It's Always More Complicated

Okay, there has been a round of things that looked as though computer was gradually getting its act back together -

From interminable 'restarting the system' lingering at about 35% -

It actually reached the log-in screen -

Only then I couldn't actually type in the log-in -

But eventually I could, but then it just hung there -

And then, wow, the thrill, the log-in logged in and the desktop appeared -

Except although at first it seemed as though it was responsive, no, it's just hanging there blankly.

So it does look as if I'm in for a reset, siiiiigh.

What I read

Katherine Addison, The Orb of Cairado (2025), many thanks to ursula for pointing me at source for ebook edition. Very good (need I say?).

Jonathan Kellerman, Open Season (Alex Delaware #40) (2025) - rather phoning it in, I felt.

Several of my collection of Desmond Corys - Cory was a writer of mostly thrillers from the 1950s, these were from not his best-remembered series:

Pilgrim at the Gate (1957) and Pilgrim on the Island (1959) - Set in the GDR in the 50s. Pilgrim, who has a deeply traumatic back story, is a kind of Grey Pimpernel getting people across the Iron Curtain - not all of them want to go....

Three of the Lindy Grey mysteries (which I read out of chronological order): Begin Murderer (1951), This is Jezebel (1952), and Lady Lost (1953). These are tonally a bit weird. There is a certain pulp hardboiled element (Grey is a professional private eye, and in an interview on the Cory website linked above he mentions the influence of Peter Cheyney on his early writings: most of the female characters tend to fall in to the category of 'dames'), but also a certain aura of the Crispin/Innes Silver Age mysteries (though more blood and more bodies), with rather over-elaborate plots, literary allusions, and all the mysteries are something to do with art. Massive amounts of smoking!

On the go

Still Some Men in London

Up next

No idea. There is a new Literary Review.

The weird taskbar thing that was happening on my desktop seems to have remedied itself yay.

Did I ever mention that my GP surgery notified me that they were scheduling the next round of boosters + flu shots? - admittedly it turned out that these were several weeks ahead, but I am now scheduled at least.

A young person solicited my advice on their research and came back to my response with effusive gratitude.

However -

Editor of volume to which I am contributing chapter I have already writ substantial portion of responded to my email saying that I was not going to make it by original deadline (which I was assured was not at all hard), but within a few weeks probably, with what I consider rather belated sending of editorial guidelines. Which include reference system I do not like at all and which means unpicking referencing I have already done, moan, groan.

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In other news: save the hedgehog by giving them additional Protected Wildlife Status.

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The people in Cheshire who will tell you they 'know' the Earth is flat: I had to play that video of Flat Earther singing in a different browser and honestly, it is not much improvement over the hymn of the real (rather than spoof) Flat Earthers in Kipling's 'The Village that Voted the Earth was Flat' - 'Flat, and Flat for ever more'.

Our esteemed (not) PM has been fulminating against 'low-value' degrees and putting a stop to people doing these.

(A number of people having been kicking back and saying, well, that's clearly out with PPE at Oxford, look at the shower that turns out.)

And you know, I'm somehow interpreting this thinking back to those ads about people in arts careers and 'their next job could be in cyber' -

And thinking about what looks like Useful Knowledge, which takes us into some very murky Victorian byways*, except, actually the Mechanics Institutes were not merely about teaching just Stuff Wot The Working Man Ought to Know but a far wider curriculum (see account here of Joanna Bourke's Birkbeck: 200 Years of Radical Learning for Working People) -

- which takes me to certain points in my own academic career where I acquired what probably looked at the time as 'wow shiny new cutting edge course to add to my portfolio of stodgy old humanities subjects' -

I.e. Due to the unusual nature of the course at uni I attended I was obliged to do a subsidiary course for my degree in a science subject, and did Computer Science.

Which may have looked quite impressively a la mode but was in fact really very very shortly swept away by the rapid tides of developments in information technology - I may mention the forgotten progamming language, the mainframe computers (that went down during the practical exam), etc etc.

Second verse, same as the first, pretty much, for doing the Computing in Archives option in my archive diploma course, which was a lot less useful down the line than the fusty old trad skills (though I will concede that one's palaeography chops are likely to wither if not kept in practice).

I will also cop to have learnt a great deal in my life just through miscellaneous and random reading instead of putting that book down and going and doing something more productive.

*'Everybody should learn PHRENOLOGY!'

Where do I begin?

Maybe with the ongoing saga of Partner's Old Computer, which we are trying to get into a condition suitable to be donated:

No, the factory reset will not complete.

I download Eraser (recommended by Which) to a USB via my computer, and while the old one will read an inserted USB, it then locks up and won't actually let one either copy the file or run it.

