Wobbly web and wobbly knee

I woke up at half past five and couldn't get back to sleep, so I wrote for an hour or so until Clare came down, and then we had breakfast together. Still felling tired, I trying going back to bed, but our cleaners came and I couldn't settle. Clare's computer wouldn't attach to the internet, so her computer needed a little troubleshooting. Thankfully it wasn't the problem plaguing thousands at the moment, but a clash between the Wifi and Ethernet devices, which were both on at the same time. A flawed Windows 10 update has left some router marques not working consistently. Sister June emailed to say she hadn't been able to access mail for ages, until this weekend just gone, and that may well be an instance of this upgrade problem, as she has really fast broadband and a dual router set up that I'm not familiar with. So I can't help wondering if her posh router is one that's been suffering from Windows 10 upgrade-itis. 

Thank heavens for a Chromebook, and Android phones, as neither is likely to be affected by this bug, which seems to leave the actual PC unable to play consistently with certain makes of router, and not the other way around, if I've understood properly. I read reports about this on Saturday. Certain TalkTalk issued routers also seem affected, as their help service tweeted about it today, drawing public attention to an article on their website. Meanwhile, Microsoft is being quite tight-lipped about it, and how long before a remedy will be issued. These days MS performs operating system updates automatically, unless the operating system is configured to change nothing without user consent. They don't say what's being fixed in each update, so there's no way of users knowing which update needs to be uninstalled to root out the problem. It's totalitarian madness.

After lunch, Clare went swimming, and I went out to meet colleague Fr Chris for a coffee and chat in Cafe Castan, before making my way to the Natural Health clinic for a MacTimony chiro apporintment with Kay, so work on a painful knee problem which has emerged in recent days, the result of several unfortunate collisions with low lying furniture, hitting me in the same place. Unfortunately,  I was a week early. I hadn't read the confirmatory email I receive properly, so grateful I'd been to get an early appointment locally. Well, after limping unsteadily home, I secured another appointment for tomorrow, and I have to drive to Newport for that. I'll be glad to get some help in sorting this problem out. Feeling wobbly in one leg is a sensation I have found most disconcerting, an unwelcome taste of old age.

   

Web housekeeping

Sunday morning was taken up with a celebration of the Eucharist at St John's Canton followed by another at St Luke's. The rest of the day was spent doing nothing much ... well, resting I suppose you'd call it. We discussed going out to join the Ecumenical street Procession of Our Lady of Walsingham at St Mary's Bute Street, but not long before it was time to leave, I nodded off and woke up too late to be punctual.

I did however finally get around to ordering an upgrade of Talktalk's Broadband on-line, after the Talktalk Care twitter helpline account manager sent me the appropriate web-link. It was altogether a lot simpler than I'd envisaged. With so many on-line devices in the house, on and off at different times, the basic service is barely adequate, so it's worth the extra to avoid impatience. Service always seems to go flaky when you most need it. I was impressed to get a text message confirming the order and giving a service start date this morning.

Much of today was spent working with my collection of photographs from my last sojourn in Spain. Some albums hadn't made it from laptop to backup drive, and now I have lots of OneDrive webspace, I uploaded over a thousand pictures, first re-sizing them in a Linux batch processing app called Phatch, which does a great quick job with no fuss. As all my photos are now taken full size, to be used sometimes for cropping out wasted space or magnifying one section, I decided to upload only half sized versions. 

OneDrive doesn't seem to offer an automatic 'best for web sharing' upload option like Google's Picasa, so the job has to be done beforehand. 'Best for web sharing' is sensible, not just from a space saving point of view, but if you're viewing them, a larger picture takes longer to display and resolve properly on screen, particularly with slower connections. It's a labour of love, and it is quite possible to do other things while uploading happens in the background. Today there was a job application pack and advertisement to prepare for recruiting a new BCRP Business Crime Reduction Manager. I'd meant to go into the office but ended up staying home all day, even though it was bright and sunny. Must get out more.

