Update time, reflection time

Clare went to the gym just after seven this morning. I had a lie-in, dozing and listening to the radio for another three hours. It was an overcast and rainy day. I ventured out for some exercise after lunch but soon my rain jacket was soaked through, so I headed home, fed up with this  miserable weather. I miss Mediterranean mildness and blue skies.

At least it meant I could occupy myself, supervising the installation of updates to my Windows 10 computers. This invariably means an hour or so when they are unusable or running frustratingly slow, with a series of reboots, and sometimes security or software updates clashing with operating system updates to the detriment of all. It's a continuing shambles leaving hundreds of millions of dependent users frustrated and less than fully productive.

I keep promising myself to make the laptop a dual boot Linux Mint device, or else ditch Windows entirely. Keeping one Windows machine for legacy software usage seems necessary, albeit less so, now that the Cardiff Business Safe workload has dwindled to nothing. That's a sad tale of distrust and business intrigue, unworthy of everyone involved, including me. I simply ran out of patience with those clashing alpha male egos, and lost confidence that I could make a positive difference and build sound bridges of trust.

This may have something to do with the time several years ago when my present physical troubles first emerged. Work demands became less easy to manage and I had to disengage from day to day business affairs and relationships. Ultimately, however,if you don't garner enough of the right kind of active support for such an innovative voluntary social enterprise, failure is inevitable sooner or later, even if it is after ten years in operation. There's no point in lamenting about nobody caring enough, and taking things for granted. As my mother used to say "Don't care was made to care."
    

Travelling home

Having readied the apartment for the arrival of the next locum, and needing to get up at four, never an easy thing for me, I slept uneasily on the sofa in my travelling clothes. At three fifteen, I had one of those 'checking everything, something's missing' dreams, featuring this Chromebook on which I write. Mercifully, I woke up realising that I hadn't packed the charger, still connected to a bank of sockets in the study. I retrieved and packed it, thanking my digital guardian angel, and went back to sleep for another thirty five minutes.

This time around I proposed not to book a cab or hail one, but to walk over the Calle Maestraza just behind the Plaza de Toros, where I'd noticed taxis park and wait by day and night. By twenty five past four I was on my way to the airport, and joined the dozen other early birds in the check-in queue at a quarter to five, and quarter of an hour before it was due to open. One desk was already open to receive bags. 

By ten to five, three desks were open, as the influx built up behind me. There are four early Vueling foreign departures, and the queue in the first hour of opening is very long. But the system is very well organised, as I found last time when I arrived over twenty minutes late at the end of that long queue and found eight desks open. Just before official desk opening time I was on my way to security clearance, through by five past five, and starting to relax into the wait, expecting to fly at seven thirty. 

Thanks to another French air traffic controllers' strike however, we left at five past nine. I'd made a picnic breakfast to eat on the 'plane, but ate it at the departure gate. Even cheese sandwiches can be a consolation with a three and a half hour wait to board the flight. Also Vueling's phone app proved to be a consolation, as it gave flight info updates on the delay every ten minutes, and a nine thirty departure time crept forward by twenty-five minutes. Heaven knows how that was managed!

I slept for most of the flight, but returning from a visit to the toilet, a fellow passenger called me out by name. It was Fr Stephen Ryan, recently retired as Team Rector of Neath, returning home from a month's in Torremolinos, a nice way to recuperate from all those fond farewells. Arriving in Cardiff at half past eleven, I didn't have long to wait for the two buses that would get me home by a quarter past twelve, in good time for lunch.

As ever, the first job was to start the two computers that need to run a backlog of three months Windows 10 updates, so many of them requiring checks and oversights that it took the rest of the day. By way of contrast, the Chromebook, likewise tablet and phones just functioned and instantly updated, save for resetting the time zone manually. There is a possible automatic adjustment, but I'm not sure how long these devices take to identify their new location in relation to the internet time server. 

