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New Year, New Broadband

Posted on by John Curd Posted in Life@Home — No Comments ↓

Possibly the last of my “New Year” posts. We’re a long way from our telephone exchange and have been suffering from a paltry 1.3Mb broadband speed for some time. Whilst investigating the supposed availability of fibre optic broadband services in our area, I questioned the reality of my supplier’s estimated speed: 9Mb. I questioned it, I explained, because they had originally estimated 3Mb for my copper connection and I was actually getting less than half that. They rummaged around  and eventually said, “our 3Mb estimate was based on ADSL2 which, it appears, you were never migrated to. And, yes, 9Mb is realistic for fibre.”

“Hmm, please migrate me to ADSL2, then“, I rejoined, based upon this being less upheaval [see below].

They did just that and, after the obligatory 1-2 week settling down period, I was getting a pretty consistent 2.3Mb download speed. Better – not great but better.

One of the things putting me off migrating to fibre had been the fact that, apparently, the fibre router needs to be connected into a master phone socket (which we didn’t have, anyway) rather than an extension socket, as in my current setup. For laptops on wi-fi, that’s no problem but my old desktop would become an effective boat anchor. It was with this in mind that, after much mulling over and fretting, I eventually ordered my new Dell XPS desktop complete with a wi-fi card, pretty much at the same time as I bit the bullet and ordered an upgrade to a fibre optic broadband connection. Brave boy!

This, of course, required a new router which PlusNet supplied as part of the 18-month contract. As well as coming with a BT OpenReach engineer to sort out the master socket issue, It came with what appeared to be comprehensive instructions about getting connected. Interesting reading: not only would Mr. OpenReach be fitting my master phone socket but he would also fit a fibre modem into which the router gets plugged. Both modem and router would need power. Two power sockets, yikes! It gets more and more difficult. Do I have two spare sockets near where a master phone socket should go? No, of course not.

Long story short, he turned up and, by running a cable round a couple of doorways, we found a suitable site with enough power points. He went to the road box to switch us over to fibre and returned to get the router bit done. No Internet connection. Internet at modem: OK. Internet at router: not OK. Much head scratching – “I’ve only ever fitted  BT Homehub, not one of these Netgear contraptions”. With a cheery, “you’ll have to call PlusNet”, he left.

To be fair, I knew the instructions mentioned connecting the router and making tea whilst waiting for 15 minutes for it to install itself. Mr. OpenReach had been a bit hasty. It did eventually come up … but, it came up with a different SSID from the documentation and unsecured. A swift phone call to PlusNet support soon had us in teh router configuration panels changing a few of the relevant settings. We were back on-line … and secured.

Out of evil curiosity, I went to www.mybroadbandspeed.com.uk and ran a test: 20Mb download, 1Mb upload. Completely unexpectedly, the service appeared to be twice as fast as the estimate. Intriguing.

I will keep my eye on it, we’re not that close to the box.

New Year, New Camera

Posted on by John Curd Posted in Life@Home — 2 Comments ↓

Yet another in the recent New Year series: a camera this time – for Carol. Her eyes were swayed by a relative giveaway price for a Canon EOS 550D on good ol’ Amazon. Her old 400D has stood her in good stead for a few years but neither of us was inclined towards the 600D with its fragile-looking articulated rear screen. So, a bargain basement price, one beating Warehouse Express (or WEX Photographic, as they now prefer), for an older model seemed quite appealing.

It arrived yesterday, on the same day as this brand spanking new desktop. It must have been delivery Wednesday, because my Amazon-supplied spindle of 25 DVD RWs arrived as well. 3 out of 3 – great!

Carol’s camera arrived by Home Delivery Network. There was a tracking number for the shipment and fascinating it proved to be, too. I couldn’t resist diagramming the camera’s journey on Google Maps and here it is, below. There are two flags on the map, the northernmost of which is Amazon’s warehouse at Ridgmont, Bedfordshire. The slightly more southerly flag is our house, also in Bedfordshire. The red line is the cameras journey calling in first at Newton Abbot, Devon, then Hitchin, Hertfordshire (still further away from us than it began), before pitching up chez nous.

