It Was Thirty Years Ago Today.....

It's difficult to believe it but the first mobile phone call in the U.K. was made on January 1st 1985.
They have become such a part of modern life that it is hard to remember when being out of the house meant being out of contact unless you could find a phone box or an open pub  Yes, pubs only used to be open between 11 and 3, and then again in the evening.

I guess the younger generation will be wondering how we managed to connect to the World Wide Web without mobiles...   Sorry guys,  it wasn't invented until 1989!

You can find the background to the phone story in today's  Guardian.

Ireland Past and Present

Caherciveen is the nearest big town to our first stop, Valencia Island.

This is the civil war memorial there. The soldier has a soviet-era look to him. A little bit cuddly and rounded.



The strangest things can give you culture shock. We are so used to seeing Pound Shops in the inner cities, but over in Ireland they have...



Look carefully, and you can see what the Euro Shop was in a previous life.



How many people went into banking for job security, and were overtaken by technology?

There and Back Again

Curses, foiled again! I took my card reader with me, and then ended up without a fast internet link to send the photos through.

I can't complain though. The countryside is simply stunning...

I was taking photos before I had even arrived at the terminal building. I couldn't resist this sign...



There is something "Twin Peaks" about it.

Safety First

After my problems with the main PC at the beginning of the week, I have decided to take some preventative action. I have just bought a 120 Gigabyte portable hard drive. It comes with software to automate a back-up procedure whenever the user specifies. At least this way, should the main hard drive fail, I will always have a back-up ready to copy over. The thought of all my music and pictures just disappearing due to component failure is horrendous.

If we are to live in cyberspace, we always need to keep a spare!

Technical Problems Update

And the hot news is that the techies could find nothing wrong, I took the PC home and now everything is hunky dory!!

One can only assume there was a loose component somewhere in the PC. They took it apart, dusted it, and put it back. I am writing this on the very machine.

All-in-all the £15.00 minimum fee seems very reasonable as long as the problem doesn't return.

Of course, the moral of this tale is

***Always Back Up Your Data!!! ***

I had all my music safe on my Ipod, and all of my photos are on CD or still on the digital camera. After dinner though, I am going to go through the files on this PC and see what else I need to copy. Before it is too late!

Isn’t Technology Wonderful?

Just heard from the computer technicians who have had my ailing PC since yesterday morning. They have checked it over, but can find nothing wrong at all. The finger of suspicion now points to my LCD flat screen monitor. (Which I did not take to the tecchies). If I was Welsh Dog, I would just reach into my pile of old monitors and plug one in. Me, I don’t have any spares.

So, I will have to collect the main PC unit and then plug it all back together again, plug in the screen, and switch on. If it still doesn’t come on, it’s probably the monitor.

I’ll be hoping it is. The alternative, an intermittent fault, is too wearisome to contemplate.