Travel

25 Sunday May 2025

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It certainly broadens the mind, but it doesn’t get any easier with age.

We just made one of our now fairly frequent trips across the Atlantic Ocean, from Toronto to London. The prospect of four weeks in the land of my birth is an enticing one, obviously, but it starts with that overnight flight, and getting over that seems to take longer each time.

Of course, air travel has revolutionised the world. My ancestors who made the trip from England to North America rarely had the opportunity to make even one trip back to their homeland, so I do recognise my good fortune, but that’s hard to remember when you can’t make simple decisions after an almost sleepless overnight flight.

We always start our trips with a three to four hour drive up Canada’s busiest highway, the Ontario 401. Mostly it’s just a chore, but this time the weather was horrible, low cloud and rain, and that resulted in collision-related delays. We had allowed a big dollop of wiggle room on timing, so arrived at the airport more or less as planned, which was obviously a good thing. Another good thing in this multi-modal journey is the “Park N Fly” valet service where we simply dump the car at the PNF lot and have a bus whisk us off to the airport terminal. Sure, it’s not cheap, but well worth the relative ease of leaving your car somewhere.

Toronto Pearson airport went the way of London’s Heathrow and revamped their terminal waiting areas with bars and restaurants which will, with a phone-based app, deliver your food and drink requirements to the table you’ve chosen. There are two major issues with that, though. Firstly, most of the regular seating was removed to allow for the food outlet tables, and secondly the food and drink is scandalously expensive. It’s probably my advancing years that make me so curmudgeonly, but I won’t buy from these places on principle. On this trip we did locate some regular seating, and sat in comfort to enjoy the sandwiches we’d brought from home, which went some way to offset my grumbles about airport rip-off pricing.

** I tried to find a photo of the departures area, but couldn’t, at least not of the regular area around the gates. Anyone would think that the Airport wasn’t proud of it’s rip-off strategy.

Our flight was late leaving, but there’s not a whole lot you can do about that. The gate staff kept us informed, although I never enjoy being chivvied into boarding the aircraft quickly when I’ve been sat in the terminal for hours. Maybe airlines should allow a longer turnaround time?

We’d been messed about by the airline, British Airways, on our reserved seat allocation. We had paid a staggeringly high fee to book specific seats, but they’d changed the aircraft type and had to reallocate the seats, meaning that we’d lost our two window seats. I know, a seat is a seat, but I don’t like to get gouged on a fee to reserve a seat, then not get said seat. I have lodged a claim with BA to get that reservation fee back, so we’ll see what transpires there.

The aircraft for the flight was an Airbus A350. Big, for sure, and by modern standards quiet and smooth, but the seating on the ‘plane was horrible. The designers of these things must have to work quite hard to make seats so uncomfortable. Their primary aim is to save weight, but the thinly-padded shells you sit on are not good for a six-hour flight, so goodness knows what they’re like for a longer flight. We were in World Traveller Plus, one up from Economy, so the seats recline quite a bit. But that reclination causes havoc when you have to get out of your seat for a call of nature, but the person in front is in maximum recline. There was a woman in the row behind us had to get a flight attendant to wake up her next-seat neighbour so she could get out. There were lots of vacant Economy seats in the cabin behind the Plus area, and she settled herself there instead of coming back to the supposedly better seats, just so she wouldn’t be trapped again.

I must have slept a little, but I couldn’t get myself into any comfortable position at all, so whether I slept or not, I didn’t feel at all rested.

I should make a comment about the food service, because I fell foul of BA’s love of curry-based menus on our last trip. There were three options this time, in the shape of meat, fish, or pasta. I didn’t fancy the fish because it was trout, which is way too fussy for an aircraft meal. I didn’t think the lamb would be up to much, so I opted for the pasta, although not before being pleasantly surprised that all three options were still available by the time the cart reached our seats. The pasta wasn’t bad, but I passed on the curry-based starter, and only had half of the cheesecake thing they dished up for desert. Coffee was served, but it was such a miniscule amount that I barely tasted it. Airlines, not just BA, seem to strive for fancy meals when simpler, plainer fare would surely be easier, cheaper and more appreciated by mugs like me.

