Thursday, June 30, 2011
WHO CALI-FORNICATED FARNHAM?
'Californication...' sang the busker at the top of gentrified Lion and Lamb Yard, off West Street, in what used to be a very special and largely peaceful little Surrey town. If you're not familiar with the term Californication, it refers to what happens to somewhere beautiful if you allow rampant overdevelopment. 'Don't Californicate Oregon', read the bumper stickers in the golden state's woody neighbour. 'Call some place paradise, kiss it goodbye' went The Eagles' lament for bounteous America in the final song on Hotel California - 'The Last Resort'. As Don Henley was reported to have said: "The gist of the song was that when we find something good, we destroy it by our presence — by the very fact that man is the only animal on earth that is capable of destroying his environment."
After trying to negotiate Farnham's car-jammed roads and wandering its crowded streets for half an hour, for only the second time in thirty years, I couldn't help thinking the busker was really singing a lament for the town itself as I fled the mayhem for the tranquility of lovely Dockenfield, to the south, in search of an old friend.
I moved to Farnham in 1978 to start work at Hammick's, the bookseller in Downing Street. My first job, on what was even for those far-off days the fairly paltry salary of £2,000 - that's the book trade for you - was actually at the company's warehouse in Alton. Fortunately I was allocated a room in the two-storey staff flat over the shop, accessed through the shop itself. I think the rent was very low, if not rent-free, which was just as well, considering how little we were paid - but then those were the days when people who wanted to get into the book trade were expected to be motivated as much by the love of books as anything so sordid as a living wage or a career!
Such were the times, that the three of us who lived overhead had the free run of what was in effect a personal library and it was a very special experience to wander the shop quietly after hours, browse the bookshelves and borrow anything we fancied to read. I don't think the shop even had an alarm system. It was a charming old building in a row of shops, probably Georgian in origin or even earlier and was the only one to retain its ornate window - possibly Victorian or older. At that time, there were still numerous little alleys and passages in the town, sometimes blocked off by doors or gates, through which mysterious redundant yards could be glimpsed. Lion and Lamb Yard was one such and it was part of Farnham's charm that there were these wasted, gently decaying spaces that whispered eloquently of the hustle and bustle of days gone by. I walked through what had been Hammick's to find the dear old place had been gutted long since and turned into a corporately soulless chain optician - even the staircase had been moved and the large rear extension, which used to house the children's book department, had been made even bigger, taking over nearly the whole of the leafy courtyard where I used to park my motorbike during the day; at night I wheeled it into the shop to keep it safe from pissed-up pub-goers.
Although the town seemed outwardly to be quite comfortable, nay genteel and perhaps even then more than a bit pleased with itself, it had some rough edges. At the bottom of Castle Street was a pub called the Coach and Horses. I hadn't been living in Farnham long before I learned that its nickname was the 'Coke and Hashish' and I'm sure that doesn't require any explanation. Today it's a 'bar-restaurant' called The Coach - one of many that now litter the town. Halfway up Castle Street was The Nelson Arms, where I got a part-time job to supplement my pathetic income. The landlady was a rather fierce woman called Mary - so fierce in fact that she gave rise to a graffito in the gents along the lines of the Smirnoff vodka advertising campaign, which used the strapline 'I thought ..... was a ..... until I discovered Smirnoff vodka'. In this case it was ' I thought a Bloody Mary was a drink until I discovered the Nelson Arms' - marvellously and succinctly eloquent, really. There were others, one or two of which have remained with me: 'Snow White thought Seven Up was a soft drink until she discovered Smirnoff vodka' - that kind of thing. Today all appears to be safely suburban, although doubtless there are pockets of resistance.
Even the fairly sedate Nelson wasn't immune from the sort of high jinks that went on at the Coach and Horses. I was actually drinking in the Nelson one evening - as opposed to working behind the bar. I'd arrived on my motorbike (tame Japanese stuff, not full-on leather Triumph or something), along with my housemate on his machine. We were chatting to a guy with whom I was at school, although he was older than me - in my brother's year. He'd spent some time in the Royal Marines, which wasn't surprising - he'd been in the First XV at school and was a tough cookie. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw someone pick up my crash helmet from where I'd parked it. I immediately went over to him and asked him what he thought he was doing and told him to give me my helmet back. He said 'Say please', so being the hard-arsed bookseller that I was, I did. He still didn't give the helmet back, so I grabbed it and turned away. As I did so, he punched me on the shoulder. Big mistake. My ex-marine friend saw immediately what was going on and shot out a mighty fist, which sent my tormentor literally flying across the bar - something until then I thought really did only happen in films. There were no further problems, although I gave up drinking at the Nelson, since I couldn't guarantee my saviour would be there in future! And I gave up the bar job when I got promoted. Anyway, we had moved on - to the Hop Blossom, in a little side street just off Castle Street, one of the new wave of real ale pubs with sawdusted floors, pork scratchings, interesting things to drink (I eschewed real ale for real cider) and a very affable landlord called Tony - where is he now?
Another memorable pub was the William Cobbett, also popular with bikers. It even had an oaken plaque hanging up in the bar bearing the inscribed words: 'two wheeled horseless carriages' - possibly the result of some greaser's carpentry homework. It was at the Cobbett where I had my first date with Susan, whom I had espied working in a 'trendy winebar' called Sevens in the Borough. Sevens was probably the forerunner of the rash of similar places that have so suburbanised Farnham today, indeed I think it's now a branch of Prezzo, but at the time it was a one-off and so quite cool. A friend called Mark managed the place and I spotted Susan waitressing there one lunchtime. She was gorgeous and I was smitten. I found out where she lived from Mark, dropped by on my bike and asked her out. Amazingly, she said yes. She smoked Marlboro and I thought it would be churlish of me (and more than a trifle uncool) to refuse when she offered me one, so began an off-on affair with the weed that lasted until I was 32, although I downgraded to wimpier Silk Cut 'gaspers' long before then.
Susan turned out to be a real heartbreaker, but that's another story. After six months in the Alton warehouse I had got a job in the shop itself and by the time I left Farnham in 1981 I had risen to the dizzy heights of Assistant Manager, earning £3,750 a year! That was as far as I could go, since Phoebe the lovely manager was very comfortable in her job and showed no signs of moving on. I had originally got into bookselling on the advice of Nigel Sissons, he of Hamish Hamilton fame, who had been in the Army with my father. I went to see him for advice on how to get into publishing and he recommended spending some time in the trade first. However, by the time I had been in it for a couple of years it was painfully obvious that there was no money to be made in books - at least not at the sharp end and that the footsoldiers of the industry were underpaid worker bees whose love of books was cynically and ruthlessly exploited by - well, everyone, really.
However, if you were tuned in to it, the bookishness of Hammick's and one or two antiquarian booksellers pervaded the town, which still reverberated gently to the ghostly local influences of William Cobbett and his Rural Rides, Gilbert White and his Natural History of Selborne and the gentility of Jane Austen. Cobbett's and White's books were steady sellers at Hammick's and it wasn't difficult to evoke the atmosphere they conveyed directly. Now, that is all lost under the cacophony of regular gridlocks in the town centre's teeming streets.
