Global web crash

Another glorious sunny day reaching 28C in the afternoon. I awoke to news of a major Microsoft internet outage, making corporate systems  using its Azure Cloud services crash worldwide. It was caused not by a cyber attack, but a faulty core system update and compounded by a separate flawed anti-virus update from a service provided by a back office business service I've never heard of called Crowdstrike. 

These faults didn't take long to remedy, but the impact was far reaching, as networks running hospitals, airlines, banks and businesses were required to re-boot networks manually the net result being chaos. Cancellations appointment booking and payment systems not working. It reveals how vulnerable the world has made itself by over dependency on Microsoft and its Cloud computing products. It may have shown us the shape of things to come, when things like this happen not by accident but by design.

Since Azure is for enterprise  networks, much of individual domestic computing services have been untouched, but this is going to set alarm bells ringing. Apple and Linux based systems were not affected. It makes me even more determined to get replace Windows 10 with Linux Mint when Microsoft stops supporting it next year. First I must work out how to free myself from dependence on the one app I do still need for making my weekly video prayer slideshow, Windows Photos (Legacy), as Microsoft calls it, dismissing in effect its value to those who use it, as something they regard as outdated.

President Biden has covid and is self isolating, many of his allies are openly appealing to him to step down. It's not clear who would replace him. In the meanwhile Trump's support continues to rise. The King's speech on Wednesday was one of the longest on record since 1945, spelling out an ambitious programme of new policies for which the government will be proposing legislation.

Apart from following the morning's spate of interesting news stories, I sat and wrote a poem inspired by seeing a birthday party held yesterday afternoon in Thompsons Park. Then I cooked lunch. A pork steak for me, hake for Clare, with quinoa carrots and a tough spring cabbage, requiring more cooking that I gave it. Better luck next time.

When I walked in Thompson's Park after my post-lunch siesta another birthday party was going on under the trees. People seizing the opportunity to make the most of the weather to have fun. It's also the end of term today. I expect the parks will even busier in weeks to come.

After supper, I responded to an email about the Azure Cloud outage from by dear friend Valdo. He has recently replaced his 2004 Macbook with a 2013 Macbook Air and converted it to Linux Mint. Quite an achievement. It works perfectly. I think he's pleased with the result. Then a brief walk for a breath of fresh night air before bringing the day to a close.

Clare's upgrade

It was nice to wake up to sunshine, even if there were showers on and off later in the day. This morning's 'Thought for the Day by Tina Beattie was interesting, as it was a reflection on Sunday's episodes of 'Call the Midwife' and 'Line of Duty' which went out on BBC One in tandem. The former she said, highlighted compassion, while the latter highlighted justice, both core Christian values which all need to take to heart.

Late morning, I walked down to Tourotech, our local independent geek store before lunch and bought Clare a two year old refurbished Core i5 laptop with 8GB RAM and a 250GB SSD. It was already set up with a Windows 10 single user area, and a small assortment of free software, but Clare wanted to continue with Linux Mint so installing that was my next job. 

But first I drove her over the the University School of Optometry to get an adjustment made to her new specs. The installation only took twenty minutes. Copying her data from old too new device to two hours. The only thing I had trouble with was getting wi-fi to work, even after correctly installing and configuring the software. I stopped at six and completed my walk for the day later than usual, listening to the Archers on my phone while I was out. Today's episode was interesting as it was all about the christening of Alice's newborn - her chat with the Vicar and the grannies getting the christening party ready.

It turns out that wi-fi works if Secure Boot is switched off. There may be a workaround but I have yet to discover it. For the most part, the new laptop involves little or no new learning or changing of habits for Clare, and that's what counts. This machine has Mint's Mate desktop, and is quite pleasing to the eye as well as being familiar in its function.

If only Windows 10 was as easy to tailor consistently to one's own needs without forever swamping the user with annoying nags and notifications. Chromebooks are better still, but not as flexible as Linux, and you have to adapt to them, as customistion is only possible in a limited way. Interestingly Google didn't send me a whole load of security notifications when I set up Chrome Browser and Firefox for email purposes on Clare's new machine. Same operating system, from same I.P. address, but different hardware seems to have gone un-noticed.

Ash Wednesday

After an unusually good night's sleep, only having to get up twice in the night instead of four tines I had breakfast, then read Morning Prayer, Litany and Eucharist. Clare met Emma returning from her walk and was given a special Ash Wednesday prayer card with cross drawn in ashes on it. A nice gesture on the part of the clergy team. 

I received a delivery of fish for freezing from Ashtons while Clare was out. The bones filleted out of the salmon get turned into a fabulous soup. The house smells of fish soup during into the evening. And there's a treat of laver bread with bacon for supper. Not exactly abstinence, but certainly something to give extra thanks for. The must be extra room for praise and gratitude in a season of penitence.

Clare asked me to pay for the order using our secure on-line banking set up. It's not something I do often and in between times forget exactly how it works. The action buttons menu is clear enough when you know where it is and what you're looking for. I didn't, and tapped something that ende up in an endless maze of information pages with no route back. I had to log out and start again, which rather uoset me. My suspicion that inconsistent web behaviour, is a result of accidentally running into a malicious intervention runs very high, even on a site with high security entrance protocols. A glitch in data flow is usually the cause of anomalies, or else poorly designed pages using esoteric terms, but these also happen with malicious sites. It all feels to me like hostile territory nowadays. Perhaps I know too much about web security issues to trust and rely on cyber things.

I spent the morning trying to get Linux to work on an old Netbook having reinstalled it and then found the hard drive wasn't recognised. A hardware fault? Or an Installation error due to the hateful early UEFI firmware being improperly configured? I had to physically remove the drive and check it on another device using a hard drive caddy. No hardware errors, found. I downloaded the latest version of Linux Mint and used it mounted on a USB card to do a fresh netbook install. This time it was bootable despite throwing a system boot error first. Something to do with UEFI.

The system functioned but couldn't be updated. It wouldn't accept root password I'd assigned to it. It's so frustrating, I'll have to reinstall and reset, if I can figure out where I've gone wrong. Something to do when I'm not busy.

Light rain came at the end of the morning and persisted non-stop into the evening. It was quite mild and there was no wind, but walking over to and then around Victoria Park, then crossing over to Llandaff Fields was a miserable wearing experience, as if I was carrying a heavy load. I was tired when I got back, and hadn't walked as far as I thought, but my rainwear was sodden. I went out again after supper when the rain had reduced to a drizzle, to complete my daily distance in the dark.