Arriving in London. Heathrow’s Terminal 5 is about as good as you’re going to get in that airport. It’s busy, for sure but everything runs quite smoothly. The UK Border was a breeze, with a very pleasant young border person welcoming us to the UK, and the baggage reclaim was similarly easy, which certainly takes the edge off the sleepless hours in the air.

Some hours later, at our destination and feeling helplessly tired, decisions were hard to make and tempers were beginning to fray, which is why bed was so welcome. The time difference is an issue, but not that first night when sleep is all you crave, regardless of what the clock says.

Our first full day here, though, was a struggle. The time difference and the sleep deficit all combined to make everything fraught. We did at least do something spontaneous, but not before some ritual shouting at each other; we have an excitable but tired four-year-old with us as well, which really doesn’t aid our attempts at achieving Zen.

Our second full day had me wide awake at 5am, which is the other issue with travelling, at least for me, and why I’m sat here at seven-thirty in the morning having finished this blog entry. As I said, travelling doesn’t get any easier. For our next, grown-ups only trip, I think we will seriously have to look at the BA version of Business Class, with its pods and bed-like seats. I guess we should start saving.

Working tales…

21 Monday Apr 2025

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Having penned a very long-winded story about the UK Government’s distaste for window envelopes last time, I thought I might jot down a few other, largely silly, experiences I had in my thirty-four years of Government employ.

I joined in 1977 as a clerk, taking myself off to the big city (London) to push bits of paper around for the Ministry of Defence (MoD). Now this won’t be a story to match Pete Hesgeth’s security breaches in the US DoD, because although I had worked in some sensitive areas occasionally, most of my time at the MoD I spent pushing bits of innocuous paper around, or pressing buttons on computers, that were as far removed from Government secrets as you could get. Anyway, I have signed the Official Secrets Act, a Government NDA, so it’ll be all very bland.

In the early 1990s, I was working on a computer system that was networked around the UK’s Royal Navy holdings, including some of their ships. It was convenient to put the land-based nodes for this system in underground bunkers, mostly to protect against an electromagnetic pulse (EMP), deliberate or otherwise, and it was to one of these holes in the ground in Scotland that we were sent to install a software upgrade. If I tell you we were using reel-to-reel tapes for the magnetic media, you get an idea that this was not a fancy, James Bond type computer, but an old, old system.

Similar, but newer…

The bunker at this site was a WWII construction, quite deep and a veritable rabbit warren of little passages and low-ceilinged rooms. The computer was in a small space, and with extra people working in there, the cooling system began to struggle a bit. Consequently, once we’d mounted the tapes and set the update running, my coworkers and I retired to our beds on the surface for the night.

Oh my! One of the systems we were working on, although not the actual one of course.

At 1am we were paged because the update wasn’t working well and the temperature and humidity in the computer room was causing concern. When we arrived to see what was happening, there was an HVAC guy already there, with his young sidekick. We checked the update, it needed restarting, and just as we had the tapes whirring again, the HVAC guy said he wasn’t happy with the temperature. He asked his sidekick to power-off the cooler so he could check things out, and all of a sudden all the power went off. The computer, complete with updates running, stopped, and the lights went out. We stood in total darkness, in complete silence, for about fifteen seconds before the emergency lights kicked and we wondered what on earth we were going to do. The HVAC guy meanwhile was apoplectic, in a serious rage, because it turned out that his sidekick had hit the emergency power kill switch for the entire computer area rather than the switch for the cooler. What it meant for him was another hour while he reset his cooling system, which was another hour away from his lovely warm bed.

We knew we were in for a long night, but fortunately the power was restored quickly, the cooler ran up smoothly and we were able to get the update restarted for the third time that night.

One of our number stayed while the update ran this time, but the rest of us went back to bed. It was with some trepidation that we went back underground at 8am, but our night watchman was perfectly happy because the update worked. He was even happier because some nice sailors that worked there had found him a nice bacon sandwich and a cup of coffee.

I love a happy ending.

As a postscript, I discovered that the Scottish underground bunker that we’d spent part of night working in had been decommissioned in the early 2000s. Not only that, it had been filled in, and there is now a bunch of new houses sat atop it. I wonder if the owners of the houses know what was once beneath their feet?