 

On line at last

This morning I went to meet the lawyer who deals with church property affairs from an office at the boundary of the boundaries of Los Boliches and Torreblanca barrios. From her, I obtained the key to the basement room of our urbanizacion housing the vital telecoms control unit. I went home straight away and started composing a text message to the Telefonica/Movistar engineer who had kindly given me his mobile number to contact him when I could give him access. Before I could press the send button, he was ringing the door bell! Is this telepathica? I thought and later tweeted. 

Within ten minutes the line was connected, phone and broadband working perfectly. Such excellent service, delivered cheerfully. Before he departed he put me on to his trouble-shooting supervisor, who spoke excellent English, so I congratulated him on the concientous delivery of this service, far superior to anything I have ever experienced from British Telecoms or TalkTalk back in the U.K. He seemed bemused to be thanked profusely. It seems handling 'complaints' was his primary role. 

So now we have our internet enabled devices attached and working without glitches or peak time outages. Why can't it be like this in Britain, I ask myself. The answer lies in reluctance to invest big time in infrastructure upgrading when it was needed, a decade ago. It may be happening now, but here and there, not everywhere. Mind you, it may well be the same in Spain if you live out in the remote campo. Grand plans, beloved of politicians, can be devilishly difficult to implement on the ground. We live in an age of breakthrough technical achievements, but vision and imagination can easily outstrip the practicalities for implementation, even with the most capable people on the job.

After lunch I went down to St Andrew's to join the church Craft Group, assembled to make Palm Crosses, with fresh palm leaves taken from someone's garden. The last time I weaved Palm Crosses was when I was Chaplain in Monaco, thirteen years ago. There was a variety of palm tree in the church garden which produced useable leaves, and a handful of us, including octogenarian sacristan France Ametis, made our crosses ahead of the Sunday service. France was the one who remembered how to weave the crosses. She'd been doing it for sixty years, most of them with her late husband who'd inherited the sacristan job from his father.

It took me a few fumbling efforts to weave my first palm cross. I had to be showed by two kind patient neighbours on the production table. Then it was as if my fingers remembered what my brain had failed to, and took over. I managed to weave about ten crosses to add to the couple of hundred to be given out at the five chaplaincy centres of worship next Sunday. It was a happy experience that reconnected me to another period in ministry among the expatriates of Europe.

   

Tracking Santa at peak time

Yesterday morning I finalised sermons for Midnight Mass and Christmas Day services. In the afternoon, I helped Clare with last minute preparations, while Kath and Rachel drove to Newbury to collect Jasmine from her Dad. Anto returned from Kenilworth, Owain came over, and we all sat down to supper together. Rhiannon and Jasmine were so thrilled and excited to be together for Christmas. 

We had some fun visiting the NORAD Santa tracking site but as the evening progressed our TalkTalk internet connection slowed down with global traffic congestion to the point where it became unusable. It's not supposed to happen but it does. The big service providers promote the virtue of faster connectivity, always at a price. That's not unreasonable for it provides extra heavy duty capacity for shifting audio and video files quickly, if this is considered necessary by a user.  

Billions of internet enabled devices are in use at any time, and when the world goes into leisure or crisis management mode, there are bound to be peaks of demand to access particular sites, no matter how much cloud capacity gets expanded. In the physical world, motorways are fine until lots of people are on the move at the same time, converging on particular destination. Having a faster car or bigger lorry makes no difference to the existence of congestion hot-spots. So who do the promoters of faster internet think they are kidding? There's always a gap between the ideal and the reality.

By eight the girls were in bed, and by eight thirty I was on my way out to join former colleague Jenny Wigley for the Midnight Masses at St John's Danescourt and Christchurch Radyr. I preached at both and celebrated as well at Christchurch. There were three dozen at St John's and around ninety at Christchurch at eleven. It doesn't seem long since I was there for Holy Week. 

