Category: Technology

Entertained by Margie – 28 September 2022

Posted on by Zogman

This afternoon we went to visit Margie.

Margie is one of Scamps friends. She is a ray of sunshine on a dull day, and today was a dull day. As usual our conversation ranged over may subjects, taking in, on the way: The difference between a Carry-out and a Take-away, what a Boogie is and how you’d draw one and the horrors of hospital food, especially Gravel Hotpot. No, not Gravy, Gravel, apparently that’s what it looked like! Three hours gone in a flash. What an entertainer. She’d have made an excellent stand-up comedian when she was younger.

We drove home and we should have stopped at the shops to get some spinach to add body to the pesto I was going to make for dinner. If we had, I might have remembered to get some pine nuts, because there were none in the cupboard. But we didn’t and the pesto tasted fine with the spaghetti without the spinach and the pine nuts.

I spent most of the evening wrestling with, and swearing at, the Samsung website. Badly written and riddled with error codes. I eventually gave up when it crashed just as I was about to buy my new Samsung Galaxy S22 Plus phone after struggling, and failing to get the 0% finance deal for some undisclosed reason. Your code worked perfectly, Jamie, as did trading in Scamp’s old unused Huawei phone for a healthy discount. I tried talking to ‘helpers’ on Chat, but they were as useless as the website. I think it might have been an omen. Keep the phone you’ve got. You don’t need a new one.

Today’s PoD was a grab shot of some carnations sitting on the kitchen window ledge. It was dull and gloomy by the time I was taking the photos and the final result was a grainy as a sand dune, but thankfully ON1 came to the rescue and removed all the digital noise without altering the flowers too much. At least something worked today.

Off in to Glasgow tomorrow to meet Alex, hopefully and talk some technospeak with him.

The Fort and The Phone – 7 September 2022

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Scamp was looking for a bag. I wanted to look at a phone.

Armed with a measuring tape we went looking for a bag, a paper bag that would be big enough to hold another bag which would hold a yellow bag. She was also looking for a birthday card for her sister. She found a really funny one. Maybe she does have a sense of humour after all.

Meanwhile I went to EE to look at a prospective phone. The assistant asked me how she could help and I told her I was looking for a new phone because I was reaching the end of my contract. With the words “… end of my contract.” I saw her shutters come down. I’m guessing that there is far less kudos attached to an Upgrade than there is to a New Customer. She did show me the phone I was looking for, but it was a bolted down dummy with a picture of the screen glued on the front. She apologised and said if I wanted to see a “Live” phone, I could go next door to O2 where they had live ones that actually worked. I noticed that she didn’t say “Then you can come back and we can work out the details of what you need.” It was more like “We don’t do upgrades. Goodbye.”
I did go to O2. I did see the phone working, but nobody there was interested in getting my business. Maybe they are just fed up with punters coming in from EE to play with their phones!

Lunch was a nuked roll ’n’ sausage for me and a nuked chicken wrap for Scamp with a coffee each in Costa. Which apparently doubles as a creche judging by the number of prams parked in the aisles.

Back home, Scamp was going to do some ironing. I grabbed both cameras and took them for a photo walk in Fannyside Moor. No insect life today, but lots of birds massing on the telephone lines (they still have telephone lines in these rural areas). I think the majority of the birds were swallows. It must be getting close to the time for them to fly back down south for the winter. I always try to record the day when I see the first swallow every year, but it’s much more difficult to set the date you saw the last swallow! A landscape shot of the cloudscape at Fannyside got PoD.

On my way home I went to see what Tesco Mobile had to offer and managed to muddy the water, because they didn’t have the phone I was ogling in O2, but did have a newer and allegedly better, but cheaper model. Now I’m going to spend waste another day comparing and contrasting both the phones and the providers!

Dinner tonight was Fish Fingers, Egg and Chips with Tinned Spaghetti on the side. A fall back when you can’t decide what you fancy for dinner and a common occurrence in this house.

Tomorrow we’re driving what Scamp calls “That awful road” because we’re hoping to go dancing!

An Explanation.
Later in the evening when I was writing this blog, I inadvertently clicked the wrong button on the menu and wiped today’s entire blog. Despite my best efforts searching for the text, it had gone. I know it’s not really gone, all the app has done is remove the header from it and the bulk of the writing is still there, but this morning I did a deeper search and eventually rewrote it.