Delivery-web

Fascinating stuff, modern logistics. (There, I’ve always wanted to use that word properly.)

New Year, New Computer

Posted on by John Curd Posted in Life@Home — 2 Comments ↓

My trusty old Sony Vaio desktop has been getting increasingly snowed under with the weight of modern versions of software and its workload. It’s all of eight years old, poor thing, but it has been faultlessly reliable and it struggles gamely on with its paltry 1Gb RAM (which is the maximum it can take) and its ageing Pentium processor. I figured it was time for a new one.

A swift investigation showed that desktops are becoming something of a rarity. Some companies produce only laptops, it seems, while others are switching to the all-in-one desktops. The all-in-one approach doesn’t fit my office layout and, more to the point, I don’t really want an all-in-one which might well all-breakdown-at-once. Dell seemed to have a well specified home desktop: an XPS with an Intel i5 processor, 6Gb RAM and a 1.5Tb hard drive. Despite reservations caused by my recent experiences with a less than reliable Dell Inspiron 1545 Craptop, hopefully now fixed with a shiny new hard drive, I took the plunge ordered one, complete with a wireless card, expecting soon to be forced into a re-sited router.

More correctly, I tried to order one. About five seconds after submitting my attempted order, John Lewis Partnership Card security department was on the phone saying they’d rejected the charge ‘cos there had been some fraudulent charges put through on computer kit recently. I should be pleased that they were so vigilant, I suppose, but at the time it was a bit of a trial. I explained to Dell and they put the charge through again. My order was accepted. Phew!

Being a special configuration with a wireless card, my machine was built to order – in Poland. After a few days I got a note saying that it was completed and ready for shipment with a UPS tracking number. UPS, goody – I’d be getting a visit from one of those bitch-ugly, brown UPS vans! My machine left Lod, in Poland and pitched up in Tamworth. Right country, at least. The next day it made its way to Luton.

Today it arrived chez moi aboard the expected bitch-ugly UPS van and here I am writing about it on it. I’m writing on my also new Logitech wireless keyboard (complete with wireless mouse) and what I write is being brightly displayed on my super new 23 inch widescreen Dell monitor. Commissioning this little lot was a relative breeze.

So far so good and so far, impressed. Let’s hope the 1.5Tb disk is more reliable than the 500Gb that came in the Craptop.

New Year, New Hard Disk

Posted on by John Curd Posted in Life@Home — No Comments ↓

Exactly 50 weeks ago [and, yes, I am counting] from Tesco Direct we bought me a Dell Inspiron 1545 laptop: 4Gb RAM, 500GB hard drive. In terms of power and storage, my new Windows 7 machine dwarfed my very elderly but doggedly reliable Windows XP Sony Vaio desktop: 1 GB RAM, 120Gb hard drive. Naturally, my new toy out-performed my trusty old workhorse noticeably in the speed department. Regrettably, a week after installing Windows 7 Service Pack 1 and after only four weeks of ownership, I ended up having to re-install the laptop from scratch.

Cutting a long story short, my Inspiron failed several times more requiring yet more re-installations of Windows 7 from scratch to encourage it back into life. After the second such instance, Windows began issuing a less than comforting message: “Windows has detected that your hard drive is about to fail” together with offering to enter a system back-up process. I stopped putting anything critical on the machine and continued to live with it. It began to look as though I did, indeed, have a dodgy disk drive perhaps with some bad surface areas on it. By running a chkdsk to fix/bypass bad areas and stopping windows doing updates, the machine seemed to stabillize.

Foolishly, about a week ago, thinking that chkdsk had fixed my problem, I became complacent and started letting Windows update itself. Mistake! I went for my fourth re-installation of Windows within a year. I had a new wrinkle: “Windows cannot be installed on this partition because the hard drive is about to fail”. Hmm? Curiously, it allowed me to go ahead anyway and I was back up and running – until I shut down, that is. Upon restarting, an even more worrying message began to appear: “No hard drive detected”. I withdrew the hard drive and re-seated it just to make sure. Still no joy. Dead in the water!

