Tag: My Passport

If At First You Don’t Succeed

Malwood Farm underpass 3.13Yesterday’s rain was magnified today.  Looking out of our windows I thought the limited visibility was mist.  It was the deluge.  All vehicles on the A31 had headlights glowing, falling raindrops adding hazy coronas.  Undeterred, I walked the loop taking in the two underpasses.

Moss and leaves 3.13Pebbles on a beach revealed by a receding tide gain, until dried out, an enhanced depth of colour.  So it is with leaked petrol, as seen yesterday, and with leaves, lichen, and moss, not that these latter fruits of the forest have much chance of drying out at the moment.  Gravel in the beds of streams glistened invitingly.

Roads and footpaths were again flowing with water.  The uphill stretch of the A31 was a torrent.  Ducking to avoid dripping branches as I walked along its verges, simply meant that spray thrown up by lorry tyres hit my face a bit sooner.  The extra gusts of wind these vehicles created as they rushed past seemed more unsettling than usual.  My choice of route was beginning to seem a less than good idea.  However, to borrow from Magnus Magnusson’s ‘Mastermind’ catchphrase, I’d started so I would finish.

Once safely on the soggy heath I made my way to the Stoney Cross underpass.Pool on heath 3.13  One of the pony trails led to a fresh waterhole being rapidly and plentifully replenished.

In 1978, Denis Healey, Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer, famously said of his friend and opposite number in the Conservative Shadow Cabinet that ‘part of his speech was like being savaged by a dead sheep’.  Geoffrey Howe was not dead, but he was certainly Wet in political parlance.  Wet sheep 3.13Seeing a wet sheep this morning attempting to gain some shelter, I thought of these two amicable rivals.

After lunch I attempted to start a new life with my new iMac.  The first step was to sort out a password problem with our Broadband.  We managed to get our Windows laptops connected to our Home Hub when we first arrived here, but now are often automatically connected to Wi Fi, requiring us to disconnect from that before connecting to the Hub. Recently the password has been rejected.  This did my head in because we had written it down.  Maybe we were looking in the wrong place.  So I rang BT and had the man take me through resetting the password, choosing the very same one as the old one for the replacement.  It worked.  When pressed, the adviser admitted that there had been an internal problem with BT Yahoo.  That annoyed me even more.

I then tried to get on the Internet with the new Apple machine, and kept being told I was inserting the wrong password.  So I rang the emergency support line which comes free for 90 days.  The technician confirmed that the password required was the BT one and not something specific to iMacs.  I put it in again.  Three times.  It was rejected.  Three times.  I couldn’t bear to go through the BT phone system again, and settled, for the time being, for the insecure Wi Fi route.  So I moved on to the second problem I had discovered.  The scroll bar for moving up and down the text of this post disappeared as soon as I looked at it.  This was a comparatively simple adjustment, so I was able to edit this document on my new toy.  But why does the M on the keyboard look exactly like an upside down W?  After a thoroughly frustrating afternoon, my head was already spinning enough.  I’d rather face any amount of dead sheep and savage terriers than go through that again. But I guess I’ll have to do so tomorrow.  Robert the Bruce learned from a spider that one must try, try, and try again.

My final effort today was to stick My Passport into the back of the computer and try to look at all the pictures I had transferred yesterday.  This needed all my willpower.  But, surprise, surprise, it was achieved in seconds.  2 Elizabeth’s set of ‘Derrick through the ages’, does not appear chronologically, but I have decided to leave it that way.  Today’s offering is from 1958. This was taken by Mick Copleston during one of our billiard sessions in his front room at the top end of Amity Grove.  Since he always won, I can’t think what I was looking so relaxed about.  Maybe I was just trying to look dreamy.

Speaking of relaxation, it is quite amazing how getting one process to work reduces the tightness around one’s head and lengthens the temper.

Feeling more optimistic, I decided to go for broke and transfer 1263 pictures direct from my camera Scandisc into iPhoto.  No problem.Slide show 3.13  As if this weren’t enough enough to lift the spirits we were able to watch a full-screen slideshow accompanied by gentle modern jazz music on a loop.  Magic.