 

 

Zadar – 7 August 2022

Posted on by Zogman

It’s been five years since we were last in Zadar. Quite a lot has changed.

We were berthed in a new port outside of the town and had to get a bus into Zadar proper. We both walked over to the Monument to the Sun which is an array of 300 multi-layered glass plates level with the pavement of the waterfront and in the shape of a 22 metre diameter circle. Beneath the glass are photovoltaic solar modules with lighting elements which turn on at night, and produce a light show. It was designed by Croatian architect Nikola Bašić from Zadar. The solar cell arrays made a good strong foreground and the leading lines would draw the eye into the distance. It became PoD.

While I was there, Scamp was recording the weird ‘music’ created by The Sea Organ. The sea organ is an architectural sound-art object located near the Monument to the Sun. It’s and an experimental musical instrument, which plays music by way of sea waves and tubes located underneath a set of large marble steps. It always attracts a crowd of folk, eager to find inner meaning in its drones and trills.

We found a new water feature further along which seemed to attract a fair variety of bird life, crows, seagulls and the occasional sparrow. All finding somewhere to drink in such a dry land. Good to see something architecturally pleasing but with a purpose at the same time.

I stood watching a bloke who looked as if he was shaving outside, but it turned out he was putting on white makeup because he was a street artist. I got a few photos of him which I might post on Flickr later. We did glimpse him later in a picture frame looking like a marble bust. Very clever.

One final place to find and it was where Scamp was mugged by a tree stump five years ago. She had been photographing the boats in the marina, when she took a step back and tripped over the stump and grazed her knee and her hand. Unluckily for her I was well out of earshot, but luckily there were some kind folk who pattered up her cuts and made sure she could walk.

After a few wrong turnings, we did find the spot, but the tree stump had gone. It had been replaced with a new sapling which hopefully will be better behaved.

We walked back through the town and caught the bus back to the ship. Scamp went off for a swim in the splash pool and I started writing up the week’s blog posts.

Dinner tonight was in Sindhu and it was lovely. Great service, wonderful food and no rush. Just what we had enjoyed the last time we’d visited. Nice to know that their standards aren’t slipping, because P&O’s seem to be on the slide.

We couldn’t move after our Indian meal, so instead of dancing, we sat on the balcony with a G&T instead.

Tomorrow on to Koper.

Dancing in the Sunshine – 19 June 2022

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None of yer Slow – Slow – Quick – Quack – Slooow, ballroom dancin’. Dancin’! Reely dancin’. Salsa dancin’.

Spoke to Hazy in the morning and thanked her for her very funny card (No, I wasn’t offended, I can improve in the resit!), and her Father’s Day present. It’s official now, I’m an Artist! I’ve got the mug to prove it! Good to know that you didn’t have too much trouble with thunderstorms down south.

It was a lovely morning and I’d actually planned to go for a walk in Colzium estate, but left it too late, as usual. Instead we took our time over lunch and then got ready to drive down to Glasgow Green for today’s main event. Shannon the salsa teacher had organised a Salsa Picnic, bring your own blanket and food. We got there just as things were heating up and after meeting folk we hadn’t seen for years, we did manage a few dances. Then more chatting to old friends, then Shannon started a Rueda where we dance with a partner in a big circle and the leader calls out the move and everyone performs it at the same time. Then we change parters when we’re told to and so it goes on. That’s the theory, anyway. In reality it never works quite as smoothly or as simply as that. Some folk had never danced a Rueda before, others thought they knew, but didn’t. It was what it usually is, a car crash. But, and this is the most important thing, but it was a good humoured car crash. Nobody fell out with anyone else, everybody, even me was kind and considerate to everyone else.

However, dancing two Ruedas, one after the other and energetic couple dancing too takes it out of us ‘oldies’, so we excused ourselves and went for a walk round Glasgow Green where there seemed to be an early Gay Pride meeting for teens. We walked round it but didn’t buy into it. We’ll wait for the real Gay Pride procession in Glasgow on Saturday. So much more, I don’t know, maybe just grown up!

