Just back from our mini-break. Yesterday was the best day: we found the best sights, and the best food!
Just wanted to share the snapshot I’ve made the background on my ‘phone. Sunset on the southwest coast path, on the gorgeous stretch just west of Ilfracombe. Yes, there’s a little of this kind of scenery in the UK (the Exmoor coast is the heart of it), but it’s the kind of thing we Brits normally expect to have to travel abroad for.
Sunset
Escaping from Tavistock’s worst week, we’re taking a couple of days away. Not far away: a guest house in Ilfracombe, on the north coast of Devon. An attractive area in many ways, on the coast path (long-distance walk) and just near Exmoor (national park), among other things.
Today we took the ferry to Lundy Island, which is known mostly for its wildlife, particularly seabirds, which nest in huge numbers on the cliffs that almost completely encircle the island. We’re out of season for the most exciting bird life, but that was somewhat compensated by a distant sight of seals in the water, down the cliff on the eastern (more sheltered) side of the island.
A drawback with that is that we took the main tourist boat, which meant as we started out we were amongst a great crowd. We diverted ASAP from the main tourist route, after which things were more relaxed. Worse, the boat’s timetable said return at 18:00, which should’ve given us us the day on the island, but they then told us the return was at 15:30 to arrive back at 18:00, leaving us a little under three and a half hours on the island. That puts us under time pressure, and makes the extortionate cost of the overcrowded and less-than-comfortable crossing seem poor value. Lesson: if and when we go again, don’t make it a day-trip!
Back at the guest house, and enjoying the tranquillity. It’s far quieter evening than anything I encounter at home, and reminds me of an important aspect of what I’m looking for in a new place.
News headlines: Earthquake and Tsunami in the Pacific region. Heard it on the news yesterday, half-heard it again today (just this minute checked – it seems there’s been another earthquake, bigger disaster than yesterday’s).
My reaction? Well, “will this affect my asia-pacific investments?” did cross my mind. Oops! In my defence, it only crossed my mind about 24 hours after I first heard the news, and I haven’t checked my portfolio since thinking it. And (barring the vanishingly unlikely event that it had hit my brother and sister-in-law in NZ without my having heard about it), this is my only link to the region.
But ultimately, this is surely the reaction of an Evil Capitalist!
I shall have to atone the Evil Capitalist way, with a contribution when the charity appeals come round. Having received a small bonus in my August pay-packet, I had already budgeted that for charitable contributions, and this looks like a candidate for a Deserving Cause.
For a little over three years, I’ve had the Mac laptop. Little shiny white affair: small for a modern laptop, but the sharp screen quality compensates for that, by enabling me to read much smaller print than is comfortable on a desktop machine.
Much to my surprise, I never liked the MacOS user interface very much: much of it seems to be a generation behind the Linux world, simple operations like cut&paste are a faff, and above all there’s the screaming inadequacy of control of windows and focus. So I wouldn’t choose it for the desktop.
But on the laptop, the defects have been more than compensated by hardware (and drivers) that just work. Minor conveniences like that great Mac power supply. Much more importantly, none of the kind of flakiness and perpetual need to take it apart and jiggle some internal connection that characterised its predecessor, a Dell Inspiron that was just plain shoddy. Decent build quality matters on a laptop!
But last night it suddenly died. First some ticking, then in less than a minute it froze up with a spinning ¨busy¨ cursor, none of the open apps responded, and it refused to reboot. Took it in to the local Mac shop this morning, and they extracted the hard disc and found it dead – ouch! They can replace the disc for sixty squids, but it means I´ll have to faff about with reinstalling lots of apps, setting up prefs, etc. Fortunately there is (I think) only a few hours of actual work on there with no duplicate, but I´m now down to one copy of quite a lot of important stuff, so spending this morning on a spot of backup!
This must be part of advancing middle-age.
The tennis-elbow is better than it was: I can even (with care) sleep on my right side! But I still have my longstanding issues: can’t sleep in the wrong bed, sit in wrong chair, etc without the back suffering; even the wrong shoes give me back pain, and pretty-much any collar or wristwatch gives me neck pain.
Well, I’m used to all that. Indeed, the difficulty with other people’s choice of desks and chairs is one of my main reasons for avoiding employment in a regular office: at home, I get to choose, and I can move around when I need a change of posture. I last sat long-term in someone else’s office in 1998, and my back has in fact been much better since then, despite the expanding paunch.
