Dark iClouds over Hastings….the shock of the new?

Making new bits of technological equipment work is far too traumatic. 
     The beautifully designed shiny new things nestle excitingly in their lovely boxes, but the experience of unpacking them is always overshadowed by a sense of dread….what will happen when the ‘on’ switch is pressed.

     Chez Battleaxe, I thought the arrival of Philosopher’s Windows 8 computer would take a lot of beating on the trauma scale – the howling and cursing went on for weeks, and can still erupt again if anything new is tried. 

     However, this week I got a new iPhone 5s.  Philosopher is getting my 4s instead of his old one, partly because he wanted a better phone camera – and that one is good.  I have been with Vodafone so long I get very good deals, so decided to upgrade.  I won’t go into the boring nerdy details of it but suffice it to say I could not download my stuff off the iCloud onto the new phone.

    After much wailing and gnashing I eventually phoned up Apple – they now appear to have located their help centres to Greece…. I guess people there must be desperate for work….and cheap.  This was Greek tragedy.  First, I spoke to Christos, who had limited English. Failing to help me after an hour, he passed me to a ‘senior’, somebody or other  Mikalopolous. This bloke’s English was a bit better, but after spending ages explaining the problem again from scratch and trying further fruitless solutions it became disturbingly apparent that his technical knowledge was no better than mine. The icloud still refused to let fall one single drop of data, and my poor new baby phone was getting weak with exhaustion after been reset to start again so many times.
    To cut a long and boring story short, there was much screaming round the house and a disturbed night spent composing irate letters to Jonathan Ive in my head. The next day I plugged the phone in to my creaky old computer where luckily, it found a not-too-old iTunes backup to download to itself.
    Apart from the fact that my computer is so old, I could actually manage perfectly well without the cloud thing, but after so much hype of its marvels, and paying good money for backup storage, one expects it to work.
    On the technology theme, many of us hereabouts have had trouble with our broadband. It is slow at best,

BT box – how do they ever find anyone’s line in here?

and apparently water has got into the cabling somewhere BT can’t find, making it flicker on and off randomly. You are not talking superfast broadband here in Hastings… and 4G, forget it. We scarcely have 3G, and we have to have a special booster in our house to get a mobile signal. The other week we lost our Sky broadband and landline telephone altogether. Without the booster, which is powered by the internet, we have no mobile, so were reduced to going round to the neighbours…. Sky customer service is actually very good, but they are dependent on BT for the cabling. We were briefly connected to someone else’s line by mistake – not surprising, looking at the apparently chaotic interior of this BT box.  But enough technology griping now.

     Had a nice morning today pottering round on the Stade taking photos – Philosopher is entering another Stade photo competition, this time the them is ‘winter’. A bit difficult right now because the weather is very mild. I took some zany pictures too. 
     I do believe those Stade fisherpersons take a positive delight in keeping their fishing beach as messy and squalid as they can. It’s a sign of their independence from the rest of us boring and conventional landlubbers. 
     You can’t tell me they need mattresses, old sofas, gas fires and even a piano littered around their fishing boats and fishing clobber, but the chaos does make for good images.