Trump Relief

15 Tuesday Apr 2025

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I was trying to think of something to write about that didn’t involve the second coming of President Donald Trump. When you live in Canada and have a left of centre view of things, everything Trump says and does is wrong; Fifty-first State, tariffs, rule of law, disappearing people, and all the rest, it dominates every day life. But then I received a Government (of Canada) brown envelope in the mail, and that set me thinking about my jobs in the Government (of the United Kingdom).

What news was contained in my brown envelope today wasn’t good, I’ve been dumped out of the Seniors Dental Plan because our family income is too high to qualify, but I can live with that because, well, I’m socially minded and understand that we can afford dental treatment without Government help. Let someone else less fortunate benefit instead. But I digress.

The envelope, as you can see, is a lovely “half-letter” size and has a Government QR code for the postage, and not one but two nice little windows so that the address and reference can be read without having to write anything on the envelope itself. When I worked in Government, we had windowed envelopes, but just the single window variety, and they were not widely used as they were expensive to buy, comparatively speaking. It used to be that all outgoing letters were in windowed envelopes, but Margaret Thatcher took up office as Prime Minister and put paid to all that, so we were then in the business of hand writing addresses on envelopes, at least at the level of output most of us achieved when issuing letters. But then I moved jobs within the Government.

My new job involved running an office that issued around seventy-thousand cheques a year, related to expenses incurred by a national subset of the Government called the Royal Observer Corps. These were spare time people, engaged in unpaid work for the good of the nation, but they were entitled to out-of-pocket expenses. While all Government workers were paid directly to their bank accounts, even in 1985, the Royal Observer Corps folks were still getting cheques, posted to their homes, on a quarterly basis. We had a tabulating machine, and a machine to print the cheques, we even had a fancy machine that put the cheques in the envelopes, albeit that you had to feed the cheques into the machine one at a time. Of course, given that the recipient’s cheque had their name and address on it, we used a window envelope to avoid having to type or write an address on seventy thousand envelopes.

In those days, Government stationery came from Her Majesty’s Stationery Office (HMSO). They held the money and the stock, all we did was order what we needed. The dreaded shadow of Thatcher loomed up quite quickly when HMSO arbitrarily changed the dimensions of the envelopes we used, “to save money”. The new envelopes, though, didn’t fit the cheques, and the window didn’t line up. That started a big kerfuffle when I had to get into an argument with HMSO in order to convince them that it was cheaper to supply the right envelopes than it was to retool our entire operation with new tabulators and envelope machines, just to fit their stationery. Fortunately we had sufficient of the old stock to weather the protracted argument, and HMSO did relent and start us back with the original sized envelopes eventually.

But things took a odder turn with further cost-cutting edicts from Thatcher. I ordered the requisite three months supply of envelopes, only to be told I could only have half the amount. I politely told HMSO that I couldn’t send only half the cheques out, but they were not to be moved. When I pointed out that each cheque had to go in an individual envelope (it was the law) and there was absolutely no room for economy, I was told that the HMSO budget couldn’t stand the use of expensive envelopes. To this day I can’t get my head around being told it was my problem that I could only have thirty-five thousand envelopes to send out seventy thousand cheques. Talk about “jobsworth”.

It took desperate measures to finally resolve the issue. I threatened to misappropriate money from our organisation’s operational budget and buy our own envelopes, and it was only that and the thought that I might usurp the authority of HMSO that finally made them see sense. Oh, and the very real risk that the volunteers who weren’t going to get their expenses cheque may very well walk off the job, all for the want of an envelope.

I’m glad to see, then, that the Government of Canada is happy to buy proper envelopes. They don’t yet trust to e-mail for these important communications, but as a tax payer and former envelope stuffer I’m happy to contribute to the purchase of nice envelopes.

As a postscript, not too long after the Great Window Envelope Scandal, we moved to a computerised expenses payment system where the recipients could opt to have direct payment to their bank accounts. It was a slow take up initially, until people worked out that their friends were getting their expenses two weeks before those still waiting on cheques. When I left that job, we were only issuing about twelve thousand cheques a year, so I guess someone at HMSO was happy about not having to buy so many windowed envelopes. What a happy ending.