Later, we watched another interesting archaeological programme on More Four. In suburban Newcastle upon Tyne there once stood a Roman fort. The sight was partly excavated before the houses were built, and the site of its gatehouse was left exposed. An investigative team came to the area with a theoretical maps of the fort and the civilian settlement adjacent to it, with a view to digging exploratory trenches in people's back gardens to search for evidence to confirm the mapping. Local residents were happy to give permission and took a great interest in the findings. 

It brought to light the history of how in the couple of centuries after it was built and established as a garrison gateway in Hadrian's wall, the civilian settlement grew up and over time grew closer to the fort itself. The findings suggested a prosperous cosmopolitan community had flourished there until the Romans retreated from Britain in the third century. I wonder what will be left to show of our settlements in two thousand years from now, given the threats to existence from pandemics and global warming we now face?

On leaving something to the imagination

Owain stayed with us until lunchtime, then I drove him to Grangetown to call on a friend for a socially distanced chat over the fence, on his way to the station. He was back home in Bristol just after half past three, having returned thankfully on an almost empty train - quiet a relief for us to know that.

We went out for a brisk walk in chilly damp air around the park together after a post-lunch siesta, it was busy with people socialising at a safe distance, if not walking their dogs or jogging. I seem to need a lot of sleep at the moment. On returning, a bout of curiosity prompted me to potter around with my HP Windows desktop PC to see if I could access its BIOS settings and change the boot order, to allow me to run a Linux Mint live distro. It was a matter of trial and error, as tracking down which BIOS version applies to this device, and how to access it, is less onerous than googling it when you don't have that info to hand. 

I found out what I needed to know, changed the settings, booted Linux Mint without a hitch, and was astonished how fast it loaded and what a crisp screen display it gave me. Now, shall I convert it to a dual boot system, or decant my data make a fresh start? The device is a 2005 Core-i3, the youngest I've ever tried Linux with, and the operating system doesn't get in the way of performance or annoying update ritual like Windows. Trouble is, if I abolish Windows I'll have no idea how to help others if something goes wrong and they ask my help.

In the evening we watched a play based on Charlotte Bronte's novel 'Jayne Eyre' on the Sky Arts channel. It was a National Theatre co-production with Bristol Old Vic, superbly done with minimal staging and powerful acting, laced with humour, showcasing uncompromising integrity of its heroin, reflecting the emergence of feminist thinking in the early nineteenth century. It was nearly four hours long, but well worth a late bed-time. I'd forgotten just how inspiring live theatre is, and how it leaves freedom for the imagination to work. 

We've become opera buffs over the past twenty five years, and rarely go out to watch a play. Nowadays, we watch movies, probably far too many, and in many if not most of them, too little is left for the imagination. Too much is inevitably mediated by the film director's perspective, and reliance on real life film locations. If a setting has symbolic significance in terms of the story-line, it may not necessarily add value to the plot. In the past few years we've had movie series in which the the clothing or car driven by the heroine has evoked as much comment as the actor and narrative. Authentic portrayal of period pieces is much praised, until someone spots and comments on an anachronism. Theatre, opera and ballet use open symbolism and settings artistically to stimulate memory and free the imagination. 

Funnily enough, what I found superb about this live audience production was the camera work which drew you right into the stage in a natural way without being intrusive, and made the choreography visible, and there's much movement by the cast on two level stage with ladders. A prime example of the powerful use of symbolic stage sets was in Matthew Bourne's masterpiece ballet production of 'The Red Shoes' on Christmas night. It supported the narrative without imposing itself on the performance. Owain a vocational 'vinylist' is fond of pointing out how many great record albums since the 1950s featured cover designs of artistic merit, inseparable from the content, and there's been a renaissance of this kind of art in the techno scene of late. Fascinating.

Quarantine Cymru - day Two

Rain all day today, so I've been confined to the house, unable to walk out into the garden. At least it has enabled me to concentrate on recording and editing the service for next Sunday. When it came to sound editing, I went through the usual routine, established in Ibiza, of converting files to MP3 format on my Linux laptop before editing the files using Audacity on my Windows PC. Curiosity made me install Audacity on the Linux laptop and try it out. 

I was surprised to discover that despite the laptop's age, Audacity ran smoothly and quickly. Also it worked, loading several different audio file formats with none of the error messages associated with a more complex Windows Audacity installation. I finished the sound edit in record time, pleased with this small discovery. The ancient laptop I converted to Linux in Ibiza may not have been quite powerful enough to achieve smooth editing, as a 32 bit machine, but it never occurred to me to try, and the routine I established switching from machine to machine was rather a time waster. Just as well I had time on my hands then!

Thinking about what else I can do to occupy my time in confinement, there are lots of old travel journals that need transcribing, and thousands of photo negatives to scan, telling stories from past decades which it'll be a pleasure to recall in detail. Small anecdotes and pictures awaken dormant memories and emotions in a marvellous way. Digitising our past may be of little interest to anyone but me, but the effort I find is an enriching and enjoyable way to wander down memory lane.

It was good to be welcomed home with a phone call from Ashley this evening. He's still clearing the CBS office slowly, and says that Motorpoint arena is deserted, apart from security staff at the gate. When will it be able to re-open? Will it ever be able to re-open given the financial damage caused to its entire operation by the pandemic?

Some time ago there was talk of the site being redeveloped with a new arena and conference centre being built elsewhere. It's hard to imagine what will happen in terms of future investment ambitions in central Cardiff, especially with the ten and a half year old St David shopping centre struggling to survive without becoming insolvent. 

Well, in fits and starts through the day, I walked my temporary 5k daily target again, this time indoors, including climbing the thirty odd stairs to the attic many times. I need to count the number of climbs I do. It's different exercise from walking on the flat, and maybe makes up for not walking so far in expended energy. I'm determined not to lose the fitness level I've gained as I feel so much better for it.
    

State of Alarm - day Thirty Three

Twenty degrees today, clouds and sunshine, warm enough for me to shed pullovers during the first half of my daily 10k. The lizards were out in force, chasing around, I came within half a second of snapping one biting the other's tail. It's the third time I've seen this happen. I'll get lucky sooner or later, the longer I stay here. Like snapping the elusive hoopoes in Al Andaluz. What I did manage to get photos of was a big green lizard scaling the wire netting fence. Its attention had been caught by a flying seed on a parachute stalk, resembling an insect in movement. Amazing, and over so quick!

