this was far more relaxing than having to drive through rush hour traffic. The return trip in the car took twenty minutes, and Fr Mark arrived for a chat, and to hand over church keys, just after I got back. I was good to talk face to face, before I went to St Catherine's to celebrate the Eucharist on his behalf. It frees him for other duties in a crowded schedule, working without a colleague. I feel somewhat ashamed of my divided loyalties, going away to do similar duties abroad, leaving him here overburdened. There's need whichever way you look.

While I was out collecting the car, Gail called with her Vicar's contact details. This meant I could email the MP3 voice file to him. A little later, I had a reply, asking if I could provide it on a CD. He explained that there were few people around he was confident would be able to manage an MP3 player with the church public address system during the service. Having a CD guaranteed to play of typical church legacy equipment would be for him the line of least resistance. This is something I understand only too well, from bitter experience. 

Thankfully, I still have a small supply of blank writable audio CDs so was able to set about the task promptly, and post it to him later in the day. My only problem was working out how to burn an audio CD in Windows 10. This aspect of the system interface has changed considerably since the last time I needed to use Windows for CD burning. In fact, I have relied on a Linux driven computer to burn CDs for ages, as its old fashioned app interfaces are simpler, more straightforward, although just as feature rich. It's fit for purpose if you understand how it works and can control it without needing to spend too much time learning new features and layout. That's half the trouble with a lot of Windows products.

It's minus four tonight. Probably too cold to snow, even though it's overcast. Many parts of the UK have been disrupted by snowfalls. All day rolling news coverage about the weather makes this sound like the major crisis it isn't. Snow has always temporarily brought normal life to a halt in Britain and we moan and worry rather than do something about it. We don't manage adverse weather conditions to make daily life weather resilient as they do in the Alpine. It's a huge anxiety generator, along with brexit, if you listen to the news reportage. No wonder so many people resort to medication to cope with the impact on their emotions.

      

Future travel prospects

Another wet morning. I was collected at ten for a funeral service in Pidgeon's chapel, and this was followed by burial at Western Cemetery. Light rain persisted throughout. I felt sorry for the small band of mourners at the graveside, huddled under umbrellas on waterlogged clay terrain. The water table on this site is a couple of meters below ground, but in wet weather, open graves frequently flood giving undertakers problems and mourners additional distress. It's not always possible to pump all the water out of a grave beforehand, and water can seep in again within fifteen to twenty minutes.

I was home and dry again by noon. After lunch I paid the balance over the phone on our Rhine cruise in May. I couldn't get the web payment facility on the website accept a card transaction, but a lady on the end of the Riviera Travel enquiry line was able to put it through, and it didn't take any longer. We're both looking forward to this greatly.

Then I did some more long drawn out Windows 10 computer updates, as each of mine at different times comes to the top of its particular queue. I also updated Libre Office on all my machines, the least onerous of tasks. Each new update brings improvements, some of them take a while to discover if you don't look at the published change-log. Improvements in speed however, are immediately noticeable and welcome every time. It's rarer and rarer that I ever have to use MS Word these days. 

This weekend I bought a copy of Linux Format magazine fro the first time in several years, as it had an up to date Linux Mint 18.1 distribution disk with it. These days I find that less and less of the technical content of the magazine is material I can understand. There's much about web computing and content management I have not kept abreast with, and have become less interested in how to do new things than I am in issues like user friendliness, or the social and cultural impact of media on life today. I still can and do troubleshoot computer problems for ordinary users, but that's now the limit of my expertise.

I whiled away a little time trying to run the live Mint distribution CD on a laptop with UEFI boot software, but without success. I am so nervous of making an irreversible change, which requires me to find and pay a real expert to put right. Progress, if it is progress, is leaving me behind, I admit.

By late afternoon the rain stopped and the sun shone, so I went for a walk to Pontcanna Fields before cooking supper, collecting a dozen pieces of litter on my way. So far, rough mental calculation still indicates that I pick up an average of half a dozen for each kilometre I walk. There's more than this on the ground for sure, but sometimes after rain, it's difficult to retrieve.

Just as I was getting ready for bed, I had an email from a churchwarden at St John's Montreux asking if I was available at the end of the summer. That's when I next have free time so I emailed my availability to her, and found myself quite excited at the prospect of an all new assignment, as I attempted to relax into sleep. I can hardly believe that it's nearly five years since we last visited Switzerland. My focus has been mainly on Spain since then, so the prospect of returning to a familiar and much loved part of Europe as a locum, and bringing my French back into use is going to be another challenge.
   