Winter

16 Sunday Feb 2025

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Having spent the first fifty years of my life in the UK (except for three years in Belgium and Germany), I was a temperate man. That is temperatures lower than -4C and higher that +20C were somewhat of a novelty for me. I also had that English resistance to the damp, especially having spent fifteen years in the village of Blewbury, Oxfordshire, which was a mass of natural springs and chalk streams, and permanently moist. Then I moved from the coastal climes to Canada’s Great Lakes, and the continental weather systems that lurk there.

We’re sat here today, February 16th, watching the snow fall and having been experiencing sub-zero temperatures for weeks, probably six so far, I wasn’t counting. While this part of Southern Ontario doesn’t get hit with really cold weather, it did bring to mind a trip I made to Canada in 2008, when I was still living in England.

My intended had said, “Hey, come over for March Break”, for she was a school teacher, “We’ll rent an RV and have a drive around Quebec”. Now I may not be the sharpest knife in the box, but I looked at the calendar, and I looked at the prevailing weather in that fine Province, and realised that we were not going to experience fine, balmy, RV-friendly weather in March. We scotched the RV idea (a wise move as it turned out), and booked hotels in Montreal and in Quebec City instead. All very exciting.

But when my intended picked me up at Lester Pearson Airport in Toronto, with me just having flown over the frozen wastes of Quebec, the snow started to fall. My intended was driving, not her favourite pastime to be sure, and the weather started to get worse and worse. We were expecting to stay in downtown Montreal that night, but to be honest, we really should have stopped off on the way, but we didn’t. The run up the Ontario Highway 401, and the Autoroute du Souvenir, was 550 Km and should have taken about five and half hours. In the event, it took us nine hours, and we didn’t get into Montreal until at 1:30am. My driver was done in. Still, we did get there.

The following morning we ventured outside. I’d left London and it had been +12C, now in Montreal’s Old Town, it was -20C, and I could feel every one of those degrees below zero. The snow looked nice, and watching the skaters on the outdoor rink was lovely, but I wasn’t really prepared for that level of cold, especially given that the wind was wicked. While we had slept, the snow came in some more, and dumped on the city, making it look wonderful, but there was only so much snow I could take when feeling so, so cold. More snow fell, but we went out to a little restaurant that evening, walking between the shoulder-high mounds of snow, and I marvelled that the city seemed to be functioning well despite the white stuff, but then I realised that this was pretty normal for Montreal in winter. I made a mental note to never return to the city between the months of October and April!

The following day we drove along the St Lawrence River to Quebec City. Yet more snow had fallen and it was waist deep in parts of the old town. It was still seriously below zero as well, but I was starting to acclimatise. Quebec City, though, was a revelation. When we arrived the snow was deep, although paths had been cleared. But, by the following morning, the snow on the roads and sidewalks had gone, almost completely. No, we hadn’t experienced a sudden thaw, but the City Fathers had brought moving equipment in and trucked all the excess snow away. I asked the English speaking co-owner of the hotel what had happened, and he explained that the snow is carted off and dumped in a field on the edge of town. It can still be there in May, he said.

The run back to Southern Ontario was actually trouble free. We did it without an overnight, while sharing the driving, all 1075Kms. The weather had improved, and it was even a wee bit warmer, so my English bones were beginning to feel a bit happier. I learned a lot on that trip, not least that Quebec can be a very cold place in winter. I also learned that a short period of acclimatisation is a good idea if you’re coming straight from a temperate climate.

Fifteen years of living in Canada and I have become accustomed to the sharp winters, and the compensating warm summers of course. Indeed, trips back to the Old Country have had me making that most Canadian of observations about England, “Goodness, everything feels damp”. I reckon I have acclimatised now.

Oh Canada!

08 Saturday Feb 2025

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I was born and raised in England, and didn’t immigrate into Canada until I was fifty. As I have discovered, though, I’m not the first of my family to come here, not by a long shot.

On my dad’s side, originally from County Cork in Ireland, we had been generations Leeds, the centre of the industrial heartland of Yorkshire’s West Riding. In the early nineteenth century, a few of the Maynes had left England, one couple to the USA, and two couples to South Africa, but most remained in Leeds. A few generations later there was a small emigration to Alberta, Canada, of more than one couple, and into the twentieth century, Toronto, Ontario, was the destination for a Mayne or two.

