Program progress!

Let joy be unconfined!

     The booklet making program has been successfully installed in my major computer.  I would like to say that I was fully in control of the download, and I knew what I was doing.  But that would be a lie.  I don’t really know what I was hoping for.  I think that I was hoping that there should be a sort of sympathetic osmosis, and that the program that I installed in my laptop would gravitate toward installing itself in my upstairs computer and that all things would be well.

     But that didn’t happen.  I even considered buying another copy of the program because it is so insanely useful for my purposes.  But there was always the nagging memory that in part of the documentation that I printed out for the program there was a mention of it being available for six other family members.  If that was true, then there must have been some way in which I could have downloaded it onto another of my computers.

     The problem as I saw it, was that the program interacted with my printer downstairs, and I wanted it to work with the computer upstairs.  (And, yes, doesn’t everyone have more than one printer?). But there was no clear indication of how to transfer the program from one machine to another.  I even downloaded the receipt from the Apple Store to see if there was some sort of code or registration number that I could use to extend the program to another machine.  But there was nothing useful that I could see.

     In a wistful attempt, more to show willing, than to show that I knew anything about how to install the program, I loaded the information about the program and, lo and behold, there in the top right corner was a little download symbol.  On which I clicked, and which did as it suggested it might do, and downloaded the program.  And it worked.

     I have worked with (those last two words are probably only an approximation of professionalism) computers for decades, as I am an enthusiastic early adopter of digital technology.  But I cannot say that I know much more about the actual workings of the programs that I use, in the sense of how they have been formulated, than I knew when I started, starry eyed, wondering about the possibilities of what could be achieved with such magical machines.

     In the very early days of personal computers, I did waste a great deal of time pretending that I was interested in programming the things before the eventual realization that I was a User (with a capital ‘U’) rather than a programmer.  I would have spent the time that I wasted on creating mindlessly simple programs that did nothing far better by paying more detailed attention to what a program could do.

     It is a truism, accepted by virtually everyone, that most Users use only a tiny percentage of the capabilities of any program.  Time would be more productively spent in learning what a program can do than trying to work out just how it does what it does.

     As I am working on a chapbook of poems at the moment, the importance of the program that is now working in both my computers is that I can complete the whole process of creating of the raw poetic material to the production of a completed chapbook ‘in-house’.

     And this new program is even supposed to indicate the optimal spot for the placement of the staples when I have folded it, and it is ready to be assembled!

     This is just one of the multitudes of ‘features’ that the program offers, in a list bewildering in its expansiveness.  I will, like most Users, find a simple path to get what I think I want, and then stick to it through thick and thin, not venturing into the rarefied regions of professionalism that the program holds out to the unwary buyers.

     I wonder if I can get a rebate for only using a tiny percentage of the possibilities.  A 50% return on investment might be encouraging.  But I know that I will count my blessings and be grateful that I will no longer be hurling vituperative invective at the printer as it fails, yet again, to do what I want it to do.

     For 22 euros, it is a small price to pay for peace of mind and a clean mouth!

Here we go, again!

 What’s the right time?  There’s never a ‘right’ time.

            That could be the questioning start of something very serious, but it’s only me, thinking about how to phrase the restart of my blog.  

I have been woefully remiss in my writing of something that used to take up a part of every day and satisfied that Puritan part of my writing mind that felt that I had to Do Something every day.

I have written books since the last entry in the Blog, but it doesn’t seem to compensate, in my mind, for the dutiful entry day-by-day that together formed an opinionated diary.

I sometimes dip back into the entries and am amazed by how much I have forgotten about so much that I obviously felt so passionately about at the time.  At times, I read the entries as if I were a stranger – and very enjoyable they are too, though I am not always in agreement with the person who wrote them!

 

One of the reasons that I have been hesitant in putting fingertip to computer key is my feeling that I ought to wait until I had something significant to say before I was able to justify starting up the blog again.  But I have concluded that is the wrong approach.  Or perhaps the word ‘wrong’ is itself wrong, and I have been using the concept of significance as a way of justifying my inaction.

I, more than most, should take my Family Wisdom to heart and recognize that “Anything is better than nothing!” and simply get on with it.

 

And it’s not as if nothing has happened in the intervening years, or however long it has been since I last wrote.  But the idea of ‘filling in’ the Lost Years is foreign to the impulse that started the Blog in the first instance.  It was to record my move from Cardiff to Catalonia and to note my impressions of the experience of moving from one country to another and to record the differences in day to day living in Catalonia as opposed to living in Cardiff.

I have now been living in Castelldefels for years, and it feel like home.  Certainly, a recent visit to London for a friend’s ‘significant’ birthday celebrations did not make me homesick, and the weather alone was enough to make me wish to be back by the sea!

