2015 — 10 July: Friday
I've received ever such a polite email1 chiding me gently for failing "to remove or rotate root access keys that are more than one year old". Actually, not only are they more like seven years old, they have lain entirely fallow since early 2008 and the collapse of what was then my main WinXP system on the now long-removed HP Media PC that IBM subsidised for me with a bunch of John Lewis vouchers in October 2006. I recall buying a "Bucket Explorer" Windows tool for accessing the minor-league cloud storage I set up at the time, but the interface to it was so appalling, and the speed of access so glacially slow, I gave the whole thing up as a bad job and decided to concentrate all my long-term data storage efforts from then on strictly inhouse.
Last night's entertainment?
No films, that's for sure. But I scanned some ancient photos, listened to lots of music. Read a bit. Thought a bit. Just the usual, really. It's a quiet life, but I do like it that way sometimes.
I also re-checked all the Probate stuff as the time is rapidly approaching when I'll finally be able to send 50% of the funds from dear Mama's estate winging in John's direction — using a "Swift" code-mediated direct transfer down to his bank in NZ, I hope. (He's often used this method before, he tells me, and brought all the account code and address details with him.) I gather each transfer costs a one-off £25 fee taken from the funds at the sending end, plus an exchange rate wrangle and another fee at the receiving bank. It's more about identity verification of the sender and receiver than about the actual money amount transferred. Sounds eminently do-able.
Breakfast beckons, and is to be followed by a gentle local-ish walk before Big Bro's return from the unfrozen North sometime later this afternoon. For a weekend "packed with travel and misadventure" (allegedly). He does like his airshows, and remains blithely unconvinced about my relative lack of enthusiasm. But then he's inherited a dislike of SF (presumably from dear Mama, since Dad read quite a lot of the classic stuff... Wells, Verne, H Rider Haggard, Conan Doyle, and so on). What can one say? 50% of shared genes (on average) can only take you so far.
That Firefox "reader view"...
... turns out to be jolly useful when checking this text. But why the tool's icon only presents itself on my own pages is a mystery.
Home again, home again
The ramble — a gentle, semi-urban 5.8 mile affair around Hiltingbury Lakes and the clay-pits beyond the "Otter" — having been rambled, it's time (13:22) to think about a light spot of lunch. Delightful, sunny weather. Slight breeze. Not too hot.
Having now...
... wandered around for a while in a state of mild bemusement/amusement here, and here, to remind myself of this long-unused AWS facility, about all I can say is I even now know the precise date I created, and last rotated, my AWS root access key!
As I said "lain entirely fallow". That was the Easter weekend, seven years ago. Following Junior's cheery advice I'd signed up for, and created, what was then called an Amazon S3 online backup space and uploaded a few photos to it on a trial basis before realising just how clumsy a system it was. I'm sure it's much improved since then, but I prefer to keep things under my own roof, as it were.
Golly!
I have four of the titles on this annual list. (#1, #11, #45, and #81.) I even know where to find my copies.
It's belatedly occurred to me (too late, of course) that I forgot to warn Big Bro about the horrendous traffic snarlups that can afflict the UK during Friday afternoon / evening rush-hours in the summer. He's driving back down from Congleton, or possibly from places nearer to Cheadle Hulme (where he went to school) as I type. [Pause] He arrived a little before 18:00 in some need of a cuppa. The M6 was very busy. Tomorrow, Yeovilton?
Entertainments?
Just concluded with Kathryn Bigelow's somewhat depressing "K19: the widowmaker", preceded by "The Guard"; both films new to him — the latter was made by the brother of the chap who made "In Bruges".