But this movement pales into insignificance when compared to my mum’s side of the family, with the Baters and the Caters. Both families are from Devon, in the south west of England. The Caters were from south Devon, south of Dartmoor, and gravitated to the village of Kingskerswell, which lies between Newton Abbot and Torquay. The Caters married into the Hill Family, and the Hills married into the Bater family, but more of that later.

John Cater, born in Kingskerswell, took himself off at some point in the mid 1850s and settled in St John’s, the capital of Newfoundland. He married a local girl, Anne Murphy in 1857, and that started a most extensive dynasty of Caters around that great island. Successive generations lived and died as “Newfies”, but also migrated out into Ontario and into the USA. I’ve recently been in contact with a modern day member of the original John Cater clan, still living in Ontario.

Then there was the Bater family. The Baters come from North Devon, in and around the River Torridge area. To a man, they were all farm workers; some farm owners, some farm workers, but farming was their only profession. In the late nineteenth century there appears to have been a paucity of work for farm labourers, and quite a few of the young men, some with their wives and children, upped sticks and sailed from Appledore in North Devon, to Quebec City in the French-speaking province of Quebec. From there they made their way on the newly laid train network, to Guelph, a community to the west of Toronto. This wasn’t one or two people, it was many, and the period they emigrated stretched from 1870 to 1910. They all seemed to have headed for Guelph, but from there spread out to the farms of Bruce and Middlesex counties, and the industry of Galt, Cambridge and London (Ontario).

Using the number of deaths recorded for family members as a constant for those arriving but never leaving, and that is Caters and Baters, I have 197 in Ontario and 128 in Newfoundland. Of course many have moved on, largely to the USA, but also to other Canadian Provinces. There are many still alive, naturally, and populating modern Canada, but they’re harder to track down.

There was another emigration route from the fields of North Devon, and that was to Peoria in Illinois, USA. It looks like having crossed the Atlantic and arrived at Quebec City, these settlers have embarked on a second vessel (possibly from Toronto, avoiding the St Lawrence River and its shallows), and made the trip through the Great Lakes, Ontario, Huron and Michigan, to Chicago. Then they made their way up the Illinois River to Peoria, and the rich farmlands that were opening up there. Further migration took them down into Kansas and Missouri.

Quebec City Harbour at the end of the nineteenth century

All of this goes to show that I really am a latecomer to the Canadian party. The ease of my move, in a few hours by air, contrasts starkly with the sea voyage undertaken by my ancestors, many of who never made the trip back to England during their lives. These were brave people, setting our for a new life, and pretty much making a success of things, given that I can’t find a Cater or Bater who ever gave up and went back to Devon. I may be a latecomer, but I am in very good company.

The Seven Stars Inn in Kingskerswell

To finish, the link between the Caters and the Baters was facilitated by the Hill family of Kingskerswell. My maternal grandmother was a Hill, descended from the Caters of Kingskerswell. Her father married a Bater from Dolton, North Devon, and there the link was made. Families, all over the world.

It’s a New Year

07 Friday Feb 2025

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I’ve not written anything for ages, so, as it’s well into the new year, I thought I should knuckle down. The trouble is that there’s so much “noise” out and about, what with Trump, Musk, et al. Still, life goes on and I can always look away from the awfulness unfolding around me.

Someone posted a photograph on Facebook of an old railway station at Alexandra Palace in North London (UK). It was built right into the main structure of the Palace, too, which caught my eye, not least because I didn’t know there had been a railway there. I have no great connection with Alexandra Palace beyond my living in North London myself for a few years, but I did travel past the place every day when I was commuting from Stevenage in Hertfordshire into London every day in the early 1980s.

Alexandra Palace isn’t a palace in the royal sense, but a palace of entertainment and sports. It’s known affectionately as “Ally Pally”, and because it sits atop a big hill, you can see it for miles around, even in the suburban jungle of North London. It was opened in 1873 and has gone through many iterations in its lifetime, most notably perhaps as the BBC’s first home for a regular television service, starting in 1936. Ally Pally is still functioning, too, as concert, exhibition, and community venue. Curiously, though, despite having seen it every day for years, and lived relatively close by, I’ve never been inside.

