A techy sort of day

Another beautiful warm blue sky day, after an interrupted night with messages from Jasmine in Arizona saying that their standby flights had been cancelled. It look like they won't arrive now until Thursday. I got up a bit late, considering I had to drive to St German's after breakfast for a ten o'clock children's Mass. Peter wasn't there to help at the altar, and although most things were ready, I had to hunt for the weekday lectionary. I doesn't contain the relevant collects, so I had to read from the Church in Wales lectionary app on my phone hidden on the lectern- in flight mode of course. 

Thirty children and three staff members arrived and I had a lovely time speaking with them about the peace that Jesus gives, starting with the story of the dumb demoniac, as someone who may have been so terrified by something nasty that he couldn't talk about it. I noticed glances of understanding in a few faces, when I talked about needing a cuddle when you are frightened. 

We sang a few short songs unaccompanied. When it came to the offertory I realised that the booklets on the altar didn't contain a Eucharistic prayer, just an outline. Rather than rush around looking for an altar book and disrupting the calm atmosphere, I recited by heart the Eucharistic Prayer as far as the anemnaesis and improvised from there on a simple continuation of the prayer down to the doxology, without hesitation or deviation. It's not something I'd normally do, but I felt comfortable about doing it. 

Angela who was doorkeeper in the house of the Lord on this occasion noticed what I'd done and expressed her approval as she'd noticed I wasn't reading from a book! I tidied up and took my leave, as the fire safety inspection was starting, another reason for Angela to be there. Driving down Newport Road, I realised that I'd forgotten to sign the service register and wondered where I might stop to phone her. Then I realised my phone was still on the lectern. I got home, checked her mobile phone number on my Chromebook, and called her. Thankfully she was still in church, as the fire safety officer had only just gone. I drove back to St German's to retrieve the phone and headed home a second time. Clare's study group was just leaving after their session. I let her carry on making lunch, as I had to finish editing audio for tomorrow's Morning Prayer pronto. 

Video making had to come later in the afternoon, as I had grocery shopping to do, and sort out the rubbish ready for collection. I also decided I should get rid of two fifteen year old laptops, still working but useless without Linux, and now a bit slow booting up. I called in to Tourotech and asked Davey if she was still a collection channel for hardware recycling, and with this confirmed I returned and collected them, to take to him. The combined weight of them must have been six kilos. I set out to walk but realised that the weight of them was too much for my back and feet, to carry nearly a mile. The 61 bus was fifteen minutes late, the amount of time that walking would have taken. Ah well!

I came away from the shop with a bargain second hand Dell Windows laptop and a set of three wireless network mesh extenders altogether costing £290. Then I started setting up the laptop, still a horribly time consuming job as it forces you to re-set your password, and makes the process a real rigmarole. It's still not complete as it's still telling me that I'm not logged into my Microsoft account when I am. I can't set up the mesh extenders, or my new phone until I've sorted out the laptop. I had to get on with video making and uploading itto YouTube on my old Honor laptop, and then return to troubleshooting. I gave up at nine and walked under a clear sky with a nearly full moon for half an hour to clear my head. An aroma of hay and lime flowers perfumed the still air. Exquisite. But I did get to bed much later than intended, and rather tired, mentally and physically.

End of an era

A day of clouds, sunshine and rain. I posted the link to this week's Morning Prayer upload before getting up for breakfast, then went to the Eucharist at St John's celebrating the birth of the Virgin Mary. A down pour began after I left church and I sheltered in the porch of 'The Corp Market' for ten minutes until it eased off enough to continue walking home. Unfortunately, instead of my jacket getting wet my trousers got soaked by cars splashing through water not draining off the road quickly enough.

News started coming in of concern for the Queen's health as I was cooked a lentil dish for lunch. Members of the Royal Family making their way hastily to Balmoral, suggesting the end is in sight for Her Majesty. After lunch I decided it was time to recycle some old redundant computers, all still working under Linux, but not with the speed and memory capability I need these days. I took three of them along to Davey at Tourotech who acts on behalf of a colleague with an IT recycling business whose shop nearby closed during the pandemic. They all fitted into one laptop bag and its was very heavy to carry. 

