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The upside(?) of being an Early Adopter

Chris was a real fan of Apple products, and a veritable early adopter of their stuff. Not in fact as early an adopter as my family though – when I was a teenager we had one of the first Apple][+ computers in the country, which I blame firmly for my subsequent career as an engineer 🙂

I think Chris got really into Apple “toys” with the Newton PDA, two of which I still have lurking around somewhere, as I haven’t had the heart to throw them away. He never had an iPhone, but that was only because the mobile signal up here on the hills is atrocious, and it wasn’t worth it as he wouldn’t be able to make full use of it. But other than that, he had most of the Apple gadgets, which he frequently pre-ordered as soon as they were announced. I think he was probably the first iPad owner to die in this country, as I had huge problems trying to cancel his 3G plan – the mobile provider seemingly had no procedures in place to deal with the death of a customer and made it far harder than it should have been.

His early adoption included a first generation iPod nano, a sleek little black gadget with “icyjumbo” engraved on the back. He didn’t keep it long, though – he bought into the Apple hype and it was (very) soon superseded by a second generation iPod nano which was of course much better (though it appeared virtually identical to me). I was then given the 1st generation nano as a hand-me-down, pre-loaded with a selection of our CDs. I can’t say I used it much, other than to while away the time on the plane when going on holiday.

Earlier this year, Apple issued a recall notice for the 1st generation iPod nano. Apparently, the lithium ion batteries were somewhat dodgy, and liable to catch fire spontaneously! And the older the devices got, the greater the risk. So Apple were recalling them and replacing them with refurbished nanos with hopefully safer batteries. But I didn’t find it straightforward to enter the recall programme. Finding the iPod was fairly simple, and when I entered its serial number into the Apple website, it was indeed covered. But then I was asked to enter his AppleID. Ummmm. That stumped me. I knew Chris had one, but it wasn’t on the list of passwords/identities/useful stuff he’d written down before he died. At the time I couldn’t face a long drawn out battle with faceless bureaucracy, so I didn’t take things any further.

But the thought of a potentially explosive iPod sitting on the shelf in my spare room kept nagging at me, so I thought I’d better grit my teeth and do something about it. I reverse-engineered Christopher’s AppleID, guessed the answers to his security questions (good job I knew him well!) and got it changed into my name. Then I applied for the nano replacement programme and got accepted on it. It took several weeks before anything happened, but then I got an envelope in the post, with instructions to send the faulty device back to Apple. Several weeks later still, I got one of those annoying “we called but you were out” cards saying that a courier company had tried to deliver a parcel, that they required a signature, and that they would only try to deliver it twice more – and wouldn’t guarantee a time-slot or even a morning/afternoon. That was annoying, as it was in the run-up to the equipment trial, and I was spending lots of time down in Hampshire. I managed to find a day when I could work from home, and rearranged delivery – which then didn’t happen until nearly 6pm and only after the driver had phoned to say he was lost and couldn’t find me!

Inside was my replacement iPod nano – but not a refurbished 1st generation one. I think by the time I finally worked out how to get on the recall programme Apple had used up the stock of direct replacements. This was a spanking new 6th generation nano, only about an inch square, with a touch-screen and all sorts of extra features. No manual though, and it’s not particularly intuitive to use!

I’ve not been happy using Christopher’s desktop computer. It’s very much still “his” – he built it from scratch, I don’t know what software it’s got on it or why he configured it the way he did, and it gives me the heebie-jeebies every time I turn it on. About the only thing I used it for was iTunes, as all of his Apple devices were registered to that particular computer. So I decided that a new iPod was a good excuse for a new start, and I’d install iTunes on my own laptop. Well, that wasn’t easy! It took two laptops, two browsers, three download managers and an external hard-drive before I finally managed to get the sodding thing installed where I wanted it!  Chris used to rave about how easy Apple products were to use – I disagree!

But now I finally have a new, hopefully non-lethal iPod nano, loaded up with a selection of albums of my choosing, registered to my laptop with my own personal version of iTunes, and docked into a set of speakers in the kitchen. The upshot of which is that I can now listen to music while I cook. And it’s only taken about eight months to get there…….