But I digress. The station was the terminal point for a broad loop of line coming out from the London to Edinburgh Eastern main line. It must have been quite a slog up the hill with a full load, because it’s some climb up to the Palace. The branch was opened in 1873, along with the venue, but closed in 1954. The track bed is still in use, only now as walking trail, known as the Parkland Walk (North), and still utilises some of the old railway infrastructure to traverse the now busy roads.

I write all of this as a way of both highlighting my total ignorance of the history of North London and it’s many esteemed buildings and infrastructure, and the fact that my trips past Ally Pally were now over forty years ago. Where on earth did the time go? Indeed, this realisation of time past manifested itself on a trip to the UK in 2023. We were on a train going from Hackney Downs into Liverpool Street and I was remarking to the good lady wife that the trains were somewhat improved compared to the ones I’d used on that route in, wait for it, 1981! I hadn’t even begun to consider the passage of time, beyond a decade or two, but four decades and counting? It was no wonder things had changed.

Anyway, enjoy the photographs of Ally Pally station, and check out the links below, while I go away and consider how time passes so darned quickly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Palace_railway_station_(1873%E2%80%931954)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Palace

Out Of Step

12 Thursday Dec 2024

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It’s mid-December and once again I find myself feeling hugely out of step with so many people as they start their Christmas early.

As I struggled into adulthood and realised that the end of year celebration was really just an excuse for commercial excess, I lost interest. I had a brief rekindling of enthusiasm when my son was little, but he was only five when he declared that Santa wasn’t real, so that put things squarely back into context. Now, when I see people lighting up their front yards in October (yes, October), I really start to squirm.

It doesn’t help that I’m not religious (that’s what attending Catholic school does for you), albeit that I have some sympathy for those Christians who really do see December 25th as a key date in their faith’s calendar, because their festival has been well and truly hijacked by greed, business and stupidity. I worry for the people who feel pressure to perform, to provide big meals for others, to entertain people they don’t much like, and to spend an awful lot of money they might not be able to properly afford. I really feel for those people who are told that they shouldn’t be alone at Christmas, and that if they are then there’s something wrong with them. Ultimately it’s just one day, and really it’s much like any other day other than the fact that the shops are shut. (Every year, though, on Christmas Day, Facebook is full of people asking if there’s a Tim Hortons coffee shop open – Moravian Town, on the Reserve, it’s open on Christmas Day every year).

Of course that all paints a very gloomy picture, and I’m not really a gloomy person, well not all the time. There is the fact that there are at least a couple of days off work for everyone, at least here in Canada, and New Year’s Day isn’t too far away. People use the time of year as an excuse for a party, and to have a drink or two, which is nice (although that really shouldn’t be limited to Christmas). And people do get off their bums to visit their families, which can be nice, mostly.

People other than me really enjoy lighting up their yards (in October), and buying gifts (Amazon helps), and they just like the season. Some really do enjoy their Christian festival by going to church and generally being more attuned to their faith, and others just like the feeling of well being. It’s all good, I guess.

Me, I still feel out of step, and I feel more out of step with every passing year. Maybe, just maybe, one day I’ll have a Dickensian epiphany. Maybe not. Bah, humbug!

We Travel Afar

29 Friday Nov 2024

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My family tree, or at least my knowledge of it, continues to grow.

But I’ll start with the headline. Before I started this family tree thing, I wasn’t aware of any of my relatives having lived their lives outside the United Kingdom. Now I know that my relatives lived in Australia, South Africa, Canada, and above everywhere else, the United States of America. Across my mother’s and my father’s sides of the family, we have had relatives die (that’s the measure I use because quite a few returned to England) in forty-eight of the fifty States of the USA. Only Hawaii and South Dakota don’t hold my family’s DNA. I haven’t done a count up, but I’m sure it’s a few thousand or so.

My dad’s side has a sizeable dynasty in the US, centred in Ohio and Indiana, but spread across continental America. Sizeable groups lived and died in Washington State and Oregon, Kansas and Colorado, and down into Texas. Much of the wider spread is Twentieth Century mobility, with sixty-six deaths in California, and thirty-six in Florida leading the way, but the roots have stayed in the Midwest. It started with one couple arriving in New York in 1822, but has been supplemented by relatives arriving in Chicago, Illinois from Ontario, and Montana from Alberta.

