The obligatory round up

A good weekend, all in all. On Friday night we played host to november_girl and ephraim as they were down to the metropolis for a wedding. It was good to see them and we managed to make our way through a number of bottles of wine and some port. Not enough for a hangover, but enough to feel pleasantly tired at the end of the evening.

Saturday’s attempts to play World of Warcraft were scuppered by Furtle’s PC throwing an unexpected wobbly. It decided to display a number of supposedly hidden icons on the desk top, refused to recognise either the keyboard or the mouse and did something inexplicably confusing to its own antivirus software.

As you may or may not be aware, Furtle is not at her best when dealing with recalcitrant technology, in much the same way I am not at my best dealing with call centres or telephone banking. To this end, our hero (me) had to step in with his uncertain knowledge of technology and get it working again. This was achieved by stealing the mouse from my PC, and digging out an ancient keyboard that we keep for such emergencies. Both these items run off cables, unlike the cable-free setup she normally prefers. This meant that I could do such things as get the machine operating in safe mode while we reset it to a start point from three weeks ago, which together with re-synchronising the wireless seemed to sort out most of the problems.

Of course, with the anti-virus program having become corrupted, we found ourselves in the position where it would neither work, nor uninstall. Happily, with a bit of mooching around on the web, we found a solution, removed the program and installed an updated and clean version. All is now well.

Of course, buy this time, it was too late to think about playing before dinner, so we stopped and ate and watched an elderly but still quite funny Doris Day/James Garner movie. It had its moments and was entertaining, but cor lumme, you can tell things have moved on in then past half century. Some of the attitudes that underlay the comedy would have start a shit storm of complaints if they were allowed into a contemporary production.

Sunday was relatively Warcrack-free too. Or at least it was for Furtle. Having made the PC bow to our will, she received an email from Blizzard notifying her of the log in details for the beta test of Mists of Pandaria, which we are both signed up for. Since Furtle has been playing a couple of years longer than me, we were expecting her invite to arrive before mine and so it has proved.

Unfortunately, it also involved a download of a dozen or so GB of data on a client that can only be described as flaky. Plus download speeds are not at their best during a weekend afternoon and evening when the entire world is online. We managed to get in and look at the start area for the new expansion – or at least the current beta version of it, but the full download didn’t complete until sometime during the early hours this morning, so we shall have to explore more closely over the next few days.

In the meantime we got some more gardening done – by which I mean that Furtle put in most of the work because my knee is still dickey, but I sorted out the irrigation for the back garden and will look at the same for the front tonight. Before anyone says anything, we’ve checked: firstly there are no hosepipe restrictions in our area – yet. For some reason our little bit of Essex is damper than the surrounding areas, which are officially in drought. Plus it seems that even in those areas with hosepipe bans, trickle irrigation is still allowed. I guess it’s the high pressure hoses pouring tens of gallons onto the gardens that cause the trouble, rather than relatively slow water deliver over ten minute spells twice a day. Anyway, it should stop the plants dying on us.

It being the weekend, we completely missed any April Fool jokes the media might have been playing. I shall have an online search at lunchtime. Were there any good ones that people saw?

Thirty Years Ago Today

Today is the thirtieth anniversary of the Argentinean invasion of the Falklands.
That means that it is thirty years ago since I was entering my second month of employment with the now defunct Oswestry Borough Council, as an ‘Organising Secretary’.

In some ways that was the best job I ever had, though it paid so poorly that had I not been living at home with Mum and Dad, I should have had no money left for anything after paying petrol and upkeep. As I recall it was £89 a week before tax and that was a low wage even in 1982.

It wasn’t a real job, it was there because of a government job creation scheme. Half the job was to act as secretary to the so-called Shropshire Mini Olympics an annual event that was hosted in turn by each of the borough/district councils in the country.¹ The other half of the job was even more ill-defined and was something to do with the borough’s attempts to crack down on litter. I liked this bit best. Apart from a couple of tedious school visits to chat to the kids and hand out freebies donated by the “Keep Britain Tidy Group” and an interview with the local newspaper about ‘educating people to bin litter’, I defined the job as an excuse to drive around one of the most rural boroughs in one of the most rural counties in England, running up a fairly generous and handsome fuel allowance in the process and poke my nose into quiet fields, beauty spots and down secluded roads looking for fly tipping that I could write up and report back to whoever was playing boss that week.

I even got to go on a sponsored trip down to Brighton and stay in a swanky hotel. After all this time I cannot remember which hotel, or anything about the convention/seminar or whatever it was. I do recall sitting on the train between London and Brighton, talking to a very nice chap from Delhi who was over from India for the same purpose, bizarrely enough. He have me some truly awful Indian cigarettes that turned my snot black for two days.

Anyway, that was thirty years ago and the first few weeks of that job were spoilt by my naïve worries about being prime military age when the country had just gone to war. My imagination always was worse than the reality, but that really didn’t help me at all.

There’s always something out there to give you the fear if you let it.

¹I have no idea if it is still going -or if it does, who hosts it since Shropshire is now just two Unitary Authorities: Shropshire County UA and Telford & Wrekin UA.