I spotted that my drive was a Seagate Momentus 5400.6 500Gb and that it did not seem to enjoy an enviable reliability reputation. Failures were relatively commonplace. One write-up suggested that 2.5inch drives >300Gb might be generally unreliable. Technically the machine should still be covered by its one-year warranty from somebody, either Dell or Tesco direct, but I really couldn’t be bothered to jump through those hoops. It looked as though, for £50-ish I could get a replacement hard drive. I wasn’t scratching the surface of 500Gb [Ed: looks as though someone had scratched the surface, though :D] so I thought 250Gb would do fine and just may be more reliable.

Spotting a review on trusty ol’ Amazon for a Toshiba 250Gb disk saying, “I used it to replace a failing drive in my Dell Inspiron 1545” ( ❗ ), I ordered one. It arrived yesterday, three days ahead of schedule on free delivery, and I slotted it in. I installed Windows 7 for a fifth time in a year; no message saying it couldn’t be installed because the disk was about to fail. I booted up and started installing a few applications: no message saying Windows had detected that my hard drive was about to fail. Here I am writing about it on my revived machine.

I took a good deal of pleasure whacking my old Seagate hard drive with a large hammer:

“Windows has detected that your hard drive has disintegrated.” 😀

Winter Visitors Return

Posted on by John Curd Posted in Life@Home — 2 Comments ↓

IMG_2201_Goldfinch There aren’t many advantages to winter in my book. One, though, is the chance to see a slightly different mix of birdlife in the garden. Only when the colder weather hits do we see Goldfinches dropping in to take their turn at our seed feeders. Whereas the usual suspects, Blue Tits, Great Tits and Chaffinches, etc., tend to grab a sunflower seed and fly away to eat it, these delightfully colourful winter additions sit on a perch and munch away in situ. I don’t really like photographs featuring feeders but, hitherto, that’s the only shot of Goldfinches I’d managed. Until now, that is. There’s a couple around again now we’ve got some colder temperatures and they’ve been using the Blackbird red berry larder bush from which to fly sorties. I managed to snag a decent shot while one was sitting in it waiting.

IMG_2206_Redwing IMG_2205_Redwing Goldfinches, of course, are resident all year but they deign to visit us only in winter. However, much to the annoyance of our local Blackbirds, “their” red berry bush, the one sheltering the Goldfinch above, also acts as a magnet to a very welcome winter migrant. Welcome by me, that is – the Blackbirds are less keen. This week three Redwings appeared and started munching the berries. They may be as common as dirt in Scandinavia but I find their winter visits quite exciting. With just three Redwings raiding the bush, the food source will last a while but a good sized flock of Redwings can strip it pretty swiftly. Here’s a couple of shots of the same individual, one with a nice catch light in its eye and the other with a nice juicy berry just disappearing down its gullet.

Last winter, for the first time, the berries attracted a small flock of Waxwings. I’d like that to be repeated but no sign so far. I think we need more severe weather for them.

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Nouvelle Année, Nouveau Guide des Papillons

Posted on by John Curd Posted in Uncategorized — No Comments ↓

Aeons ago, at about the time that the eminent Charles Darwin was thinking that a trip around the world studying wildlife might be a jolly neat idea, I bought a copy of A Field Guide to the Butterflies of Britain and Europe, published by Collins. Actually, it’s a 1980 edition and has stood me in good stead, giving me a fighting chance of identifying foreign species that we might come across in France for the last 30 years. I’d be driving across France and spot a butterfly, slam on the brakes, leap athletically from the car and chase said butterfly, even more athletically, across several fields in an attempt to see its distinguishing features. I was young in 1980, you see. Then I spend hours leafing through the aforementioned butterfly guide failing to find it.

The book’s main armoury is a series of colour paintings by Brian Hargreaves which looked very impressive as Darwin set sail for the Galapagos. Now, however, one or two don’t seem to match specimen photographs particularly closely and, believe me, when it comes to trying to distinguish between the almost countless continental fritillaries, for example, precision id paramount.