Now I find a whole other group of British escapees from my mum’s side of the tree settled in the Peoria, Illinois, area. It seems that they moved rural North Devon and sailed to Montreal in Canada. From there, they caught another ship that sailed down the St Lawrence River, through Lakes Ontario, Huron and Michigan to Chicago, then down the Illinois River to Peoria. They swapped their Devon farms for new land in the Midwest, and established themselves and their communities in the middle of the Nineteenth Century.

Let’s not forget those who stayed in Canada and set themselves up in Newfoundland, Ontario, and Alberta; not as many as in the USA, but still more than I had reckoned on.

I saw a photograph of a bumper sticker today, coined after the recent 2024 US election, that said “This Country Was Built On Immigration”. My family have certainly played their part in that construction.

More Computer Stuff

24 Sunday Nov 2024

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My old PC, an HP all-in-one with a 34″ curved screen, was showing signs of imminent failure. Microsoft Blue Screens of Death started happening with WHE (Windows Hardware Error) codes, and the screen started to get intermittent yellow lines on it, from top to bottom, and none of that looked good. The old girl had to have been at least seven years old and didn’t really owe me anything, so I thought I’d pension her off before she turned up her digital toes. It’s a bit sad because I’d done some good upgrades, including replacing the original 150GB Solid State Drive (SSD), that was supposed to be the boot drive with a 1TB upgrade, and I swapped out the old 1Tb mechanical hard disk for a 1Tb SSD. That upgrade on the mechanical hard drive was a bit of disaster because I managed to damage the LCD screen when putting it all back together, and lost an inch of visible screen on the left side, and suffered a growing dark stain over about a third of the bottom of the left-hand side of the screen. It was still useable, especially as the screen was so big, but the problem was getting worse.

The HP all-in-one cost me an arm and a leg when I bought it, and right now I don’t have the cash to lay out for a similar system, so I downsized. Now it’s an HP all-in-one with a 27″ screen, but with a bit more memory and slightly faster processors than the old PC. Happily, it cost less than one third of the old machine, which pleased me greatly. My needs are fewer these days, so I’m quite content with the downgrade. Anyway, I can see my desk again, now.

Buying a new PC is quite easy. I shopped around, checked out a few early Black Friday deals and settled on the new HP, direct from HP Canada. I managed to get nearly $700 off the list price, so that was the clincher. I ordered it on the Tuesday night, and I had it in my grubby little hands on Friday afternoon, which was pretty much Amazon speed. Alarmingly, HP Canada proudly boasts Canadapost and Purolator as its partners, which was a quite concerning given that Canadapost is on strike right now. However, it didn’t appear that Purolator was involved in the strike, even though it’s the parcels arm of Canadapost, and I was mightily relieved to see the Purolator van pull up outside my house.

The packaging of the computer was quite ingenious, and the way it was all fitted into the box, meant that because I followed the instructions properly, I didn’t have to handle the screen while getting it out from all the padding. Take it from one who has manhandled a 65″ thin screen TV onto a wall, that’s a real bonus. The keyboard and mouse were both wired models, actually perfect for my needs, and battery-free, but they are very cheap and cheerful, so it hasn’t taken me long to replace those with better models that I had knocking around at home.

Then I began the set up process. Years ago when I was in IT support, I installed hundreds of software packages onto hundreds of PCs, and all using boxes full of floppy disks. It was a slow and painful business, and done at a time when very few PCs had an Internet connection, or even a Local Area Network. Compuserve was our friend back then, but only on the PC that had a modem and telephone line attached. Today, all I had to do was plug a network cable into the back of the PC and let it do its thing. The PC came with Windows 11 pre-loaded, but that all has to be updated and tweaked, but even then I had the thing working within a few minutes and was downloading all the paid software I have collected over the years. I could have cloned the boot disk from my old machine as it was the same size, but doing it the long way, by treating it as a first-time set up, I’ve been able to leave things out and make a few adjustments. A clean start is a good start, even if it takes a little longer.

