pumpkinstrokemarrow

For once in a while HSBC internet banking on the blink yesterday. Got to the page OK then got stuck. Tried again later and got one of those temporary fault pages the systems guys put up when all else fails. Something, as I dimly recall, you stick up on the internet accelerators which sit between the outward facing fire walls and the back office application servers doing the real banking or whatever, it being these last which have gone wrong. Back up again this morning.

No doubt their IT department deep in witch-hunt mode this morning. Who is going to walk the plank for loss of service?

Reminded on the way of the very serious way they treat the messages they send to one's internet bank account. Just the usual sort of junk mail that you drop in the bin when it drops through the letter box, but when you go to delete it you get a special dialog box giving you the opportunity to print your deletion or, alternatively, to confirm the deletion. Same sort of thing as you get when you make a payment or change a direct debit. Presumably the product design people were a bit lazy that day and settled for one size fits all confirmation.

Then, at roughly the same time, lost the internet service itself. Oh dear. Rather a muggy day to be talking to Bangalore. Luckily the service reappeared on the second reboot and is still with us.

And then two glitches of my own to report. The other day, having retired for the day, closed my eyes, as per usual. But instead of void on black I got a sprinkling of stars on black. Rather faint pin-pricks of white light scattered about the field of vision. Maybe a couple of dozen of them. I didn't think to count. Rather like the sort of night sky you get in the glowing suburbs on a moonless night. Has not happened before or since but I suppose if it becomes a habit I had better trot down to specsavers and see what one of their nice opticians makes of it. I dare say they will be able to squeeze three new pairs of specs. out whatever it is.

And yesterday, while turning over the large pile of books beside the bed, came across a small book by one Margaret MacMillan, noticed on March 28. Looked at the thing and could not remember what it was or why it was there. No recollection of the thing at all. It was only when I opened it up that I remembered that it was rather a good book, a sort of chat about modern uses and abuses of history. Which I remembered well enough when prompted. But not impressed by the void before prompting.

Today's book, sourced as usual from the TLS, presents a different problem. Interesting book about ancient mystery cults by one Hugh Bowden, but one of those glossy productions by Thames & Hudson. Very thick paper, wide margins, lots of black and white (half tone? See rather good explanation of same at http://www.ted.photographer.org.uk/) pictures and some plates. Which is all very well but it all makes the book, which does not contain very many words, very heavy. Too heavy to comfortably hold in one hand. Too stiff to comfortably read at a table: it does not lie open at the page, it has to be held open. Rather like my new Filofax. One suspects that whoever was responsible for the book design did not actually handle a test copy. All too focussed on the page images on his high resolution artmaster's screen to worry about the physical feel of the thing.

Incidentally, I hear that electronic books not too good with this sort of book either. Can't really cope with pictures, diagrams and maps, despite the fact that the whole thing could be shipped as a .pdf file. So what's the problem? Installing the Adobe software can't be the problem, so is it that the screen is not up to it? Or that the software that does the display just does not have enough buttons to allow the reader to control the reading of such a thing?