Manual resetting allows one to keep the clock in a time zone in which you're no located at that moment. I believe there's an option to display more than one time zone too, but don't know how it works. Such things are possible, and for some users necessary for easily maintaining international communications. Google Calendar offers time zone options for engagement entries, but I still haven't figured out how this is meant to work, if you're entering data for use in another time zone. All this tech savvy business about keeping your life on track only works well if you have a real clue about how it works.

The weather here is fairly warm, but will get colder with rain to come. Time to hunt out a pullover. Opening three months mail will have to wait until tomorrow.

Homeward bound

Thanks to having booked an afternoon flight, I had the leisure of a whole morning to pack, strip the bed, take the recycling and rubbish out to the collecting point nearby, before walking to Montreux gare. I got there and booked my ticket early enough to catch the through train to Geneva airport, but found this had been cancelled, and replaced by a stopping train as far as Lausanne, where a choice of trains would to get me there would be possible. I think there are at least four every hour. I didn't need to catch this, but thought - what if the train 20 minutes later I planned to catch was cancelled as well? Whatever the reason for one cancellation, there's no guarantee it won't be followed by another, so I took the stopping train.

As far as Vevey, I chatted to a lady whom I had met while queueing to buy a ticket. She asked me if the ticket office did a money changing service, and I said that I thought not. She boarded the train at the same time as I did, and needed reassurance about when the train reached Vevey. I think she had not travelled on this line before. She was on the way to visit a friend, and had come from Germany. If she came via Basel and Lausanne, she may have missed her stop and needed to double back. We spoke in French and she told me she was from South America. I couldn't resist speaking a few words of Spanish as we parted company, and this raised a smile.

In Lausanne, I had to change platforms, then ten minutes later, the train arrived which I had intended to catch, and by two o'clock, three quarters of an hour later, I was queueing at the EasyJet bag drop with the returning skiers, many looking tired or hung over. Already a hundred people were waiting, but the staff managed the increasing numbers checking in so well that I only waited fifteen minutes. There were no queues at all at the security clearance gates. I guess people checked in ahead of me may have chose to eat lunch or drink before going through. I'd eaten on the train, so went into the departures area to wait the hour until the boarding gate was announced, time which quickly passed doing my Duolingo French and Spanish drills for the day, and sending messages.

You're told to allow twenty minutes to walk from the Departures area to the gate 'island' EasyJet uses for departing flights. This includes time for passport control, where there can be queues, but all four 

duty officers were unoccupied when I passed through. Time seemed to pass quickly and boarding began ten minutes early, which is understandable, as the flight was full, and many passengers had brought bulky hand baggage on board, some of which had to be relegated to the hold, adding time to the departure process. 

Even so, we left on time and flew all the way to Bristol over continuous cloud cover as the sun was setting. The pilot told us that the aircraft would turn west north of Gatwick and roughly follow the M4 most of the rest of the way. Watching the sun move from the window I was sitting beside, to the window ahead of me, was the only time in the flight I had a rough idea of journey progress. 

When we landed, we were delayed from disembarkation by some problem with the mobile stairs, which approached the aircraft and stopped short, where attempts were make to get the height of approach and ramp extension correct. It made me wonder if the person driving the machine was uncertain of what they were doing. This had the pilot call for another set of steps to be fetched for disembarking from the rear door. It was an amusing episode, which at least gave some passengers time to get their coats on, and cabin bags out ready to move.

It's the second time in six months that I've flown out of and into Bristol, and had to use the ePassport gates. These are now so slick and quick, I didn't expect to be through so  quick. The technology used previously for the ePassport gates has been replaced, and the number of booths doubled. I'd hazard a guess that rather than a local face recognition scan being compared initially to the national passport database, it's linked to an airport server containing the passport details of all on the passenger list for the flight in question. All this information is available to take advantage of from the moment anyone checks in for their flight. But, it does require a huge amount of reliable computing resources. Fine it it works, chaos when it doesn't.