It's as warm as I mistakenly thought it'd be when I arrived six weeks ago. Should have checked! I spent a lot of time talking on both the landline phone and WhatsApp today, but still succeeded in being productive. Last Sunday I did a short Easter video message. I wanted to try something a bit different this week, and was inspired by watching the video of Fr Jorge's discursive prayer in the little Opus Dei chapel in their Wandsworth Common house, which sister June sent me a month ago.

What I drafted as a brief reflection on life in lock-down translated easily into prayer. Rather than talk to camera, which seemed to me a bit naff - 'nothing to see here' - I set up a camera pointing at the little makeshift altar I set up for the blessing of Palms two weeks ago, and prayed from behind the camera. The sound was very good, but the lighting contrast in the video wasn't all that good. It was nice to do something different though.

Then I set about recording the components of Sunday's on-line audio service of the Word, which included the sermon, that could be done while waiting for the audio files of the readings to arrive. It was more than I expected to get done in a busy day. I'm feeling the benefit of having the Linuxed Compaq laptop available for use now. The batch of audio files I made this evening would have then taken me a fiddly hour's waiting if not longer, while converting them from M4A to MP3 formal via a Cloud app, laden with adware. I installed one little app on my Linux workhorse which did the lot in under a minute. That's what it means to have full control of your own free software device with no interference from ads and other distractions.

A satisfying day in all sorts of ways.

State of Alarm - day thirty

Six weeks today already since I left the UK for Mallorca on my way here. The world has changed so much in that time, and the future has shrunk to 'grateful to still be alive, just one day at a time'.

After my walk in the afternoon, I took the car, to dispose of a large box of recyclable empties to the roadside receptacles just past Es Cuco supermarket, closed for the afternoon. The area was deserted.  It was good to get out again. Now Easter is over, I think I'm relaxing and adjusting to this situation a bit more. Going out in the car didn't feel quite like an ordeal. It's not a matter of confidence, but I have been reluctant to push myself for fear of coming adrift and making mistakes - probably a legacy of a year's confinement, minimising the physical stress on my wound. Things have improved a good deal, pleasingly enough, since I have been here. Feeling less uneasy in myself is a sign of putting all that trauma behind me, and feeling more at home in myself and in my environment, uncommon though it is.

Yesterday evening, I got around to examining the redundant Compaq laptop in the study. It has been stripped of personal data, still had some software on it, but ran so terribly slowly it was unusable. It had AVG on it and flagged up virus content but struggled to rid the machine of malware. It was also a low powered consumer Windows 7 machine, unsupported now by Microsoft. With Dave's consent I tried to install a live bootable version of Linux Mint XFCE edition on it from the installation flash drive that travels in my digital tool kit. It booted to a functional desktop of sorts, but not install on the laptop.

It took me a while to remember it was a version for 64 bit devices and the Compaq is so old it's a 32 bit device very under-powered. I downloaded  a Mint 32 bit version ISO to another flash drive, then used a spare SD memory card to make a live bootable disk to use. It wouldn't book from the laptop's card reader, but I had a USB card reader in my tool kit. The live version of Mint 32 bit booted nicely from this and proceeded to install perfectly on the laptop, giving it a new lease of life as a fully working machine. It's not lightning fast, as the hard drive is slow, but it's quite usable for all but complex demanding task like video and audio editing. That too cheered me up no end.
    

Better safe

Monday and Tuesday, annoying it rained most of the day, making routine tasks, shopping and laundry harder to complete. It didn't stop my daily walks however, and much of my time at home was spent researching journey detail for my novel writing. I've now been asked to do two funerals in the coming fortnight. It's six weeks since I did the last one.

I saw a high spec second hand laptop at a recent price in the window of the Tourotech computer shop, and wondered about buying it. I have some older pieces of kit that I keep as spares but rarely have to use. In fact they aren't particularly nice to use for any extended length of time. I think they are ready for recycling. I checked, and Tourotech will do that for me. I have and regularly use quite an old Acer laptop, running Linux off a solid state drive. It's not wonderful for photo processing, but I can boot it into Libre Office with a file open for work in less than a minute. The same process on my Windows 10 workstation takes four to eight times as long, and that's not a slow machine. It's just that Windows punishes users refusing to keep devices permanently running and on-line. If Microsoft ignores this not insignificant user group it can expect to lose them to Linux, Mac or Android.

Anyway, I rehearsed the possibility of part exchanging the Acer for the device I fancied, concluding that it would need to have Windows running on it again. I found the spare Windows hard drive from Clare's laptop, now happily working with Linux Mint, and put it into the Acer to find out if it would work. As it had an intact rescue partition on it, this proved no problem, except that this called for the reformatting of the main partition and re-installation of Windows. This process took seven hours without attaching my One Drive account to it and letting it sync! Probably another couple of hours. If ever I install Linux on any device, it takes an hour, plus update time, although this happens in the background and doesn't stop one using it to work on.

The worst thing about doing this was that when I replaced the solid state drive with the Windows one I forgot to make an up to date file copy of my novel. Figuring out how to extract one from the Linux file system seemed too much of an effort so I had to guess where I had finished off the night before and write some more to another file to copy and paste. It's not often I fail to make multiple copies of a vital file when finishing for the day, but on this occasion I did, and was sorry for this lapse. Next day I put the solid state drive back into the Acer and continued working on it. I had second thoughts about getting a new laptop. The Acer keyboard is better than ones on the other old machines I want to get rid of and from a writers point of view it's as fast as it needs to be.

It's been a bright and sunny all day today, such a relief. In this morning's mail, the application forms for my Llandaff diocesan safeguarding check arrived. My Permission to Officiate which depends on passing this runs out at the end of March. After lunch I walked up to Llys Esgob to see Bishop's chaplain Sarah Rogers, one of several senior staff whose job description has recently had added to it the task of verifying identity documents for PTO applicants, a new requirement of the procedure. 

Five years ago, it was just a matter of sending identity documents to the Provincial Safeguarding Officer to be checked. Now each applicant has to be seen in person. As if the senior staff members didn't already have enough work to do! At least the end of producing passport, driving license and a document with my National Insurance Number on it for good measure, was that Sarah was able to put the completed application into her evening mailbag for sending. 

It's all a necessary formality, and as Sarah and I have known each other for eighteen years, there's no chance of anyone impersonating me, but it may not be the case for someone who's a newcomer, known by name but not by face in the diocese. In our contemporary world where credible identity theft is not unusual, an element of risk exists of abuse attached to any impersonal bureaucratic process. Trust in others has been replaced by evidence leading to proof that someone is trustworthy. 

