The shadow of terrorist violence falls again

Yesterday was uneventful, unmemorable, a day of rain showers mixed with sunshine. I went for a walk in Pontcanna Fields during a bright spell in the afternoon, but got soaked in a sudden shower on my way home. Unusually, I didn't spot anything to pick up from the streets on the way there, but along the river path collected thirteen items, half pulled from briars in the undergrowth.

Before this morning's 'class Mass' at St German's, I took the car to N.G. Motors for its MOT test. After the service, I went to check on the church hall office PC, which we'd left running on Sunday to address the update backlog problem. It was running, but had stalled, in need of permission to continue. Once rebooted, it completed a lengthy update process, lasting twenty minutes, then declared that another batch was available to download. So, it was a matter of setting it off and leaving it again. 

The internet link is stable enough, but very slow, which may mean the Powerline network set-up is not being as efficient as usual in sending a receiving data. Is a workaround possible, apart from relocating the machine elsewhere in the building nearer the router, at least for the purposes of updating? The church hall ring-main is extensive. At present the distance is forty metres, so who knows what electrical interference may be affecting transmission?

By the time I decided to give up on machine minding for the day, Clare had received a text and sent one to met, to say the car was ready for collection. This was most fortunate as it meant that I didn't need to go home and return at the end of the day, or possibly next day if any repairs were needed, to collect the car. So delighted my venerable auto is still roadworthy! It meant I could call into the Lidl's on the way back from retrieving the car, and stock up with additional food items for the coming days, during which Clare will be with sister-in-law Ann over in East Anglia from tomorrow. 

As I was relaxing after lunch, a brief but urgent phone call came from my sister June to switch on the telly, as a major incident had been declared in London. That's how I learned about the terrorist incident outside the House of Commons. Given the gravity of the 7/7 bombing, I feared the worst as I switched on. With four deaths reported, including a policeman, it was an appalling incident, but I was grateful that it wasn't worse involving a truck bomb or lethal toxic attack. Paramedics were on the scene very quickly and police had the area under security lock-down very quickly after the initial incident had concluded. The assailant's car, used as a simple lethal weapon was travelling on public roads, with possibly the best video surveillance and policing in Britain. It's impossible to scan minds for deadly ill-will, however. The stories of all those involved will dominate the media for days to come. 

This week, some airlines working on Middle Eastern routes are starting to ban electronic devices larger than a phone from cabin baggage, due to reports of terrorist techies disguising explosives to resemble batteries used in laptops. Placing them in the aircraft's hold in robust containers would limit damage from any undetected device. Working out exactly how to manage this, so that no passenger has their electronic baggage stolen in transit to or from the flight will be challenging. I don't suppose it'll be too long before this becomes ubiquitous on the majority of flights, even though the risk of an attack on an airport terminal is regarded as far more likely than successfully detonating a bomb on a 'plane, in the light of rigorous security  measures already in place. It's a strange 'new normal' we've had to get used to in over the fifteen years since 9/11. 

What a hostile world we've created for our descendents, despite all our best idealist intentions!

  

A swings and roundabouts day

I drove to St John's to celebrate this morning's Eucharist, and then on my way home took the car into the Kwikfit garage a few streets away to see if could get the car's heater fan fixed. It had stopped working and I assumed it was due to a burned out fuse. It was surprised to discover however that there's no fuse, but rather a thermo-couple switch, linked to a similar switch in the radiator fan. It turned out that the heat exchanger which supplies the fan with air had finally given up the air-lock which had caused the fan to deliver only mildly warm air instead of hot air, for the past two years. 

Before the heat exchanger filled with cold water, the relay had stuck in the 'off' position. All that had been needed was to top up the radiator by the volume of the air bubble and run the engine until the main radiator fan started and with it, the heater fan. Anthony, the garage supervisor did the detective work on my 25 year old VW Golf Mark Two and got the heating working again. He's worked on it before and taken pride in helping keep it on the road. It cheered me up no end. On previous occasions, I've tweeted my thanks to Kwikfit for going the extra distance for me as a customer. It's been noticed and appreciated by the team, who remember me when I bring the car in for them to work on occasionally.