A year or two after I arrived in Farnham, an old college friend and I got together to share a house - at Shady Nook (yes, it really was called that) at the top of the hill you reached when you left Farnham up Castle Street. A devoutly evangelical Christian fellow-Hammickite and talented mechanic took the third bedroom and not long afterwards my then-unemployed elder brother arrived and took the fourth. I collected him from the station (illegally) on my 200cc motorbike after I took the L-plates off and we weaved our way back up to Shady Nook with him balancing a single suitcase on his lap. He soon got a job in the ironmongers opposite the Cobbett and could be seen in there for a while in the traditional khaki coat, until he moved on to bigger things as a journalist on a medical publication in Guildford.
We had some wild-ish times at Shady Nook - or Shapely Knockers as we re-Christened it - not least because my brother was a fanatical skydiver and an assortment of similarly afflicted people (including my younger brother, for a while) would turn up at weekends and head off to Netheravon to, as my father put it, 'jump out of perfectly serviceable aeroplanes' - anathema to an old soldier! When they returned, still high on adrenaline (and one or three beers at the Dog and Gun in 'Nethers', I suspect), the party would get started. One of our number sold BMWs very successfully in the City, so he was always turning up in these incredible cars, while the rest of us drove around in heaps or rode motorbikes. It used to amuse the neighbours no end when he burned rubber in the quiet cul-de-sac as he departed in his latest beast and what with the noise from my very powerful hi-fi as the skydivers 'dirt-dived' in the sitting room to Boston's 'More than a feeling' and OMD's 'Enola Gay', no weekend was complete without a courtesy visit from Surrey's finest.
But I digress.
Like tourist attractions and the most desirable places to live in our increasingly overcrowded world, Farnham seems to have become a victim of its own loveliness, so that it is no longer lovely, or special, but something akin to Richmond or Chiswick or some other sought-after but anonymous and over-developed London suburb. The people who live in Farnham today probably think they've arrived, as they drink and eat in the town's expensive wine bars and restaurants and relax in their staggeringly expensive houses, feeling quite a bit more than a little pleased with themselves. But there is something intangible and fragile missing from the town that can never be replaced - I know, I was there when it still existed.
A lot of it has to do with excessive development - shoehorning in houses where space should have been preserved - and tacking on incongruous commercial development that has distorted the proportions of the place and which sucks in far too much traffic, business and people. I dare say that what has happened to Farnham only reflects what has happened to thousands of other sleepy little market towns the length and breadth of the country, but I don't know about them. Farnham is in Surrey, but in my day seemed to be geographically not of it - it was much more a Hampshire kind of place, perhaps because it was perched right on the county boundary. Now it could be Cobham or Effingham for all the difference and specialness it conveys, as the baleful influence of London creeps ever-further outwards.
When I reached Dockenfield, I called in at the home of my old friend's brother and, remarking on what a hell-hole Farnham had become, asked if he ever goes there these days. He doesn't - and I wish I hadn't.
'Californication...' sang the busker at the top of gentrified Lion and Lamb Yard, off West Street, in what used to be a very special and largely peaceful little Surrey town. If you're not familiar with the term Californication, it refers to what happens to somewhere beautiful if you allow rampant overdevelopment. 'Don't Californicate Oregon', read the bumper stickers in the golden state's woody neighbour. 'Call some place paradise, kiss it goodbye' went The Eagles' lament for bounteous America in the final song on Hotel California - 'The Last Resort'. As Don Henley was reported to have said: "The gist of the song was that when we find something good, we destroy it by our presence — by the very fact that man is the only animal on earth that is capable of destroying his environment."
After trying to negotiate Farnham's car-jammed roads and wandering its crowded streets for half an hour, for only the second time in thirty years, I couldn't help thinking the busker was really singing a lament for the town itself as I fled the mayhem for the tranquility of lovely Dockenfield, to the south, in search of an old friend.
I moved to Farnham in 1978 to start work at Hammick's, the bookseller in Downing Street. My first job, on what was even for those far-off days the fairly paltry salary of £2,000 - that's the book trade for you - was actually at the company's warehouse in Alton. Fortunately I was allocated a room in the two-storey staff flat over the shop, accessed through the shop itself. I think the rent was very low, if not rent-free, which was just as well, considering how little we were paid - but then those were the days when people who wanted to get into the book trade were expected to be motivated as much by the love of books as anything so sordid as a living wage or a career!
Such were the times, that the three of us who lived overhead had the free run of what was in effect a personal library and it was a very special experience to wander the shop quietly after hours, browse the bookshelves and borrow anything we fancied to read. I don't think the shop even had an alarm system. It was a charming old building in a row of shops, probably Georgian in origin or even earlier and was the only one to retain its ornate window - possibly Victorian or older. At that time, there were still numerous little alleys and passages in the town, sometimes blocked off by doors or gates, through which mysterious redundant yards could be glimpsed. Lion and Lamb Yard was one such and it was part of Farnham's charm that there were these wasted, gently decaying spaces that whispered eloquently of the hustle and bustle of days gone by. I walked through what had been Hammick's to find the dear old place had been gutted long since and turned into a corporately soulless chain optician - even the staircase had been moved and the large rear extension, which used to house the children's book department, had been made even bigger, taking over nearly the whole of the leafy courtyard where I used to park my motorbike during the day; at night I wheeled it into the shop to keep it safe from pissed-up pub-goers.
Although the town seemed outwardly to be quite comfortable, nay genteel and perhaps even then more than a bit pleased with itself, it had some rough edges. At the bottom of Castle Street was a pub called the Coach and Horses. I hadn't been living in Farnham long before I learned that its nickname was the 'Coke and Hashish' and I'm sure that doesn't require any explanation. Today it's a 'bar-restaurant' called The Coach - one of many that now litter the town. Halfway up Castle Street was The Nelson Arms, where I got a part-time job to supplement my pathetic income. The landlady was a rather fierce woman called Mary - so fierce in fact that she gave rise to a graffito in the gents along the lines of the Smirnoff vodka advertising campaign, which used the strapline 'I thought ..... was a ..... until I discovered Smirnoff vodka'. In this case it was ' I thought a Bloody Mary was a drink until I discovered the Nelson Arms' - marvellously and succinctly eloquent, really. There were others, one or two of which have remained with me: 'Snow White thought Seven Up was a soft drink until she discovered Smirnoff vodka' - that kind of thing. Today all appears to be safely suburban, although doubtless there are pockets of resistance.
Even the fairly sedate Nelson wasn't immune from the sort of high jinks that went on at the Coach and Horses. I was actually drinking in the Nelson one evening - as opposed to working behind the bar. I'd arrived on my motorbike (tame Japanese stuff, not full-on leather Triumph or something), along with my housemate on his machine. We were chatting to a guy with whom I was at school, although he was older than me - in my brother's year. He'd spent some time in the Royal Marines, which wasn't surprising - he'd been in the First XV at school and was a tough cookie. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw someone pick up my crash helmet from where I'd parked it. I immediately went over to him and asked him what he thought he was doing and told him to give me my helmet back. He said 'Say please', so being the hard-arsed bookseller that I was, I did. He still didn't give the helmet back, so I grabbed it and turned away. As I did so, he punched me on the shoulder. Big mistake. My ex-marine friend saw immediately what was going on and shot out a mighty fist, which sent my tormentor literally flying across the bar - something until then I thought really did only happen in films. There were no further problems, although I gave up drinking at the Nelson, since I couldn't guarantee my saviour would be there in future! And I gave up the bar job when I got promoted. Anyway, we had moved on - to the Hop Blossom, in a little side street just off Castle Street, one of the new wave of real ale pubs with sawdusted floors, pork scratchings, interesting things to drink (I eschewed real ale for real cider) and a very affable landlord called Tony - where is he now?