This is not the same. It displaces the element of personal relatedness which makes us who we are. It can detract from our human dignity and sense of worth. In times past, we earned trustworthiness and respect through right and proper relationships with those we served without having to prove anything. Sure, things could go wrong, they can and still do, even for those whose identity credentials and police checks are impeccable but are cunning enough for their deceit and transgressons not to be found out, or because they deceived friends in high places into refusing to act on hearing concerns about their behaviour. Safeguarding checks are entirely necessary, but it's still possible for someone to have a clean record and yet still be abusive and a manipulator of others, and get away with it. It's a reality of life, yet thankfully today we are more vigilant than ever in history due to higher standards and values applying to the care and respect all people deserve, no matter who they are. The required change in disciple just takes some getting used to.

Useful spares

Ann left for Felixstowe after breakfast and Clare went off to school for her weekly kindergarten eurythmy session. As I was leaving for church, Mary came across and said that BT was refusing to let her access her email, posting a warning message about using an 'insecure browser'. I couldn't do anything about it at that moment and promised to return and sort it out after lunch. She's still using Kath's elderly Acer Aspire, which reached the end of its useful life with Windows over five years ago. I got it running nicely with Linux Mint, and gave the machine to Mary, and it's given her little trouble ever since. Interesting ... what's happened?

Following our trip to Caldey on Tuesday, I was glad of the opportunity to go and celebrate the memory of St Benedict at the St John's midweek Eucharist. It's amazing to think that St Samson, the first Abbot of Caldey's Celtic religious community was a contemporary of Benedict. So too was St Illtud, Samson's spiritual father and teacher in the monastic settlement at Llantwit Major. The movement of the Spirit that inspired the 'flight into the desert' of God seeking individuals dropping out of society, uncomfortable with the rise of Christianity as an established religion under the Emperor Constantine, began a century earlier with St Anthony of Egypt, St Basil the Great and the Cappadocian Fathers. 

Latin and Celtic monasticism also evolved at this time and communities organised themselves, in their own distinctive way and flourished wherever they were able to plant themselves, whatever the challenges and difficulties this entailed. Were they each aware of the other's existence, I wonder? The 5th-6th century monastic pioneers probably knew of their fourth century predecessors and their teaching, but not necessarily about their contemporaries. Where monks settled, lived, worked and prayed, they attracted neighbours, and benefited from each others skills, experience and labour, and as a result social and economic development occurred. 

There wasn't a grand social networking plan or a mission strategy as such. Everything evolved around a life of worship that was accompanied by hard work of one kind or another. Thus the Benedictine way of life spread across Europe, to ever more remote regions, bringing know-how, technologies, education, and transformation of the very landscape itself. European civilisation, and even British religious culture owes much to the movement Benedict's rule inspired. He's a suitable patron saint for the continent as a whole. 

After the service I visited the wound clinic to collect a supply of dressings and returned home to cook lunch, then went and inspected the problematic laptop. I quickly found it couldn't complete its update cycle - 'Repositories not found ...' was the error message. Well, surprise surprise! The Linux version installed has run for five years, and hadn't updated some of its components: i.e. to the new Firefox browser version. The older the version, and eventually some secure sites will refuse to make use of it because it's been labelled 'insecure'. If the repository links weren't functional then the best answer would be a re-installation of a recent Linux Mint version, destined to be update supported for another five years. So that's what I did. Well, did twice actually, as I removed the installation medium to soon at reboot and borked the process. Still, by the time I left, the machine was running normally again, probably better in fact than recently. Eventually the hard drive will go. I have a few spares I can used. If anything else dies, the machine goes for scrap. I have several spare machines, as people given them to me, when they upgrade. You never know when they'll come in useful.

  

A Linux bank holiday

The bank holiday Monday weather was poor and discouraged us from making the effort to go out anywhere. There wasn't much of interest on telly, so I whiled away the time downloading and trying out different distributions of Linux on the little Acer machine Kath returned to me - Ubuntu, Fedora Manjaro and Mint XFCE. All worked well, but the first two were not as lively as the latter two, as the notebook has only 2GB of RAM which isn't quite enough given demands they make on memory. 

I occupied myself with this, having discovered that the trackpad wasn't recognised when I made the first install of Mint with the Mate desktop. I thought it might be an operating system deficiency, but as the fault is reproduced on each of the distros, I can only conclude it's a hardware fault. I may have knocked the machine stowing in the boot for the journey home, as up until then with WIndows 10 on it, there was no problem. Not that it matters much, as I habitually use a mouse with portable PCs.

In the end, I settled for Mint XFCE for the simple reason that there's a minimal amount to learn. I've been using Mint now for several years, with Mate, Cinnamon and even KDE versions on time. This will do all that I need it to without getting in the way. I wish I had introduced my sister to Mint many years ago. Once she'd got used to the differences with Windows, it would have given her far more confidence and control, and in turn spared me from trying to explain to her so many irrelevant things which distract Windows users from getting the job done.

The risk of over depending on the Cloud

It rained all day today, so I couldn't get out for a walk and didn't much feel like it anyway, as my affliction was more painful and energy sapping than usual. I spent some time writing, and backing up data from my newer Windows 10 laptop, to prepare for a Linux Mint installation and making it into a dual booting device. I am so fed up with the the length of time it takes to reach a browser or a word processor page I want to work on, often between three and five minutes. In spite of keeping it fully updated, this continues to be the case. 

The laptop's UEFI firmware makes Linux installation a bit tricky. If this fails, I have the option to get rid of Windows 10 altogether. I have a Windows 10 desktop PC, for guests to use, or if I need to run a one of the few proprietary Windows only programs I use occasionally. For the most part, apps I need are part of Linux and accessible so much quicker. Also Linux on a PC isn't at all reliant on Cloud data storage, unless you want it to be. Sure you can set up a Windows 10 account which doesn't rely on OneDrive storage, but device registration and essential information from it are still extracted and stored on line, and not always used in ways that are easy to determine or control. 

Whilst the Cloud is a useful resource, this is the price to be paid for having your data accessible on all kinds of devices. It risks taking too exclusive a hold on my information and workflow, Windows 10 relies on a decent internet connection to work as designed, and this slows things down, to my mind. Ever since local data storage became affordable, I've kept backups to hand. It was insurance against unreliable PCs in the old days. The more reliable Cloud storage is however, the more risk there is of losing the discipline to back things up. Then, if the worst happens - total loss of internet, Cloud storage access catastrophe, ransomware etc., you lose out, especially on recent stuff you've been working on, often things you most need.

