Saturday, 12th March, 2022

[Day 726]

Today dawned nice and bright so Meg and I after breakfasting at our leisure prepared to walk down slowly into town to enjoy a bit of spring sunshine and get our exercise done. We had a loose arrangement to meet with our regular couple of friends outside the park cafe and so we all enjoyed a sit-down in the pale spring sunshine, which was quite a change from the rainy day of yesterday. Whilst Meg was sitting with our friends having a coffee, I took the opportunity to walk quickly the remaining distance to the newspaper shop to pick up the Saturday edition of The Times which, apart from other things, contains a good guide to all of the TV and radio programmes in the week ahead. We spent a pleasant half hour or so in the company of our friends and also had chats with another couple and a park regular who we had not seen for a few days now. Once we had put the world to rights again, we all took our leave of each other knowing that we would be at home in plenty of time to watch the ‘Six Nations‘ rugby matches which were scheduled for the early and the late afternoon. The first of these matches was Scotland vs. Italy and I do not think we had great expectations of it. Nonetheless, although Scotland always seemed likely to win the match, which they did with some degree of ease, nonetheless the Italians played with a great deal of flair and imagination. They brought on a young winger who obviously had a lot of talent and upon his debut he managed to ‘wriggle through’ and score a couple of tries, which is quite something for Scotland. One has to remember that they went through the match wih Englnd without scoring a single point so to score a couple of tries in the second half was no mean feat for them. The really ‘juicy’ match this afternoon is going to be the England-Ireland match which I cannot see Englnd winning. This match (or rather the second half of it) exactly coincides with our attendance at church on a late Saturday afternoon so we have got our PVR set up to record this and we can watch this after we get home. We will also be looking forward to our homemade root vegetable soup which I made a couple of days ago and which, as it contains no preservatives, we like to consume within a couple of days of it being made.

There is a sort of interesting potential development in the Russia-Ukraine war this afternoon. Apparently, the Israelis are having some success in getting the two sides togther and not just grandstanding with each other, which has been the story hitherto. I suppose the Israelis have plenty of experience of occupying neighbouring territories and the problems thrown up by this – given the exodus of some Jews from Russia to Israel, I suppose they have a fair number of fluent Russian speakers who might have some skills in delicate negotiations so, although it is clutching at straws time again, this may be a glimmer of hope for the end of the conflict.

After we got back from church we we had some of our homemade soup and then settled down to ‘watch’ the England v. Ireland rugby match. However, this turned out to be incredibly frustrating experience as we manged to get the vision part of the transmission but the sound channels was completely garbled. We were on the point of abandoning this altogether and decided to cut pur losses and watched a pre-recorded version of Jane Austen’s ‘Emma’ but again, we got no sound. So we turned the control back to TV and then back onto the AV and suddenly the sound came back. So we started watching the rugby again from the beginning but after about 30 minutes, the same old problem started to recur. So we stopped the whole lot, fast-forwarded to the interval and now it started to work again. So all of this was an incredibly frustrating experience and I do now know whether the fault lies with our VCR or whether there was a problem with the quality of the trasnmitted signal that out VCR couldn’t cope with. We are going to see if we can see most of the second half but are not particularly hopeful.

The application to examine listing of files in their folders in the MAC operating system is called ‘Finder‘ and this has its frustrations – for example, if you have copied over a whole group of files, then Finder does not always update itself correctly. I downloaded a free app from the Apple App Store called ‘Commander One‘ Their ‘Help’ screen is interesting as it states ‘For all those who’ve been longing for a dual-panel file manager for Mac, we did our best to stay close to Windows classics, and did it with all the affection to OS X users‘. I have not had much opportunity to play with this but at first sight, it seems to be just what I want i.e. a source screen on the left (the MacBook’s hard disk) and a second screen on the right (destination screen of your backup) and it is very easy to transfer files from one pane to the other. I think it also has an FTP capability but this I will have to explore when I have more time.