Another memorable pub was the William Cobbett, also popular with bikers. It even had an oaken plaque hanging up in the bar bearing the inscribed words: 'two wheeled horseless carriages' - possibly the result of some greaser's carpentry homework. It was at the Cobbett where I had my first date with Susan, whom I had espied working in a 'trendy winebar' called Sevens in the Borough. Sevens was probably the forerunner of the rash of similar places that have so suburbanised Farnham today, indeed I think it's now a branch of Prezzo, but at the time it was a one-off and so quite cool. A friend called Mark managed the place and I spotted Susan waitressing there one lunchtime. She was gorgeous and I was smitten. I found out where she lived from Mark, dropped by on my bike and asked her out. Amazingly, she said yes. She smoked Marlboro and I thought it would be churlish of me (and more than a trifle uncool) to refuse when she offered me one, so began an off-on affair with the weed that lasted until I was 32, although I downgraded to wimpier Silk Cut 'gaspers' long before then.
Susan turned out to be a real heartbreaker, but that's another story. After six months in the Alton warehouse I had got a job in the shop itself and by the time I left Farnham in 1981 I had risen to the dizzy heights of Assistant Manager, earning £3,750 a year! That was as far as I could go, since Phoebe the lovely manager was very comfortable in her job and showed no signs of moving on. I had originally got into bookselling on the advice of Nigel Sissons, he of Hamish Hamilton fame, who had been in the Army with my father. I went to see him for advice on how to get into publishing and he recommended spending some time in the trade first. However, by the time I had been in it for a couple of years it was painfully obvious that there was no money to be made in books - at least not at the sharp end and that the footsoldiers of the industry were underpaid worker bees whose love of books was cynically and ruthlessly exploited by - well, everyone, really.
However, if you were tuned in to it, the bookishness of Hammick's and one or two antiquarian booksellers pervaded the town, which still reverberated gently to the ghostly local influences of William Cobbett and his Rural Rides, Gilbert White and his Natural History of Selborne and the gentility of Jane Austen. Cobbett's and White's books were steady sellers at Hammick's and it wasn't difficult to evoke the atmosphere they conveyed directly. Now, that is all lost under the cacophony of regular gridlocks in the town centre's teeming streets.
A year or two after I arrived in Farnham, an old college friend and I got together to share a house - at Shady Nook (yes, it really was called that) at the top of the hill you reached when you left Farnham up Castle Street. A devoutly evangelical Christian fellow-Hammickite and talented mechanic took the third bedroom and not long afterwards my then-unemployed elder brother arrived and took the fourth. I collected him from the station (illegally) on my 200cc motorbike after I took the L-plates off and we weaved our way back up to Shady Nook with him balancing a single suitcase on his lap. He soon got a job in the ironmongers opposite the Cobbett and could be seen in there for a while in the traditional khaki coat, until he moved on to bigger things as a journalist on a medical publication in Guildford.
We had some wild-ish times at Shady Nook - or Shapely Knockers as we re-Christened it - not least because my brother was a fanatical skydiver and an assortment of similarly afflicted people (including my younger brother, for a while) would turn up at weekends and head off to Netheravon to, as my father put it, 'jump out of perfectly serviceable aeroplanes' - anathema to an old soldier! When they returned, still high on adrenaline (and one or three beers at the Dog and Gun in 'Nethers', I suspect), the party would get started. One of our number sold BMWs very successfully in the City, so he was always turning up in these incredible cars, while the rest of us drove around in heaps or rode motorbikes. It used to amuse the neighbours no end when he burned rubber in the quiet cul-de-sac as he departed in his latest beast and what with the noise from my very powerful hi-fi as the skydivers 'dirt-dived' in the sitting room to Boston's 'More than a feeling' and OMD's 'Enola Gay', no weekend was complete without a courtesy visit from Surrey's finest.
But I digress.
Like tourist attractions and the most desirable places to live in our increasingly overcrowded world, Farnham seems to have become a victim of its own loveliness, so that it is no longer lovely, or special, but something akin to Richmond or Chiswick or some other sought-after but anonymous and over-developed London suburb. The people who live in Farnham today probably think they've arrived, as they drink and eat in the town's expensive wine bars and restaurants and relax in their staggeringly expensive houses, feeling quite a bit more than a little pleased with themselves. But there is something intangible and fragile missing from the town that can never be replaced - I know, I was there when it still existed.
A lot of it has to do with excessive development - shoehorning in houses where space should have been preserved - and tacking on incongruous commercial development that has distorted the proportions of the place and which sucks in far too much traffic, business and people. I dare say that what has happened to Farnham only reflects what has happened to thousands of other sleepy little market towns the length and breadth of the country, but I don't know about them. Farnham is in Surrey, but in my day seemed to be geographically not of it - it was much more a Hampshire kind of place, perhaps because it was perched right on the county boundary. Now it could be Cobham or Effingham for all the difference and specialness it conveys, as the baleful influence of London creeps ever-further outwards.
When I reached Dockenfield, I called in at the home of my old friend's brother and, remarking on what a hell-hole Farnham had become, asked if he ever goes there these days. He doesn't - and I wish I hadn't.
Labels: Coach and Horses, Farnham, Hammick's, William Cobbett
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
LACIE NETWORK SPACE - NETWORK ATTACHED STORAGE? - NETWORK ATTACHED BRICK, MORE LIKE
AND DEFINITELY NOT FIT FOR PURPOSE
I remember back in 1999-2000 knowledgeable techie colleagues were fairly unimpressed with Lacie products, so why oh why didn't I heed their criticisms a few years ago when I was looking for some network attached storage and found the Lacie Network Space?
I wanted an inexpensive but reliable, large-capacity hard drive that any PC connected to my home network could access for data backups etc. I thought 1 Terabyte (1,000 Gigabytes) would last a good while and hold plenty of stuff.
So the Lacie Network Space seemed ideal for a SOHO worker like me who needs to back up my everyday stuff but also my wife's, visiting stepdaughters' etc etc.
The Lacie looked sleek and shiny when I unpacked it and it seemed simple enough to set up and use, albeit slightly unpredictable as to when my PC could 'see' it. As I only intended to use it for backups it wasn't running continuously, so it's never had to work hard.
After I'd had it a while the drive couldn't be seen by my PC at all via the Windows Explorer and the Ethernet Agent software that came with it couldn't see it either. So as it was still under warranty I opened a support ticket with Lacie and played email tennis with them for a few weeks as they tried to avoid doing anything about it.
I have to say that Lacie's tech support is tantamount to useless and their customer communications are even worse. I ended up having to escalate the problem to their CEO before anything happened.
However, eventually I got them to agree to take the thing back for repair, although they warned me I would lose any data on the drive. So much for the reliable backup drive I had been seeking. I think the geeks at Lacie told me the network interface had failed, but they also said that the external power supply could cause problems - not delivering the right or clean-enough voltage, apparently. I suspect from this that Lacie sources the cheapest possible components for its products, regardless of the fact that they want to play in a market segment where the words 'reliable' and 'mission critical' are quite important to their customers.