Chromebooks are even more dependent on internet access, leaving you quite limited in what can be done off-line. It is however far quicker and less insecure than any Windows set up. I'll be better off with Linux, as I can control where and how I store the data I use, and maintaining backup habits that don't rely on the Cloud. It's a matter of getting around to tackling the installation procedure I've been rehearsing and putting off for some time. 

Ministry joys and Linux Legacy

Yesterday afternoon in beautiful sunny weather, I caught the bus into town, took photos of the Central Square construction site, then walked down the Taff Embankment to the Bay Wetland Area. There was a couple of Coots with some young chicks swimming on one of the ponds.

I also got glimpses of what I think was another pair of chicks hiding in a reed bed, but they seemed different from the Coot chicks, as their heads were red/orange. Were they moorhen offspring, I wonder? I've seen both kinds of bird down there in the past. With most things ready for our Rhine cruise journey and a sermon prepared, I watched a couple of episodes of NCIS season 13 which I've not seen before. One was about an agent suffering from the theft of his identity multiple times. Quite timely really, given the on-going global ransomware crisis.

I celebrated the Solemn Mass at St German's this morning as usual. Priest in charge designate Fr Phelim O'Hare came with his wife Annette and two sons to meet people and sit in the congregation. We're still waiting for an induction date, however. It now looks certain that it will take place while I'm out in Malaga, Although I won't be at St German's for the final few Sundays of the interregnum, I will take much pleasure in seeing photos of the event, content to have worked myself out of a job at St German's, for a second time in five years.

After the service, the church filled again with a congregation double the numbers for the Mass, there for the baptism of Michelle and her baby daughter Millie. For me it was a great pleasure to complete something which started last year when I officiated at Andy Michelle's wedding in St German's. Out of curiosity, I checked the baptism register, and discovered, much to my surprise, that over past five years of locum duties at St German's, I have performed 23 baptisms, double the number I did in the eight years of my last job as Vicar of St John's City Parish Church.

By the time I got home, after attending the Christening party in the church hall, Clare had already left for a final rehearsal for the afternoon Community Choir Concert at the Fountain Steiner School, but she'd left lunch for me. Once I'd eaten, I sat down to do my daily Duo Lingo Spanish drill, and when I reached the end of it, I nodded off, waking up only just in time to drive to the school for the start of the concert. The programme was an unusual mix of mediaeval secular and sacred music, technically a challenge for the singers. I've been listening to Clare rehearse for weeks, but only hearing everything sung in performance made sense of what I'd been listening to at home, as some of the pieces involved part singing which was dissonant to modern ears. It was an ear opening success, for the audience and for the singers.

After supper, a quiet evening without telly, making sure computers were all up to date, trying to find some files of photographs I'd digitized for my sister three years ago, which she said she couldn't find. It took me a while to locate them, as they weren't in any of my archives. Then I remembered that I'd done the original job on my previous desktop PC, which I left in its usual position on the floor to the left of my desk, rather than decommission and dispose of it. Once re-connected to peripherals, it powered up into Linux Mint perfectly, and within a couple of minutes I'd found the files and copied them to a backup drive. Later, I discovered that I had already uploaded the missing photos to the web, as well as putting them on June's PC hard drive. They weren't missing. Finding them in either place was her problem. Just as well I had an evening with nothing better to do.

When I next have an idle moment, I'll to a timed comparison of booting the machine to a functioning desktop using the now defunct original Windows Vista operating system and Linux Mint. Vista was less dependent on internet connectivity and than its successors, except for anti-virus updating. Mint works just as well with or without internet. When connected and ready to update, it does so unobtrusively and without interfering with one's workflow. So much better than Windows, once you've learned it and made the switch. Time I switched a couple of my machines over permanently to Linux, and retain Windows only where necessary for working with outsiders.

   

Sunrise at the beach

Having woken at first light, I was too restless to doze for another hour, so I went out and walked eastwards along the beach towards Benalgobion. The sky was rich with red orange and yellow clouds,  precursor to an overcast day, but most spectacular as it changed.

The beach is oriented east southeast, so the sun emerging on the horizon at eight wasn't visible, but to be glimpsed through trees half an hour later. Already there were scores of walkers and joggers out enjoying the cool still fresh morning air.

Sand on the foreshore, up as far as the parasols and sun loungers, had been flattened by a plough similar to those used for making snow pistes. I guess it's a good way of trawling for rubbish, especially broken glass and cans, as well as giving a fresh impression to holidaymakers, although numbers are now starting to dwindle as high season finishes.

Offshore, half a dozen small fishing boats were out, either laying their pots or casting their nets or hauling them in. It was hard to tell in low light a hundred metres away. It was still too early for gulls and pigeons to be active when I set out, but on my way back, the starlings, sparrows, blackbirds and even noisy flocks of parakeets were on the move. There wee few signs of life in the restaurants or shops too. Most tend to open after nine, except the panaderos.

It was a delightful way to start the day.

After breakfast I looked at the photos taken earlier and edited them ready for upload when I next go to St George's, but not today. I have often started thinking about next Sunday's sermon on a Monday, and the discovery of a Common Worship app called Sunday Worship, which delivers just next Sunday's Anglican readings and collects is proving to be an asset, as you don't have to mess around with lectionaries, the necessary text is right there for you to ponder on. So, yet again this week, I'd made an early first draft before lunch.

The preliminary to this was searching for a stand alone Chromebook app which would enable me to do word processing and save files in a useable format without ever needing to be on line. Google Docs apps work well, albeit in a rather convoluted way with different file formats, offline as well as online, with the rigmarole of syncing between the two governed always by connection speed and reliability. But often I want to write and save a text to a flash drive not to the device or the web. This process is not straightforward enough, and I have lost material accidentally in doing so. An app that sits on the device and does offline only what you ask of it is desirable. But how to find the right one?

I wasted an hour trying apps called Writer and Ain't with no satisfaction and in the end resorted to performing the simple task of sermon writing on the office Windows 7 laptop. It's got a nag to update to Windows 10, but now it's too late. The connection speed is too low even to enable it to do Toshiba system updates, apart from pop up reminders. 'Everybody ought to have fast enough internet to run our software' is hardly a realistic design requirement. Consequently, there's a gulf between marketing expectation and mundane reality. Such foolishness.