This morning we moved the computer to a spot where it will talk to the wifi, so that I could download Eraser directly. Which I can do, and clicking on that appears to open it up, but then one clicks on 'Yes' and nothing happens.

Well, the good news, I suppose, is my institutional email is BAAAAACK!

With a) several nudging emails about filling in my copyright licensing documentation for a review forthcoming in a journal and WOE WOE ABOMINATION the login needed is not the same one for uploading one's reviews, articles, referee reports etc but Entirely Different. So that was fun. Not.

And b) an email from a journal with which I have not previously had to do, and somewhat peripheral to my field but nonetheless I could anticipate that it might conceivably have received an article to which my expertise in refereeing could be applicable. However, they coyly did not inform me what the article was actually about (there was allegedly an invitation email laying this out, not seen) and I was obliged to register, which took up entirely more of my time than seemed reasonable, especially as when I finally achieved login, I could not find anything actually listed under 'Waiting for Review'. (I can, actually, think of a person of similar name to mine who might be a little more likely to fall within their purlieu, which makes this even more annoying.)*

In the realm of, I am over here, channeling Groucho Marx, received an email to my usual address from A Young Person (at least I guess them to be a Young Meedja Type), soliciting my participation in a programme put out by a TV channel which does not, shall we say, give off vibes of SRS CRED, with Jokey Title, to talk on something on which my only words are 'Didn't Happen', filming in 1 week.

NO WAI.

Don't think I'm venturing on that mental well-being survey just yet.

*ETA: Latest update: 'On checking I see you have not yet been invited. You are the reserve and if one of those invited declines or fails to respond they you can expect an invitation in the not too distant future'. FUME.

Or, further episodes in Partner's computer saga.

This finally came to the point when, yes, this was an ex-computer, it had, or was on the way to, joining the choir invisible, etc. It would, after a Very Long Time seething and muttering to itself boot up, but when it did so there were only a limited amount of operations it would actually undertake, and most of them at a very much less than presto pace.

So a new computer was ordered (and I took the opportunity, if an order was being put in, to order myself a nice shiny keyboard and mouse, because the replacement keyboard I'd had for my own computer from the supplier was doing the sticking key thing like the previous one, even if it was a different key).

So then I got to be Tech Support Person getting everything set up (and lo, it has Windows 11, what is this even?)

And most of this went reasonably smoothly, except, ahem, the printer, I understand that printers are pretty much everybody's Known Issue. At first it wanted a PIN to log it on the system, which we had no record of.

But anyway, it was eventually showing as connected to the system, except, you know, not actually talking to it?

So I went and fiddled about, and endeavoured with not much success to see whether I could download a more uptodate driver in case that was the issue (well, it was with mine).

But anyway, and I am still not sure how and why, it finally after sulking and grumbling printed a test page, and has in fact printed other things.

I can only suppose that there was some equivalent to the 'what I tell you three times is true' unlock on the massive mega-computer in Stand on Zanzibar, and I had just jumped through the hoops enough number of times or in a particular order.

What I read

Finished The Documents in the Case (have a feeling I read somewhere, that no, you can't tell synthetic fungal toxin from the natural product even with SCIENCE, but I think the whole thing works rather well as a story).

Premee Mohammed, The Apple-Tree Throne (2018) - sortes ereader, not sure how I acquired this - well, that was different, if pretty much as grim, but shorter, than the last of theirs I read.

Barbara Pym, Less Than Angels (1955) - the one which is beady-eyed ethnographical about a set of anthropologists.

Farah Mendlesohn, Spring Flowering (2017), which I think was being pitched as f/f romance, but I thought that it was more about a young woman not perhaps initially entirely aware of her disposition - even though she had had a particular friend, who is getting married as the narrative kicks off - and her life changing in other ways at the same time - and gradually finding herself and a place in the world.

Norah C James, Sleeveless Errand (1929) (the first Paris edition, as this book was Banned by the Censor) (I thought I might have a real goldmine on my hands, but these are around for well under £20 on Bookfinder). This turned up during recent book sorting, and I must have read it but didn't remember much about it. While it's pretty tame by contemporary measure, I guess by the standards of Just After The Well of Loneliness it was probably somewhere on the 'rather give a child a vial of prussic acid' scale, having unwed sex, reference to physical activity in same, boho circles of protag featuring promiscuity (in one case married woman promiscuous with men and women), 'homos', prostitutes, divorce, including put-up jobs, random encounter with a seaside concert party with similar elements in rather lower class, practice of birth control by protag and within marriage of guy she meets up with who has just discovered his wife in bed with another man - plus a lot of general 'neurotic morbidity'. Not a lost classic, I think, but interesting.

