iPad down and up

A day of respite from intermittent rain hail and cold wind, sunny and warm enough to go out with no top coat, proper spring weather. There were eight of us at the St Catherine's Eucharist. It was Emma's last service at St Catherine's before she goes on three month's secondment to Fairwater Parish. She will be missed, and it generates a certain level of uncertainty about how projects she initiated or catalysed will be able to continue.

I collected our organic veggy bag on the way home, and cooked what I call my Inspector Montalbano tribute lunch. Pasta with pesto mixed with spinach and carrots, and boil in the bag mussels in a white wine sauce, plus a bottle of a organic Sicilian white wine to accompany it. In all thirty of the movies based on Camillieri's novels I have never seen Salvo drink anything other than local white wine. It's not something seen here often but Lidl's had one when we visited yesterday. 

After lunch I collected our weekly grocery order from Beanfreaks, and then took my Sony Alpha 68 with me for a walk around the periphery of Llandaff Fields, equipped with a 11-18mm wide angle lens to take a succession of landscape photos of the trees whose leaf canopy is now almost fully developed. On three of the marked pitches, preparations were under way for evening cricket matches - at a guess, teams of Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi players, each group speaking a mixture of English and their national language. If there's a Caribbean team or league hereabouts, I'm not aware of it. It's just great that so much cricket is played. Most afternoons there are players practicing at the mobile nets array in a corner of the park. We're just a mile away from the SWALEC stadium, home of Glamorgan County Cricket, where there are even more practice nets, so it's understandable.

Yesterday, Clare's iPad froze on her. The touch screen stopped working, although it seemed that behind the inaccessible login screen, everything else was still working, but inaccessible. She took it to Turotech on her way into town, only to discover the shop is closed on a Wednesday. When she returned, she left the device on the kitchen worktop. I was pondering on why Apple would fail to provide the equivalent of a kill-switch and means to reboot iPad OS, as happens with all other electronic devices. 

The older iPad has a top edge button that works like a power switch to bring it out of hibernation, but no amount of prolonged pressing would shut the thing down properly. It also has a physical button below the touch screen that can take you back to the home screen whenever it's pressed. I tried pressing the two together. The screen went completely black, then after a few seconds, the Apple logo appeared and reboot started. We were both delighted to find the touch screen worked again and found out something neither of us knew before. But, why it froze when it froze is a complete mystery.

This evening, just for fun, and for practice, I made a three minute video slideshow using the photos I took this afternoon, and accompanied it with the first movement of Vivaldi's 'Four Seasons'. I was quite pleased the result, and uploaded it to YouTube for the family to see.

Catch-up viewing language lesson

Feeling somewhat better on Friday, I worked on my Sunday sermon, worked on next Tuesday's funeral and then went into town in the afternoon, for a catch-up meeting with Ashley. On the way there I walked around the Central Square development site and took photos It's ten weeks since I was last here and the major visual change is the extent of the external glazing of the buildings. On a bright but cloudy day, the reflections look very decorative. Not so wonderful on one of Cardiff's many low grey cloud days, I suspect.

This afternoon, Clare and I walked our usual circuit along the Taff through Bute Park and back. It was pleasantly warm, and there was an open air concert going on in the car park of the SWALEC stadium, with a wild sounding jazz big band playing.

In the evening I decided to catch up watching the latest BBC Four serialised euro-crime, a Spanish production called 'Sé quién eres', (I know who you are), rather than drop in and watch the most recent double episode. I got through four of the eight published episodes in one go, as not only was it an engaging story line with good acting, but to my amazement, my last couple of years of hard work using the Duo Lingo language app is now paying off in terms of being able to follow dialogue, and see how it relates to the sub-titles. It was like a four hour lesson in colloquial speech. I learned a lot about how common phrases and interjections are actually used. It was most rewarding.

The plot concerns a tough ruthless well connected lawyer who loses his memory in a car accident and finds afterwards that his car is a crime scene, and he is chief suspect in the disappearance of his student aged niece. He is totally reliant on what his family and colleagues tell him about what kind of person he is. Finds find this leaves him feeling unhappy with himself. He no longer wants to be that kind of person. Yet he has to recover a sense of himself and his memory to defend himself against allegations which promise to ruin his life. 

The thought provoking story of how this happens is convoluted and interesting, and the theme of family loyalty runs through it, as well as that of corrupt practices in the legal profession. I think it's set in Barcelona. Thankfully the discourse is in Castilian rather than Catalan, or I would have far less chance of following it and getting so much out of it. That's the first time I've watched any TV or video since I went to Malaga, two months ago. Amazing how one can live without entertainment when everyday life on the street is so interesting to be part of.

A new role for Facebook?

Another beautiful warm sunny day, and with the door into the garden open, the sound of a crowd cheering wildly somewhere in the distance. It took a while to realise that it wasn't someone's telly turned up loud in a kitchen with the patio doors open, nor the distinctive roar of a crowd over at Cardiff City Stadium in Leckwith, it was the cricket crowd at the SWALEC stadium on the Taff side of Pontcanna. The noisy excitement that accompanies the modern game isn't something I've yet got accustomed to expect on the summer air.

I went into the office for the afternoon, to meet Dave Sharpe the co-ordinator of the Barry Business Crime Reduction Partnership, and discuss with him the use of our new crime data sharing ABCP Intranet. He also related how information on suspects and their associates could be gleaned from their Facebook public profiles, thanks to the ingenuous impulse many have to self-publicise. This prompted me to open a CBS Facebook account, to give the CBS team its own access opportunity. It may also be useful for some kind of crime reduction publicity in due course, and help us to raise the profile of who we are and what we do. It's several years since I gave up using Facebook. I found it such a waste of time at a personal level. I'll be interesting to see if if any of us does research suspects in this way.

I got home in good time to cook supper before driving Clare and Gail to Dinas Powis before going to my Tai Chi class, Tonight, by special request, in the absence of our teacher, the group opted to do the entire short form three times - that's the most I've done in one session for years, and it enabled my to work at a part of the sequence where my memory is most flaky. I expect to sleep well after this workout.