I wondered what using just my beloved Chromebook for a month might be like, aware there might be risks of poor connectivity. Now I wish I'd brought the spare MS Surface RT along as well. Despite its many software limits, this works better offline. Even better would be a small portable with Linux Mint installed. That would cover my travel needs for offline work. Maybe I can find a second hand machine for a reasonable price, and convert it for another tour of duty.

Lunch, siesta, evening walk under an overcast sky, quite cool really. A surfing class going on down the end of the beach near Nuestra Señora del Carmen. Children youngsters and adults all wearing Malaga Bahia matching sweatshirts, out jogging, dozens of them, spread out over a kilometer of the paseo maritimo, with men on bikes at either end of the group shepherding them. Old people chatting with friends, strolling at a leisurely pace or sitting together in bars or on benches. Fewer visitors now, more space for locals to socialise, and enjoy the coming of autumn.

I have taken an old pair of dark blue 'cargo' shorts acquired a few years ago in Vinaros and now looking very tired, and soaked them in bleach overnight. The result is a rather interesting shade of red. Certainly a revival of fortunes for them. It's better than throwing them away. They are taking a long time to dry in this weather. I look forward to wearing them in their new guise.

  

A Linux play day

This morning, we visited Ryanair's website, checked in, reserved seats for our Budapest flights and obtained boarding passes for both directions. There was a small office job to be done, sending out a few notifications, and then I set about tinkering with the spare laptop I acquired through Kath, on which I'd installed Linux Mint efffectively, except that there seems to be no way of controlling screen brightness. 

With little else to do, I tried several different installs in succession with limited success partly as versions used were a couple of years old, and the update repository links didn't work, having been superceded by those supplying newer versions. Ah well, lessons learned. In the end, I downloaded the latest ISO of Mint 17.3 and copied it on to a SD card to boot from. It wouldn't boot when the card was inserted in the laptop card reading slot, showing that the motherboard wasn't designed to make this device recognisable as bootable.

In my collection of computer accessories, I had an USB flash card reader, so old it was powered from an additional USB cable. THe computer immediately recognised it, much to my delight, and now the old laptop sports the most recent version of Mint, plus my favourite software add-ons. The screen doesn't glare quite so much, but I haven't found a way to control this through the operating system software. The keyboard brightness control, through left and right cursor keys, doesn't seem to work, even though the volume control, through the up and down cursor keys, does work. I'm pleased with the outcome, nevertheless.

The other redundant laptop, which used to be Kath's bequeathed to me last Christmas, also runs Linux well. It's currently on loan to Mary across the road at the moment, who is trying it out as an alternative to giving up her Windows XP desktop machine and getting something up to date. Her needs are limited to email, flight booking and occasional surfing. She doesn't much enjoy having to cope with dubious spam emails and the endlessly helpful anti-virus pop up messages generated trying to be helpful but ending up being confusing. 

Windows 10 is far from an attractive alternative. Although much safer, it's not short of confusing pop-ups, occasional unexplained long delays while it updates, plus a user interface that is far less helpful than it thinks it is, changing the look and feel of so much for no good reason. For an older person with a long history of struggling with XP usage anyway, what can be done?

Last week, after a brief trouble shooting session, I asked Mary if I could set up the extra laptop with her needs in mind, to borrow and use when she wants to, and see if she finds it poses less problems for her. I have read occasional articles asserting that if basic needs can be met without complication or incident, a user who is unfamiliar and unconcerned about how Linus works, may just use it and feel no reason to go back. Well, if it's true, I may yet find a home for this spare spare laptop.
       

Tribute to the Linux collective

It's a long while since I last had a good rant about the virtues of Linux. Windows has meanwhile seen many improvements in its development, but can still often be frustrating to use in comparison.

All that computer tinkering yesterday got me to bed later than I needed, so I slept late this morning, and eventually returned to the task of getting the Acer to work again by installing Linux Mint properly. It's  half to three quarters of an hour from boot to a fully working system. Better than Windows. You're then advised to update, but can do so at your leisure. Update runs for half an hour, bringing the latest version of the operating system and software. It does so without preventing you from carrying on with work, and usually without asking you to reboot. Utterly brilliant if you're busy. 

All you need available for productive working is there. If you have additional software needs it's easy to top up with your favourites to complete the job. All made possible by the core design of Linux at the outset. It's one of the greatest collaborative social enterprises of our era. Fortunes are made by companies offering Linux software services, yet it's available for free within a global community of volunteers and professionals, for anyone to adopt - especially when Windows dies on them. It's still hard to find Linux driven computers readily available in the consumer marketplace.

I discovered Linux working in Geneva twenty years ago, learned to use it and become intrigued by it on hardware that wasn't really powerful enough to do it justice. I have watched it evolve and diversify into an ecosystem of related products that can get the best out of all kinds of equipment, especially in the scientific community. Now it's being introduced to systems running on the international space station. In some regions it's used to run whole departments of government and for the trading engines of the economy. 

MS Windows and Apple Mac have had their hold on consumer markets for decades, but the innovation of Android on smartphones and tablets has changed habits of digital consumption radically irreversibly. The Android operating system is derived from Linux. It has not only risen to meet expectations, but also helped shape expectations of what is possible to do with a powerful pocket computer. Admittedly this vision of the possible was generated by Apple with its iPhone and apps, and the challenge taken on by Android, but Apple operating systems developed, from origins in the BSD operating system with many of the same characteristics and philosophy as Linux.

These days, I don't do much more than enjoy using Linux, where once I enjoyed tinkering, learning how to use its own command scripts. It was always hard work, paying attention to that kind of detail, and nowadays easily configurable user interfaces remove the need to tinker unless desperate. The modest amount that has stuck in my brain, however, makes life easier when it comes to diagnosing and troubleshooting problems. 

Before I consigned the broken Windows 7 to Microsoft Hell, I figured out that essential files were missing, deleted either from the boot partition which performed essential start up functions, including linkage to a main partition where most Windows 7 software is installed. This killed access to the recovery partition, making impossible a factory re-set or an independent re-install. There was nothing to suggest hard disk damage by a surge. Files had been irretrievably deleted without which not even a minimal operating system could fire up and facilitate a repair. Whether by accident or sabotage, this shouldn't be possible, but it happens. The world of work is less efficient, less secure as long as vulnerabilities due to poor design remain.

Sure, over the years I may have wasted a lot of time trying to learn things for which I may well be temperamentally and intellectually unsuited, perhaps a bit like my shoddy efforts to learn how to sight read music or speak other languages fluently over the years. Yet, I do feel enriched by these minor efforts to understand what changes are going on in our era and how they work.

