Monday, March 10, 2008
It rains after all
Despite wishful thinking (not entirely without bottled help) about rain shadows, it has rained a lot here in the last twelve hours or so. The garden pond's guardian duck was blown down. There is water running down the garden. A large branch has broken off the willow tree in our neighbour's garden. A fair size lump, the biggest that has ever broken off. At perhaps 20 cubic feet at 50lbs to the cubic foot (including due allowance for rising sap) it would have made quite a mess of our garage had it taken flight East, rather than dropping down dead.
Oddly, taking a chance and cycling to Cheam for bread in a gap (just long enough as it turned out) between blusters and showers, nothing as big as our neighbourly lump to be seen. A few small hedge trees blown over on Howell Hill, a few twigs here and there and that was about it. But a nasty cross wind coming out of Banstead Road on the way down Howell Hill. Not sure quite why, but maybe something to do with the open hillside to one side of it. Nothing to break the wind. Reminded why cycling in the wind - leaving aside the extra work involved - is not always a good idea.
Excel playing up again. The year old laptop with Windows XP and shiny new Office crashed three or four times in the same number of days last week. Didn't lose much work but all a bit tiresome - not least because of all the extra saves one puts in while one is calming down again. While one stops worrying about whether one's file has got corrupt - something which I think ought to be less likely now that they have moved to XML encoding, away from some fiendishly complicated binary encoding.
Maybe I shall have to move the laptop to Vista and see if that does any better - the new desktop which does have Vista having yet to crash. Maybe new Office works better with new Windows. But things are not so bad that I am going to start poking around the Microsoft support site yet. Let alone attempt to make a support call.
Not too impressed to see over the weekend that three or four members of the BBB are staunch Catholics. Given that my betters spent centuries acquiring the now basic freedoms of the country we live in, I am not about to say that this is not permitted. But makes it even less likely that I will vote for them (the BBB gang that is) next time around than it was last time around. When I was sufficiently uncivic not to bother to vote at all. As an aside, I wonder if Mr Blair's task in Northern Ireland was made any easier by his being almost a Catholic. Did they care?
And on a slightly differant tack, was prompted this morning to read something called the seven penitential psalms. And rather heavy weather I made of them too. So I am not at all sure that it is wise to let all and sundry try and decipher the things. Psalm 51, for example, leaves me without a clue as to whether burnt offerings are a good thing or a bad thing, despite their being mentioned twice. Maybe we do need fully qualified sky pilots to lead the way through. The protestant protest that we can all find our own way through Holy Writ does not seem to wash today.
Oddly, taking a chance and cycling to Cheam for bread in a gap (just long enough as it turned out) between blusters and showers, nothing as big as our neighbourly lump to be seen. A few small hedge trees blown over on Howell Hill, a few twigs here and there and that was about it. But a nasty cross wind coming out of Banstead Road on the way down Howell Hill. Not sure quite why, but maybe something to do with the open hillside to one side of it. Nothing to break the wind. Reminded why cycling in the wind - leaving aside the extra work involved - is not always a good idea.
Excel playing up again. The year old laptop with Windows XP and shiny new Office crashed three or four times in the same number of days last week. Didn't lose much work but all a bit tiresome - not least because of all the extra saves one puts in while one is calming down again. While one stops worrying about whether one's file has got corrupt - something which I think ought to be less likely now that they have moved to XML encoding, away from some fiendishly complicated binary encoding.
Maybe I shall have to move the laptop to Vista and see if that does any better - the new desktop which does have Vista having yet to crash. Maybe new Office works better with new Windows. But things are not so bad that I am going to start poking around the Microsoft support site yet. Let alone attempt to make a support call.
Not too impressed to see over the weekend that three or four members of the BBB are staunch Catholics. Given that my betters spent centuries acquiring the now basic freedoms of the country we live in, I am not about to say that this is not permitted. But makes it even less likely that I will vote for them (the BBB gang that is) next time around than it was last time around. When I was sufficiently uncivic not to bother to vote at all. As an aside, I wonder if Mr Blair's task in Northern Ireland was made any easier by his being almost a Catholic. Did they care?
And on a slightly differant tack, was prompted this morning to read something called the seven penitential psalms. And rather heavy weather I made of them too. So I am not at all sure that it is wise to let all and sundry try and decipher the things. Psalm 51, for example, leaves me without a clue as to whether burnt offerings are a good thing or a bad thing, despite their being mentioned twice. Maybe we do need fully qualified sky pilots to lead the way through. The protestant protest that we can all find our own way through Holy Writ does not seem to wash today.
# posted by Jim @ 6:28 AM 