But now it’s cramp. I’m not at all used to that, at least when not engaged in exceptional activity. But today, and once or twice recently while out cycling, I find that anything substantial in certain pockets leads to cramp in the leg. Today it was the ‘phone: I was finding it annoying in my right above-the-knee pocket, so moved it to the left, and after a mile or so had cramp in the left leg (ouch)! Moving it back to the right fixed that, but for how long? Will I start finding cycling or even walking a problem? Bah, Humbug 
Just been spending a weekend with the parents in Brighton, ten minutes walk from the beach. The second-best[1] thing about this is the chance for a good swim in the sea. And the weekend has seen some great weather for it, too.
Saturday was slightly rough, with breakers sufficient to pummel me a bit. But past the breakers it’s beautiful: compared to our local rivers, the warmer water and extra buoyancy make for a lovely spot of luxury! I much enjoyed bobbing about on the waves for a first swim.
Coming out, I went to sit on the beach, whereupon two small girls came and asked what the water was like. I told them it was lovely, and eventually they believed me. They then disappeared up the beach, and reappeared dressed for a dip. That left me really wondering whether I should encourage them in or the opposite: unless they have the technique to ride the waves, those breakers would surely have them down and possibly in distress – and I don’t even know if they can swim!
Eventually an adult appears: the mother of one of them is happy for them to go as far as they want. But she gets called back to the urgent needs of a younger child, leaving me with the two girls on the waters edge. They only go half-in, and one of them does get knocked down by a wave. She’s not bothered by it, confirming mum’s view that they can cope. And we all have fun.
In a country where the meeja and government run a witch-hunt against adults having contact with children, I find this kind of healthy encounter as refreshing as a really good swim. And I expect these girls, not surrounded by paranoia, will grow into healthy, well-adjusted teenagers and later adults, unlike some of those contemporaries who are denied any kind of spontaneous human contact.
Sunday and Monday (yep – long weekend) I went back again for a swim. The water was by now much calmer (kite-surfers were gone, canoeists were out instead), and I had no more human encounters.
[1] I have to say second-best, as they sometimes read the blog 
I first recollect seeing the peacock in the spring of 2005, shortly after moving here. He lives about 3 miles north of Tavistock, on one of my regular short (daily-exercise length) cycling routes. On that occasion he was sitting on a gate and displaying a fantastic tail! But he only occasionally puts in an appearance.
Today I had the ‘phone in my pocket as I cycled the route, and caught him on camera. Unfortunately it’s not his most photogenic season, as he’s evidently moulted and looks rather tatty. But still, pretty impressive for the UK
I have a disc. It used to live in a regular desktop computer, but that died. It has quite a few different partitions, and different filesystems on them. And I want occasional use of it.
To resurrect it, and I’m contemplating buying an external hard drive enclosure. Seems I can get one with USB and/or ethernet connection. But that leaves me wondering: what does the computer see? Does the enclosure expect to manage the disc and just export it in the manner of NFS or SMB? Or does the computer see it as a local device at low level? Should it be possible even to boot from it – subject to configuring a boot manager?
If the former, that’s pretty useless to me, as I’d expect to be hard-pressed to get it to grok all the filesystems on there. If the latter then great: I can do without IDE support in a new barebones box.
Browsing vendor sites, I can’t see any mention of using them for an existing disc that isn’t windows or mac, even in the user reviews.
Dear Lazyweb, how can I tell whether I’m buying something useful?
I have Bud with me, due to an emergency. I’ve had him most of the day, and now for the night.
I’m well used to walkies with him. That’s fun, even when (as today) it’s pissing down (as is evident from the graph of our local reservoir level). But having him at home is much harder work, when he refuses to be left alone (and as a corollary, won’t leave me alone). I expect it’s a little like that for parents of toddlers who can’t ever be let out of sight.
Knackered.
With my right elbow still painful and aggravated by using a mouse, I’ve moved the mouse over to the left of the computer. I’m trying very hard to get used to using it left-handed, but it’s making for more slightly-bitter laughs than productive work. Mouse actions you’d take for granted have become a conscious effort, at best slower than usual, and at worst it becomes quite an effort to click on the right icon or link, or cut&paste. I’m sure that’ll improve with time.
Meanwhile, I also catch myself reverting to my natural state: subconsciously moving the mouse back to its normal place, and once even reaching over with the right hand to use the mouse while the left hand remained on the keyboard, before correcting myself.
Yesterday morning I also went to NHS Direct and used their online self-diagnosis tool. It told me to go and see my GP, so I went and asked for an appointment. To my surprise, they gave me one that very afternoon! The quack diagnosed tennis elbow which came as no surprise. He also said it’s a very common affliction, and that most sufferers are not tennis players 
. He gave me an exercise to help improve it, and suggested it might take about six weeks to go away.
I guess that’s time to become ambidextrous with the mouse. Could be a useful skill for the future!