Driving between churches, I started remembering last year's unique Christmas Eve in Taormina, with a praesepio (nativity scene) in half the shop windows along the town's main street. Then I started thinking about the Andalusian Belen scenes I'd seen just before I returned home from Spain at the beginning of this month. By the time the second service started I decided not to repeat my sermon, but to ad lib a reflection around these experiences instead. I'm always nervous about going on too long or losing my thread, but on this occasion, the outcome was more satisfying than just repeating my earlier effort. By one o'clock, I was home again, enjoying half a glass of Rioja and a slice of cheese in a very calm and quiet household before going to bed.

The little ones were awake at four, and finally up opening their stockings at half six. Clare and I got up at a quarter to eight - she to start cooking Christmas lunch and I to get ready to leave for my nine thirty service at All Saints' Llandaff North. There were fifteen of us there and no organist, so I led unaccompanied singing, and wonderfully, the sun shone in to brighten a chilly church. It was great to be home again just after ten thirty and free of duties for the rest of the day. It meant that I could be kitchen slave and help in various ways to get the Christmas dinner on the table punctually.

It was a great meal, meticulously masterminded by Clare with help from Kath and Rachel in preparation, and Owain in carving and serving. Rhiannon and Jasmine decorated the table. We stretched the eating over several hours taking a break, after the main course and a red wine and cheese interlude, for a short entertainment called 'Red Santa' devised by Rhiannon to introduce the exchange of presents. Then we returned for the pudding, pies and a second round of cheeses with a sweet white wine. A wonderful happy family affair for which I thank God and all the participants.

   

Troubleshooting by Twitter

Pope Francis is inspiring others and being inspired by his visit to Assisi today, home and last resting place of his inspirational namesake. The whole world is a better place for the light and joy he brings to sharing the Gospel. I spent the morning in Pontcanna's Coffee #1 learning about how one of my St Mike's students from last year packed his summer with really interesting things to do. I found that inspirational too.

This morning I woke up to find that my internet router/modem was dead, and tweeted about it to service providor TalkTalk Care. Within an hour, I received an email to tell me that a new router/modem was being dispatched to me. Great, you may think, but the story started yesterday afternoon. The internet connection was very intermittent, as it has been intermittently several times of late. It was annoying as I had some office work to get done before the weekend. I tweeted a moan about poor connectivity, and my growing curiosity about changing service providor. Within an hour I had a response from TalkTalk Care asking me to explain the problem. This was the first of nine exchanges via Twitter during the rest of the day.

First I was asked to log into my TalkTalk account page and request a line test, which I was only able to do because I had an internet enable Blackberry, of course. But at least I was spared the telephone queue, the multi-option menus and technical support people with accents difficult to comprehend. The TalkTalkCare tweeter(s) were under the impression this would restore service, having not taken in the fact that the device under test was not lighting up, even with the power on. 

I rummaged about among my spare pieces of kit for a redundant modem of bygone years to use, and came to the conclusion it was somewhere in the office. TalkTalkCare suggested I register a support request with the help desk via their internet page. The page link sent to me with the best intentions was unreadable, as it was not intended for a device as small as a Blackberry. After supper, I went off to my Tai Chi class, discussing this by tweets when an opportunity to stop arose.  On my way back from class I went into the office, rummaged around there for the spare modem without success, logged into the TalkTalk website on a desktop PC and registered my request.

When I got home late, I dug out an old multi-voltage transformer to test with the modem, just in case it was only the transformer that was dead. Sure enough the transformer powered up the modem after fiddling with the on-off switch. This got me back on-line and I was able to tweet a message from my laptop describing the outcome to the TalkTalk Care team. I left the device running and went to bed. When I got up, I found the old transformer was dead, so evidently it wasn't up to meeting regular demand, or the modem had a fault that was taking more than it could possibly give. I tweeted this to the TalkTalk Care team and very soon after had a message to say that a modem had been ordered for despatch to me. It should arrive in three working days - I make that Tuesday. Meanwhile my work Blackberry and BT mobile dongle are proving invaluable, and my jobs are getting done.