 

23 12 2012 Gillian status Comments (1) Permalink

Tales from Fawlty Towers

Now that I’ve been back home for over a week, I can look back at the several weeks I spent staying at Fawlty Towers during the equipment trial and laugh at the ongoing incompetence of the staff – but at the time it wasn’t so funny. It’s a real shame, because it could be a lovely hotel and has a lot going for it – but it needs someone to get in there and show a bit of leadership from the top……

A colleague was also booked into the same hotel, so we found it convenient to meet up for dinner in the evening to discuss the day’s experiments and do any hot planning we needed for the following day’s runs. At the start of each week I booked a table for dinner for each of the nights we were there, since the restaurant gets surprisingly busy and I didn’t want to risk just turning up. We also gave our room numbers when we ordered the food, since obviously the bill was going to have to be split between the two of us and two different expenses systems.

About a week into the trial we’d finished dinner and were about to adjourn as usual with the remnants of our drinks to the bar area, where it was easier to  talk. The maître d’ came bustling over and loudly, in front of everyone, said that we couldn’t go through to the bar without paying first, as “the bar is too close to the front door” – i.e. implying that we were about to make a run for it without paying! And this was despite the fact that we were both residents, had been doing exactly that for the past week with no issues, and the Reception had an imprint of our credit cards.  There’s no problem with requesting politely that we sign the chits before moving out of the restaurant, if that’s company policy,  but there was absolutely no need to be that staggeringly rude! My colleague saw red at the implication that we were about to do a runner, and made such a fuss at the aspersions cast on his character that we got a grovelling apology and a free drink each on the house. The maître d’, who was a complete fool, “hadn’t realised we were residents” – despite it clearly being stated on our orders. And even if we hadn’t been residents, there was no need to be so rude in front of all the other guests.  For the rest of the next week and a half we ostentatiously made a point of saying at the end of dinner “We’re moving to the bar now and will sign the bills there” – I think they got the point that we were not impressed!

So that was the standard of service in the restaurant. Reception wasn’t much better. My colleague works for a company with a rather less restrictive expense policy than mine. So while I was in a “standard” room, he was paying £20 extra per night for an “Executive” room. Except that when we compared notes, it sounded like his room for the middle week of the trial was pretty much identical to mine – no extra-big plasma TV, no upgraded toiletries, and certainly no complimentary mineral water. So he went to Reception to complain, and found that they’d put him in a standard room whilst charging him the extra for an executive room! Cue another major fuss, another apology, and  a discount on his bill to get it down to the correct price….

So with Reception and Restaurant staff both being less than competent, I decided I’d better check my bill extra carefully when it came to checking out.  There were lots of opportunities for mistakes. And I was right – there was one dinner missing entirely from my bill. I got out the copy of the chit I’d signed at the time and showed it to Reception, saying that they didn’t appear to have charged me for it. Turns out they’d charged that dinner to completely the wrong room! I said they’d better cross charge it back to me, but no they couldn’t do that. The person whose room they’d mistakenly charged my dinner to had already settled his bill and checked out and there was “nothing they could do about it”! I hope that whoever he is doesn’t get a nasty shock trying to justify that one through his own expenses system! Just shows how important it is to keep copies of everything and check your bill line-by-line…….

Funnily enough, my customer for the equipment trial was staying at a different hotel a few miles away, which he also referred to as “Fawlty Towers”. So I’m not convinced that the competition is any more competent. A shame, as there is a real need for a business-class hotel at a reasonable price with good levels of service in the area.

17 12 2012 Gillian invective Comments Off on Tales from Fawlty Towers Permalink

Jamie’s 15 minute meals – not quite!

A friend gave me “Jamie’s 15 minute meals” as an early Christmas present, knowing that I find it a real chore cooking for myself during the week. Christopher and I each had a copy of Katharine Whitehorn’s “Cooking in a Bedsitter” which draws a distinction between “cooking to stay alive” and “cooking to impress”, and whilst I’m prepared to make a big effort for my Saturday night dinner (even though the only person I’m impressing is myself), mid-week is definitely a case of cooking to stay alive. And I still haven’t come to terms with having to cook for myself on a Saturday lunchtime. So the tagline from Jamie’s book, “Delicious, nutritious, super-fast food” sounded really appealing.

I’ve tried a couple of recipes from it so far, and can report that the title is somewhat misleading. It should really be called “Jamie’s 21 minute frantic non-stop cooking setting off the smoke alarm and leaving the kitchen looking like a bomb has hit it”! I’ve had to adapt the recipes somewhat – for a start, they are all for four so I have to quarter the ingredients. Then there’s the factor that one of the ways he gets everything done in such a short time is by using a food processor to chop/slice his vegetables. I don’t have one, so have to chop/slice the old-fashioned way using a knife, which takes longer. And I’ve noticed that he gets a lot of flavour into his food in such a short cooking time through the liberal use of chilies, which I really don’t like, so I shall have to adapt or avoid those recipes.