Following that, however, I was in serious need of something fluffier, which was a re-read of Alexis Hall, Murder Most Actual (2021).

Then, pretty much by accident or chance - waiting for Partner's computer to get to a point where I could actually start Doing Something to see if I could Do Something about the recent 'Critical Process Died' Event - took Georgette Heyer, A Civil Contract (1961) off the shelf - I had forgotten how good (and untypical) it is.

On the go

I have literally only just finished that so there is nothing on the go though I recently started a couple of things that I am not sure I am moved to go on with.

Up next

That is a question.

Dept, struggles with technology -

Last week I had occasion to do something I thought would be a simple operation taking 5 minutes tops, printing out a document and an addressed envelope to post it in.

Hah.

Foe some reason, my computer had decided that the scanner/colour printer was the default printer (WOT - I only use it these days for scanning), and then when I finally got the actual printer set as default it was doing Weird Stuff, which turned out, after much poking about in submenus, to be because the Eco setting was enabled.

Substantial portion of the afternoon shot.

However, I have managed to perform factory resets on a) my old computer and b) an even older laptop (so old the battery is completely defunct and it only runs when plugged in) so that, at least in theory, they could be recycled.

I have also dug out the Yogabook, on the grounds that although it was rather Fail as a laptop, it might make a useful ancillary tablet. At first I thought it had dedded itself, but it merely needed significant recharging. However, then it did its not unknown trick of being sulky about acknowledging the wifi connection, but I think I have finally (?) got that sorted.

(Still have not bitten the bullet over Project New Phone, though.)

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Dept, embodiment: last few days have been have a flare-up of the lower back problem, sigh. However, I had a flare-up a few weeks ago and it did actually disperse in due course, not sure if it had any relation at all to anything I actually did, to bring it on or to dismiss it.

One Simple Life-Hack: have started pulling my hair back with a scrunchie and this is a minor but very definite improvement. There are still escaping wisps of hair, but nothing like the previous annoyance.

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Dept, Recherche de Temps Perdu: have been excavating certain files from the corner of the room. Mostly research related, accumulated at my place of work and conveyed here at the time of one of the upheavals involving temporary moves during rebuilding/refurbishment. Gosh, I was a busy little bee.

Under this same heading, lately discovered that I can access my Scopus Author Profile (courtesy of Evil Publishing Empire Elsevier) via my institutional login, and have been doing a little ego-surfing of my citations. It's quite odd to see which pieces have gained traction.

Looking back (I'm not doing one of those lists that assume that life is more or less NORMAL, not that they ever particularly match the lifestyle of a Crabby Ol' Bat Hedjog.

Best thing I got during the year: 2 A-Z + 1 Pfizer vaxxes.

Best things I bought during the year: new computer, it really does show up how massively, massively sluggish the old one was. In the realm of small pleasures, discovered Molton Brown vetiver and grapefruit bodywash, which is wonderful. Let us also praise M&S joggers for contributing to the comfort of the Crabby Ol' Hedjog.

Most expensive thing I bought during the year: replacement of the back steps to the garden, which has been something needing doing for a while, and was something that could be worked in with the ongoing downstairs work going on, so we did it.

Dept of, Life in the Old Dame Yet: there is a chapter in a book that was supposed to be published this year, but like everything else, delayed. A chapter in what one hopes is final edits... Two pieces for a web project that I have signed off on, in final readying for online publication. Being still relevant: asked to referee articles, read book manuscripts, review grant applications, be involved in projects, etc. Revived the old academic blog.

Published 4 volumes in the ongoing saga, plus a small treat, as well as a new tale on the blog currently in prep to publish, and another in consideration.

According to Goodreads, 272 books read and finished over the course of the year.

So it wasn't quite the deep blankness and real thing strange (hat-tip to W Empson) that it often felt like. Even if any light at the end of the tunnel was invariably the headlights of an oncoming train.

Okay, I am in grim anticipation of having to Do Something about replacing my existing WDCloud when support is ending as it is no longer compatible with continuing security updates. They will be sending a voucher towards a new device... while I backup the old one, disable remote access etc etc.

So I had that sur le tapis, but not anything that needs absolutely immediate attention, even if they have been nagging me about for months, although the critical date is not until several months into the New Year.

And this morning, on my new computer, which I have just about got into shape, as it boots up, I get, do I want to upgrade to Windows 11?

I depose that even if I did, does anyone want to do this first thing? (there didn't seem to be the option, that you get with existing system updates, to defer to a More Convenient Time), only to skip for the present.

Before my first coffee...

Does not seem entirely well-thought-through.