At tea-time I collected our friend Andrea from the train. She's come from Scarborough for the weekend to go to a Sunday afternoon opera with us. This weekend I have no locum duties, so it'll be good to share extra free time with her. Just as we were saying goodnight, the phone rang. It was Father Graham Francis in need of a little tech support as a consequence of a suspicious email that had set of alarm bells as it carried a file attachment which refused to open. All sorts of straightforward reasons for this, but better safe than sorry, so I talked him through starting a full security check on both his machines, just in case. I bet his namesake Pope Francis doesn't get calls like that just before bedtime.

  

The illusion that speed means progress

Easter Monday we all rose late. It's quite a while since I last slept ten hours. We didn't do much or go far, as it was still cold and dull. Irritatingly, the internet was intermittently on and off all day, and for the most part slower than usual. Not that unusual with TalkTalk Broadband however. Most nights we're without a reliable connection from nine thirty for two hours.

Easter Tuesday, rising late again. Mary from across the road came over to ask for help with her computer, as she was getting error messages she didn't recognise. It turned out that her internet connection was also very slow and intermittent, making the job of updating an old XP driven computer into a series of long freezes. Now Mary is a BT customer. I've checked all my equipment, connected to TalkTalk broadband, and the problem's the same. This suggests there's an infrastructure problem somewhere not too far away and it's affecting service providors who buy their slice of the information highway from BT Openreach.

My router shows I am connected, the operating systems on various computers in the house show that my  data is being sent out but only a tiny fragment of data is returning, not enough to display a website, only enough to make the browser hang. Then after a while the router displays 'unable to connect to internet' and drops out for several minutes before resuming at a speed too slow to be functional.

Nothing about local outages on the news. Nothing about it on the TalkTalk website - no point in phoning them as their customer service is rarely of any use at the time you need it. Oh yes, the way I know this is because my BT 3G wireless internet dongle still works, enabling me to visit websites and post this. It's lucky I have no urgent need to spend lots of time on-line at the moment. 

I wonder how many people in business, or managing emergencies are wondering what on earth is happening. It makes me realise how dangerously dependent we've become on internet connectivity over the past decade, and just how wicked it is that internet service marketing promotes an illusion of a world in which every service runs perfectly, consistently and powerfully, when in reality it's still a work in progress whose reliability falls far short of being comparable with that of the national electricity grid.

The Big Joke is all the promotional hype Cardiff is getting to do with the roll out of super-fast broadband services intended to improve economic development. What's most needed is consistency and reliability at whatever speed. Without that your plans always unravel and your emergencies are un-manageable.

What are we doing by lying to ourselves about priorities?

 

More security compromise

After a nice lie in and breakfast, Clare and I both went to our computers to check email and found we had difficulty getting on-line. Then she succeeded, but my problem persisted, so I went through an equipment fault finding check, to no avail. When I attempted to access our router to check the settings, my access password was refused. Thinking it might be a hardware fault, I rebooted. Same result. Then I visited each of the computers in the house in turn, and discovered none of them could access the router using neither this password nor the original default setting. Switching router on and off made no difference. 

The only conclusion I could come to was that the password had been changed overnight from outside, as  the router had been left on. In other words, I'd been hacked. Uh oh? Any relation to my sister's scam, as my Gmail address was on her computer, with my warning message emailed during the event. Maybe that enabled someone to track my IP address and start an attack on me.

Thankfully, I have a spare router at home set up for my account, and another spare in the CBS office. I switched them over and changed the access password, making it harder to break, plus the wireless access password. That'll do for now, hopefully. But what of my sister? I phoned her and told her to call Talktalk Care to tell them that she believed her router security had been compromised. Later she rang back to say she had spoken to someone who when she said this replied: "Compromise, what is compromise?" Neither a first language English speaker nor trained in security jargon, it seems. She couldn't make herself understood and rang off in disgust. It means her computer is still potentially vulnerable, until her router cannot be accessed and its password changed. I should have checked it !

