This memorial contains almost a month’s worth of parts – though not all of ‘em are about electronics! – and the post you’re reading is the fifth in the series.
-------------------------- May -----------------------
I put the pool pump on backwash three times on 5 May when Sydney had another wet period. It’d been dry for a couple of weeks but now the rain was heavy and squally conditions held for a day. The last session of drainage was in the evening before I went to bed, and was done to give me peace of mind so that I’d sleep soundly.
By this time I’d listed for sale on Facebook Marketplace one of Aunty Madge’s photographs, pricing it at $120 and describing it as a “mid century photograph”, adding a description that would allow someone to find it with by googling the word “Auckland”. Madge’s husband Elmer worked on a tugboat on Auckland Harbour and the photo shows men painting a ship’s hull, the precariousness of their activity sitting in contrast to the steely bulk of the vessel’s impressive flank.
On a trip to Newcastle I had to use the car radio in a different way from usual as all the radio presets the dealership’s mechanics’d programmed point to Sydney stations. If you use a different command you can manually scan for stations, hitting a button that says “Scan” to shift the radio’s focus to a different frequency, then hitting it again to stop the scan. I found a station that uses the same format as one of my favourite Sydney stations – 2Day FM – which even has the same signature tune, but that is called something different and has different announcers. Evidently 2Day FM is syndicated on the Central Coast where I heard it, the car on this trip surprising me also due to its responsiveness. If I’m doing 100km/hr and want to overtake someone it’s easily done – even on a hill though the 4-cylinder engine makes a bit of noise it responds by delivering additional horsepower – my only problem coming from the vagaries of motorists sometimes dealing with difficult conditions in capricious fashion.
The satnav in my mobile phone efficiently provided guidance, allowing me to find the house I wanted to visit, pick up the package that had been left out on the verandah for me to collect, and quickly get back to the Sydney road. It gave strange directions when I was negotiating the Northconnex tunnel as it thought I was on the surface, and this happened in both directions, but overall it works effectively when you find yourself in unfamiliar territory. On the way out it got me off the Pacific Motorway at Toronto, took me via local roads for a distance of about 15 kilometres, and brought me to the town of Cardiff from the south, instead of from the west. Homeward to get back to the motorway the system instead took me directly west before I headed south.
Satnav and Marketplace gave dividends on 16 May when, on sale for $20, I found two Chinese-themed bedside lamps. Asking about the location for pickup and being told it was in St Ives, I received a question from the woman selling the lamps who wanted to know when I could be at her mother’s house, from where they were to be collected. I said, quickly checking the mobile’s map app – it provides an estimate of elapsed time for each trip you enquire about – that I could be there in an hour. She got back to me sharply, telling me her mother’d be home until 12.30pm so as I was putting my shoes on I punched in the command to navigate, then plugged the phone into the car once I was seated inside. It was just on 11.30am by the time I was on the street with the devices working to convey directions to me by way of the car’s speakers.
I took the Eastern Distributor and the Harbour Tunnel then (disobeying the device) exited the Gore Hill Freeway just before the Lane Cove Tunnel in order to save a few dollars in tolls. I negotiated Epping Road through heavy traffic to Mona Vale Road. The house up a driveway – as the seller’d said it would be – and the lady who was her mother (outside gardening) took me to the garage where I gave her a banknote. I put her little lamps, in my car’s shipping box, snuggled up with a rug I keep there for emergencies, in the back of the RAV4, and got home via the Pacific Highway, again disobeying the satnav. Disobeying satnav must occasionally present itself as an option if you want to get somewhere cheaply and on time. When, a week or so later, I was asked to take a friend to Ian Thorpe Aquatic Centre I ignored the device until, arriving in Pyrmont, I wisely decided to take it and found a park on the street a couple of minutes away from our destination.
Early in the morning on 28 May I had a problem loading images to Blogger, an occurrence that for hours profoundly disconcerted me – I was so worried I skipped breakfast – as I’d been firmly committed to the site since 2006 and this was the only time I’d ever had a problem with it. Eventually I found a thread on the community site Google operates where I read about others facing computers with the same error message displayed. When it happened to me, at first I thought that there was something objectionable in the images I was trying to load, so I’d gone back to my PC’s navigator and cropped them, removing from each a naked woman’s back – which features in a picture hung on the wall of the pub I’d been inside the evening before – and trying again to load them. It didn’t work, and this is when I discovered others were experiencing the same issue. At 8.20am Google’s technical team still hadn’t resolved the problem. At 11.49am, when I tried again, it worked, so evidently they’d fixed whatever problem’d been stopping thousands of people from posting images to the web.
I got a subscriber on Patreon for book reviews at the end of the month after posting a recount of an evening at a poetry reading. The post got double my usual number of pageviews, so evidently many people are interested in poetry.
---------------------- Jul ---------------------
On the second day of the month I got an email from a guy named Chris Foster about a service I’d earlier expressed interest in called StreemPay. This was back in January. The service allows you to pay per view for subscription-blocked news websites. Now, I signed up for the beta test so that I could be a guinea-pig, enabling the makers of the software to see how it performed and whether it needed to be fine-tuned for general release. The beta would only work on a PC using Chrome – it needs you to download an extension to use with your Chrome browser – but in future it would also work on a mobile phone. The next day I downloaded the extension using a link in an email. Instructions told me to log into a news provider’s website in the normal way – only a small subset of the total number of news organisations use StreemPay – after registering with my email address. I resolved not to deliberately at this time navigate to such a company’s site, but to simply wait until an attractive news story entered my socials, one which previously I’d be forced to ignore because no subscription, but when, on 10 July, I found a story on the New York Times website I wanted to read I was using my laptop so that the StreemPay extension wasn’t at that moment live in my browser. The first story I’d come across that I wanted to read, which happened on 8 July on the paywalled website of the Globe and Mail, a Canadian company, wasn’t accessible with StreemPay because the news provider isn’t in the beta. I got around to downloading the browser extension to my new PC (see later in this memorial) on the morning of the 18th.