So, this return is not necessarily to record quaint differences in living styles that mark the differences in Wales and Catalonia that I experience, but rather to provide me with a daily opportunity to indulge my inclination to pontificate and digress.

 

As a non sequitur to everything that has gone before I would like to indulge myself with a mini rant.

As well as being the only teacher I know who has used the OHP (Overhead Projector) throughout his teaching career (from the Training Year to his Retirement) I was also the manic exponent of the booklet approach to dealing with aspects of my subject.

The start of my teaching career pre-dated the use of computers in school and the use of personal computers, and the photocopier and the reproduction of teaching material was difficult, and we used Roneo machines and Stencil machines and all sorts of messy ways of getting our thoughts onto multiple pieces of paper.

The first plain paper copiers revolutionized the whole way of producing teaching material.  And I photocopied with a vengeance!  

Of course, in the early days, the format of a booklet had to be done in rough, each of the A5 pages printed separately and then counted to see how many pages were in the booklet, and then stuck onto the pages of a blank same-sized booklet so that all the pages were in the right order to be photocopied page by page, to make the final finished product.  Time intensive, but very satisfying when completed.

The computer made things much easier, and when I discovered that the printing program had a ‘booklet’ setting my delight was complete.  This setting took a booklet composed on the computer and sorted out the individual pages so that they were printed in the correct order.  All you had to do was collate and fold and staple and the job was done.

And that was true, right up until the time when the program didn’t work.  The instruction is there in the choices you get before you print, but it simply does not do the job.  And no one has been able to explain to me why that is.  At one time I had experts in Mac, Brother and Word all working at getting the program to work.  And they all failed and did not know why they were failing.

Usually, I have found a way to getting around the obstacles that the non-working program has put in my way, but, as time goes on, so the program becomes more and more skittish and even the work arounds that I have found which compensate for some its vagaries fail to work themselves.

So, I have bitten the bullet and bought a program specifically designed to work with all the programs that I use to print the damn things.  And I resent the fact that I have spent some twenty Euros to do something that used to be bundled with the printer program.

The bought program does work, but my next problem is finding out a way of getting my desktop computer to get the program as well as my laptop.  There must be a way of getting more than one of my machines to have the program, but I have yet to find a way to get my other computer to recognize that I have bought the program.  Of such concerns are paranoia made!

Obey your technology!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My new watch even beeped at me to let me know that it thought that there would be rain later in the morning!   

     When you are stumbling around in the pre-dawn getting read to cycle for the morning swim, a beeping watch is the last thing that you need, as you mostly rely on automatic to get you through the quotidian rituals of getting the day going.

     I did however, glance at the watch and a terse message said, “Expect rain at 8 am” – even poetic in its way.  However, I decided to ignore such a warning and trust to the legendary positive weather conditions of Castelldefels.  Sometimes, even when the forecast for the town says rain, it seems to make an exception for the strip of the town along the beach and we often stay dry.

     Not this time.   

     It rained at 8. 

And as I ploughed my way up and down my gloriously empty lane in the local pool, I heard the tell-tale sound of globular moisture hitting the retractable roof and, with my surgically altered eyes, I could make out the running smears of water trickling down the glazing at the sides of the pool.

     Never mind, I told myself, after I’ve finished my swim there is always the extra time for my tea and sarnie in the cafe, which together with note writing  should ensure that by the time that I am ready to leave the weather will have cleared up.

     Not this time.   

     In a rather touching gesture of moderate futility, I drained the water from the cleft of the saddle and dabbed, mostly ineffectually, at the rest of the seat in the hope that first rump-contact would not be totally wet, but just unpleasantly damp.

     And so I made my way home through spiteful rain that, in spite of the fact that I modified my route back via tree canopied roads, seemed to find the spaces between the leaves to fall, not so gently, on me.   

     My coat is now hanging on the sheltered line downstairs to drip dry and my shorts have (bugger the expense!) been put into the tumble dryer in gloriously damp isolation.

     It is said that the amount of super-computing power that it devoted to forecasting the weather dwarfs all other uses.  But I still react to forecasts as if they were based on the “feeling of a bit of seaweed” approach of the “experts” of my youth, rather than the almost infinitely sophisticated approach of the present technological day. 

     I should believe the forecasts because they are really, generally, correct.  I think that what you might call 'forecasting faith' could be related to an age divide, where people of my baby-boomer generation are still sceptical, whereas those who have been brought up looking at ever smaller screens for their information now expect the info that they are given by the Almighty operating systems of their phones to be correct.