We walked back to the Doulton Fountain where the salsa was going on. We had another dance and then found more folk we hadn’t met face to face for years. I took a few photos, but my favourite and PoD was one of an Indian group having a big family picnic on the grass of The Green. One of the salsa dancers had brought his drone along and was filming the dancing from an elevated position. However, my little brain was full and I’d danced almost all moves at least twice. That’s what happens when you don’t practise every week, you just remember the moves you like the best. We drove home.

We sat in the garden for a while with a good book each soaking up some sun and watching the busy bees. Since it was Father’s day, I got to choose my dinner. I chose Mince ’n’ Tatties and Scamp chose ‘Rats’. It’s nice to get real (not posh, not fancy) food.

Spoke to Jamie later and told him I appreciated the ’Scottish’ Father’s day card from my ‘Wane’ not ‘Wain’ as some say or ‘Wean’ as it should be. Good to hear that they are bat free at present. If you have any more problems with the bats, just call in Hazy and Neil, they have experience dealing with the flying rats!

A few more minutes out in the sun, then it was time to call a halt, because that east wind was becoming a bit cool, so it was time to bring the seats in and shut the back door.

That was a good day. I thoroughly enjoyed it. So did Scamp. So nice to have a dance in the sunshine and to have such a clever and thoughtful family behind you.

Maybe going east tomorrow and maybe on the bus.

A toy off the rack – 16 June 2022

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In my defense, it’s a long time since I had one.

Scamp was out in the morning having lunch with Mags. While she was out I compared and contrasted the two ‘smart’ watches which would replace the Huawei (not so) smart watch I have just now. To be honest, it’s been a great watch, doing most of the things I needed, then in February came an upgrade and since then the ‘smart’ has gone out of it. It doesn’t record heart rate, it doesn’t record sleep patterns, it doesn’t even have a timer any more. I’ve tried restarting it, factory resetting it and to no avail. Huawei being so secretive, they don’t publish the earlier versions of the OS, and nobody on the net advertises one. Its time has come if you excuse the pun.

By the time Scamp had returned I had decided on a Fitbit Versa3 which was almost the same price as its competitor, the Garmin Venu Sq which is a horrible name for anything. I could get either one in Argos today, so after hearing about the improved food in Wetherspoons in Cumbersheugh, I set off to navigate the labyrinth under the shopping centre of The Toonie. I went with an open mind, knowing that whatever I picked, it would be the wrong one, but the screen was bigger and better quality in the Fitbit, also I’d already had one, two in fact, and knew it would last well for two years, then suddenly die.

I hated it after I got it. The strap has an unusual locking mechanism and is awkward to fasten. The square face is a bit stupid, because all the watch faces for it are round. It was going back. However I had to play-test it and I’d sleep on it, literally.

I took it, and the Sony out for a walk to see if the GPS would work (it did), and while I was out got some photos of Wolf Spiders, the ones that don’t build webs, but ambush their prey instead. Vicious little spiders! Met a lady walking her dog who, the lady that is, was interested to discover that I was photographing spiders, not just lying comatose on the boardwalk! Wolfie made PoD.

Got an email last night from Alex to say that he was laid up. He’d been emptying an old shed that had boxes of weedkiller in it and thinks he may have ingested some! Since you’ll realise that this is a catch-up, I can tell you that he’s feeling a lot better on Friday morning.

I also got a couple of messages from Jamie and Simonne to say that the really love my watercolour picture of their house, which was good to know.

That was about it for Thursday on a lovely warm, sunny day. The Fitbit works for me because I have the records of my old Fitbits to remind me of past walks. From April 2017 until June 2021:

I took 12,814,083 steps
I climbed 32,030 floors
I walked 5,772.65 miles
I burned 4,632,748 calories

That’s not bad, I think.

Tomorrow we’re getting ready for Crawford and Nancy who are coming to dinner. Oh no, more hoovering!!

Making an impression

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Scamp, not for me.

Scamp was out this morning to the dentist, to get an impression made of a tooth that needs replaced. This has been an ongoing saga for many, many months, probably since last year. Many excuses have been made for the length of time it’s taken. Covid has been the main whipping boy, being blamed for everything, but a government that sits on its hand, rather than making decisions is a culprit that is never mentioned, but is always there in the background. Don’t get me started!