Neither is it the most convenient of books to use. All the illustrations are grouped together in a series of 63 colour-plates in the centre of the book. The words describing each species in detail, the main content of the book for propeller heads, are arranged in about two hundred pages, one hundred each either side of the illustrations. A series of small, black-and-white distribution maps are grouped together at the end of the book in a third section immediately before the indexes. The result is that identifications requires that you:

  1. look in the colour plates for a likely candidate – the entry references the words page;
  2. refer to the write-up to check flight season – this entry also provides the reference to the relevant distribution map;
  3. flick to the back of the book to see if your candidate might occur in the relevant area.

So Just recently, probably spurred on by the excellent illustrations by Richard Lewington in my Field Guide to the Dragonflies of Britain and Europe, I’d been looking for a replacement. Unfortunately, I’d seen a few disparaging remarks about the latest incarnation of the Collins butterfly field guide (errors in a few distribution maps, for example) so I was sceptical. I did, however, receive a recommendation for a French book, Guide des Papillons d’Europe et d’Afrique du Nord. I saw a copy of this in the flesh on our spring 2011 trip to France but didn’t buy it – probably dissuaded by the advanced French. 😉

I should have. Once back at home, I began regretting my decision not to purchase the French book and feared that I’d miss out on a copy. Since good ol’ Amazon still had it available so I listened to my heart and ordered it.

GuideDesPapillons It’s here. It  seems very sturdy (it’s a hardback) and very well produced with good binding, good quality paper and excellent Lewington illustrations. All relevant information – colour plate, description, flight period (période de vol) and distribution – is grouped together, so that looks easier to use. The French words will be an interesting challenge and I’ll end up having to cross-reference the scientific/binomial name to other sources to get a common/English name (where one exists) for the species but it looks promising so far.

I won’t really know until I try it in the field, though.

New Year, New Look, New Site, New Title

Posted on by John Curd Posted in Life@Home — 2 Comments ↓

For much of the current winter, I’ve been beavering away giving our website a bit of a facelift. [Ed: Now that was interesting, spellchecker doesn’t understand beavering and neither, to my surprise, does Chamber’s 20th century dictionary. Hmm.] Although it may look very similar in that a neutral grey background is used to show off photographs, it was actually a completely new implementation based on a standard WordPress theme, largely to make use of drop-down menus. Since I now admit to being obsessed by dragonflies, I also wanted them to play a more significant role, hence the use of a few of our more suitable photographic efforts in the banner.

Still on the dragonfly obsession, the information I wanted to make available about them online had also grown to the point where I needed more than a single page photo album. Enter: Odo-nutters, my new so-called microsite concentrating on Odonata. My old single-page dragonfly and damselfly albums are still there (under Galleries in the main Odo-nutter menu) but I’ve added sections specific to individual species which I will add more information, such has id notes, to when bored – it’s currently mostly photographic. It’s given me a vehicle to use the UK and French locations maps, which I’ve been building up, together with a flight season spreadsheet which is very new.

From the new to the old – RIP Traveblog. With the threat, real or imagined, of potential insurance difficulties due to advertising one’s absence on social networking vehicles, the enjoyable idea of a blog whilst travelling (other than an anonymous one) was pretty much ruined. My head could have been ruined if Carol hit me over it for ignoring her warnings. 😀 So, regrettably Traveblog is defunct. I’m trying a more general JC’s Ramblings approach (same Web address), which contains all my old Traveblog stuff, so I’ll see how that goes. What a drag the modern world can be, spoiling peoples’ fun.

So, from me and all next season’s Odos, currently hopefully over-wintering as larvae, I wish you a Happy New Year!

[This, BTW, is a Large Red Damselfly (Pyrrhosoma nymphula), which should be the first species to emerge in the new season.]

Anniversary Present

Posted on by John Curd Posted in Prostate cancer — 1 Comment ↓

prostate_logo Today I had another chance to enjoy a trip to Stoke Mandeville hospital for my third PSA-level check since my radical prostatectomy. Coincidentally, it is one year to the day since I dressed (briefly) in a theatre gown and was ushered into the wings of the operating theatre awaiting my entrance to go under the knife. Actually, this should have been my fourth post-operative check but holidays [vacations in Amerispeak] got in the way somewhat. Well, one shouldn’t let medical issues disturb having a good time too much, eh?