Tomorrow is the grand rugbyfest day, which will be fully explained then, and for which Jackie has been preparing food since this morning.  It therefore seemed only right that I take her out for a meal this evening.  Her choice was Imperial China in Lyndhurst.  We enjoyed a marvellous and plentiful set meal, accompanied by  T’sing Tao beer in her case and a Georges du Beouf red wine in mine.

Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway

Sheepfield in rain 3.13Mahonia 3.13The rain is back.  There was no off-road venturing this morning.  As I dripped round the ford ampersand, I sought comfort in the expectation that I would return with ‘that Brylcreem look’ which would resolve my bad hair day.  I had awoken with it sticking out all over the place. Johnny Rotten would have been proud of it.

Able Piling’s crew, who were, with shovels and spades, laying stones in a drive, didn’t welcome the rain. Able Piling crew 3.13 They sensibly kept their heads covered.

The work of post-winter clearing of the ditches had begun.  This involves digging out mud and debris which is then heaped by the side of the trenches.  No doubt it finds its own level and is soon covered in greenery.  I do hope this is now done by machines.  I expect I will find out.  Interestingly, if the ditch is alongside your property its maintenance is your responsibility.

The coned off pool described in, among others, the post of 17th December last year, has now been resurfaced and its drain cleared.

Champion (see 16th December) has his cough back.

Petrol stain 3.13Jackie drove us to Southampton Parkway to collect Alison who came for a visit.  Leaked petrol glowed iridescently on the wet forecourt of the garage at Eastleigh where she filled the tank.

Later I applied my mind to iMacs.  First I had to use an ordinary memory stick on which Elizabeth had collected the photographs of ‘Derrick through the ages’, that were a background slideshow at my 70th birthday party.  This I had attached to my ‘veteran’ iMac, but hadn’t tried to save it.  Given that I had bought a My Passport for Mac with which to transfer all the pictures from old to new computer, I thought I would initially attempt to put Elizabeth’s set into the pictures section of the old one.  Miraculously I managed it.

The next task was to transfer the now enhanced collection of saved photos from my six year old redundant Mac.  So the first box I opened was the My Passport for Mac.  It carried a guarantee in goodness knows how many languages, but the directions consisted of a scanty sheet of paper with three pictures, numbered 1,2,and 3.  I couldn’t make head or tail of them, except that I should first plug it into a USB port.  So I did that, clicked onto the icon and stared at stuff.  After much trial and error, I eventually clicked and dragged the Pictures icon to the My Passport one.  Then we had lift-off.  Perhaps the most scary bit was the message informing me this would take about two hours.  So, in order not to spend that time hovering over a screen watching a thin blue line creeping across it and a white light flashing on the super duper memory stick, I sidled across the room to my laptop and played an on-line Scrabble session.  After two hours I had a look.  It was done.  Ejecting the My Passport safely was problematic.  I kept getting a message telling me it was in use and therefore couldn’t be ejected.  So I shut down the computer, switched it on again and had no problem.  Thanks to ‘The It Crowd’ for that little tip.  I think I’ll open the new iMac box tomorrow.  I don’t want to push my luck. 1 But just to show you that I can at least transfer the contents of a memory stick to my soon to be obsolete iMac, here is a picture of Derrick from 1942.

Anyone under the age of five reading this, please understand that I’m an old man.  You are probably already familiar with all this.  If you are not there already, when you get to school it will be how you communicate and learn.  When I went to school even biros had only just been invented.  We didn’t yet have them, and dipped a pen with a steel nib into a dark liquid called ink with which to write on paper.

I felt I’d earned the wonderful chicken jalfrezi with homemade chutneys  that Jackie served up for our evening meal.  Bread and Butter pudding was my choice of afters. Hers was rhubarb crumble.  I finished the Isla Negra whilst Jackie abstained.  Don’t get the wrong idea, I would have given her some had she wanted it.

Today’s title comes from a classic self-help book by Susan Jeffers, first published in 1987.  I’ve never read the book, but the title has always appealed to me.