Thursday, September 28, 2006

Hello Folks - Back On Air

Very pleased to be back and it will need several 'blogs' to bring everyone up-to-date. The details would be boring but the hard drive on the old lappy finally gave up and this is posted via my new Fujitsu notebook. Don't understand all the technical stuff but suffice it to say that 'it goes like a rat up a drain pipe'. It has taken me 4 hours to install all my toolbars, AVG, Firefox, Picasa et al. The pictures uploaded without pain and the old problems might have been the kit rather than 'blogger'. I've now got AVG instead of Norton (to which I shall give a wide-berth from now on).

There was a prob. retrieving my data and I wish I had followed Ray's advice re 'Mozy' because, although I've safely got my old My Pictures, and My Documents, it is going to take ages to download them all and I might just leave them on disc, knowing they are available if necessary. Family photos and things were on Picasa WebAlbums anyway and I've checked that I can access them. Similarly, it was a great relief to be able to work out how to open my Blog Dashboard and create a new post.

We are not lucky enough to have a 'meteorological correspondent who can explain picture 1. These little bits in the sky just before sunset have always fascinated me (the sun is out-of-frame left). They are not quite rainbows and there must be a name for them.

Picture 2 is a special request from Miles who wanted to see his train-set on the Blog. So here it is and I am sure he will be pleased with it. Steve took the photo on the Nikon, to save me from struggling with the stairs.

Thanks to Bungus for 'nipping into the station' to post a holding message. It is just a relief that he didn't find it necessary to make it play sombre music.

Bye for now.................

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Welcome back, I've missed your Blogs. I'm your "meteorological correspondent" today! What you're seeing in that photo is known as "cloud iridescence". A couple of sites for you, I don't know how to do clickable links on here, so you'll have to copy and paste.
http://www.meteoros.de/iris/irise.htm
http://www.sundog.clara.co.uk/droplets/irid1.htm
We quite often see this phenomenon here, wearing sunglasses seems to heighten the effect!

Madeline.

Anonymous said...

Good to have you back.

Moving swiftly on to para 3, I think the invisible bits in the sky may be what is known to aficionados of things meteorological as ‘aurora boreollicks’, a phenomenon seldom seen outside Ireland. On the other hand, could it be what is known as a ‘mackerel sky’? Or, more likely, Madeline has sussed it.

I ignored the first 2 paras because I feel that I would find them more readily understandable if written in Arabic rather than what I assume to be Double Dutch. I know that this incomprehension is entirely my own shortcoming as I have closed my mind to computer jargon in the same way that I have managed to do to the workings of the infernal combustion engine and anything else more mechanical than a screwdriver (if you want to see my eyes glaze over just try explaining how hydraulic brakes work). So please just ignore me and I might go away.
I am reminded of a young fellow patient in the plastic surgery ward of Norwich Hospital in 1967. He was essentially a countryman, a man of the soil, who had recently taken a step up the employment ladder by accepting a job at Batchelors canning factory in King’s Lynn (the Big City). At interview he was asked what experience he had of machinery, to which he replied, “The nearest I’ve come to working with a machine is using a s**t shovel.” He was, in fact, being self deprecating because he was hospitalized for the third time having smashed his knee when an elderly lady reversed from her drive, without warning, into the path of his motorcycle. She had visited him at home a few days after the collision, seeking recompense for her broken rearlight, parts of which were still embedded in his leg.

Had I only possessed the technical ability, I would certainly have inserted a requiem to the defunct laptop. But here goes, "Dum, dum-de-dum, dum-de-dum, de-dum, de-dum."