     As a matter of interest, I just asked Google what it based its weather forecasts on and the answer was that it, "takes radar data created by doppler radar stations" and by organizing this data into images and creating a time specific sequence is able to suggest what the weather will be.  So there!

     Just staying with temperature, I got to thinking about how much 'faith' I do have in flashing lights and digital information connected to various things that I possess actually telling me the truth.

     I have never independently verified the set temperature in the fridge for example.  I have taken as gospel the temperatures that the machine tells me that my dishes are washed at in the dishwasher; the time that the microwave cooks for; the length of the various washes in the washing machine.  Virtuallly the only time that I check my watch is when the BBC News starts, and even that is compromised by the fact that I listen to the BBC on the Internet and I have discovered that there are seconds lagging, between broadcast and my radio making absolute accuracy impossible.

     I remember, from my teaching days, one supremely irritating child in a 'bottom group' when such things existed (no, hardly a child he was 15 going on 7) who replied to everything I said for almost the whole of a lesson with the single word, "Why?"  

     I decided, in the way that you sometimes do, that, instead of losing my temper or ignoring the kid, I would attempt to answer him.  And I did.  The interchange (if you could call it that because the boy didn't think about any of his responses, which were always "Why?" or consider any of my increasingly philosophical responses) were obviously one-sided, but the rest of the small class appreciated the 'game' and eventually, they called time, to which the kid gave one final "Why?" and laughed.

     I recall this because it was an example of questioning, mindless questioning perhaps, but it did force me to think while I attempted to answer the continuous drill of "whys?" that was leading to a point of absurdity that I never quite gave into.

     If that experience was essentially arrid, perhaps it should make us think about the way that we too easily accept authority from electronic, inanimate machines functioning on a series of zeros and ones.

     My watch measures and charts my movement and lack of it, my activity, my sleep, my heartbeat and lord alone knows what else.  When I go for a bike ride, I can with a few taps bring up a map and trace the route that I have taken, the time it took me to complete it and even the elevation above sea level and the inclines and declines that I navigated.

     My watch and the app that is linked to it have more information about me and the way that my body works and where that body has been, than anyone else in the world - apart of course from the people who can link into the watch or the app and download whatever.

     What prompted these thoughts was that my watch was right about the rain and I was wrong.  

     Perhaps, in the future should I be more willing to listen to the information that, although presented on one, small, round watchscreen, is actually the visible and tangible sign of an unthinkably powerful information superhighway to which I am linked?

     I am no conspiracy theorist, but asking "Why?" might be the really human thing to do.

3 days in 1

 

SUNDAY 1^st October

 

Five years ago, to the day, we were in our local medical centre.  Not for any treatment, but rather for Toni to be able to cast his vote in the referendum about Catalan independence.  On that day, we made our way through crowds of people flocking around the doors of the medical centre and spilling onto the closed road in front.  We walked past police who were there, but not doing anything positive or negative, merely being there.

     The mood inside the centre was fairly febrile with the volunteers staffing the voting stations constantly looking around to see if the police were going to do anything more proactive.  The plastic, translucent, ballot boxes were guarded like precious jewels and were able to be whisked away at a moment’s notice if it seemed like they were in danger of being impounded by agents of the Spanish government.

     News about other polling stations filtered in throughout the day, where the peacefulness of our experience was not matched by the police violence and thuggery that took place in the name of Spanish democracy!

     The scenes of police aggression against people peacefully trying to cast a vote was shocking, and as more stories began to be told about the day, the anger was palpable.  The gleefully heavy-handed ‘policing’ ordered by the conservative PP (the most corrupt political party in western Europe) government in Spain, did irreparable harm to the reputation of the government and the country.  And the extended victimization of the leaders who took part by use of a highly questionable judicial procedure and blatantly partisan judges did nothing to repair the damage.

     North of the Pyrenees the ‘legal’ ‘justification’ for the prosecution and later condemnation of the leaders of the referendum and their consequent imprisonment was treated with astonished contempt, and all other European countries rejected the shaming demands by the Spanish Government for extradition of the self-exiled leaders of the referendum movement, political and social.

     In the five years since the referendum was held, where an overwhelming majority voted in favour of independence, most people would say that the political situation has worsened, and not just as far as the question of independence for Catalonia is concerned.

     The influence of Vox, the far-right party, has grown and there are areas of Spain where the far-right is in government, working with PP to ensure a right-wing majority, or with Vox forming the largest party in its own right.

     Of course, in Catalonia, PP and Vox are treated with the disgusted contempt that they so richly deserve, with their parliamentary representation being so small that they do not even have the numbers to form their own grouping within the Catalan parliament – but nationally, it does look as though the PP with the help of fascist scum like Vox and an equally contemptible right-wing party, the C’s, could have a majority in the next general election for the national parliament and oust the so-called “Socialists” that are in power at the moment.