For what it's worth, such a waste of time has been lots of fun in a perverse sort of way. I remember when I first got an early version of SUSE Linux to boot to the command line, during our Swiss sojourn, seeing a message displayed when reaching the command line saying something like:

' You are now running Linux. Have lots of fun ! '

Thanks to all those who have contributed to making it so.

Laptop rescue saga

As the school is on holiday this week, the midweek Eucharist at St German's was a quiet affair in the Lady chapel, a welcome change after the intensity of last week. I went straight home afterwards and did some necessary food shopping, banking and parcel posting before lunch. Then I settled down to see if I could fix the broken Acer Aspire Core i3 laptop which Kath acquired from a fellow gym member and passed on to me to play with.

Normal booting caused it to crash and reboot, so I tried booting into 'Safe Mode' but without success. It got so far and then hung after a file check, displaying a desktop wallpaper but nothing else. Eventually the hard disk light went off, indicating there was no activity. I then modified the boot settings and tried a live version of Linux Mint on a USB flash drive. I was astonished at the speed with which it started, took full control of the hardware and gave me a fully functional machine. 

Linux showed the Windows file system was in place, seemingly uncorrupted. The name of the last user was evident, but data file folders had been emptied or never filled. I was able to email Kath with a status report, but nothing more than this. At least the hardware works.

Today, I took the funeral in St Paul's Grangetown of a well known local lady who'd lived in the same house for sixty years. The church was packed, and there was standing room only. St Paul's is a big church, impossible to heat properly. It was cold indoors, despite the sunshine streaming in. One of the granddaughters gave a moving and funny tribute, much of which was devoted to extracts from Gran's regular letters to her when she was in university. There were more smiles than tears. 

Among mourners were two relatives of the deceased whom I knew - one was Brian, Martin's father in law, the other was Tony Bishop who was city centre Police Inspector when Vicar of St John's. He retired around the same time as I did, and it's the first time we've met in five years. The Committal was in the South Glamorgan Crematorium, closer to Grangetown than Thornhill. We sang 'Amazing Grace' which in the crem hymn book had an extra verse that didn't appear in the service hymn sheet, a verse I don't recall singing before. Not everyone had brought their service sheets with them, so there was a little confusion which left people bemused, if smiling.

After a late lunch I went into the office with a few small jobs to complete, and then brought home with me the office copy of Windows 7 installation disks, to see if I could effect a system repair on the Acer. No luck. The DVD/CD drive certainly worked with other disks, but would not boot from the Windows installation disks, for reasons which I couldn't fathom. I was able to use one to create an ISO file and copy it to a flash drive, having had success with booting Linux from flash. This was a tricky process of trial and error to get right using only the resources of the Linux live flash version. No luck again. There seems to be enough of Windows operating system to block the use of anything other than a Windows backup taken from the Acer itself. Or else the CD firmware is rigged to prevent this. 

In the end, there's no alternative to getting rid of the offending operating system, and install Linux Mint. That little pleasure will have to wait until tomorrow.

       

Data recovery

Cardiff city centre was busy and full of rugby fans today, so we walked to Leckwith to catch a bus to take us to Penarth. A covering of grey clouds, a slight chill wind and comparative absence of people taking their leisure gave the promenade a wintry feel. We had lunch in the pier restaurant, including an excellent 'home made' broccoli and stilton soup. Then we walked along the cliff top for an hour before heading back up into the town to catch a bus home.

With my Sunday sermon already prepared and printed out, I had time to work on retrieving and then removing data from the dead Dell XPS. A hefty machine with 'old school' modular construction, its key components, memory, CPU, network cards, hard drive are all accessible through different panels underside. I was able to find and remove the hard drive very easily. A decade ago I bought an adaptor interface that enabled a CD/DVD/HDD to connect to a PC via USB. It's come in useful for a variety of reasons over the years, but I'd  only ever had occasion to use the IDE not the SATA adaptor. The drive from the Dell is the first SATA one I've come across, so fitting it correctly was something I had to work out carefully. 

To my great pleasure it worked without incident. The drive, an early type 500GB has a couple of FAT format partitions for Windows and a couple of EXT2 partitions for Linux. Thankfully, I have an old dual boot Windows/Linux desktop machine, same age as the Dell, which is now only used for a handful of legacy programs I need occasionally to use. I fired it up into Linux Mint, which saw the attached drive immediately, and was able to transfer, albeit slowly, all files from the various partitions of the Dell drive to the safety of a new USB3 drive acquired earlier in the year. If it was possible to get an economical repair done on the Dell, I could send it off, knowing it was free of data that should be kept away from prying eyes.

I was disappointed there was no episode of 'Beck' on BBC Four tonight, as I'd expected a longer series run. Instead, another Swedish crime drama series 'Arne Dahl' shown in double episodes, with a diverse expert team assembled to apply themselves to very difficult cases, all interwoven with lots of personal relationship stories and back history stuff. I found it a bit long winded, and I began to get impatient ninety minutes into the two hour show. I preferred the concentration of 'Beck' episodes and the issues exposed. As with many high tech crime dramas these days, much is made of the ability to track cellphone users and pinpoint their locations. Is the technology portrayed in use that quick and slick to deliver results, or is it dramatic license, I wonder.

  

Upgrades complete, web authoring re-starts

Things are a bit quieter this end of the week, thankfully, so a day of not doing much apart from a walk into town and back was very welcome. I seem to need good exercise as much as rest these days, if I'm not to feel out of sorts much of the time. The city centre was full of New Zealand rugby fans ahead of the evening's match with Romania. There was an atmosphere of congeniality and boisterousness, few signs of misbehaviour anywhere. 

My only complaint is the amount of fast food rubbish, discarded cans, plastic beakers and bottles parked on wall and window ledges, or in the gutters. Litter picking and bin emptying may well occur during as well as after the game. Maybe rubbish bins provided do become full too quickly to prevent this but in the end organisers of major sporting events could do something to nag supporters to make an effort not to dump their empties for others to clear up behind them.

There was no need for me to go into the office while I was in town. I just wandered around watching tens of thousands of visitors having a good time. Julie texted me to say she'd finally found space in her work schedule to let her PC do the Windows 10 upgrade. It had taken two hours in total and was done without hassle. 

That's the last of the machines I oversee to be upgraded, and I didn't have to do anything apart from advise Julie to keep to the routine of using Chrome browser to access emails, which she knows, rather than learn the new Edge browser, such a fiddle to configure to one's own needs, or the new email client, so far, still a bit unreliable. Better to stick with tools you've adapted to your workflow, than get distracted into learning new apps which sabotage effective working habits. Or, only put the effort into something new when your workflow is definitely unfit for new purposes.