When she returned and after she told her tale of woe, she went out to get some things for tonight’s dinner while I drove in to Glasgow hoping to find a new phone that would connect consistently using Bluetooth. I tried most of the shops in the city centre, but although most of them had phones on display, many were dead with a pasted on picture of what a screen might look like, but they were not powered, probably had no innards and besides they were glued down to the stands. The ones that actually worked were the most expensive, of course, but on closer inspection, there weren’t any boxed phones visible. John Lewis, one of my favourite browsing sites had hardly any available for purchase. It’s nearly always the case now that you look, you pay and you get the tech sent to you. That’s not the way old folk like me like to work. We like to touch, lift, and play with these ‘toys’ before we pay for them, then take them away in our pocket. We don’t want to wait for a delivery from a white-van-man. Even worse, we don’t want to get home and find an email waiting for us, the gist of which is “Sorry. The article you bought is out of stock. Sucker!”

Back home the sun came out for a while. Not a long while, but enough to encourage Scamp to go and sit in the garden. I joined her and together we sat with a glass of wine and watched the bees feeding on and at the same time, pollinating the Honeybell flowers. We must have had about half an hour of peace and quiet, watching the bees and waiting for the oven ready chips to cook, taking turns at shaking them ever ten minutes or so to make sure they didn’t burn. Then Scamp went inside to fry the Giant Fish Fingers to go with them for dinner. Fish Fingers, egg, chips and peas. A decent dinner.

PoD was going to be Honeybells and Bees, but instead it became the flower heads of the fluffy Thalictrum. The flower we bought in Cambo last year.

I don’t believe we have anything planned for tomorrow.

Sensible Shoes – 10 May 2022

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We were going in to Glasgow today to get me a pair of sensible shoes. They would make a change from the black Ghillie brogues I have just now. The brogues themselves are actually quite comfortable, but the long laces criss-crossing the knee length kilt socks are awkward things to tie and uncomfortable after a while. I thought I’d try a pair of brown brogues instead. The first shop I tried had a pair that seemed to be what I was looking for. Foolishly I didn’t try them on, but went looking to see if there was anything else in a similar style.

There were loads of shoes in a similar style, but none that caught my eye. One pair looked the part, but when I tried them on, there was something just not right about them. Scamp noticed the creases in the leather that showed that they have been tried at home and returned as not suitable. They weren’t suitable for me either. There were brogues in dark brown, tan and even yellow. Brogues made from leather with tartan patches, some with tweed patches. Some were definitely meant for tramping the peat bogs of Wester Ross, weighing in at about a hundredweight each and others so thin you could spit peas through them. M&S had a great selection in every size under the sun … except mine. Eventually, after a coffee and a croissant in Nero I made my decision to go back to the first shop and try on that pair. They fitted perfectly. The looked like I wanted them to look. They were solid without being too clumpy. I bought them. The assistant wanted to put them in a machine that would spray them with some undisclosed liquid that would make them waterproof, stain-resistant, crease resistant and self ironing. She seemed quite disappointed when I said I’d polish them myself with shoe polish.

We drove home after Scamp had picked some cosmetics to make her look even more beautiful than she already is, if that’s possible. On the way to the car I grabbed a couple of photos from the JL bridge. One of them became PoD after some gentle toning and tweaking in Lightroom.

Lunch was a piece ’n’ banana. Fresh bread and a banana. The only thing that would make it better was a sprinkling of sugar, but I decided to forego that pleasure. Sometimes you can have too much of a good thing. I took a walk over St Mo’s later, but there wasn’t much to see although I did get one decent photo which is on Flickr.

Scamp was off to choir tonight, so I was going to be a salsa helper all by myself. The class was much the same as last week. We went over the same moves as last week and then Jamie added in Damé then, just for the hell of it, Damé Dos. It’s about a level 3 move, but the folk all enjoyed it. Really, it could have been carnage, but it didn’t. Great fun.

When I got home and pressed the button to stop the engine, all the lights in the car went out and it wouldn’t start again. The car wouldn’t lock and the boot wouldn’t open. Inside my car’s key fob there is a hidden key. I used it to lock, then unlock the car. Then I started it as normal, well nearly normal. It appears that the trip mileage had been reset and also the mpg was reset. The second time this has happened in the last couple of weeks. I’m taking it to the garage tomorrow.