Bus then to Temple Meads Station and a convenient train to Cardiff and bus to Pontcanna. Home in time for the Archers, and supper at the usual time, with thankfully, no mail needing attention, just my Windows 10 PC's in need of updating. After a month or longer away, this is always an irksome task taking hours, or get caught out later when you really need to use one quickly. Thank heavens for instantly updating Chromebook, despite its few minor irritations. I'll sleep well tonight. 

   

Updated at last

I returned to St German's to celebrate the usual midday Lent Mass and for the Lent Lunch which followed. On inspecting the office PC I found, much to my delight, that finally ten months worth of Windows 10 updates had finished installing, and the machine was completely up to date. Altogether this took sixteen days to complete, not only due to the limitations of the network connection, but also because I had to find out by trial and error how to ensure the machine remained 'always on', and not powering down or going into sleep mode as it waited to complete downloads. This wouldn't have been necessary if the connection had functioned at a normal speed. 

If I'd moved the PC closer to the main router on the ring main circuit, in the office next to the router, or if I'd taken it home to update, updating wouldn't have taken so long. I simply didn't have time to do the machine minding that either solution required. It was a matter of letting it run slowly and checking on it each time I went to church. Now it's up to date, the machine will be able to send and receive emails, and allow slow surfing, and that's enough for the moment, until I can figure out a faster connection between back and front offices. So far so good!

Yesterday and today, I didn't pick up much litter, just half a dozen items as I didn't go out for my usual long walk when I returned home, but worked on my Sunday sermon, and slept for a while. Last night I went to bed late, slept badly and woke up feeling groggy as a result, and this feeling took most of the day to shake off. One way or another I need eight hours a night when I'm as busy as I have been this past few months. It's a symptom of getting old!

   

Refreshment Sunday

Yesterday was another sunny day, so I took the bus into town and out to Penarth at the end of the morning, and after a walk through the parks above the Esplanade, I returned on foot along the rocky pebble strewn foreshore and crossed the barrage, before picking up a bus from the Millennium Centre to town, and then a 61 home. Coping with loose stones and rough rocky surfaces was a good test for the stability and resilience of my knee, above and beyond regular walking on metalled roads, and passed without incident. I expect I'll have stiff legs over the next few days nevertheless.

On the beach I collected just half a dozen plastic bottles over the majority of its kilometre length, then in the last 200 metres of beach and 100 metres of footpath to the car park, the most frequented patch, another dozen pieces. The only waste bin in sight was on the opposite side of the road beyond the car park. The beach was relatively clean as the tide was receding, but among the few items of plastic found at the high water mark, were several that were oily and may have been tossed overboard from a passing ship. I could have picked up more if I'd had a bigger bag. This beach is litter picked regularly by local volunteers. It just goes to show that the stream of visitors lacking concern for the environment continues unabated.

Aware of the arrival of summertime, I put all the clocks forward early, and restricted myself to just one of the two episodes of 'Follow the Money' before turning in early for the night. A nine o'clock celebration at St John's Canton would still be eight o'clock according to my body clock. At the service Sam, one of the two ordinands on placement preached the sermon. It was good to listen to him with a view to making an assessment - something I haven't done since my St Mike's sojourn. It was also good refreshment for Refreshment Sunday to have a respite from preaching.

After the St German's Mass and distribution of Mothering Sunday flowers and cards, followed by a brief check on the state of the office PC Windows 10 updates (now reaching 50%), I took Communion to Angela at home. She's glad to be home and looked after by nurses, family and friends, rather than still being in a recovery ward waiting to be moved into a regular ward, as she was for a week after her urgent shoulder repair. Now she's all trussed up with her arm and shoulder immobilised, similar to the way Clare was after her operation, but cheerful nevertheless, and trying to figure out how she can use her PC to catch up on her administrative backlog after two weeks of down time.