Long drawn out updating

After a late breakfast, I finished off my Sunday sermon, then headed to St German's for the Friday Mass and hunger lunch. When that was finished, it was time to return and inspect the office PC. Overnight, it had updated its anti-virus libraries and scanned automatically, and, the download counter for the update backlog of updates stood at seventy five percent. The machine was still locked into completing this as a matter of priority, and the much simpler task of downloading and update the more preferable Chrome browser promised to take forever. So the PC will be left running until Sunday for its next inspection.

Often I read complaints in tech' web articles about the havoc wreaked on workloads by the interference from routine downloads. You can schedule them for when you're not working and are prepared to leave a machine running. To hell with you if don't like leaving computers switched on all the time. Linux systems tell you when software update downloads are available, and let you decide when to activate them. For the most part, these happen in the background, allowing you to continue working. I seem to recall that system tweaks are available that permit users to regulate the amount of bandwidth used by an update, in case a fair amount is required for work. 

Microsoft strives to impose control on this process, by giving their updates absolute priority by default. Their argument is, it's safer for all users, but especially those prone to ignore notifications and refuse to take responsibility for personal computer security. It's possible to opt out of the default and regulate this for yourself, with a little effort, but no choice is given about this default and not doing so generates unhealthy dependency on 'Microsoft knows best'. Users, from the outset should be confronted with a choice about whether they go along with this, and be offered an alternative to manage updating for themselves, with a separate mechanism working along Linux lines. It's already been mooted in on-line forums, but will it ever happen I wonder?

This evening, Owain arrived for the weekend in time for supper, although were obliged to start without him, as we were due leave early and walk in the rain to St John's Canton for a concert. We arrived early, and well before the concert started, Clare had a phone call ostensibly from me, but looked bewilderingly at me across the room, but my phone was silent in my pocket. I took it out to show her, and she looked even more puzzled. I opened the phone and discovered the opening screen had acquired a locking device. My first thought was that my phone had been hacked, as it otherwise looked identical to the way I expected it to. Then the penny dropped. I'd picked up Owain's phone, identical to mine, and he was ringing Clare's on my phone in a panic, to arrange to retrieve his phone before the concert. We arranged to meet for the exchange over the road outside Tescos, asap. I couldn't then call him to check his ETA, as his phone was pass-coded. He did, however, turn up within minutes, and I was able to return in good time to St John's before the concert started.

It was given by the Castalian string quartet, with works by Haydn, Schumann and Beethoven. They are a group of young musicians, playing together since 2011, having met and trained together in Hannover University School of Music. They have risen quickly to rank with top tier international touring performers, and no wonder. They play with such disciplined cohesion and passionate energy as generates exciting performance, rich with emotion. It was a rotten night, so there were hardly three dozen people present. I felt sorry for those who didn't brave the elements to share this experience. The church is a superb music venue for all kinds of live performances, and musicians tend to love it. In the silence between musical movements, the wind could be heard roaring through churchyard trees over the high roof. It was as if the music emerged from the wind, and was driven along by it. A marvellous experience.

   

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?

    

Kenilworth and faster broadband

We left Plas Baladeulyn mid morning and drove along the A5 to Llangollen to stop for lunch. Parking a difficult, but serendipdy prevail. We found a space just across the street from two tea rooms, side by side. We settled for the Vintage Road Tea Room, where we enjoyed, not only a good meal but also the charming experience of sitting out in their small back yard to eat. All the crockery used is china in traditional patterns, and there's lots on display as well, indoors.

Inevitably the M6 was congested with traffic and slow moving, but apart from that the journey, in good weather, was uneventful, and we arrived in Kenilworth by five. Kath, Anto and Rhiannon weren't there. They'd sent us messages and a few photos from their ferry crossing from Portsmouth to Bilbao on Tuesday, plus a picture of their hotel in Olite, the wine capital of Navarra province in Spain. We made supper, and got ourselves an early night, conscious of the need to get Rachel to Birmingham airport by six forty-five for her return flight to Arizona.

How nice to be able to take advantage of Anto's fast BT business broadband! Instead of two hours at home to download the office file system to this machine, it took twenty minutes. It certainly won't be long now until I put my order in to get faster broadband. All the users on this machine are now completely updated. Hopefully there'll be fewer virtual lockouts due to file system updating issues in future. What's bad is how little control you have over the process.