Tomorrow, apart from a trip to Stirling we’re both hoping to go for coffee. Me with Val and Scamp with Isobel.

Photo Album – 4 May 2022

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Photo albums were so much easier in the olden days.

Today we spent a bit of the morning and half of the afternoon making up a photo book of our recent trip down south. In the olden days, you took your film to the chemist who developed and printed it and handed it back to you in a neat little cardboard folder. Then you bought a photo album and a packet of Lick and Stick corners and used them to hold the photos in place. Usually this meant that the next day when you opened the album the photos all fell out. Either that or the pages had become stuck together by the Lick and Stick corners and then you tore the page when frustration took over.

Now you simply have to upload all your photos to an online company, decide what format of book you want and how many photos you want to add, then the hard work of arranging them is done automatically. The problems come when you want to move things around. No longer do you simply unclip them, replace them with another photo and then find a new place to put the old one. Now you have to consider the size and shape of every photo and sometimes the AI automatic formatter gets it a bit wrong and portrait shots get chopped into landscape and vice versa. It all seems to take a lot longer than the happy smiley company video shows it. That’s why it took us about three hours, with a break for lunch, to get things the way we wanted them. The book is to show off a new house to the folks up in Skye, because books are so much easier to look at than a tablet, aren’t they? Hopefully it will be printed and in their hands in no time.

After that collaboration, we split up. Scamp went to the shops to get stuff for tonight’s dinner and I headed over to Condorrat to post an envelope. Of course I took my camera with me and caught a fly with its beady little glass eye and that became PoD. Just an ordinary fly, because I haven’t seen any damselflies yet and very few hover flies.

It was a cold wind today, but if you found shelter, the sun was warm.

Oh yes, and May the Fourth have been with you today!

Tomorrow we’re booked to go and see Margie. Also hoping my new camera bag will arrive at WEX in Glasgow without a birthday card for a stranger in it this time!

Time to tidy up – 1 May 2022

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Scamp returns today and that means the kitchen must be returned to its pristine condition. Oh dear.

As it happened, Scamp didn’t return to around 6pm which gave me plenty of leeway to make an even bigger mess of the kitchen by attempting to make a dozen English Muffins as advertised by Simon and Garfunkel in Punky’s Dilemma. Water, sugar, salt, yeast, flour, melted butter. What could go wrong!? Well, the answer was “Not much, actually.” It all went quite well considering how long it is since I’ve done any baking.

With the dough made, I left it to its own devices while I loaded the washing machine with stuff and set it to work. Then I went into the garden and planted some seeds. Teasels and a sort of Cowparsley or Hogweed called Ammi majus. The first is now in the greenhouse and the second is in the raised bed.

Lunch was another of Hazy’s “Crimpits”. This time the filling wasn’t so successful. I used grated cheese, cooked ham and beetroot. Maybe I overloaded it. Maybe it was because I was using white ‘Thins’, rather than wholewheat. Maybe it was because it was Sunday and Sunday should be a fried lunch. Anyway, I’ll try another mixture of fillings later in the week.

The dough was having a lazy Sunday and needed a bit of a talking to, so I gave it a last warning and told it to get rising or it would get kicked out, then I left it to consider its future while I took a camera and a couple of lenses to see what was hiding in St Mo’s woods.

There was a deer hiding there, but it saw me long before I saw it. It was last seen heading in the general direction of Glasgow at a fair rate of knots. PoD was a shot of a larch branch with fresh green needles that had captured some of yesterday’s rain and was holding on to it. I liked that.

Back home the dough was more than doubled in size. It’s amazing what a threat will do. I chopped it up into 12 little 77.33g balls and rolled them until they were smooth, flattened them and dusted them with a mixture of flour and semolina before cooking six of them in the frying pan (without oil),then baking them in the oven. As usual with our gas oven the timing was a bit hit and miss, and more miss than hit in this case. Some worked ok, some were underdone. There are another six in the fridge chilling tonight. Hopefully I’ll be more successful tomorrow. I suppose it doesn’t help that in Scotland we don’t eat many English muffins, so I didn’t really know what the texture should be like.