While I was cooking lunch after my return home, Owain called to say he was on his way over to give his mum flowers and chocolates for 'Mothers Day', as he insists on calling it to wind me up. He had forgotten that Clare's in Kirton over the weekend, and called only after buying his ticket, poor lad. Even so he came over and we spent a couple of hours chatting. I walked with him down to Cowbridge Road when he was leaving. Before taking a bus into town, we called into the 'Calabrisella' restaurant, for him to get a pizza, as he'd missed out on lunch earlier. Having eaten a few hours earlier, I didn't feel like eating a full meal, so just shared his tasty arancino and couple of tranches of pizza. An unexpected treat at the end of the afternoon.

While I was waiting for Owain to arrive, I sat down do do my daily Duo Lingo Spanish drill. Before I could get started, fell asleep. When I woke up, an hour later, I completely forgot to continue. It's the first day in months that I missed practicing altogether. Despite going to bed early, I was more tired that I realised.

I discovered a new BBC 1 TV series of 'Call of Duty' about a police anti-corruption squad was on at nine, and that gave me something new and interesting to watch. Just after it finished, I had a message from Jane, the Churchwarden in Montreux, to confirm that I'm wanted for locum duty there the second half of August and all of September coming. I was surprised to discover that it'll be six years since we last spent time in Switzerland. The place is so vivid in my memory that it still seems like yesterday when we were there. I say the same about Spain too. Beautiful places are so nourishing. I need a lovely landscape for nurture and inspiration.

Still no news about the appointment of a new bishop for Llandaff diocese. It's worrying.
    

Knee news and TV crimewatching

Yesterday, as I was getting ready to go down to St John's Canton to celebrate their midweek Eucharist, Clare went off by train to spend a long weekend in Kirton with sister-in-law Ann. Walking there and back, I collected sixteen pieces of rubbish and binned them. An appointment with my GP later brought the good news that there's nothing more wrong with my dodgy knee than age related wear and tear. The doc also wants me to try out a 24 hour blood pressure monitoring device next week, to track variations over the day, as it's still higher any time it's taken in the surgery than it is at home.

With time to myself in the afternoon I sat and watched several episodes of a new euro-crime Channel 4 TV series called the 'Team'. I found it most enjoyable as uses Danish, German, Flemish, French and English, since it features the work of a multi-national investigation into corruption and people trafficking. It's not about Interpol, although the agency does occasionally feature, but rather about police forces working together. Interestingly, for group discussions English is the common language, although occasionally you also hear one person speak German and another reply in Danish or Flemish. In the evening, I went to St German's to take Stations of the Cross and Devotions.

This morning, I was back at St German's again to celebrate Mass and share in the 'hunger lunch' in the church hall. I checked the office PC's updating progress. It seemed to be stuck on 5% since Wednesday, even though the machine had not been switched off. Then I looked at the power settings and the penny dropped. Although it didn't go properly into sleep mode, the hard drive was set to stop spinning after two hours, so the update download could not be saved. So, I set the machine to stay fully alive and left it to continue, aware it could still take a long time. 

Then I Julie and Ashley in town for a cup of tea and a chat, and before taking Ashley to the RadioNet equipment supplier in Chepstow with a several radio handsets to be exchanged for re-configuration. It was a pleasant drive on a bright and sunny day, and the sun was in our faces as we returned in evening traffic as the sun was setting. Trees in blossom and daffodils in the roadside verges everywhere.

Later, I watched this week's episode of 'The Team'. It's not merely a 'straight cops and criminals' drama series. Relationships between team members, relationships with spouses are also an interesting and complicating feature of the narrative. Well worth watching. Interesting to observe that while people can and do bridge language barriers with their variety of language skills, there are often problems in communication arising from the intended meaning of the content. A detective finds an encryption key concealed in a couple of lines of romantic poetry. The discovery is then texted to a colleague working on the vital file, but intercepted by her husband, who reads the lines and concludes his spouse is having an affair, creating a crisis and disrupting progress on the case. It's well observed indeed.

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.
  

Another Windows troubleshooting mission

An early start today, with the alarm going off just after six, and after a suitable breakfast, out of the house by twenty to seven, walking to the National Express coach station in Sophia Gardens for the seven fifteen coach to London to see my sister June and fix her computer. On my way down Cathedral Road, with relatively little traffic around, I was delighted to hear singing, first a wren, then a robin, then a blackbird, then a starling, and then thrush. All in the trees and garden bushes along one of Cardiff's main arterial roads into the city centre. What a lovely surprise to start the day!