After making dinner for Omer on 6 July I went upstairs and the next morning tried to work out how to make the air-conditioning system function as designed. It took me minutes of walking up- and downstairs – the central controller is on the first floor – but I finally had warm air out of ceiling vents in the living room. I went to this trouble because Ming’s boyfriend had told me the night before that sitting in my living room he feels cold so it seemed important to figure out how to use the expensive machine.
A crisis manifested itself early on the morning of 9 July when my desktop PC stopped working at the same time as it appeared my ISP changed the hosting login details for my email accounts. I tried to access new emails on the phone but just got a twirling circle. Then I shut down the PC and it told me to wait, with another twirling circle presented for about ten minutes as the computer worked out what to do, but it did nothing so I switched the device off at the power point. Then the button on the front of the PC wouldn’t work to turn it on: when I tried to press the start button it vanished into its slot, useless as an exhausted dormouse.
Venturing out to the studio, I picked up my laptop and booted it then laboriously logged into all my social media accounts. Logging into to OneDrive I was able to edit saved documents (like the draft of the post you’re reading) and also worked out how to upload new JPGs to where they needed to go in the cloud – where, at some point, my new desktop’d be able to see them. The old desktop’d been purchased in 2017 so I wasn’t completely surprised when it failed. Using a device I’d owned since 2012, and which I’d used from time to time, I soon returned to a relative state of normality so that I could combat daylight’s slack dwarves. This, materially aided when I did eventually get to download new emails, though I only arrived at awareness of this after calling the ISP on my mobile phone. A number of administrative messages from the various online services I use – including Google and Twitter – came into my phone’s client software to warn me of the new logins, and it wasn’t until I saw them that I knew the problem with the hosting service had magically resolved itself.
By this time I’d messaged Tim to ask if he could set up a new desktop if I bought one. He replied a few hours later and sent a link to a JB HiFi web page featuring a suitable desktop PC and I told him to go ahead and buy it for me. In the evening of the same day he was about to bring the thing over to install it but when he messaged me I was out of the house (at a psychiatrist’s appointment) so we discussed a different time for his visit.
This eventually happened on 13 July. Tim said in a late morning message that he’d arrive after 3.30pm and when he did he unpacked the PC and started to set it up. I logged into the various websites and it became necessary at one stage to call the ISP to get correct configuration details for one of my email accounts. By 4.25pm Tim was walking down the street to his car and by 4.45pm I had started to update this memorial using the word processing software he’d just installed. He’d made a special trip to the retailer to buy the computer, he said, but had done his shopping at the same time (I assumed he meant grocery shopping). My passwords were all valid; each time one was refused I felt fate’s blind destiny’s grip.
The next day I tried to do a Facebook Messenger video call with a friend but the microphone didn’t work so I used my phone. On the Thursday (the 15th) I unplugged the microphone and found by accessing the PC’s Settings screen that the webcam contains a microphone. On Friday my kitchen scale batteries ran out of charge so to replace them I walked to the newsagent on Botany Road and bought a new pack of AAA size batteries then used jewellers’ screwdrivers in the tool chest in the laundry to put the thing back together. I also had freezing camera uploads affecting OneDrive on this day. OneDrive is the Microsoft cloud platform that automatically saves photos and documents that are made on the phone or on the PC. Normally, photos I take on my phone get automatically uploaded to the cloud so that, if I want, I can subsequently access them on my PC, but on the 16th this function didn’t work. I went online to search for a fix and found a site telling me to delete the OneDrive app. I did this but then the App Store wouldn’t appear, so I went to Settings on my phone and reset network settings then downloaded OneDrive again and the problem was solved.
On 18 July it seemed that the PC Tim’d installed was corrupting my files. The problem initially became evident when I tried to open in a graphics program images made with my mobile phone. Then I tried opening an MS-Word file that had a little cross on its icon, and it failed to open, so I logged into OneDrive and downloaded critical files, things that I’d really miss if they weren’t on my computer, things I’d spent days or weeks – or even longer – making (mainly MS-Word docs). I messaged Tim early in the morning and he soon got back to me, telling me to change a setting in OneDrive so that the program WASN’T set to save space. (I’d not been aware it had been setup this way …) Once I made the recommended change a number of files that I’d thought had been synched started to synch but more problems appeared when it turned out the OneDrive folder was on a disc that wouldn’t accommodate everything due to space limitations. I did some things I thought would fix the problem but after deleting some folders got hopelessly tangled so messaged Tim, who called me when he got home and emailed me with a link to click that would allow him to gain control of my computer. After completing a few important tasks and accompanied by a touch of a panic – when it looked like the OneDrive executable wasn’t on it – Tim got the Microsoft backup working again but it would take hours, so I had a snack (an apple and some Jarlsberg cheese) and prepared to wait to see if the process would complete before I was forced by fatigue to go to bed.
This is the OneDrive display window at 7.31pm:
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