Halfway through the cooking and baking I got a WhatsApp from Jamie asking if we could do a FaceTime from New York. I explained that Scamp was still on the way home from St Andrews, but I was available. The next thing I knew, I was looking at Jamie with skyscrapers in the background. It felt such a surreal thing to do, to talk to someone I knew, thousands of miles away and in real time. I know this sounds incredibly old fashioned to some folk, but I’ve never had the need to do Face Time over a long distance before. It quite took my breath away. Thank you for that opportunity Jamie. Such a pity Scamp couldn’t have joined in too. And then he was off to catch his train to the airport to fly home. Safe flight home Jamie.

Scamp arrived about half an hour later, with lots of interesting foody things. Duck eggs, Ginger and Leek sausages, an interesting looking quiche, a jar of garlic piccalilli and two sticky cakes that we’re keeping for tomorrow. The sausages and a duck egg with some bacon became my dinner and mixed well with the piccalilli. Scamp said the quiche was ‘just all right’, but the pastry was lovely.

It’s great to have a bit of freedom, but its even better when you’re back home again. Lots of stories still to tell, I’m sure.

Somebody is coming to see us tomorrow to invite us to swab our throats and noses, then ask us those difficult searching questions.

Last full day – 18 April 2022

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Our last full day at the house and we wanted to cram everything we could into those 12 waking hours.

It started off with a walk round the garden and the outside of this remarkable house and also some time for interior shots. I was glad I’d brought along the 18mm wide angle lens. Really useful for showing off the odd shaped rooms. Flowers, oh yes, lots of photos of flowers, but also photos of plants in Jamie’s greenhouse. Not just the immediate environs either, but also the church next door, St Mary’s. A few shots of that too. I’d thought I might get a last walk through it and down to the wee bridge, but there just wasn’t enough time.

Jamie drove us to look for some plants at a garden centre. The first place we went to had some plants they wanted and bought, but no compost which they needed. The second one was more like a retirement home for ill and dying plants. Not worth the name of a garden centre. The third one did have plants, compost and seeds. They didn’t want the seeds, but we did. I wanted Teasel seeds, but I also grabbed Yellow Rattle, Basil and Rocket micro greens. Scamp bought me a packet of Ammi majus which look like Cow Parsley, so hopefully I can have some in the garden, to save me walking to St Mo’s to capture hoverflies in the summer. Thanks Scamp!

Then we were off again, being driven to Bury St Edmonds to go for a walk through the Abbey gardens. Clever planting in the gardens with good colour combinations. We took more photos of the ruins in the gardens, but time constraints didn’t allow us a chance to visit the actual abbey. Maybe another time, if we’re allowed back. Outside the big ornate front entrance to the gardens there were a bollard and a post box that had been yarn bombed. I don’t know what I liked best, the Easter bunny or the flower garden with the bee. Both fun additions to the street furniture.

We had a rather high cholesterol lunch in Cafe Nero. My favourite being a Chouxnut which Jamie called a Croconut because that’s what they are called in the US where he’d seen them first. It is a soft choux pastry filled with white chocolate mousse topped with caramel biscuit fondant and crushed biscuits. Delicious and very fattening, but who’s counting when you’re on your holidays! I haven’t seen them up north, but maybe that’s a good thing.

Then we were driven back to the house, because Jamie wanted to show off his latest acquisition, a petrol driven lawn mower. Not a ride-on one, although that may come. Scamp was the first to try it out and found it a little bit more demanding than she’d anticipated. I have a video! I was a bit more cautious, since I’d had a chance to watch Scamp’s antics and realise that you don’t just go full speed all the time. I don’t do the ‘grass hoovering’ at home, but I can see how much of a boon this must be when you have such a big lawn on a slope.

Jamie wanted a head and shoulders shot for his profile page and I took a few shots when we were finished playing with the new toy. After a bit of cosmetic adjustments in Lightroom he was satisfied with the result.

After that it was time to start stuffing all our clothes into our bags, and for me, finding places to store cameras, lenses and all the assorted paraphernalia that photogs carry about with them. We had a final drink and then it was time for bed.

PoD was an ingenious lock on a little shed which holds the gas canisters that provide the means of cooking in the house.

Tomorrow is the long journey home.