The database is now working properly, at least until the next problem is uncovered. Now I can get to work on re-building the websites I made for CBS and the BCRP. I couldn't remember which web authoring tool I'd used a decade ago, but googling soon revealed a forgotten application 'NVU' for Windows, and its correlate KompoZer for Linux. The latter I was able to download and after a brief visit to the Linux Mint help forums, found out how to install and run. There are loads of free templates to make use of on different websites, but initially, all I want to do is try and reproduce the format of the pages I made sitting on Google Sites, and hard to link up to a proper URL, with such user unfriendly instructions. Now we've hiring our own web hosting space, a little learning by doing is possible before going live. I never thought I'd get back to doing this again after so long.

Windows 10 comes home

A sunny Friday morning started with a computer notification that the Windows 10 upgrade was ready for installation – eight days after the new operating system was launched. So, around eleven, I clicked go, then went off to my GP appointment. Thankfully the blood pressure was what it should be again. What it was like at the end of this day, I didn't bother to check, but I imagine it'd be high in the light of what I now report.

The upgrade took about an hour on a machine only a little slower than my office PC, but took another quarter of an hour to configure to my requirements. Again, all installed programs run nicely, the Edge browser is still a fiddle to set up for my default choices, but this time expected.
 

I started writing my Sunday sermon on another Windows 8.1 machine, my little underpowered travel portable, and it soon gave me an installation notification, but when I clicked on it, downloading the upgrade hadn't finished. An hour later, it changed its mind and let me start. Again this took about an hour and a quarter to get to a state usability, except for one thing.

Internet access speeds on standard consumer 2mb/sec broadband connection plummeted to the point where it took a minute or two to access any new page. Other wi-fi devices in the house were also crippled, and even the phone signal booster struggled to deliver the consistent in-house signal we've got used to relying on. The reason? One Drive was busy syncing 8GB worth of files with both Windows 10 computers entirely from scratch. In fact, when the second sync started, the first stopped in its tracks, and could only be re-started once the other finished. 

The sync process notification said that files were downloading from OneDrive. I was mystified by this, as previously in Windows 8.1, a personal filesystem was uploaded to the internet and disappeared the machine. If you wanted to save work in progress to tackle when off-line, you had to hide it where OneDrive wouldn't whisk it away. This time, when the syncing stopped, after four or five hours, I discovered that all my files had been returned to the hard drive and now could be accessed off-line. Or so it says!

While this initial syncing process was going on, it seemed to consume most of the available bandwidth, to the point that other network attached devices were, for most purposes, apart from receiving notifications, un-useable. Like a denial of service attack, but in effect a provision of service sucking up all the capacity of the system.

It was so bad that when, later in the afternoon, during the sync-fest, I sought to retrieve my half prepared sermon from OneDrive, it wouldn't deliver, as pages were loading so slow they timed out. Finally, after more long waits, my trusty Linux Mint six year old Dell machine managed to slip through the traffic stream and deliver me vital file. Then I was able to complete the sermon off-line and print. It then took several attempts to upload the edited file to OneDrive. 

This may be a one off experience to do with upgrading. It won't much affect people with fast broadband, but anyone with ordinary broadband speed is going to be confounded by the experience, wishing they'd never bothered to upgrade.  In essence the upgrade is a seamless experience, apart from this issue, which is a stumbling block for those unwarned.

What I have been reminded of by this waste of a day is not to rely totally on any Cloud based service or application. Great for back-up, or file sharing, sure, but today's experience reduced fancy new Windows 10 to an offering no better or worse than a Chromebook, and brought the household to a halt.

Admittedly we're running a lot of connected devices on our domestic broadband service. Four wired devices and six to eight wi-fi devices are attached at any time, but most are just idling. Any massive file download is going to disrupt. So, it's time to pay extra for more capacity, and switch to a fibre optic system. Cable has been in the street for over a decade, and the BT cabinet around the corner has boasted of being upgraded for the past two years. 

It may be a long time before we have such a diminished service again, but truth to tell, we're now so dependent on seamless delivery, it's hard to cope with such disruption. Are we right to be so heavily reliant on internet connectedness? Days like this seem to suggest untold disasters if things ever go wrong on the macro scale.
 

Office and other achievements

I woke up early, preoccupied with thoughts of batch invoice generation for the annual round of CBS RadioNet subscription renewals, due to go out this week. With no distractions and a clear sharp mind, I tackled the much unloved job methodically and by breakfast time I had the datasets and merge templates working, ready for action, and uploaded to the CBS office OneDrive account. A cheering achievement to start the day.

Then, I took the remains of the old desk for re-cycling. It was quite a job getting all the bulky pieces in the car. The large heavy desktop will have to go on a separate journey. I returned to Staples to acquire an extra storage unit to occupy an empty space in the corner behind the new desk, and some tidy trays for desk draws in which to keep all the small fiddly things that accumulate in drawers that you can't think what to do with. 

After a couple hours, two folding crates and a large ice cream carton of little bits all from the old desk, were assigned a new home. Bookshelves were rearranged, archive material rarely if ever consulted was stored out of sight, and accessible shelf space made for all the things I regularly use. The desk surface area is now too small to be a dumping ground, and can only be used for its proper purpose, to support the use of a computer workstation.

Now there's enough real room for a second chair and my office desk chair, and hardly any clutter on the floor. Quite an achievement. I can even open the window fully for the first time. It's crazy what you put up with when you are too busy to stop and think about your working conditions. I guess that spending much of this year away in clergy houses that aren't oversized, yet have good sized well equipped office workspaces, has made me less tolerant of the cramped environment I've put up with since retirement.

With everything looking neat and tidy, it was time to re-install Linux Mint. A flawless operation in its own right, with additional software installations (Chrome and Audacity) following achieved with ease. Once more, no recourse to the Home partition back-up was necessary, though when I'd finished I realise that backing up hadn't included the newly digitized sound files of the Sinatra dream concert. Nevertheless, these played back perfectly because the upgrade had gone immaculately according to plan. Bravo Linux Mint for being so beautifully consistent.

With domestic jobs done, I was able to spend a couple of hours in the office putting finishing touches to the invoicing process with a discussion on the inevitable anomalies with Ashley and Julie. Then home in time a cook a paella for supper, and relax. Wonderful to feel good enough and have the energy to get so much done, and so satisfying.