It took me three hours to go through all the internet enabled devices in the house registering password changes in all of them, just in case, well, ten out of eleven so far, there's still Clare's Kindle to do. Rather later than expected, I went into town, temporarily quiet because the Wales Ireland rugby match was in full swing. I watched the miserable Welsh defeat up on the top floor of John Lewis, where I met up with Ashley before we went to the CBS office to finish off what we didn't get done yesterday. It was seven o'clock by the time I left, and made my way to the bus through heaving crowds eating or queuing for fast food in scores, blocking Caroline Street with bodies and litter. Not an endearing sight. What slobs we are with our unhealthy public eating habits.

A strange unsettling day.

 

Security breach probe

A walk into town for the seven thirty coach to London freshened me up nicely. The man charged with dispatching the coach had a smartphone rigged to scan passengers' tickets. Those printed from an internet booking contain a QR code which can confirm the place assigned. Official National Express tickets don't (yet), so require visual checking and a photo taken, I think. The two add up to the number of seats available. An interesting development. I commented on the innovation to him, but he remained unsmiling. Obviously it was too early in the day for him to rejoice in anything.

My brisk awakening didn't prevent me from snoozing for a while on the coach, before saying the Divine Office, then writing a blog post and a brief report during the journey. I remembered to stow my BT wireless dongle in my little laptop case. It worked a treat on the M4, only on the last leg through West End London, did the signal get wobbly in between high buildings. 

I was with my sister June by midday, cautiously going over her compromised computer to see in which ways it had been interfered with by the IT telephone scammer of last Friday. I found 'system optimiser' software that she'd been tricked into paying for installed, also 'Team Viewer' a reputable program which enables secure remote access of another computer, both on the date of the call. Funnily enough, last year I considered installing this to allow me to troubleshoot her computer problems remotely, but I didn't, as I had no experience of how to use it securely.Its presence meant that someone could access her computer and install things on it remotely while it was on without her knowing.

Once it and its settings were uninstalled, I connected to the internet, updated the anti-virus, performed a scrupulous scan of the system, taking three hours. There was nothing malicious detectable. The anti-virus program log showed it had last updated before the scammer called, finding nothing malicious to quarantine. June's bank account had been debited for the software sold to her fraudulently, but she'd just received a letter informing her the amount had been refunded to her account. Well done NatWest!

Certainly, some clean-up work had been done, as browser history and the recycling bin were unusually empty. There were few redundant files and links to files scattered around as usual. On the surface, some sort of job had been done to justify the remote access visit as a 'client service' - except that it wasn't asked for, and was achieved through an outright lie. The remote access portal had not been removed, and  Gmail password handed over by trickery. Free access rights to my sister's computer could then be sold on by the invader to anyone wanting to add it to their botnet, or use it as a spam server.

June said that just before the scam call, she'd had an odd virus alert pop up. As there was nothing logged, I wondered what happened. Had the router been hacked to provide an opening through which to send an Instant Message fake alert via Google Chat, while she was reading emails? I wondered. Microsoft IM was banished from her computer long ago for (in-)security reasons. The router stores the phone number to access broadband, so it could provide the vital link for a scammer to call, once hacked. Or did one of the many circulating emails containing jokes and stories carry a nasty payload to open a hidden backdoor to her machine? Maybe I'll get to the bottom of it one of these days.

The best thing about the day was the arrival of our cousin Dianne to spend the afternoon with us. It was such a delight to meet up, as I haven't seen her since we dedicated her mother's memorial stone in Sunningdale churchyard two years ago. She's retired since then, so there was plenty of fresh delight in new life to be shared. The coach was packed on the way home, and on time despite the Friday evening rush hour crawl leaving London. I'm still mulling over June's router - I didn't change its administrator access password. She didn't have it. Hmmm. Not finished yet, maybe. A call to TalkTalk Care should be able to do something about that tomorrow.