It wasn't until I got home and tried to switch on my mobile phone that I discovered it wasn't working. As I was getting into the car, my outer jacket pocket, containing the phone drooped outside the car and took an unlucky hit from the door, closing under gravity, without me noticing. Thankfully, I was able to slip the phone SIM into the my spare old Blackberry, and use it until I worked out what to do next. I walked to Canton Mobile Zone on the corner of Severn Road, to see if a newish Samsung J3 screen could be repaired, or if the phone was broken beyond repair. The manager told me replacing the screen would cost £100. He showed me on his smartphone the cost of an OEM screen, inevitably increased lately due to the drop in sterling. I paid £95 in a discount deal before Christmas. Now the best price on offer is around £120. Before going ahead with the repair, the manager found a replacement screen, attached it to the phone and started it up. It worked fine. If it could do that much, I was in luck. After half an hour's wait, phone and I were happily reunited. Walking there and back, wandering around the street of shops, I picked up and binned forty nine items of litter.

I drove to St German's early enough to set up the office PC with a Powerline Network Adapter. I still have a couple of redundant spares. It worked first time in finding the internet, but I wondered about the quality of the signal passing through a large ring main with secondary router and wi-fi device in-line, as the actual speed of downloading was glacially slow. At the outset, I'd expected the system to be more responsive, as it's a Core i5 machine containing few extra programs and no new data. We left it running while we were in church for Stations of the Cross. On return an hour later, Windows Defender update had stalled and needed re-starting. I checked to see if anything else had updated, and it looked as if Windows 10 updates hadn't started either. After a restart we decided to leave it running overnight, just in case it was running slowly due to competing demands, once it had been recognised by the Microsoft servers after a ten month break and change of address. I can check after the lunchtime Mass tomorrow. In the meanwhile, home for supper and a couple of hours of telly before bed.
  

Old assets, new uses

With a trip to St German's for Mass and Christian Aid Lent lunch at the end of the morning, I woke up thinking about the church hall wi-fi connectivity problem, then went hunting through my stored redundant technology bits and pieces to see what I could find. There were four Powerline adaptor plugs and ethernet cables, plus a box containing a complete wi-fi router, redundant after our broadband upgrade last year. That was about the time when I bought a wi-fi extending Powerline adaptor set, which was incompatible with the slower originals. I had to lay out more than I expected to complete the upgrade, and thus had a spare set working, in any case at a decent speed.

After Mass and lunch, I installed the kit and found that it worked as planned. The spare wi-fi extender that had been bought also connected, enabling the signal to travel to the furthest extent of the long steel and concrete building. This little success brought me no end of good cheer. I hate to see good working kit go to waste. There's still a lot more I wish I could find a use for, however.

On my afternoon walk, to the shops and the post office in two separate outings, I continued my Lenten 'wombling' effort, collecting this time thirty eight separate cans, paper cups, glass and plastic bottles, along my 3 km route. That's an average of a dozen pieces discarded per kilometre, much the same as I estimated yesterday. The number of slim energy drink cans among the detritus is remarkable, some of them tossed in the few days since I last passed by. As these beverages are marketed to sustain people who are being unusually physically active, I wondered if there's a correlation between this and total disregard for one's physical environment. 

As I was entering Tesco's, at Canton Cross, a mum and a granny emerged with a kindergarten age child in a strop, who dashed a small yoghourt drink from her lips, which hit my coat and splashed me with drops. They apologised but the child refused to, and refused defiantly to pick up the carton and take it to a bin two metres away. After I'd passed them I thought too late what I should have said to the child to bring home the fact that this behaviour was unacceptable - all the situation needed was to say "I'll tell your teacher you've been naughty!"

Within ten metres of the store entrance, curiously, there are no fewer than three litter bins, yet one can walk several hundred metres along Cowbridge Road and side streets leading off it, and rarely find a bin. It's no wonder people have got out of the habit of using them.

After supper I went over to St Catherine's Church Hall to collect some church keys I inadvertently left at St John's yesterday. The Parish youth club was in full session, with table football, ping-pong and an assortment of other table games being played, by over a dozen youngsters, and watched over by several parents, plus Fr Phelim. As the hall is a 19th century wooden building, an original temporary mission church in good repair, still finding use in the church grounds. I felt as if I was stepping back in time forty years to my days as a Curate. Even in these days of electronic devices and games, it's great that there's still a social space in which physical playful activities still continue to give pleasure and forge bonds between children that might even last a lifetime.