You can, however, create a user area to work in that doesn't have a OneDrive address to sync to. The system takes slightly longer to boot up, as if it can't believe that syncing isn't required. But then you can access internet without hindrance, and if needs be get files from any OneDrive account by means of a browser, just the way it always was. 

As time goes on, it'll be interesting to see if the amount of comment on tech forums about the Microsoft's use of syncing to 'data-slurp your machine and potentially compromise data privacy increases because users don't have control over what's being sent. Let's hope that complaints will rise into a roar of discontent, and more people switch to run versions of Linux on terms of their own choice instead.

 

Windows woes

Today was a damp day. Rachel, Jasmine and Clare went off to the St Fagan's Folk Museum. I went shopping for new office equipment, meeting up with Ashley in John Lewis', and returning home with a seventeen inch HP Windows 8 'laptop' to set up for use as a dedicated crime data work-station for the CBS office in the coming year.

Thus far I have been deterred by so many negative reviews from considering Windows 8, but now it's getting rarer to find Windows 7 kit on sale, there wasn't much alternative to spending lots of time and energy hunting for something to buy of the specification required before the end of our financial year. Ah well, sooner or later I have to find out more about this, and waste time re-learning how to use a piece of equipment to perform familiar tasks efficiently, just because a user interface has been changed without any reason that's at all relevant to my needs. But this is what commercial companies do to prove that we are their slaves, rather than them serving out best interests. 

I much prefer the superior Linux operating system with its choice of user interfaces, but in the everyday world of users who are just consumers of tools and products, persuading anyone to change their habits is as difficult for them as it is for me. So reluctantly I have a go a learning something new and pretty irrelevant to my working needs, as it's less inconvenient than chasing around after an alternative. 

If you're relatively new to computers, setting up a Windows 8 PC is elegantly simple. If you've spent decades getting Windows or Linux machines to work the way you want them to, it's painful. You feel as if you're not in control. The way the user interface works is different, it's more difficult to get beneath the slick looking surface to the level where there's detailed control. At first encounter, it feels as if you have no control at all. The user interface is designed with touchscreen in mind more than mouse. Touch is all very well, but  mouse control is more accurate in the hands of an experienced user. The chosen machine wasn't touch-screen, and I found this infuriating at first.

Setting up the machine for initial use took four time longer than doing a fresh Linux install, then even longer as I pressed on to upgrade the machine to Windows 8.1 straight away, since this fix promises to address some of the complaints made against Windows 8 from day one. All in all, we're talking five hours finding my way around and then machine minding installation and downloading patches and upgrades. This included half an hour going around in circles trying to find out how to do the upgrade, as links provided pointed to the Windows App store, and this had nothing to show how to get the upgrade. I got the upgrade from the Microsoft website, which was less than user friendly, taking to the bottom of a very long page before you could click on a download link that produced to goods. What a mess!

OK so TalkTalk internet is lousy and slow, but it only crashed the upgrade download once, and after a reboot, picked up where it left off, so that's one up for Microsoft. But, the process took up the whole of a Saturday evening, and at the end I still had to find out how to install my small portfolio of programs to turn into a piece of kit for the office desktop that 'just works'.

This is is me, performing a few of the functions of a system administrator (most are beyond me) to keep a small team of people active and confident that computers will do what they need, are secure, stable and don't make unintelligible demands of them that get in the way of productive work, or require them to change and re-learn working methods without hindering their work schedule. If the creative and visionary designers of a new generation of operating systems had understood the needs of the 'drones' at the real workfaces of the world, they would not have changed so much at the functional surface level, or at least made adoption of such a change optional. No wonder PC sales have slumped badly over the past year. Bad news travels fast.

 

Belated upgrade

This morning a parcel for me arrived by courier from PC World. On Saturday I ordered a disc copy of Windows 7 in order to upgrade my work Windows Vista laptop. It's a well specified machine, but the flaws of  Vista betrays its potential, and connectivity is often a problem. An operating system refresh is preferable to replacing a reliable serviceable machine with many more years of life in it. 

So, after making a funeral preparation visit in Danescourt for a service the day before New Year's Eve, before lunch, I went to the office mid-afternoon just to do the installation, and was amazed that it should take four hours to complete.