Carol cleverly avoided the normal Stoke Mandeville parking nightmare by kicking me out of the car in the near vicinity – at least she came to a halt before doing so – and then smartly dashing off to do some planning for her mum’s approaching 90th birthday bash.

I walked the short distance to outpatients reception to check in, then wandered along to the waiting room. I had hardly sat down and begun reading one of the traditionally out of date magazines before I was called in to see the consultant. Odd! This is the first time my appointment has ever been on-time.

PSA-level = zero.

I have to return for another check in March but, if that is still zero, they will let my GP carry out the further tests. Actually, I had been expecting that to happen this time; I think it’s normal after one year. My suspicion is that the consultant saw just three test results, which are normally at 3-monthly intervals, and didn’t realize that my year was, in fact, up. Still, no worries, I don’t have much else planned for March. 😉 I walked back into town to meet Carol.

It was a curious hospital trip: no stressful searching for a parking space and no one hour wait staring at paint flaking off the walls.

Excellent news, happy anniversary.

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France 2011, Autumn – Picturesque Pyrenees

Posted on by John Curd Posted in France, 2011 autumn — No Comments ↓

Normally when we get to our blissful dairy sheep farm at Fanjeaux, we have trouble dragging ourselves away. Our normal pattern is to go through the motions of a debate between ourselves, whereupon we always decide to stay as long as possible making a last minute dash for the  northern coast and our ferry. [Note: dashing, with Billy in tow, is a relative pedestrian affair and requires two days minimum.]

This trip was different. We had already enjoyed a mix of new and old haunts with a mix of sight-seeing, Odo-spotting and socialising (meeting friends Mike and Linda Eaton) at Montagnac for a week. We’d already enjoyed four weeks of almost unbroken sunshine. Technically, Luc and Nadine close their campsite at the end of September though they are normally helpful enough to let us stay on a few extra days if we want. Our friends were all leaving, though; we were in danger of feeling like Billy No-mates, which did not appeal. Nor were there any dragonflies of any note with which to amuse ourselves. Furthermore, the weather forecast was excellent for the coming five days and we were looking longingly at clear blue skies over the Pyrenees. We love mountains – you can keep your beaches – but, all too often their weather is unsettled. Not wishing to miss a rare clear spell on the French side of the majestic Pyrenees, we happily packed up and headed for Bagnères-de-Bigorre.

IMG_2030_Pyrenees IMG_1997_Pyrenees When we come to the end of a spring trip to France, Channel 4’s excellent TV coverage of Le Tour de France softens the blow of being at home again – it lets us down gently. Helicopters fly TV cameras around some of the more intriguing sights in the countryside surrounding the stages and we can enjoy the feel of France again vicariously. Le Tour always, but always, visits both the Alps and the Pyrenees. Let’s face it, the French don’t think they are truly cycling unless they are pedalling up a painfully steep and seemingly never ending hill. At Bagnères-de-Bigorre we were within striking distance, in a car you understand, of three notable Tour de France cols. With this weather and this scenery, we had no trouble amusing ourselves.

On our way down from the col d’Aspin we happened across a very picturesque leisure area around the Lac de Payolle. That is, it would normally have been picturesque but this was a Sunday and the place was buried under dozens of camper vans. Furthermore, this Sunday was the French fêtes des grands-pères [grandfathers’ day] and the dozens of camper vans had been joined by dozens of picnicking families with grand-père in tow. Nonetheless, it was a large area and very agreeable.

IMG_2094_Common_Hawker_male Being the Lac de Payolle. in the large area was a decent sized lake – dammed, of course, as are most French lakes – clearly designed for leisure pursuits. However, at its top end the lake was fed by something resembling a flush. What Odo-nutter could resist a flush when the season was not quite over? Certainly not I. ‘T was a good job, too. Several hawkers were buzzing around including Southern Hawkers. However, there were others that I didn’t immediately recognize. After much stressful snapping, mostly on manual focus, I eventually snagged a shot of a male in flight. New species #8: a Common Hawker (Aeshna juncea). This may be a so-called Common Hawker but I’d never seen one before. I did snag a female ovipositing, too, but the flight shot is the only shot I got of the male, the darn things just would not settle. it comes to something when a shot in flight is “easier” than a stationary shot!

