In which I pretend to be a techno-minded person

Tom has been grumbling about the slowness of the computer.  The blue screen of death has been in abeyance of late, but has occasionally shown its baleful visage.  I promised to defrag to improve the former problem, but when I did, I was informed by the sagacious wizard that it was quite unnecessary, it wouldn't help, but that there was a mere 18 g free space left in the memory. 

Time to face facts, we are carrying too much and it could all disappear never to return.  We need an external hard drive.  Perusal of Amazon revealed for 40 quid I could buy ten times more storage than the computer ever had, and we could buy it from the UK in sterling, which is a somewhat more ready resource than the euro for us at the moment.  It arrived today, and I am really quite taken with it, even though I've not used it yet.  That something the shape and size of a paperback can potentially contain so much is a mighty wonder to me.  Yes, yes, I know you all know about such things already, but I am still quite unworldly in these matters.

But a detail that really impressed me was that the power adaptor comprised an interchangeable plug,

just slide off the guard and you can slide on the plug interface of your choice, chunky British oblong three pin, or neat continental round two pin.  Sweet!

Then just when I'd sent off the order, my memory card reader, a very tacky blue plastic thing which came in a bundle with the Canon, died a death at the point where the cable goes into it, the metal bit just collapsed (I'm good at these technical terms as you see...).  I was obliged to download one lot of pictures directly from the camera, a tedious and cack-handed procedure if ever there was.  Now, I may not be very multi-media savvy in many regards, but it always surprises me how many people don't use card readers, even printing and developing businesses don't always offer to print your pics straight off a card, but require you to put them onto CD or USB key.  I suppose it depends on the procedure you're used to, and I know many 'puters have them built-in (oddly, it seems to me, our printer does but the laptop doesn't), but they really are a boon, in my opinion, and you can get one from Amazon from under two quid.  Plus postage, so having missed the chance to get one with the bigger order, I decided I needed it too quickly to wait anyway and went and bought one from Leclerc's Espace Culturel or Media or whatever it's called now, for about 9 euro.  Again, I am disproportionately charmed by it simply as an object.  It looks like a USB key, but pop each end off,

put the card in one and put the other into the USB port, and off you go, no annoying cables, no batteries required.

So, time to get shunting.  Well over a year's worth of photos, incompletely edited, a few little movies, all my amazingly important documents, can simply be dragged and dropped into the outside hard drive, where, in all probability, they will never be looked at again.

One of my excuses for doing daily blogging this month was to go through and use some of the old photos that were thus languishing, but I keep taking more instead.  My mother had a fabric hoarding habit; she collected pieces of fabric, all kinds of lengths and types, from market stalls, material shops, remnant bins, clearance places, and stored them in chests and hampers.  We were great makers, and whenever two or more Masters sisters were gathered in one place we always had a glorious rummage through them, and bore them off with projects in mind or got sewing there and then.  Nevertheless, her acquisition of material outstripped our ability or will to use it up.  I don't know what happened to it all in the end.  I feel that my photos are a bit like that; I keep hanging onto them becasue although only some are really worthwhile in themselves, I can often see a small section and think 'oh but that would be nice made into something else...' but I don't get around to doing the snipping and stitching and shaping required to do it. 

But here are a handful of snippets, bits I've cropped out of otherwise mediocre shots which I feel stand up as abstracts or vignettes on their own. 

Faded celandine

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Burned out log

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Small fry

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Reedmace papyrus

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Grub on a post

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Tagetes

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More of the same tomorrow.