Anyway. By and by the drive came back and it seemed to be working ok. A year down the line I have switched it on and used it no more than three or four times (not very good backup strategy, I admit) and usually managed to get it working after restarting it a few times.
One particularly annoying foible of the drive, by the way, is that if you don't ensure its onboard clock is correct after switching on, it returns to a default date and time at some point in 2000. If you save any files to the drive while it's in this state, it time and date-stamps them from its own clock, not from the files' built-in creation date, so they all end up being some time in 2000 and there's no way of knowing which is the most recent.
This is absolutely useless for a backup and pretty unhelpful for any other file. Ok, fair enough if its onboard clock is going to reset to factory default if it's been turned off for months, but you would think it could have been designed to ask you to confirm the date and time at power-up instead. Supposedly it can be configured to go and look for a time server on the internet and get the date and time from that, but that feature doesn't work, or at least not reliably.
One other thing: wireless PCs on the network can't see it at all, only when they're connected by cable. Marvellous.
Today I thought I'd better do a backup so turned the wretched thing on. Powers up, pretty blue light comes on and that's it. Lacie Ethernet Agent can't see it, Windows Explorer can't see it, so I can't connect to it to see what it's doing (actually, I know what it's doing: f*ck-all). Have tried restarting it three or four times but no joy.
This is a machine that's probably been on for eight hours in its miserable, useless life, so in terms of MTBF it's hardly been pushed to the limit. Maybe it's meant to be left running 24/7? Well there's nothing in the manual to say so and in any case it's not very green to leave something running continuously when you only want to use it once every few months.
No, it's just a piece of junk and so, based on my experience and the recommendations of my former colleagues, if you are ever contemplating buying a Lacie product I strongly recommend you don't.
And if you'd like a shiny, black paperweight - 'designed' (not sure how much design there is in a featureless brick) by Neil Poulton, no less - whoever the hell he is - then let me know and for a very small consideration I will bung my Lacie Network Space in the post to you.
Just don't plug it in and expect it to do anything useful.
AND DEFINITELY NOT FIT FOR PURPOSE
I remember back in 1999-2000 knowledgeable techie colleagues were fairly unimpressed with Lacie products, so why oh why didn't I heed their criticisms a few years ago when I was looking for some network attached storage and found the Lacie Network Space?
I wanted an inexpensive but reliable, large-capacity hard drive that any PC connected to my home network could access for data backups etc. I thought 1 Terabyte (1,000 Gigabytes) would last a good while and hold plenty of stuff.
So the Lacie Network Space seemed ideal for a SOHO worker like me who needs to back up my everyday stuff but also my wife's, visiting stepdaughters' etc etc.
The Lacie looked sleek and shiny when I unpacked it and it seemed simple enough to set up and use, albeit slightly unpredictable as to when my PC could 'see' it. As I only intended to use it for backups it wasn't running continuously, so it's never had to work hard.
After I'd had it a while the drive couldn't be seen by my PC at all via the Windows Explorer and the Ethernet Agent software that came with it couldn't see it either. So as it was still under warranty I opened a support ticket with Lacie and played email tennis with them for a few weeks as they tried to avoid doing anything about it.
I have to say that Lacie's tech support is tantamount to useless and their customer communications are even worse. I ended up having to escalate the problem to their CEO before anything happened.
However, eventually I got them to agree to take the thing back for repair, although they warned me I would lose any data on the drive. So much for the reliable backup drive I had been seeking. I think the geeks at Lacie told me the network interface had failed, but they also said that the external power supply could cause problems - not delivering the right or clean-enough voltage, apparently. I suspect from this that Lacie sources the cheapest possible components for its products, regardless of the fact that they want to play in a market segment where the words 'reliable' and 'mission critical' are quite important to their customers.
Anyway. By and by the drive came back and it seemed to be working ok. A year down the line I have switched it on and used it no more than three or four times (not very good backup strategy, I admit) and usually managed to get it working after restarting it a few times.
One particularly annoying foible of the drive, by the way, is that if you don't ensure its onboard clock is correct after switching on, it returns to a default date and time at some point in 2000. If you save any files to the drive while it's in this state, it time and date-stamps them from its own clock, not from the files' built-in creation date, so they all end up being some time in 2000 and there's no way of knowing which is the most recent.
This is absolutely useless for a backup and pretty unhelpful for any other file. Ok, fair enough if its onboard clock is going to reset to factory default if it's been turned off for months, but you would think it could have been designed to ask you to confirm the date and time at power-up instead. Supposedly it can be configured to go and look for a time server on the internet and get the date and time from that, but that feature doesn't work, or at least not reliably.
One other thing: wireless PCs on the network can't see it at all, only when they're connected by cable. Marvellous.
Today I thought I'd better do a backup so turned the wretched thing on. Powers up, pretty blue light comes on and that's it. Lacie Ethernet Agent can't see it, Windows Explorer can't see it, so I can't connect to it to see what it's doing (actually, I know what it's doing: f*ck-all). Have tried restarting it three or four times but no joy.
This is a machine that's probably been on for eight hours in its miserable, useless life, so in terms of MTBF it's hardly been pushed to the limit. Maybe it's meant to be left running 24/7? Well there's nothing in the manual to say so and in any case it's not very green to leave something running continuously when you only want to use it once every few months.
No, it's just a piece of junk and so, based on my experience and the recommendations of my former colleagues, if you are ever contemplating buying a Lacie product I strongly recommend you don't.
And if you'd like a shiny, black paperweight - 'designed' (not sure how much design there is in a featureless brick) by Neil Poulton, no less - whoever the hell he is - then let me know and for a very small consideration I will bung my Lacie Network Space in the post to you.
Just don't plug it in and expect it to do anything useful.
Labels: Lacie, NAS, network attached storage, Network Space
Monday, January 17, 2011
HAVE FARMERS TAKEN OUT A CONTRACT ON OUR COUNTRYSIDE?
Maybe things are changing: consumers are becoming more savvy about the environmental price that has to be paid for cheap food and that is slowly leading to a kinder approach to food production - in some areas at least.
One issue that has no profile, however, is the physical damage caused to the local infrastructure by agriculture. Here in Norfolk the land is in thrall to 'big power farming' - massive machines harvest potatoes and sugar beet and huge articulated lorries hurtle down narrow lanes to collect them. And have you seen the size of today's tractors?
Take a look at this image of a vintage 'little grey Fergie' tractor alongside a typical monster in use on the land and obliterating verges all over the country.
Once upon a time the diminutive machine on the left and others like it were deemed quite large enough to do the donkeywork on the farm. Not any more, now that the land is more or less bare of toiling and expensive human labour. Today one man can do the work of dozens, thanks to mighty machines like that on the right, so many if not most farmers only have one full-time employee and have contracted out practically all the work.
I believe the use of contractors is leading directly to the destruction of verges for two reasons: the aforementioned size of modern tractors which, wheel-to-wheel, are often as wide as the road and the fact that cost-driven contractors are always in a big hurry to get the job done. Sure, they work hard and all hours, but they have no obvious familial or social allegiance to the environment in which they work. They are also not accountable to the farmer for damage to the verges of roads that may well pass through his land: he just wants the work done as quickly and cheaply as possible. So tractor drivers think nothing of driving up onto verges - often towing massive and heavily laden trailers behind them - to let oncoming vehicles pass. The verges simply get mashed and take ages to recover, if they ever do.
