2013 — 18 October: Friday
Continuing yesterday evening's theme, briefly, and with Win8.1 Pro being Win8.1 Pro, I suppose I shouldn't really have been surprised this morning by its arrogant assumption that I must "want" my photos and "PC settings" automatically backed up to "my" SkyDrive1 cloud storage. In case, if you please, something goes wrong with my PC. And furthermore it's "not recommended" to turn off this facility.
Well, b******s to that! When (not "if") something goes wrong with my PC I've always figured it's up to me (or one or more of my gurus) to fix it. Having my settings stored up in the cloud when I only have one Windows device to restore them to isn't going to do much for me if that device is castors-up, is it? Besides, Microsoft is clearly unfamiliar with my too-early-in-the-morning for this sh1t, pre-cuppa, truculent mood of active non-coöperation.
More grumpy thoughts here, while I make myself that cuppa. Is it dawn yet?
Conceptually...
... here's my new Desktop:
I keep my common working set of applications pinned to the Taskbar. I expect / hope I will soon get used to the extra (and completely unwanted / unnecessary) "Start" button being back in the bottom left hand corner, right where I'd got very well-used to it not being for the past eleven months. <Sigh>
Time to nip out ahead of the horde of Friday shoppers. I wonder if Waitrose sell decent operating systems?
As a result of...
... Tuesday's call from my latest bank, I popped in to discuss matters arising, then arranged to close (in 75 days from now) the passbook account of diminishing interest, came home, and have just opened a new "loyalty" instant access savings account that pays 50% more than the passbook account was paying. Neat. Inexplicable, but neat. I think I've earned some lunch.
In later news...
... I've been very strongly urged not to miss Peaky Blinders so, pausing only to eat my tasty evening curry (and do the dishes), I've just unleashed the mighty power of my new, higher bandwidth download cap in the direction of the BBC's get_iplayer hi-def TV feeds to snaffle all six episodes before they vanish into the aether. Before that, I was taken down to Hedge End for a wander round white goods and others in PC World / Currys and came back clutching a useful rubber-tipped stylus designed to mimic the human finger without smearing touch screens.
Next? I'm predicting another cuppa.
While not hanging around...
... in the bank lobby waiting more than 40 minutes beyond the scheduled time before "my" financial chappie was free, I picked up a new volume of verse by Felix Dennis, and I found the Deborah Yaffe waiting on my front doorstep...
The Dennis poems are more of a known quantity to me than the Yaffe treatise on Jane Austen fandom as this is my fourth anthology of his poetry. As in the past, there's also a CD and in this case the book is also well-served, on cursory scrutiny so far, by 66 Eric Gill engravings.
Also on my doorstep was the boxed set of all the episodes of "Wire in the Blood", all entirely new territory for me:
Oh, Betsy! AbeBooks has let me down. They have no record of "Selected Stories" by Harold Alfred Manhood (Jonathan Cape, 1947). However, they have let me create a "want" and will email me if the thing shows up. I don't propose to hold my breath.