I’ve tried three of the recipes so far – linguine with smoked trout, asparagus and peas; a ludicrously decadent breakfast of a toastie filled with ricotta, honey, banana and dark chocolate; and chicken breast with braised greens and a potato gratin. That last recipe was a big surprise – I love potato gratin, but the way I’ve always cooked it takes about an hour and a half. So to be able to have a version ready in twenty minutes was a real revelation. I’ll definitely be cooking all three recipes again, and will be adding that potato gratin to my standard repertoire!

Judging by the recipes I’ve tried to date, they are certainly delicious and nutritious, if not quite as super-fast as Jamie Oliver suggests. I doubt that I’ll get down to the fifteen minutes  promised, but I think that some of the time-saving techniques he suggests are well worth adopting. When I come back from a long day at our Hampshire HQ, I’ve typically cooked myself a store-bought pizza. The oven takes 10-15 minutes to heat up, and the pizza another 10 minutes to cook. In that time, I could have cooked one of these new recipes  from scratch – and I think I’ll do so next time. I’ve read the book from cover to cover, and book-marked several recipes that I want to try out…..

13 12 2012 Gillian food Comments (4) Permalink

A lesson learned the hard way

It was a real struggle to get out of bed when my alarm went off today, and if I had known what the morning had in store for me, I think I’d have just turned over and gone back to sleep!

There was a very hard frost, and the car was completely iced up. So before I could head off to work this morning I had to de-ice it. I set the engine running, with the heater on full blast directed onto the windscreen, and turned on the de-mister on the rear window to soften the ice. Then I set to work on the side windows with the scraper. In order to get enough strength behind the scraper on the driver’s side window, I leaned on the door, which shut – and promptly locked itself! And I’ve got central locking, so all the doors locked.

So now the key was in the ignition, with the engine running, locked inside the car so I couldn’t get to it. Worse, the house was locked up with the alarm set, and the house keys were in my handbag, which was on the front passenger seat. So I was locked out of both the house and the car! I said – or rather, shouted with great feeling – a very rude word indeed, then considered what on earth I could do next.

I did have my mobile phone in my pocket, but there was no point calling the RAC to break into the car, as I only have roadside and recovery, not home start. But fortunately my next door neighbour has a spare key to my house, so that she can keep an eye on it while I’m away. I tore across the road and hammered on her door, hoping that she hadn’t already gone out for the day! She has retired, so there was a good chance that she’d still be in at 09:30. Her dog went bananas at the frantic woman hammering on the door, and thankfully she was in, and able to loan me back my spare set of keys.

So then I had to let myself back into the house, and find Christopher’s set of car keys, which haven’t been used for over two years. What a good job I’d put them somewhere sensible so could find them relatively quickly. I used those to let myself into the car, to rescue both my car keys and the house keys, then locked both up again and returned the spare keys to my neighbour. Then I still had to finish de-icing the car – but I made sure I kept the driver’s door open as I did so!

10 12 2012 icyjumbo car
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The roofers are back…..

It rained again heavily on Friday, and again I marked-up the porch with coloured dots indicating the location of the leaks, plural. I currently have yellow, green and orange dots from the last three rainstorms, all adding interest to the decor. The roofers turned up again this afternoon, without any warning so it was a good job I was in. They’re currently drinking my tea up a ladder scratching their heads. This saga will run and run…….

08 12 2012 Gillian house Comments Off on The roofers are back….. Permalink

Home at last

I’ve spent most of the last three weeks based down at our Hampshire HQ working on another equipment trial. It’s been very interesting – as an engineer, I always find it highly valuable to work with end-users of our technology in a controlled setting and see whether/how much our innovations actually add value to them. But it’s very, very hard work – long hours, having to keep totally sharp and reactive the whole time, and responding flexibly to the needs of both the customer and the end-users. It’s simply not possible to pull it off successfully within the constraint of the three-day week that HR think I work, so I’ve been putting in full days (and then some) as well as doing a load of preparation over the weekends. Mind you, even then I was doing very short hours compared to some of the technical team, who were working solidly over the weekends and until 10pm several nights in a row to fix emerging bugs and do some last-minute technical fixes and improvements in response to feedback from the operators. It’s all gone very well, the most successful of the three trials I’ve participated in this year, and the team really pulled together well.