Similarly, at least in Norfolk, the endless succession of 38-ton articulated lorries thundering down narrow lanes to collect sugar beet and potatoes and rush them to the refineries and processing plants, is also putting the local infrastructure under a lot of pressure. Once a verge is destroyed and the edge of the tarmac is exposed, the road starts to crumble and potholes appear. And we all know what those do to the tender wheels, tyres and suspensions of our cars. Oh - and those mashed up verges are really, really, ugly, turned from havens for flora and fauna into something more akin to WWI battlefields.
I watched a monster very like the one above, which was also towing a huge trailer with enormous tyres, ride up the foot-high verge outside our parish church to pass an oncoming lorry - instead of doing the sensible thing and pulling over further back where the road was wide enough for both vehicles. Those big tyres just chewed up the verge and scarred the grassy bank outside the church for good. That verge is a lovely spot, in the shadow of a mighty oak that must have been there for hundreds of years. Norfolk isn't blessed with many hills, but this spot is one of the highest locally and on a clear day you can see all around for several miles, hear skylarks singing and see Billy Wix the Barn Owl, who lives in the church tower, gliding silently over the fields and copses.
On another occasion, I was standing on the verge of a single track road, close to where a car had pulled over. Up roared a steroidal tractor and instead of waiting for the car to move, or even slowing down noticeably, swerved onto the opposite verge, leaving the deep and lasting tread marks characteristic of tractor tyres in the soft ground. In a kind of rough justice, the tractor driver caught the prominent bracket of his offside mirror on a tree, which ripped the whole thing off. Oblivious even to this in his giant vehicle, he continued on his way. I was still there an hour later when he returned somewhat sheepishly to collect the remains of the mirror - hopefully after he had been given a bollocking by his boss.
To be fair to the agricultural community, they are not wholly to blame for the destruction of verges. In this increasingly discourteous age, fewer car drivers will pull over at a convenient spot to let oncoming traffic pass, so more and more ad hoc passing places are being carved out of the verges in our haste to get to our destinations quickly and through our unwillingness to give way to other road users. It's almost as if there's a loss of face involved in giving way, an assertion that 'I have just as much right to be on this road as you - I pay my road tax!'.
I can't really see a solution to the problem: farmers are unlikely to badger their contractors to drive more considerately, while the behaviour of car drivers reflects the increasing selfishness of modern life. Many people would say: 'What do a few verges out in the countryside matter - it's practically all mud anyway?'. If you look at the erosion of verges as a metaphor for modern life, with the big battalions riding roughshod over the little people, perhaps it's not so easy to dismiss the issue as someone else's worry.
Farmers come in for a lot of stick these days and are a popular whipping boy, for the most part unable to fight back against their critics. On the whole they don't deserve the brickbats that get thrown at them: they have responded to the demand for more and ever-cheaper food by producing it, year after year. But increasingly it seems that this has only been possible by getting into bed with the agro-chem companies and burdening the land with more and more chemicals.
Maybe things are changing: consumers are becoming more savvy about the environmental price that has to be paid for cheap food and that is slowly leading to a kinder approach to food production - in some areas at least.
One issue that has no profile, however, is the physical damage caused to the local infrastructure by agriculture. Here in Norfolk the land is in thrall to 'big power farming' - massive machines harvest potatoes and sugar beet and huge articulated lorries hurtle down narrow lanes to collect them. And have you seen the size of today's tractors?
Take a look at this image of a vintage 'little grey Fergie' tractor alongside a typical monster in use on the land and obliterating verges all over the country.
Once upon a time the diminutive machine on the left and others like it were deemed quite large enough to do the donkeywork on the farm. Not any more, now that the land is more or less bare of toiling and expensive human labour. Today one man can do the work of dozens, thanks to mighty machines like that on the right, so many if not most farmers only have one full-time employee and have contracted out practically all the work.
I believe the use of contractors is leading directly to the destruction of verges for two reasons: the aforementioned size of modern tractors which, wheel-to-wheel, are often as wide as the road and the fact that cost-driven contractors are always in a big hurry to get the job done. Sure, they work hard and all hours, but they have no obvious familial or social allegiance to the environment in which they work. They are also not accountable to the farmer for damage to the verges of roads that may well pass through his land: he just wants the work done as quickly and cheaply as possible. So tractor drivers think nothing of driving up onto verges - often towing massive and heavily laden trailers behind them - to let oncoming vehicles pass. The verges simply get mashed and take ages to recover, if they ever do.
Similarly, at least in Norfolk, the endless succession of 38-ton articulated lorries thundering down narrow lanes to collect sugar beet and potatoes and rush them to the refineries and processing plants, is also putting the local infrastructure under a lot of pressure. Once a verge is destroyed and the edge of the tarmac is exposed, the road starts to crumble and potholes appear. And we all know what those do to the tender wheels, tyres and suspensions of our cars. Oh - and those mashed up verges are really, really, ugly, turned from havens for flora and fauna into something more akin to WWI battlefields.
I watched a monster very like the one above, which was also towing a huge trailer with enormous tyres, ride up the foot-high verge outside our parish church to pass an oncoming lorry - instead of doing the sensible thing and pulling over further back where the road was wide enough for both vehicles. Those big tyres just chewed up the verge and scarred the grassy bank outside the church for good. That verge is a lovely spot, in the shadow of a mighty oak that must have been there for hundreds of years. Norfolk isn't blessed with many hills, but this spot is one of the highest locally and on a clear day you can see all around for several miles, hear skylarks singing and see Billy Wix the Barn Owl, who lives in the church tower, gliding silently over the fields and copses.
On another occasion, I was standing on the verge of a single track road, close to where a car had pulled over. Up roared a steroidal tractor and instead of waiting for the car to move, or even slowing down noticeably, swerved onto the opposite verge, leaving the deep and lasting tread marks characteristic of tractor tyres in the soft ground. In a kind of rough justice, the tractor driver caught the prominent bracket of his offside mirror on a tree, which ripped the whole thing off. Oblivious even to this in his giant vehicle, he continued on his way. I was still there an hour later when he returned somewhat sheepishly to collect the remains of the mirror - hopefully after he had been given a bollocking by his boss.
To be fair to the agricultural community, they are not wholly to blame for the destruction of verges. In this increasingly discourteous age, fewer car drivers will pull over at a convenient spot to let oncoming traffic pass, so more and more ad hoc passing places are being carved out of the verges in our haste to get to our destinations quickly and through our unwillingness to give way to other road users. It's almost as if there's a loss of face involved in giving way, an assertion that 'I have just as much right to be on this road as you - I pay my road tax!'.
I can't really see a solution to the problem: farmers are unlikely to badger their contractors to drive more considerately, while the behaviour of car drivers reflects the increasing selfishness of modern life. Many people would say: 'What do a few verges out in the countryside matter - it's practically all mud anyway?'. If you look at the erosion of verges as a metaphor for modern life, with the big battalions riding roughshod over the little people, perhaps it's not so easy to dismiss the issue as someone else's worry.
