Family - keeping my feet on the ground
It was my niece, Lucy's 14th birthday on Sunday so I dropped into my sister's in Addiscombe on the way home from Wickenden. A lesson I remember from my own youth is that uncles are really best at giving pocket money rather than trying to think what teenagers might like so that makes things relatively easy.
Whenever I visit Mary and Jim, I always seem to spend some time cleaning up the computer from the ravages of four children. (The computer is downstairs, in full view and use is heavily supervised.) Today, we had to wait for Patrick's 8Gb collection of music tracks to get copied over to the new external hard drive before deleting them and giving the internal drive some breathing space.
(Actually, I am sure I could write a script that would randomly produce "music" at least as rhythmic and tuneful as that lot in about 20Kb but that suggestion would probably not be welcomed. At least now Lucy's new game will probably run better.)
They now have Adaware (from a previous visit) to hoover up the junk that gets put on from the various websites that promote the music. The file system is unfathomably complicated with various phantom "users" so I decide that in the time available, it is best to leave well alone.
Joseph is obviously going to be the tech wizard of the family. He has a penchant for making things. A fan of Doctor Who, he has made a convincing model Tardis out of cardboard which was so well executed that I thought it was a printed model. Not the case - all done freehand from scratch.
Charlie, the youngest, took a bit of persuading to go to bed. I was pleased to see that he had "Lord of the Rings" pyjamas with Aragorn pictured on the front.
In between times, Mary, Jim and I managed to discuss such things as the state of the Church, various matters of education policy and pro-life issues. I think everything in the world is OK now :-)
Whenever I visit Mary and Jim, I always seem to spend some time cleaning up the computer from the ravages of four children. (The computer is downstairs, in full view and use is heavily supervised.) Today, we had to wait for Patrick's 8Gb collection of music tracks to get copied over to the new external hard drive before deleting them and giving the internal drive some breathing space.
(Actually, I am sure I could write a script that would randomly produce "music" at least as rhythmic and tuneful as that lot in about 20Kb but that suggestion would probably not be welcomed. At least now Lucy's new game will probably run better.)
They now have Adaware (from a previous visit) to hoover up the junk that gets put on from the various websites that promote the music. The file system is unfathomably complicated with various phantom "users" so I decide that in the time available, it is best to leave well alone.
Joseph is obviously going to be the tech wizard of the family. He has a penchant for making things. A fan of Doctor Who, he has made a convincing model Tardis out of cardboard which was so well executed that I thought it was a printed model. Not the case - all done freehand from scratch.
Charlie, the youngest, took a bit of persuading to go to bed. I was pleased to see that he had "Lord of the Rings" pyjamas with Aragorn pictured on the front.
In between times, Mary, Jim and I managed to discuss such things as the state of the Church, various matters of education policy and pro-life issues. I think everything in the world is OK now :-)