Admittedly, the outcome was satisfactory, with all existing programs, settings and data preserved. It did however, wipe the machine's master boot record, depriving me of access to the secure partition with  an install of KDE Linux on it. That problem shouldn't be too difficult to fix when I have a spare hour. It will inevitably take a while to draw down all the security patches and modifications to Windows 7 that have arrived over the past few years, but never mind. It's worth being patient with because it works well, and is familiar. No need to waste time on learning how to use yet another user interface with the most recent upgrades, Windows 8 and 8.1.

While I waited for the machine to finish the upgrade, Ashley went over the documents we need to send in preparation for the next meeting we have with Council officers on Jan 2nd. The office was quiet with the effective abandonment of inessential regular duties as the festive season takes hold, and it meant we could work without distraction for a change.  Even so, the calm was punctuated by the arrival of a series of Twitter notifications advising that one of mine regarding William Dalrymple's 'Point of View' programme has been re-tweeted half a dozen times. It never happened to me before! 

I didn't get home for supper, until nine o'clock. Just as well I don't have any early duties tomorrow.

Machine minding

An uneventful few days. I took Andrea to her train on Tuesday morning, went into the office in the afternoon and to Chi Gung in the evening. Wednesday in the office was devoted to preparing the mailing of a dozen letters of invitation to prospective members of the Crime Reduction Partnership Board of Management for the inaugural meeting at the end of the month. Once the job was done, I had the task of re-assigning and setting up the new HP desktop PC for the Administrator to use, as it didn't suit Ashley's workflow pattern. Julie now has one machine with the office accounts on it and another for managing the rest of her labours. Getting that right also involved moving the printers around, but in the end, there were improvements all round.

What I hadn't bargained for was a massive twenty two item system update installation from Microsoft, which effectively took four machines in succession out of service for at an hour at a time. Downloads happened in the background, but then, when installation started, system reboots were required which took an age to complete. I was left machine minding, and got home much later than expected as a result. It was the same with Windows PCs at home as well. I was grateful for the use of several Android devices to consult until the job was done on a further three machines.

I went into the office early on Thursday, as I'd forgotten the night before to install our standard backup software on the new HP desktop, which Julie is accustomed to using at close of day. Then I had to wait while my office machine did its updates, as I'd not got around to it the day before. Luckily most of this week's waiting time was done when there wasn't a need for all the machines to be in use, and other things could be done not requiring computers in the meanwhile. Big companies can afford a tech guy to waste his time machine minding, or devising clever automated routines to run updates network wide, but I'm not that clever. 

It did make me wonder however just how many hours of productive time the world's billion computers take up waiting for updates - well, probably half of them don't bother installing updates, don't need to, or are designed beautifully to update in the background without interfering with anyone's workflow. But still if it's half a billion PCs, taking a total, say, of fifteen minutes waiting time a month, that's three hours a year, fifteen hundred million hours productivity time. Just say two thirds of those are updated out of work hours by corporate IT staff, that's still five hundred million wasted hours a year. Apart from the hours re-deployed by meticulous planners who factor in tea breaks, assignations, keep fit routines, or a trip to the shops in their down-time. Thankfully, the rise and rise of Linux based equipment via Android and Chromebook operating systems is effecting a necessary change in this. Will Windows ever catch up?
  

Picking up the pieces

Since we've returned home, we are both still waking up before dawn, much earlier than usual. At first light the streaks of cloud across the sky are all red, and it doesn't take long for the the cloud cover to grow dense and grey, obscuring the remains of the early blue and it stays dull and grey all day, and sooner or later rain comes and goes. It's typical of mid winter along the lowlands of the Severn Estuary. There's no point in hiding, so eventually we get up, eat breakfast, say prayers and get on with the day, trying not to get lost thinking too much of open skies, sun and mountains.

First, a trip to the GP surgery to pick up a prescription in response to yesterday's letter. It isn't ready, I can't hand around to find out why, as there's a tutor team meeting in College to get to on time. It's the day when activities resume, and there's a Masters' degree course running. Our students will arrive in fits and starts over the coming days, as there are two weeks worth of an exam schedule before the normal routine of College life resumes.

After the meeting, I popped across the road from College to say hello to Pauline, and learn that two St John's people have now died recently over the holiday. Nancy, in her mid nineties and Sam in his late eighties, details of funeral arrangements are awaited, but it's likely neither will be in a place where they were well known and loved. After coffee I inspected Pauline's increasingly slow running computer. Its browser was congested with tool bars and add-ons that sap performance on a seven year old machine, and goodness knows how long it is since the hard drive was last de-fragmented.