Labels: agricultural contractors, potatoes, potholes, roadside verges, sugar beet, tractors
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
MULTI-CULTURALISM FAILS THE CRICKET TEST
Hearing about the Territorial Army volunteers who have been verbally abused and worse in the street, for having the temerity to wear their uniforms in public, I can only agree with German Chancellor Angela Merkel's assertion that multi-culturalism has failed. It was brave of her, the leader of a country with a dark past on ethnic issues, to make such a statement, but it shows how strongly otherwise fair-minded people now feel about having their fellow-citizens plotting against them and otherwise abusing the lands that have given them a home.
America doesn't seem to suffer from these problems to quite the same extent: immigrants and their families and descendants are, for the most part, very proud to call themselves Americans first and their nationality of origin second. Does the same thing apply in matters of religion, which seem to override nationality? I don't know, but it certainly doesn't in the UK, where it's possible to be Muslim first, second and third and to hell with the country that has taken you in and made you welcome.
I'm not arguing in favour of a policy of 'my country, right or wrong', but if you are a citizen of the UK then that should come before any partisan considerations or religious loyalties. Abusing members of our armed forces going about their lawful business is tantamount to treason, not freedom of expression and it's only our weary tolerance of such freedoms, often at the expense of the values we claim to hold dear, that makes such expressions possible. In some of the states and groups that wish us harm, such disrespect would not be tolerated, indeed it would be likely to lead to imprisonment, torture or more extreme retribution.
Those who consider their first loyalty is to their god, not their country badly need to re-examine their values and priorities.
Hearing about the Territorial Army volunteers who have been verbally abused and worse in the street, for having the temerity to wear their uniforms in public, I can only agree with German Chancellor Angela Merkel's assertion that multi-culturalism has failed. It was brave of her, the leader of a country with a dark past on ethnic issues, to make such a statement, but it shows how strongly otherwise fair-minded people now feel about having their fellow-citizens plotting against them and otherwise abusing the lands that have given them a home.
America doesn't seem to suffer from these problems to quite the same extent: immigrants and their families and descendants are, for the most part, very proud to call themselves Americans first and their nationality of origin second. Does the same thing apply in matters of religion, which seem to override nationality? I don't know, but it certainly doesn't in the UK, where it's possible to be Muslim first, second and third and to hell with the country that has taken you in and made you welcome.
I'm not arguing in favour of a policy of 'my country, right or wrong', but if you are a citizen of the UK then that should come before any partisan considerations or religious loyalties. Abusing members of our armed forces going about their lawful business is tantamount to treason, not freedom of expression and it's only our weary tolerance of such freedoms, often at the expense of the values we claim to hold dear, that makes such expressions possible. In some of the states and groups that wish us harm, such disrespect would not be tolerated, indeed it would be likely to lead to imprisonment, torture or more extreme retribution.
Those who consider their first loyalty is to their god, not their country badly need to re-examine their values and priorities.
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
COME ON, MET OFFICE, COME CLEAN AND TELL US WHAT'S REALLY WRONG WITH THE WEATHER
As you can see, I survived my heart surgery (four weeks ago as I write) and am recovering well.
Last thing I remember on the Monday of the operation is being wheeled down to the anaesthetic room at 08:00, where a regular bed jam started to form - it's a veritable production line there on operating days. I glanced to my left, where a somewhat apprehensive-looking elderly lady lay on her bed. Then somebody must have sneaked something into my canula because the next thing I knew, I was back on the ward, nearly 36 hours later.
When my wife came in to see me late the next day, she told me that I had taken a long time to wake up after the operation so had remained on the critical care unit for longer than usual. That was complete news to me. So Monday 8am to Tuesday early evening is a complete blank.
By Saturday, however, I was allowed to go home and so here I am, complete with nicely healed up 8" scar down my chest and a state-of-the-art Carpentier-Edwards Perimount Magna Ease bovine prosthetic valve quietly getting on with its business inside my aorta. Oh, I do hope it keeps going for a good while yet - I'm not sure I could go through that again! It's still a shock to look down at my scar and remind myself that I have had heart surgery - too weird!
Anyway, that wasn't intended to be the subject of this post - I want to know what's gone wrong with the weather and to what extent the powers that be think it's our fault.
When we moved from Dorset to Essex in 2004, that summer we spent nearly all our spare time in the garden. We ate breakfast, lunch and supper outside a lot and even decided to buy a boat as our village was coastal.
In 2005 we were able to get out on the Blackwater a fair bit, but an easterly wind began to blow and never really let up before we moved to Norfolk in late 2008. We more or less gave up taking the boat out as the Blackwater was just too choppy most of the time. Our boat was ok to force 4-5, but it was no fun. We know that East Anglia tends to be a bit windier than the south of England, but in the south there are long periods of calm weather, just as there were in Essex in 2004.
Every summer since, we have experienced unceasing winds throughout the summer,often coming from the east or north east, which makes them cold, even in months when it ought to be warm.
Once upon a time when a high pressure system settled over the country it meant warm southerly winds from the continent. Not any more - now it means sunshine with cold air being funnelled down from Scandinavia - and it seems to affect the whole country.
I mean, here we are, in the middle of June and we are still running the central heating (only to achieve 18 DegC indoors) or lighting the woodburner in the evening to keep warm. Outside the sky is grey and overcast and that blasted wind just doesn't stop blowing. It's ruined four summers now and with the distinctly indifferent Spring we endured, it looks like we might just slide into Autumn without having a proper summer and any sustained fine weather at all. Remember when June was called 'Flaming June'? What a joke that name is today.
I am surprised not to find more traffic on the 'net as to what is happening to the weather and more comment on the subject from bodies like the Met Office, whose own predictions seem to have lost credibility lately. Does that mean we're encountering weather they are just not expecting and they have no idea why? They keep telling us that temperatures are close to the seasonal average and that this Spring or that Summer was the warmest since records began, but how come we aren't enjoying them? Doesn't make sense to me at all.
I'm not a conspiracy theorist, although I quite enjoy some of the wilder ones, but I can't help thinking that there's something going on with the weather that we are just not being told, because it's too awful to contemplate - that we are in fact sliding into an extended period of colder weather that might even be described as a mini-ice age. The implications for energy costs and the general difficulty of living, keeping mobile, growing crops and feeding the population are all quite frightening if such a change comes about. With national economies already fragile, prolonged cold weather could also be extremely damaging to the prospects for recovery.
What do you think?
As you can see, I survived my heart surgery (four weeks ago as I write) and am recovering well.
Last thing I remember on the Monday of the operation is being wheeled down to the anaesthetic room at 08:00, where a regular bed jam started to form - it's a veritable production line there on operating days. I glanced to my left, where a somewhat apprehensive-looking elderly lady lay on her bed. Then somebody must have sneaked something into my canula because the next thing I knew, I was back on the ward, nearly 36 hours later.
When my wife came in to see me late the next day, she told me that I had taken a long time to wake up after the operation so had remained on the critical care unit for longer than usual. That was complete news to me. So Monday 8am to Tuesday early evening is a complete blank.
By Saturday, however, I was allowed to go home and so here I am, complete with nicely healed up 8" scar down my chest and a state-of-the-art Carpentier-Edwards Perimount Magna Ease bovine prosthetic valve quietly getting on with its business inside my aorta. Oh, I do hope it keeps going for a good while yet - I'm not sure I could go through that again! It's still a shock to look down at my scar and remind myself that I have had heart surgery - too weird!
