Week of 25th November, 2013

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Monday, 25th November

New fortnight starts today, a swapped 10 shift. So it's short-form material, and own productions all the way, all same usual.

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Tuesday, 26th November

More of the same, and the engineers have finally fixed the Mac on Ingest desk 1, which has now blown 2 hard disks within months. The new boot disk is installed in a different one of the 4 slots available, and the engineers have hopes that the new drive will survive - implying that the slot previously in use for the boot drive has something wrong with it. We shall see about that.

This has taken so long because of software incompatibilities. For some obscure reason OS X Mountain Lion isn't compatible with the software in the network storage bucket, which is old. We need Snow Leopard for this to work. Then there were sundry other software niggles, so it's taken a week or so. Here's hoping it survives. And it only needs to do that for just under a year. When we move to the new building - currently planned for about September-time next year - the Macs will be retired, in favour of Adobe Premiere, running on PC hardware. Or so they tell me.

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Wednesday, 27th November

I've been attempting to get the Nexi set up to read USB sticks, via a USB OTG cable. I had another try today, discovering in the process that Nexus 4s cannot do it - unless you play silly buggers with powered hubs. An LG Nexus 4 doesn't power USB devices connected via an OTG cable.

Asus Nexus 7s do, 2012 and 2013 versions both. But there's no native software support in Android 4.3 Jelly Bean or earlier. Add-ons are available in the Google Play Store, but some of these involve rooting your phone, and most of them are for-pay. But OTG Disk Explorer has a free, Lite version, and claims Nexus 7 compatibility, so I installed it.

And it works! I can read a USB thumb drive. It may write as well, but I haven't tried that yet - reading files into the Nexus 7 is all I need at present.

This was for the e-tickets for Saturday's rail excursion to Chester. Jane will have hard copy, I'll rely on the built-in .pdf reader in the Nexus 7, and electronic copies of the tickets. That .pdf reader works nicely, by the way. I'll maybe put an e-book reader app on as well, although the Nook works fine for that.

Talking of e-books, I've just been working through the first 6 books of John Norman's Gor saga , which is (as far as I've gone) reasonable sword-and-sandals science fantasy. Norman is a good world builder, and he creates the world and culture of Gor, the Counter-Earth, quite well. He's prone to info-dump style digressions about some aspect of Gorean life, even in the middle of battles, but the stories flow well enough, despite that.

The viewpoint character, Tarl Cabot, is an Earthman, transported involuntarily to Gor at the instigation of the Priest-Kings, who, we discover, are highly scientifically-advanced insectoid aliens, who deliberately maintain Gor at a medieval level of technology. Firearms, for example, are verboten, mere possession of such will result in death at the Priest-Kings' hands.

Where I suspect a lot of people would take issue with the series is his assertion that women are natural slaves, despite any appearance to the contrary, and are just aching to be dominated by a strong male, only finding true fulfilment in total submission to their master. Reading around the subject, on various websites, I have seen it posited that Norman is only reacting to some of the more extreme feminist tracts that were current in the 70s and 80s, and for all I know, still are. Tarl Cabot starts off treating Gorean women more-or-less like earth women, but by Book 6 he's has fully absorbed the Gorean male philosophy, and becomes a piratical, slave-holding, women-abusing, Gorean-in-all-but-name. To give him credit, he seems to be backing off a bit by the end of the book.

My copy of this omnibus came from Amazon, as a Kindle e-book, and as such would be unreadable on a Nook. But, as is my practice, I remove the encryption and convert to .epub format, which the Nook can read. Calibre can do this, with the appropriate, unoffical, add-ons, the finding of which I will leave as an exercise for my readers.

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Thursday, 28th November

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Friday, 29th November

Preparations for the Chester trip tomorrow. I had to hire a wheelchair for Mum, and the local, mobility charity shop still hasn't reopened after their forced relocation, so I had to schlep out to the for-pay mobility aids shop, where I was just in time to hire the last chair of their stock - not a motorised one, or one with the extra handwheels, just a standard someone-push-it wheelchair. UKP25 for the weekend.

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Saturday, 30th November

Chester trip by steam train today. It was supposed to be pulled by 70000 Britannia, but she went tech, with wheel problems. So the owner of the locos that will be pulling  several of the upcoming Steam Dreams excursion trains stepped up, and our train was pulled by a pair of ex-LMS Stanier 4-6-0 Black 5s, running double-headed, 44871 and 45407 The Lancashire Fusilier.

I'd pre-booked parking at Euston station - UKP10 for the day - so we parked in a disabled bay (displaying the Disabled Badge, natch) and headed off to the train. And, of course, it was virtually impossible to get near the locomotives, because of all the steam-geeks clustered round. I have to count myself anong them.

07:40 came around, and off we steamed. 1950s vintage coaches, and the steam heating was up to it's usual standard, i.e. not very. But 'twas always thus. Temperatures were not helped by one steam geek in the party just across the aisle, who insisted on having the (small) 1950s style sliding window open, so that he could listen to the engines working. We were at the end of the coach, next to the entrance vestibule, and I think someone had left the drop-down window in the door open, because there was a howling gale of cold air if anyone left the aisle door open. And lots of people did, so I was forever pulling the sliding door shut.

Food and drink service was frequent and efficient, throughout, albeit most food was not included in the fare. Tea and coffee were, though, and we'd brought sandwiches.

180 miles, and best part of 5½ hours later, we arrived at Chester. Train staff had taken Mum's wheelchair away to the guard's van at boarding time, and the chair was waiting for us when we alighted. Good service, that.

We had just over 3 hours available to sightsee and shop. And since this was Christmas Market day, shop we did.

The return trip was similarly managed, albeit we were at the end this time, since they ran the locos round without reversing the train. This meant that things were a little warmer, since windows were closed. And Mum could not reminisce about her days at the Government Code and Cipher School at Bletchley Park, because she couldn't see out in the dark. Outbound she kept looking for places she remembered, and was disappointed not to see them, despite the 70-odd years that have passed.

All-in-all a very good day, and one we will repeat, probably in the New Year, once the 2014 excursion timetable is finalised. I'm going to hold out for  4464 (later 60019) Bittern or 4498 (later 60007) Sir Nigel Gresley when we do.

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Sunday, 1st December

I've started backing up my 3no 1TB USB drives to a newly-purchased Seagate Central 4TB NAS drive, which I purchased from my local Staples office supplies store. I'm using the Seagate Dashboard software to do this. It's obscenely overweight, at 150MB, not including the dependencies on M$ Visual C 2005 Redistributable and M$ .NET 4.0. As a result, it's slow on stinker, who is only a Core 2 Duo@1.6GHz. It's none-too-stable, either. But it's doing the job.

I just wish it didn't bury all the files at least 6 levels down in subdirectories. In fairness, this default would allow backup of multiple machines to the same NAS, but it would be better to allow a custom backup destination

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