Monday, 19th March 2012: As I sit here I should be preparing for a presentation I am making this afternoon, I have also gotten a little behind on my posting and if I don’t keep up then I forget things – old age y’ know. At the same time I have been enduring answerphone hell over the last week, first with British Gas and this morning with John Lewis.
I came home last night after meetings in London to find that our less than one year old Sony Digital Video Recorder – was unable to output a picture. In what must be a first, I laid my hand on the receipt within two minutes of looking for it and it helpfully had a number to call. After playing push the button I got through to a human pretty quickly. She asked me for some detail – even, perhaps, hopefully my contract number. I was so quick that I had to get me to repeat it – but it wasn’t in the system. So I gave her my postcode and name – although they had spelt that incorrectly on the form. Apparently my DVR was so new it would not have been moved onto their system yet (it was within the first year of guarantee).
So I rang my local John Lewis store – I listened to the first set of options – designed to ensure I spoke with a human that could help me. I was not too sure, so I listened again – and went for technical support – that presented me with more options, none of which fitted the bill so I went back to the beginning and went for the “wait on the line if none fit” option. I spoke with a human who did help me – “bring it in to the service desk”.
It also seems that Google have been changing the Beta version of Chrome faster than a lady of easy virtue’s unmentionables (here is a link if you are wondering what on earth I am on about). The trouble is when you have created a reputation for good software then when it does cause problems it is all the more annoying. I have become somewhat used to problems when Patch Tuesday rolls along. when Microsoft roll out regular updates. In fact it wasn’t too bad last week – my laptop was fine, my desktop almost made it – although not without a BSOD on boot up.
It can be a bit unnerving to be told that it has stopped working to prevent damage to your computer, I used to have visions of the chips all fighting each other. I had my trusty boot CD to hand but didn’t need it - it booted the second time and what was even better did not require the RAID drive to spend 8 hours making the compute feel like treacle (checking for errors between the two disks).
At the same time “All My Apps” has reported that a couple of programs need updating (on my laptop and desktop) so those have been updating in the background. (This is a great program for keeping my wife’s laptop up to date – since I do the Sys Admin in makes my life much easier!).
As I mentioned I had meetings in London yesterday and have a bunch of picture for processing (80 odd) and pictures I took on my phone to down-load (don’t get me started on crap cycle parking at Cambridge station again). Also for good measure 29 tabs hanging around on my Chrome Browser, that I thought interesting enough to comment on in a Post or two.
And finally my daughter, sister and son’s girlfriend have all had accidents with a common thread that I was going to talk about.
The good news is that Spring is springing, I am looking forward to cycling over to make my presentation this afternoon and getting out into the sun.
So scrub all that I will leave it for another day – a few pictures and a few word. I had meetings over on the East Side of Cambridge in Cherry Hinton. For some history – Wikipedia references an Archaeologist and make-up artist – Michelle Bullivant and she points to a community website - Cherry Hinton Community Archive.
This was taken just opposite the Robin Hood Pub, along side Giant’s Grave after the giant Gogmagog. It was the blossom and daffodils that caught me eye.
A peep down the bank to the pool which leads on to the Cherry Hinton Brook – you can see the stepping stones to the right hand side.
After a bit of searching I made my way to Snakey Path – it is much easier to find from the Mill Road end than it is from the Cherry Hinton end. As you can see it runs “parallel” to The Tins path. It does snake alongside Cherry Hinton Brook. On the OSM Cycle map it is highlighted as a “preferred route?” whereas The Tins is just a dotted cycle route. Yet The Tins is much more suitable for cycling along? This is a picturesque route though. mind you it might be a little dodgy cycling along here at night without lights.
Some information about the Brook and those private fishing lakes – what a shame that that is not more of a public amenity.
At the Mill Road end the path is more a liner path. As you can see it is not that wide.
As I wandered (more cycled really) “lonely as a cloud” they did look pretty striking.
This field up near Quy was only drilled the other day – now look at it – presumably the birds didn’t manage to eat all of the seeds before germination.
Cycle-parking near the Ditton Walk/Newmarket Road junction. Did a car reverse into the bike’s wheel.
A two picture panorama of Coldham’s Common with the floodlights of Cambridge United’s football ground in the background. It was the lines of clouds that caught my eye though.
No comments:
Post a Comment