Anyway, that wasn't intended to be the subject of this post - I want to know what's gone wrong with the weather and to what extent the powers that be think it's our fault.
When we moved from Dorset to Essex in 2004, that summer we spent nearly all our spare time in the garden. We ate breakfast, lunch and supper outside a lot and even decided to buy a boat as our village was coastal.
In 2005 we were able to get out on the Blackwater a fair bit, but an easterly wind began to blow and never really let up before we moved to Norfolk in late 2008. We more or less gave up taking the boat out as the Blackwater was just too choppy most of the time. Our boat was ok to force 4-5, but it was no fun. We know that East Anglia tends to be a bit windier than the south of England, but in the south there are long periods of calm weather, just as there were in Essex in 2004.
Every summer since, we have experienced unceasing winds throughout the summer,often coming from the east or north east, which makes them cold, even in months when it ought to be warm.
Once upon a time when a high pressure system settled over the country it meant warm southerly winds from the continent. Not any more - now it means sunshine with cold air being funnelled down from Scandinavia - and it seems to affect the whole country.
I mean, here we are, in the middle of June and we are still running the central heating (only to achieve 18 DegC indoors) or lighting the woodburner in the evening to keep warm. Outside the sky is grey and overcast and that blasted wind just doesn't stop blowing. It's ruined four summers now and with the distinctly indifferent Spring we endured, it looks like we might just slide into Autumn without having a proper summer and any sustained fine weather at all. Remember when June was called 'Flaming June'? What a joke that name is today.
I am surprised not to find more traffic on the 'net as to what is happening to the weather and more comment on the subject from bodies like the Met Office, whose own predictions seem to have lost credibility lately. Does that mean we're encountering weather they are just not expecting and they have no idea why? They keep telling us that temperatures are close to the seasonal average and that this Spring or that Summer was the warmest since records began, but how come we aren't enjoying them? Doesn't make sense to me at all.
I'm not a conspiracy theorist, although I quite enjoy some of the wilder ones, but I can't help thinking that there's something going on with the weather that we are just not being told, because it's too awful to contemplate - that we are in fact sliding into an extended period of colder weather that might even be described as a mini-ice age. The implications for energy costs and the general difficulty of living, keeping mobile, growing crops and feeding the population are all quite frightening if such a change comes about. With national economies already fragile, prolonged cold weather could also be extremely damaging to the prospects for recovery.
What do you think?
Thursday, May 13, 2010
SOME WORDS ON INTIMATIONS OF MORTALITY
Ever since I discovered, in January 2010, that I need a replacement aortic heart valve asap, I've been wondering if and how to write about it here. John Diamond, the journalist and first Mr Nigella Lawson, wrote bravely, eloquently, often amusingly and without self-pity about his ultimately unsuccessful battle with cancer of the throat and tongue, so I thought he should be my role model, notwithstanding the fact that a heart valve replacement is not supposed to be life-threatening.
Once you are in the medical machine, there is so much information available to you on every subject, that you can both find out everything you could possibly want to know - and view it in graphic detail - but also scare yourself silly whilst actually seeking reassurance.
I started writing this entry before the General Election. Now it's over and we're in the brave new world of an extraordinary Conservative/Lib-Dem coalition, I feel more optimistic about the future of our country, if not myself.
The problem with which I have been wrestling during the seemingly interminable months of waiting for the operation, is what happens if I don't survive it; if I just don't come around from the anaesthetic, or die shortly afterwards from a complication? I've been told there's a 1% chance of mortality and a 4% chance of needing to have a pacemaker fitted following damage to my heart's sino-atrial node during the procedure. These are indeed very small odds, but if my surgeon carries out around 100 of these operations each year, that means one person doesn't make it. Ok, so at 52 I'm young to be having a valve replacement and therefore it's unlikely to be me, but no matter how many people I talk to and no matter how much I remind myself that my father had the same operation, with the added complication of several bypass grafts, at the greater age of 65 and survived, that tiny, insignificant chance just won't go away.
Here's the thing: the anaesthetist comes along and injects you with a drug that puts you out like a light and that's it - to all intents and purposes you have, as Monty Python put it, ceased to be. I've had a general anaesthetic a couple of times, for comparatively minor procedures and the shutdown is complete - you don't dream and there is no sense of self until you are coming around. The time you spend unconscious is totally lost, with no place in your memory. This time some maniac with a buzzsaw is going to cut my breastbone open, heave my ribs aside with what looks like a car jack and then a highly-qualified person with a very sharp knife and a sewing kit, but no mental health problems, is going to do unspeakable things to my heart, which is possibly the repository of my very soul! And I'm confidently expected not only to shrug it off within days, but be home within a week, skylarking about. It's madness; it's completely inconceivable!
Anyway, if you haven't made your farewells to your loved ones and the world in general and something does go wrong, you can't just sit up and say to the surgeon 'Hold on, doc - if my number really is up I'd like a few minutes to say my goodbyes, after that you can shunt me down to the mortuary.' It's too late; no-one will ever speak to you or hear from you again.
So I will leave parting letters for my wife, sons, brothers and stepdaughters - because you just never know, do you?
If you know/knew me and I didn't send you a goodbye letter, please accept this entry in lieu, would you?
'So goodbye, pleased to know you,
We had some laughs along the way,
But I have to be leaving,
And there's nothing you can do to make me stay'
No flowers, just donations to the Norfolk Zipper Club for Papworth Hospital.
Thanks.
Ever since I discovered, in January 2010, that I need a replacement aortic heart valve asap, I've been wondering if and how to write about it here. John Diamond, the journalist and first Mr Nigella Lawson, wrote bravely, eloquently, often amusingly and without self-pity about his ultimately unsuccessful battle with cancer of the throat and tongue, so I thought he should be my role model, notwithstanding the fact that a heart valve replacement is not supposed to be life-threatening.
Once you are in the medical machine, there is so much information available to you on every subject, that you can both find out everything you could possibly want to know - and view it in graphic detail - but also scare yourself silly whilst actually seeking reassurance.
I started writing this entry before the General Election. Now it's over and we're in the brave new world of an extraordinary Conservative/Lib-Dem coalition, I feel more optimistic about the future of our country, if not myself.
The problem with which I have been wrestling during the seemingly interminable months of waiting for the operation, is what happens if I don't survive it; if I just don't come around from the anaesthetic, or die shortly afterwards from a complication? I've been told there's a 1% chance of mortality and a 4% chance of needing to have a pacemaker fitted following damage to my heart's sino-atrial node during the procedure. These are indeed very small odds, but if my surgeon carries out around 100 of these operations each year, that means one person doesn't make it. Ok, so at 52 I'm young to be having a valve replacement and therefore it's unlikely to be me, but no matter how many people I talk to and no matter how much I remind myself that my father had the same operation, with the added complication of several bypass grafts, at the greater age of 65 and survived, that tiny, insignificant chance just won't go away.
Here's the thing: the anaesthetist comes along and injects you with a drug that puts you out like a light and that's it - to all intents and purposes you have, as Monty Python put it, ceased to be. I've had a general anaesthetic a couple of times, for comparatively minor procedures and the shutdown is complete - you don't dream and there is no sense of self until you are coming around. The time you spend unconscious is totally lost, with no place in your memory. This time some maniac with a buzzsaw is going to cut my breastbone open, heave my ribs aside with what looks like a car jack and then a highly-qualified person with a very sharp knife and a sewing kit, but no mental health problems, is going to do unspeakable things to my heart, which is possibly the repository of my very soul! And I'm confidently expected not only to shrug it off within days, but be home within a week, skylarking about. It's madness; it's completely inconceivable!