I’ve had to be very careful to try to pace myself over the last few weeks, as it would do no one any good if I overdid it and came down with a debilitating migraine right in the middle of one of the experimental runs. My boss has an ongoing agreement with my subcontractor, Dave, who is working very closely with me on this project, that he will keep an eye on me and send me back to the hotel in a taxi if (a) I’m looking too tired, or (b) the runs are dragging on and I’ve already done well over a full day’s work. It was quite funny on Monday when Dave was returning back to the lab from frog-marching walking  me to the main gate to get a taxi. He bumped into one of my management chain from the Malvern office, who was visiting the HQ quite independently of the trial, and of course seized the opportunity to check up on me. Dave was very pleased to be able to report that I was being sensible – even if it took significant coercion to force me to do so! It’s really annoying being bullied like that (and after all, I’m Dave’s customer!) but I do recognise that I’m my own worst enemy and will try to do more than I should as I don’t want to let the team down. Overall though, the plan worked well, and I have put in the longest hours that I’ve been able to manage since Chris was first diagnosed nearly three years ago. That’s encouraging. But I’m absolutely shattered now, and plan to take tomorrow off as time-off-in-lieu and have a bit of a lie-in for the first time in several weeks!

06 12 2012 Gillian status Comments (1) Permalink

Clearing out the pantry

If you are house-proud and fastidious, look away now! On the other hand, if you are interested in the psychology of bereavement, read on…..

One of the hardest things I have had to do when widowed is to somehow turn “our house” into “my house”. It’s not healthy to live in a house preserved in aspic with all one’s partner’s possessions/junk. But neither is it necessarily a good thing to throw absolutely everything away – there has to be a healthy balance, and that’s difficult to achieve. And I think that balance shifts with time, so you have to keep re-negotiating it as you are ready to let more things go.

I was talking a few weeks ago to a friend of mine whose wife has very recently died of cancer. He is devastated, and can hardly bear to spend any time at all at home, as everything reminds him of her. He’s sleeping in his spare room, as it simply hurts too much to go into their bedroom. He was asking me how I coped when Chris died. With difficulty, is the honest answer, but I did make a point of making the house look subtly different, so that I wasn’t always looking at a Christopher-shaped hole in my life. There’s still an awful lot of his stuff around, which I am gradually dealing with, but on the whole I’ve been successful at making the house feel like it’s mine.

Interestingly, I was talking to another friend of mine whose husband died a few months after Chris did. She has taken a similar approach to me but even more so, and has redecorated the house from to bottom, including new carpets, to make it feel like hers. I’ve not gone to those extremes – except I suppose in the garden, which looks totally different since I had the retaining walls refashioned.

Some rooms I found easier to deal with than others. I bought new linen for the bedroom, which was a very cost-effective way of giving the room a new look. I moved the pictures around on the walls in the living room and dining room, and changed where I habitually sit, so that subconsciously things look different. The kitchen was more of a challenge, as that was very much his domain (I was allowed in on sufferance) so it very strongly reminded me of him. I dealt with that by getting Rob in to completely repaint the kitchen earlier this year, which had the desired effect of making it feel more “mine”.

However, off the kitchen I have an old-fashioned pantry (the house is Victorian, so it’s an original feature) which wasn’t included in the redecoration. It was Christopher’s domain, even more so than the kitchen itself. It was the quietest place in the house, so he used to shut himself in there and do his Librivox recordings, away from the rumble of passing lorries. I did do a very quick sweep through the pantry shortly after he died, and threw out all the curry and chili powder that I could find – I strongly dislike hot spicy food, and have absolutely no need for those ingredients. But apart from that, I left it alone, including the recording booth, microphone and amplifier sitting on the shelf in front of the wine rack.

I knew that it needed sorting out – although I’ve been reasonably good about keeping an eye on use-by dates of stuff I’ve bought, I was aware that I hadn’t done a clear out of the stuff he used to use. Since he was a much more varied and accomplished cook than me, he had packets of ingredients in stock that I’ve never cooked with. Which meant that there was likely to be several shelves-worth of packets with expiry dates of 2010…… But it was really difficult finding the energy to face up to it.

So I had a discussion with my cleaners, and they agreed to help me out. I moved all the recording equipment out of the way, and then asked them to spend a morning going through the pantry, throwing out anything way out-of-date, and leaving on the side for me to deal with anything they weren’t sure about. Then I asked them to give the shelves a really good clean. I got in from work yesterday to find they’d been as good as their word, and there was a little pile of stuff on the side for me to look through and throw out.