The coach fleet has been upgraded since I last took the journey a year ago. Seats are better upholstered, if a bit narrow for me, and there's more legroom. Best of all, there's free wi-fi, which allows one to receive and send emails, also to surf the net, though not to use social media apps, it appears, probably because they gobble up too much data. Some video streaming is possible via a Sky app, and e-magazines are available to read, but not much to interest me. 

I slept on and off, and browsed a little, and the journey seemed to go much quicker than usual, despite arriving about forty minutes late because of traffic congestion around Newport and beyond the Severn bridge on the approach to North Bristol. Google kept issuing notifications of traffic delays throughout the journey, and it was possible to follow the trip on the Maps app in 'real time'. If you're not driving, this is quite interesting as you get to put names to the hamlets and villages along the M4 corridor which do not appear in motorway exit signage. Then if you're curious, you can Google further info about them. This time last year, on a trip like this, I would have been struggling to do office tasks on my Blackberry in response to a crisis phone call from Ashley, or prepare a document draft on a policy change. This was a much more relaxing and leisurely an outing.

I arrived at June's place at half past midday, having done some shopping for her on my way from coach to Victoria train station. June's laptop is identical to Kath's, and as soon as I switched it on and examined it, the same problem problem presented itself. A broken network configuration, meant that there had been no updates since 9th November, and the anti-virus software was also out of date. It was a matter of re-setting the network software from the command prompt window, with the recommended single line of code, rebooting the machine and forcing it to update everything immediately, a process that took about an hour, all told. 

This was a lot more straightforward than with Kath's machine, as in her case the update mechanism was broken, and it took ages just to find out how to repair it. Would I have been able to remember how I did the full repair two weeks later? Glad I didn't have to put that to the test.  Being risk averse, I'd brought with me the little Acer Aspire E11 I bought recently, to leave for June's use, while I took the other one back home to sort out. But that wasn't necessary. After lunch, I spent some more time, removing some of the useless redundant software, installing and using CCleaner to keep her Acer ES1-521 running as well as it can. So, hopefully there'll be no more problems, unless Microsoft does something equally as stupid and dangerous to render its flagship software system unfit for purpose again. I wonder how many millions of hours have been wasted and money expended by individuals and businesses unable to sort out critical technical problems forced upon them for themselves?

My sister starting using a home computer of her own fifteen years after retirement, and that was ten years ago this year. She gets along reasonably well with surfing, emailing, writing and printing off letters, scanning documents, shifting photos from camera to computer, but finds changes in the user interface, layout and terminology imposed by Windows quite baffling and dis-empowering. I wish that I had introduced her to Linux at the outset, where it is possible to choose your own user interface and modify layout until you get it the way you want it, then stick to it through all the necessary updating processes that improve the work the software needed to do in the background, to keep users safe and stable. Too late for that now however! 

I am pleased, however, that she gets on well with Libre Office, as I never put MS Word on her first laptop. So, she has benefited from having basically the same user interface throughout the decade, as its appearance changes have been cosmetic and minor. I'm glad to see reports that the next Libre Office will replicate the ribbon tool bar familiar with many users of recent iterations of MS Word, and that it will be optional - if only Microsoft would make optional appearances available easily, without fuss and palaver.

My trip home took just three hours and ten minutes, as the traffic on the streets of West London was relatively light, so it only took about half an hour to get as far as Heston services, when it can take twice as long when things are really busy. Despite spending seven hours of the way in coach seats, my gammy leg didn't stiffen up too much, so the twenty minute walk home wasn't an effort. With 'mission accomplished' I arrived with a sense of modest satisfaction, and devoured the welcome late supper Clare had left for me. She retired to bed early, in anticipation of early rising tomorrow to attend the Heath Hospital for her next eye operation. 

    

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.