This leaves me with five computers of various ages, all used for different purposes and situations. One is twelve years old, running Windows Vista, retained because it drives my photo negative scanner. I would have to pay as much as the cost of a new scanner to acquire software to run the device on a Windows 10 machine. Best to keep the old machine until there are no more negatives left to scan. 

Another machine is ten years old with a solid state drive running Linux. Then there's a Chromebook, a Windows 10 laptop and a Windows 10 workstation with a big screen. Crazy really, but all have their uses on different occasions. It's strange to have a phone powerful enough to use for emails and text messaging in any time or place. I spend far less time now sitting writing at a desk or table because I can do short pieces of business and check information on my Blackberry instead, despite the risk of getting repetitive strain injury from one fingered typing.

By the time we were sitting down to supper, news of the Queen's death was being announced, and all normal programme schedules on radio and telly were suspended and given over the reporting on the event and reactions to it world wide, and no wonder. So much has changed in the world over the past seventy years of her reign, appointing fifteen prime ministers, from Winston Churchill to Liz Truss over ninety percent of my lifetime. The Prince of Wales became King Charles the Third around six this evening. Despite the rain, crowds of mourners are gathering outside Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, Balmoral and probably Sandringham as well. 

Our churches are opening for prayer, There'll be an extra service at St John's in the morning, a Requiem Mass for the longest serving Queen in the past Millennium. King Charles takes the mantle of continuity, and will wear it in his own way. I hope and pray his long standing advocacy on environment issues will continue. He was right to speak out, and those who mocked him are proved to be the fools, in a light of the climate crisis. May Queen Elizabeth rest in peace. Long live King Charles.

New kit and a favourite returns

After I good night's sleep I woke up feeling full of energy, which showed itself when I went out for a walk before lunch, covering ground at a faster pace than I have for a long time. It was the same again when I went out after lunch, totalling ten kilometres in under two hours instead of the more usual nine to nine and a half. Strange, I don't know where the energy came from. I still can't walk as fast as others younger than me. Some folk in their sixties set a fair pace when out on their daily stroll.

Overheard on the street after school, a mum talking to her four year old - "No darling the tiny bug can't hurt you, it's been caught inside the stone for thousands of years..." I wonder what she was being shown in nursery school today?

I've been getting rather frustrated with the slowness of my desktop workstation since I bought the laptop with a SSD drive and a quick modern processor. It takes far too long to start up, access apps and files, it's getting in the way of workflow. The same old story of built in redundancy. So, I gave in and visited our local tech shop to buy a cheap used Dell server running Windows 10 Pro. I chatted with Davey, the guy who runs TouroTech about old devices and he showed me a laptop brought in for repair to a hinge that was about thirty years old, one of the original small Compaq portables with a seven inch screen. It's about that amount of time since I bought my first laptop, as we were about to move to Switzerland. It's so long ago I can't remember what make it was. Nor for that matter, how many I've had since then.

The new workstation is a couple of years old, but as it has a SSD it boots as fast as my laptop. Getting started and synchronised took less time than I thought it would, perhaps because of our much faster internet connection, so it was useable in half an hour, rather than half a day, as happened when I bought my last desktop PC about six years ago. The only problem I had was setting it up to work with my trusty Swiss French keyboard which gives me all the accents and umlauts when I need them. This task used to be fairly straightforward, but now the keyboard language setup module is very hard to find, buried among a plethora of other options for things you can do either with a physical or an on-screen keyboard. One of the many frustrating features of Windows 10.

A special treat on telly tonight, the second series on More Four Walter Presents of the remarkable Italian crimmie 'Ice Cold Murders - Rocco Schiavone'. Now the Valdostano police have the full tragic story of why the maverick Roman detective inspector has been exiled in the Alps, with him getting on the wrong side of gang leaders in the Eternal City. The lust for revenge has followed him five hundred miles from home, costing the life of his wife and the wife of a close friend. The portrayal of the impact of violence on some of the police officers is thoughtfully done.  

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.

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.