     Although Catalonia does have a majority of independence representatives in the Catalan Parliament, the politicos have not declared independence and have worked with the national government to get the referendum leaders out of jail and have decided to proceed via negotiation rather than via confrontation.  Which sounds reasonable enough, until you start looking at the history of the conflicts between central government in Madrid and the government and people of Catalonia.

     The question of whether there is a majority in favour of independence in Catalonia is moot.  In Catalan parliamentary terms, the majority is clear; in terms of the general population of Catalonia, the figures are ambiguous.  To which the response might well be, “Then put the question to a vote!”  A vote that would be accepted by all sides in the argument.

     You have to understand that the “Unity of Spain” is a concept that is written into the Constitution, and some have suggested that any vote for independence by Catalonia would have to be open to the whole of the population of Spain!

     When I was seven or eight years old, my parents brought me to Spain from Cardiff, for my first foreign holiday, to Tossa de Mar on the Costa Brava in Catalonia.  Dad took me to the building site that was the Sagrada Familia and explained to me what the church represented and said, “Catalonia is not Spain!” 

     It is perhaps significant that behind the Civic Buildings in the centre of Cardiff there is a memorial to the Welshmen who fought and died in The Spanish Civil War https://historypoints.org/index.php?page=spanish-civil-war-memorial-cardiff and some of those names are from the area where my father grew up, he would have known the families and, although too young to have fought in the Spanish Civil War, he was of an age to be a member of the armed forces in the Second World War.  The modern story of Spain and its fight against fascism, and especially the heroic struggle of the Republican forces centred in Barcelona against Franco was a story with personal links.  The miners of South Wales were stalwart supporters of the Republic, as were many other workers and intellectuals.  There is a residual affection for the national ambitions of Catalonia and a rejection of the subterfuge that has been used to belittle the valid arguments for statehood.

     But, as always, politics is the art of the possible, and in the complex games that politicians play, the simple questions become enmeshed in the rococo frills of self-interested definitions, so that impetus is lost.

     Catalan politicians make clear statements calling for independence, but their actions are more nuanced and ambiguous – but the rancour of unfinished business is likely to sour Catalan politics for some time to come.

 

 

MONDAY 2^nd October

 

There seems to be a direct correlation between my buying an uninteresting piece of domestic hardware via the Internet and then finding a cheaper version on sale in Aldi or Lidl almost immediately afterwards.  This has happened too often for it to be a mere coincidence, and I begin to suspect a major conspiracy.

     Everyone 'knows' that one’s computer and mobile phone listen to us via voice and keystrokes.  How many times have we volubly prevaricated about cutting the grass or painting the bathroom ceiling with proper anti-mould paint, to find adverts for mowers, strimmers, paint brushes, paint, and those little trays for use with rollers suddenly making their way into the feeds for computer and phone?  And bafflingly, if you do succumb to the purchase of a lawn mower or strimmer, you are assailed by further adverts urging you to buy another one!  What sort of palatial establishments do Amazon, and their devilish associates think we live in, where a single mower is wildly inadequate for our vast lawns?  Why waste computing power on repeat adverts when the product has already been bought?  Such things are beyond the imagining of we mere consumers – perhaps Amazon has a computer-generated list of the things and the number of those things that we are supposed to possess according to their relentlessly capitalistic algorithms, and we are kicking against the weight of untold exabytes of computing power that tell the company what we should have, irrespective of how we mere flesh-carriers think our possessions should be ordered!

     I am sure that there is a sci-fi short story there somewhere - if it hasn’t already been written.

 

TUESDAY  3^rd October

 

Today is the opening performance in the new Opera Season in the Liceu – at least it is the opening concert in Torn A – the subscription series that I have – though I don’t think that this is the First Night.

     The walk from the car park on the Ramblas to the Liceu is getting more and more onerous for me, as I hobble along with my baston and pausing to look into the windows of shops full of tourist crap, as a way of spacing out the effort to get me there.

     I always dress down for the Opera, which is to say that I wear what I always wear, shorts and a t-shirt, unless the weather is really cool, in which case I make the concession to dressiness and sport a pair of jeans.  The weather at this stage of October is still fairly warm, and I type this with the doors to the balcony open to give a cooling breeze!

     The opera is Don Pasquale by Donizetti and, as usual, I have had recourse to my Amanda Holden edited copy of The Penguin Opera Guide to give me an edge as the absurdities of the piece, but it is a masterpiece of opera buffa, and a convincingly realistic narrative is not something that we should expect!

     And, at the end of the week, another (the second) of my Saturday afternoon (early evening) concerts in La Palau. 

     Culture reigns!