Some of it had really strong memories attached, so I was really glad the cleaners had done the hard work for me by forcing me to decide to chuck it out. If I’d have tried to do it myself, I suspect the memories would have been too painful and I’d have given up. There was a pack of gelatine (exp 2010) left over from when Chris went through a stage in 2009 of making champagne jellies, and which he also used when he was ill in an attempt to make his high-energy drinks more palatable by disguising them as fruit jellies. And there were several unopened bars of Green and Blacks milk chocolate which was his favourite – I prefer Cadbury’s whole nut as my emergency chocolate fix.

So all in all I feel very pleased that the cleaners were ruthless on my behalf. I’ve got a spanking clean pantry, with all the food well within date, and that’s another room sanitised and able to become “mine”.

01 12 2012 Gillian house
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Not exactly a priority

My builder phoned this evening to discuss my leaking porch, and to reassure me that he hasn’t forgotten me. I bet he hasn’t, when I still owe him money awaiting satisfactory completion of the job. It was pouring with rain again on Sunday, and I marked up the leaks – plural – with yellow dots this time. The porch is looking very colourful! However, as we agreed, in the grand scheme of things I’m hardly a priority. It is only a porch after all, and there are many people worse off than me. Worcestershire has been very heavily hit by the weather, and he has several clients who are flooded right out of their houses. As I said, I was hardly on the phone to him in tears demanding urgent help right now. No, he agreed, unlike the previous client he’d just spoken to on the phone who was flooded and was in a dreadful state. So we’ve left it that he’ll keep me on the list of “important but not urgent” jobs, and will get back to me when the urgent priority jobs are cleared. That’s fine by me – provided that it does get fixed sooner rather than later.

26 11 2012 icyjumbo house Comments Off on Not exactly a priority Permalink

Christopher’s Tree

A few weekends ago, Christopher’s step-father, Peter, phoned for a chat. Apropos of nothing much, he asked me “What was Christopher’s favourite tree?” Well, that stumped me! Christopher and I talked about many things in the twenty years we had together, but I don’t think we ever discussed favourite trees…..  After frantically thinking for a while, I remembered that we used to take a day off work most years to visit Westonbirt arboretum to look at the autumn colours, and he particularly enjoyed the groves of Japanese Maples aka acers. We have a small one in the garden which is pretty spectacular in the autumn. Plus, he really liked maple syrup (his cousins in upstate New York make their own, and it is absolutely delicious – and so much smokier with more depth of flavour than the stuff you can buy in  the shops). So I tentatively replied that I thought his favourite tree was probably the acer/maple. Then I asked the biggie – why did Peter want to know?

It turns out that he had recently been at a meeting of his village’s Woodland Trust, and they had acquired some more land that they were planting with saplings. In order to raise the money to do this, they proposed to offer people the opportunity to sponsor a tree. When Christopher’s mother died, Peter sponsored/dedicated a sapling in her memory. I think that was an ash tree, so I do hope that the ash die-back disease won’t affect it. That was over twenty years ago, so it must be a decent-sized tree by now. Peter was keen to do the same in Christopher’s memory, hence the question about the preferred tree. I was so glad I hadn’t said magnolia, which was the other one that sprang to mind, as that would be totally out of place in a British deciduous woodland! Peter had a word with the Woodland Trust people, and between them they settled on a Field Maple, which should grow well in the woodland, and is in the right family.

Christopher's tree

He’s kindly sent me a picture of it, and permission to use it. The plaque has Christopher’s name and dates, and the message “Much loved husband, son, brother and step-son”. I think it’s a very good idea – thank you very much indeed, Peter.

23 11 2012 Gillian Photo
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Pots and Plates

Jon the Potter has put up on his blog a link to some photos he took during the pottery workshop last weekend. There are a couple of snaps of my pots which I have shamelessly copied.

Three pots with (hopefully) matching lids

side plates

I was clearly in a blue-and-yellow mood that day! There are three pots, each with a matching lid that hopefully should fit together once they are fired, taking into account a extra millimetre or so of glaze. Normally the base of a pot is left unglazed, as otherwise when the glaze runs during firing it firmly fixes the pot to the kiln floor. But I want to use the pots to store food, so that means that I want all the surfaces of the lid to be glazed, as otherwise it won’t be  as hygienic as I would like. So I have asked Jon to glaze the lids fully and to fire them on trivets – little pointed cones which hold the glazed pot off the kiln surface. The plates are designed with a large flat bottom and a vertical lip at the edge, almost like a very wide shallow bowl. They’re really good for eating pasta off, as you can chase the pasta round and round with just a fork, and the lip stops it leaping off onto the table!

21 11 2012 Gillian Day out Comments Off on Pots and Plates Permalink