We left it running as we parted company, to get on with our respective afternoons. I think a new machine will soon be necessary, even though this one hasn't died. It can't keep up with the demands made on it. Sad to say, it would run quite decently for regular tasks using Linux, but the problem is the learning curve for someone busy. And having made the switch, the machine might still expire, and another new operating system would then have to be learned, and that's no fun when you're busy and organising your life depends upon not having to think about what you're using.

I returned to the GP surgery and was successful in obtaining a prescription second time around. I collected the medicines, returned home to change wet shoes, and then headed into town to see if I could buy a replacement kitchen florescent tube, but no luck again, the sizes don't match, and we'll have to order one via the internet. Our not very efficient kitchen suppliers use non standard components - vendor lock-in. Things you don't tend to think about when you're spending lots of money fitting replacement units. 

By the time I got home it has already been dark for two hours. Clare was working out how to assemble and use the Nokia phone she bought today to replace the stolen one. The operating system, though basically the same had a different user interface, and this took an age for her and I to figure out. We're just not used to swapping phones. Why should we unless lost or broken? Clare's now taken out a monthly contract. This was less easy than anticipated, because she had to prove who she was. The reported theft of phone meant that the PAYG credit was rescued and credited to her, but it also meant that a strict credit rating identity check had to be run as protection against identity theft. Pleasing if inconvenient thoroughness.

She also enquire of her banks when she could expect replacements for the other two cards reported missing and presumed blocked nine days ago. Neither branch had any record of notification. The cards didn't seem to be blocked at all. Clare called the card protection agency who confirmed from their records that notification of all three cards lost had been sent, but not acted upon over new year. This is certainly to the discredit of the banking system. Come to think of it, the very notion of 'bank holiday' is not at all comforting in a 24/7/365 world.

It was disturbing news, but thankfully bank statements showed no unauthorised card activity on either account since theft. It's possible that after money and phone were extracted by the thief, the bag ended up in the sea, or tossed into waste land, where it may one day be discovered. It was what the investigating officer said happened typically in these cases. Local thieves weren't that sophisticated.

I whiled away the evening reading one of my Christmas presents: my first Inspector Montalbano novel by Antonio Camillieri - the Voice of the Violin. I remembered the TV movie well, so there were no surprises, but the humour and lean descriptions played well with memory and imagination, and I read it in an evening. A sliver of wintry comfort.

 

Malware crisis

The annual Christmas circular newsletter is now printed off and ready to go, so after a visit to the doctor's for a routine checkup and lunch yesterday, I went into town to buy some Christmas cards. As I was paying for them my phone went. It was a worried Katherine, asking for advice. Anto's office computer had been hit by a virus, and getting rid of it was posing a problem. I made a few suggestions as I stood outside the card shop in St David's Centre, clutching boxes of cards as I talked, not having had time to put them in my rucksack. I then waited for further updates for the rest of the afternoon. 

It couldn't have happened at a worse time for them. They were awaiting Rhiannon's return from school, and were then about to set off for Heathrow for an overnight stay before flying to Cuba for a long planned trip to all the island's best music and dance places, to refresh their inspiration for their latino band Lament. Viv, Anto's sister minds the shop while they're away, but needs a serviceable secure system to use. Eventually, the status quo seems to have been restored, after performing a system rollback, re-installation of all OS updates and Antivirus software, which seemed to have been knocked out by the malware attack. 

If only I could persuade Anto to use a Linux driven computer for secure threat free surfing, and restrict internet use of his business computer to selected safe sites, the liklehood of bad stuff like this happening would be reduced greatly. I shall nag him about it over Christmas. I even woke up very early and remembered that I had forgotten to tell them to change all their passwords as a security precaution. So I got up and texted them at the airport as they were checking in, poor souls.

Two students were absent for the tutor group meeting, one was poorly and the other's wife was ill, which meant a change in our arrangements. The Paradise Run arrangements came up for discussion, as College students undertake food distribution duties a couple of times a term. Disappointingly, nothing was known as nothing had been said to them about the Street Carers Forum, or its accreditation and training programme. It's up to me now to ensure that there's an evening's briefing for students factored into the College timetable for next term. I think it could be useful at several different levels, and Paul Hocking, Chair of the Street Carers' Representative Group is keen on the idea.