The evening before last, I received a pleasant surprise as I has received an email from the trip organiser for U3A to organise a trip to Kedleston Hall and Bakewell in Derbyshire for an amazingly reasonable £20. However one did need an up-to-date National Trust membership to go around the Hall and I went scurrying to my wallet to discover two out-of-date cards and then an up-to-date one. This must have renewed automatically and is one of those occasions when one is glad to have automatic renewal. One emerging problem is that Meg had her own National Trust card and I have not got round yet to informing them of Meg’s demise so I have made a reminder to myself to phone them up on Monday morning to get Meg’s subscription cancelled. I find these trips are quite important to me nowadays and going by coach takes out all of the trouble of navigation and it means there is a coach full of people with whom to interact. The trip is in late May and the system is that you first have to apply to get on the trip[ and, when accepted, go ahead and pay for it. But the Jodrell Bank excursion a few days ago went without a hitch so now there is another excursion to which to look forward. I spent more time than is good for me messing about with audio things for the following reason. Thinking ahead to my little musical presentation in about two weeks time, I wondered whether I might enhance the sound of the speaker in my iPad which are tiny but do quite a good job considering their size. I had in my possession a standalone Bluetooth speaker so I needed to find the right cable for this, charge it up, print off the manual again (fortunately saved and in my ‘manuals’ folder on my desktop) Now I knew I also had a pair of quite powerful little speakers which I had linked year ago onto an old IBM laptop but evidently they need a power supply. This can be provided on a portable basis by a portable power source such as a Power Bank and one of these I had purchased some time ago. I know this worked well with my speakers in the past but I had to work out how to get it charged it up again which meant quite a lot of experimentation with cables of various sizes, some of which looked as though they might fit. Eventually I found one and I have the Power Bank charging up (slowly) but I know it will give me a couple of hours at the very least which will be enough to power the speakers. Whenever I get a new charging cable, I must get into the habit of labelling it up well so it can be matched up exactly – fortunately, the model I had bought in the past gives an electronic display of power actually charged which seems at first sight to be incredibly useful but I know from what other users have said that these displayed charge levels are often very approximate and often malfunction. But at the end of the morning, I have got the kit more or less assembled together that I know will work and it has given the results that I think I will need in the future. But playing an iPad in large sonorous kitchen with sound that can reflect off hard surfaces gives a very different result to that found in a living room with a lot of (sound absorbing) soft furnishings.
My son and daughter-in-law left our family home to go and give their own flat a good clean after the installation of their new kitchen and to get some of their pots, pans, crockery and kitchenware into their new resting places. Whilst they were doing this, I picked up a copy of the newspaper and popped into Wetherspoons where I knew that my long standing acquaintance, World Seasoned Traveller, was occupied having his coffee and consulting his iPhone for photographs. We had a few words and then I proceeded along the High Street popping into the occasional charity shop. Actually I did find a glass butter dish which I wanted to buy (for the storage of cheese) and then happened across two dog walkers that Meg and I would often see in the park. This couple I know pretty well and the lady hails from Pula in Yugoslavia which I have actually visited on holiday decades ago. I had a quick ‘fish on read’ type lunch and then my son and daughter-in-law turned up, pretty tired after their cleaning activities and then we are going to be preparing a meal together this evening. My daughter-in-law very slowly and patiently helped me to sort how to make my music website which relies upon links to Youtube will play videoclips without the interruptions of adverts. I already have a subscription to YouTube but I was not aware how should I access the premium edition of YouTube and then ‘pin’ it so that I could access further links advert free. Some of my problems arose from the fact that one runs tabs in a browser on a desktop but apps in a browser window on an iPad and although the operating systems are similar, they work in subtly different ways. But my daughter-in-law has now pushed me further along a learning curve for which I am very grateful and it means that when I come do my presentations, they should now be advert free. It has been a beautiful afternoon with only a little of a cold breeze but instead of doing outside jobs, I have been dosing myself up with flu and cold remedy to stave off an imminent cold. We are now approaching the start of British Summer Time at which at some ungodly hour in the morning, I need to go round and put all of the clocks forward one hour. Some are easy and some I always have to think about such as how to adjust the clock on our oven which seems to have a mind of its own. I think the time is approaching when we may have a debate about whether we need (DST = Daylight Savings Time) at all. There is now a school of thought that we should put forward our clocks by two hours at this time of year and then stick at that with no further clock changes at all. As so often in these matters, it is a case of the balance of advantages vs. disadvantages but there are times for long established rituals to have had their day and not in tune with modern living conditions.