Saturday, 15th May, 2021

[Day 425]

It was one of those indeterminate mornings this morning when you were not quite sure how the day was going to turn out, weather-wise. We did not rush for our morning walk having spent some time having a pleasant chat with our daughter-in-law who was busy cooking (or at least preparing food) whilst our son was out at a ‘Diesel Gala’ in the nearby Severn Valley Railway. Our decision to go down into town was vindicated as the heavens started to open again and we would have got quite a soaking if we had walked all the way. Having picked up our newspapers, we paid a visit to Waitrose from which we needed to pick up one or two cooking ingredients for our daughter-in-law and whilst we were at it, we bought a Cornish pasty to act as the basis for our midday meal. The afternoon was a little attenuated because we usually get ready to go to church at 5.30 which is part of our normal Saturday afternoon ritual.

We knew that today was the day of the FA Cup Final which is something that we do not normally follow, unless there are special reasons to watch it. The Cup Final is typically played on a weekend very close to my birthday and today the finalists were Chelsea vs. Leicester City. Whilst not particular supporters of Leicester City, we did live in Leicester and its environs for 26 years so it was quite easy for us to become Leicester City fans for the day, reinforced by the fact that Chelsea have won the FA Cup some nine times but Leicester have never won it in the entire history of their club. The match started at 5.30 which was just about the time we left to go to church but when we got back home we turned on the TV to discover to our delight that Leicester City were leading 1-0. There was about 30 minutes left to play so this was well worth a watch. They replayed the Leicester goal several times and it really was a stunning strike, struck from a distance and aimed like a rocket into the top corner of the net – their goalie did not stand a chance. The Leicester goalkeeper, Schmeichel, pulled off an absolute stunning flying save some 10 minutes before the end of the match, saving what would have been a draw. Then there was a sustained Chelsea onslaught as you might expect and they did in fact ‘equalise’ with only 1½ minutes left to play. When the goal was scored it did look as though a Chelsea forward was offside – in the subsequent VAR (video replay) then at the moment that the ball left a Chelsea mid-player’s foot for a long ranging pass then the Chelsea forward was offside by some centimetres (about a player’s foot worth it seemed to me) So the ‘equaliser’ was declared invalid and Leicester went on to win amidst signs of absolute delirium (even by football standards) amongst the few Leicester supporters who were allowed by the COVID unlock-down experimental rules to attend the match. It goes without saying, this result gave us particular pleasure – particularly as Leicester must have been rated as very much the ‘under-dogs’ before the match.

Earlier in the day, I had engaged in a little bit of computing work in which I think my efforts have been crowned with success. A week or so ago, I had found a Microsoft Outlook ‘clone’ called OEClassic which is a standalone program (i.e. not part of Microsoft Office 365) and which seemed to install and run beautifully whilst preserving all of the classic look and feel of Outlook which for many of us was the de facto standard with which we used in the decades when we were at work. OEClassic (as well as Outlook itself) allows you to not only install a default program but allows for several ‘identities’ when you could install additional copies of your email client or even completely new ones. The point of this, I suppose, is that in a family computer it would be possible for Mum, Dad and each child to have their own ‘identity’ and associated mailboxes so this would be a way of making sure that everybody’s emails did not collide with each other. A day or so, I had successfully installed another secure mail client called TopMail as another identity. Today, I took another even more secure and comprehensive email client called Posteo and successfully installed that. You have to get into the documentation of each client to understand the port numbers for both receiving mail (IMAP) and sending mail (SMTP). Then there is a certain amount of tweaking to get things right – if you try and fail, then a ‘Log file‘ of errors helps you to ascertain what you have got got wrong so that you can tweak it and get ir right. Now that I have now got to this stage, I have the inputs/outputs of each of my three email clients all available as separate identities in OEClassic. Things can often go wrong in installing and tweaking programs like this so it is particularly satisfying when you get things to work correctly.