Anyway, if you haven't made your farewells to your loved ones and the world in general and something does go wrong, you can't just sit up and say to the surgeon 'Hold on, doc - if my number really is up I'd like a few minutes to say my goodbyes, after that you can shunt me down to the mortuary.' It's too late; no-one will ever speak to you or hear from you again.
So I will leave parting letters for my wife, sons, brothers and stepdaughters - because you just never know, do you?
If you know/knew me and I didn't send you a goodbye letter, please accept this entry in lieu, would you?
'So goodbye, pleased to know you,
We had some laughs along the way,
But I have to be leaving,
And there's nothing you can do to make me stay'
- Barclay James Harvest, Poor Boy Blues, Everyone is Everybody Else (1974)
No flowers, just donations to the Norfolk Zipper Club for Papworth Hospital.
Thanks.
Labels: aortic valve replacement, Barclay James Harvest, dead parrot sketch, John Diamond, Monty Python, Nigella Lawson, Norfolk Zipper Club, Papworth Hospital, Tory Lib-Dem coalition
Thursday, April 15, 2010
I THOUGHT WINDOWS VISTA WAS BAD UNTIL I 'UPGRADED' TO OFFICE 2007
I started this blog in 2007 with a moan about how half-baked Windows Vista was and why did Microsoft feel they had to move familiar things around every time they upgraded their operating system. Now the various service packs and security patches have come out and it's running properly, more or less - although it still takes an age to boot up - and device driver developers have finally caught up.
Mind you, I hear it's practically back to square one yet again with Windows 7 - you can't even upgrade simply from Vista, apparently - you have to format your hard drive and start all over again, which means moving everything you want to keep off your PC first - how useless is that, especially when you consider how big today's hard drives are and how many thousands of photos and MP3s etc they can hold?
But anyway, these gripes pale into insignificance when you 'upgrade' (and I use the term advisedly) from Office 2003 to Office 2007 and find that you've been dumped in a maze, or perhaps more accurately the Alaskan wilderness without map, compass or GPS. While wearing a blindfold and earplugs.
In an attempt to make Office more intuitive and user-friendly (love that expression) Microsoft did away with the toolbar we all know our way around with our eyes shut, and gave us the 'ribbon' - a grouping of popular tasks that's supposed to make it easy to get straight to what you want to do.
Well it doesn't.
I've been using Office 2007 for several months now and I still find myself searching fruitlessly for such basic functions as a document's properties in Word so I can check the word count or how long I have been working on it.
It's no wonder that many businesses have shied away from migrating to Office 2007 - they fear the loss of productivity by their staff and the support overload for their IT departments as a deluge of completely unnecessary questions about where things are is unleashed.
I actually found a bit of software on the 'net that uses the add-in function in Office to give you back your original toolbar, more or less. It speaks volumes for how hopeless the ribbon is that someone felt it worthwhile coding software to restore the conventional toolbar. If you're tearing your hair out with Office 2007, you might want to give it a try - there's a free but functionally-limited evaluation version.
And of course, no new version of Office would be complete without changing the document format yet again, so old versions can't open documents created in the new version without a bit of MS software that allows the benighted users to read documents from the new version being installed. It takes a bit of digging on MS's website to discover there is such a thing, mind you - more time wasted - even if it is free. $29.95 seems a small price to pay to get your sanity - and productivity - back!
I do hope that Microsoft comes to its senses with Office 2010 and restores the toolbar, exactly the way it was. Perhaps the development team should ask itself why no other leading software developer has gone down the ribbon route, as far as I know.
It's because it's crap and doesn't work.
Now I see that Microsoft has had to come out with the Ribbon Hero game, which I see as a backhanded way of admitting that the ribbon is useless and that users need extra software just to teach them how to use it. So much for intuitive software!
Remember, Microsoft: if it ain't broke there's really no need to try and fix it. So if you don't want to lose everyone to Open Office, put the toolbar back - just the way it was.
Oh, and put the mailmerge function back the way it was in Office 2000 while you're at it, would you - you completely wrecked it in Office 2003?
Thankyou.
I started this blog in 2007 with a moan about how half-baked Windows Vista was and why did Microsoft feel they had to move familiar things around every time they upgraded their operating system. Now the various service packs and security patches have come out and it's running properly, more or less - although it still takes an age to boot up - and device driver developers have finally caught up.
Mind you, I hear it's practically back to square one yet again with Windows 7 - you can't even upgrade simply from Vista, apparently - you have to format your hard drive and start all over again, which means moving everything you want to keep off your PC first - how useless is that, especially when you consider how big today's hard drives are and how many thousands of photos and MP3s etc they can hold?
But anyway, these gripes pale into insignificance when you 'upgrade' (and I use the term advisedly) from Office 2003 to Office 2007 and find that you've been dumped in a maze, or perhaps more accurately the Alaskan wilderness without map, compass or GPS. While wearing a blindfold and earplugs.
In an attempt to make Office more intuitive and user-friendly (love that expression) Microsoft did away with the toolbar we all know our way around with our eyes shut, and gave us the 'ribbon' - a grouping of popular tasks that's supposed to make it easy to get straight to what you want to do.
Well it doesn't.
I've been using Office 2007 for several months now and I still find myself searching fruitlessly for such basic functions as a document's properties in Word so I can check the word count or how long I have been working on it.
It's no wonder that many businesses have shied away from migrating to Office 2007 - they fear the loss of productivity by their staff and the support overload for their IT departments as a deluge of completely unnecessary questions about where things are is unleashed.
I actually found a bit of software on the 'net that uses the add-in function in Office to give you back your original toolbar, more or less. It speaks volumes for how hopeless the ribbon is that someone felt it worthwhile coding software to restore the conventional toolbar. If you're tearing your hair out with Office 2007, you might want to give it a try - there's a free but functionally-limited evaluation version.
And of course, no new version of Office would be complete without changing the document format yet again, so old versions can't open documents created in the new version without a bit of MS software that allows the benighted users to read documents from the new version being installed. It takes a bit of digging on MS's website to discover there is such a thing, mind you - more time wasted - even if it is free. $29.95 seems a small price to pay to get your sanity - and productivity - back!
I do hope that Microsoft comes to its senses with Office 2010 and restores the toolbar, exactly the way it was. Perhaps the development team should ask itself why no other leading software developer has gone down the ribbon route, as far as I know.
It's because it's crap and doesn't work.
Now I see that Microsoft has had to come out with the Ribbon Hero game, which I see as a backhanded way of admitting that the ribbon is useless and that users need extra software just to teach them how to use it. So much for intuitive software!
Remember, Microsoft: if it ain't broke there's really no need to try and fix it. So if you don't want to lose everyone to Open Office, put the toolbar back - just the way it was.
Oh, and put the mailmerge function back the way it was in Office 2000 while you're at it, would you - you completely wrecked it in Office 2003?
Thankyou.
Labels: Microsoft Office 2007, Office 2000, Office 2003, office ribbon, Office toolbar