IMHO this was a classic trip, the weather was great, our stops worked out well, we enjoyed some good times in the company of friends and we got to see new dragonflies to add to our growing catalogue. 30 confirmed species overall, including eight new ones, I regard as a decent tally. I don’t want to see them all in one year – what would I do to amuse myself next year?

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France 2011, Autumn – La Rigole to the Rescue

Posted on by John Curd Posted in France, 2011 autumn — No Comments ↓

The beginnings of misgivings began in my mind when we visited Fanjeaux, comme d’habitude, during our spring trip. Farmer Luc had let a fish farmer in to breed inconceivably large numbers of inconceivably small fish in his lake. The inconceivably small fish weren’t even useful, they were useless decorative Koi Carp that, apparently, eat almost everything in sight. There were also some inconceivably large fish that had been introduced to the lake: Grass Carp the size of nuclear submarines. Whereas Fanjeaux had been our top Odonata spot, both in terms of number of  species and individual numbers, we saw many less than I would have expected for the time of year. There was even a time when the usually ubiquitous Scarlet Darters (Crocothemis erythraea) all but disappeared. My suspicion was that the inconceivably large Grass Carp were destroying the floating vegetation making ovipositing difficult, while the small Koi Carp were feasting on Odonata eggs.

Here we were again in September. What a different picture we were greeted by this year compared to the normally numerous dragonflies in Septembers of previous years. There were a few pairs of Red-veined Darters (Sympetrum fonscolombii) zooming about ovipositing furiously; the trouble is they were ovipositing into the midst of swarms of inconceivably small but irritatingly voracious Koi Carp. How many of those eggs would survive literally thousands of small jaws? Furthermore, the floating vegetation, so necessary for damselflies to oviposit, had completely disappeared down the gullets of the inconceivably large Grass Carp. There was still a relatively healthy population of Willow Emerald Damselflies (Lestes viridis) which, laying their eggs in fresh green wood, would have a fighting chance but their larvae then drop into water where … there may well be thousands of tiny decorative jaws waiting to snap them up. Prospects were not good. Odonata spotting was not good. I had become a rather depressed camper. Disheartened but undaunted, we tried a few of our other known haunts in the area.

IMG_1878_Violet_Dropwing_male First up was what we refer to affectionately as La Rigole #2. It is actually Le Lac de Lenclas, a small manmade leisure lake nestling in a sharp bend of La Rigole, the small purpose-built canal that feeds water into the much larger Canal du Midi. We were wandering along the lake’s digue [dyke] when I spotted what looked at first sight lie a Scarlet Darter. I edged precariously down the 45° rocky slope of the dyke and brought my camera to bear on the suspect. As my camera came painfully slowly into focus, a definite pink hue greeted me. Joy unbounded! – my subject was a magnificent Violet Dropwing/Violet-marked Darter (Trithemis annulata). Carol had spotted one briefly on our spring trip but I had missed it, being otherwise occupied. New species #6. This made up firstly for my previous trip disappointment and secondly for my misgivings about our erstwhile favourite lake at Fanjeaux. What a stunning sight!

IMG_3048_Blue-eyed_Hooktail_male P1010679_Blue-eyed_Hooktail_female We also tried what we refer to as La Rigole #1, more formally referred to as La Prize d’Eau d’Alzeau, which had been the first section of La Rigole at which we had spotted Odos. Not much was happening beside the water itself so we struck off along a track through some trees, sans proper camera, I might add – there having been no activity at the water, we really weren’t expecting to see anything. Big mistake! After not very long I spotted an unrecognised specimen flitting along the forest track in front of me. We had got the snappy camera and Carol managed to grab a distant shot. We returned to the car for lunch followed by some proper photographic equipment with which to return to the forest track. It took a while but eventually we spotted our quarry. Getting on the right side of the light was difficult and the results are not exhibition quality shots but we did get enough for an identification. Furthermore, our snappy attempt proved to be a female and the second attempt, a male, so we had ourselves a matched pair of Blue-eyed Hooktails/Large Pincertails (Onychogomphus uncatus). New species #7.

We’ll just have to return for better pictures on another occasion. 🙂

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