Early impressions of the new PC are good. The screen resolution isn’t as tight as I’d like, and I could probably tighten it up a little, but I’ll leave it as it is because I’m sure to get used to it. I did hang a second monitor from the PC, and marvelled at how easy it is to do these days with an HDMI cable and Windows 11. The boot up is fast, and the response is good, although as so much is done through the Internet these days, it’s as much about having a decent connection as it is about the speed of the computer. I am slowly switching off all the little things that Windows likes to add, the bells and whistles as it were, that I have no need for. The very first thing I did was revert the right-click context menus to the Windows 10 version. The newer iteration of Windows uses little pictograms for Cut, Copy, and Paste, and if you want a full context menu you have to select it from the top menu, a retrograde step in my view. It seems that there are many Windows users out there who think the same as I do, though, because when you Google “Windows 10 Context Menu”, there are thousands of hits showing you how to achieve your aim. Perhaps Microsoft should take note and offer a choice of context menus at startup?

It’s probably an age thing, but I don’t get the use of so many pictograms in place of the written words. The Windows symbol for “Crop”, for example, means nothing to me. Sure, use the symbol, but put the word “Crop” underneath it for those of us that can read. It’s not just Microsoft, though, smartphone-based Millennials have been brought up on using pictures rather than words, and it’s they who are writing today’s software. Won’t anyone think of the old folk?

Time will tell if the new PC is up to the job, and I do intend to work it quite hard. For now, though, I will sit back and reflect on how all those years of setting up computers at work have proved to be very useful in retirement, even if I don’t need floppy disks anymore.

Be Safe

20 Wednesday Nov 2024

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I had an e-mail a couple of weeks ago that came with a PDF file. In that file was a letter to me from someone I didn’t know, claiming that they knew things about me and that my “secrets” would be made public if I didn’t send some money to them. Given that the street address, phone number and e-mail address was correct, it was a little frightening. Or it would have been but for some fundamental errors in the letter.

The first error was that they thought the phone number they were quoting was a cell phone, which it wasn’t. Threatening to put all manner of malware on my phone wasn’t going to work on an old fashioned landline. Then there was the issue of the person claiming to “see” inside my home, presumably through a camera on a computer or my cell phone, but that can’t happen with my computer and phone set up at home. Having access to my computer was another claim, and while I can’t claim to have the most secure set up, I do take precautions and I’m confident that no one has access to my computer, at least not that I’m not aware of. But, armed with some genuine information, data that is actually publicly available or maybe had been gleaned from a data breach somewhere, someone has attempted to extort money from me.

I toyed with reporting the matter to the Police, but the e-mail address was not traceable, and while they may have investigated, it would have taken a long time and probably revealed nothing. So, I deleted the e-mail, and the PDF file and awaited further contact.

The issue here is that if you’re not particularly tech-savvy, you might take this kind of threat seriously and be goaded into parting with money. Push out a ton of these letters and you’ll get some return from your efforts, I’d guess. The world can be a dark place sometimes.

What the incident did do, though, was prompt me into reviewing my online security arrangements. I subscribe to three different security packages covering phones and PCs. They were all up to date and reporting nothing untoward, which was good. I made sure all my Operating Systems were updated, too, as they are the front line of security. I also use a Virtual Private Network (VPN), at least some of the time, although I’ve found that online functionality can suffer with the VPN running, at least when working with certain software, or on certain websites. Where I lacked security, and it’s not directly associated with the attempted extortion, was with passwords. I had used the same passwords across a broad range of online accounts, and while not having had an issue so far, I thought it was time to tidy that up. With the use of a paid third-party password manager, I revisited all my online accounts, changed the passwords where I needed to, and took advantage of the additional protection the password manager software gave me. I looked back through the password records of my web browsers and was amazed to find data going back years. While the browser providers will always assure you that this data is safe, it is information that could be compromised, so I’ve stripped that data right down and now the browsers carry no significant password data. Changing passwords regularly is a must, anyway, and made easier with the use of the password manager. As an added layer of protection, I’ve gone to using just a single browser, rather than the chopping and changing browsers as I’ve been doing. There are issues with that, “all the eggs in one basket” so to speak, but at least I don’t have more than one Browser password file to manage now

No word back yet from my extortioner, and the original contact was a month ago. There have been no notified attacks on my computers, either, so it’s looking like it was a fishing trip. Obviously you never engage with people like that, but if I did I’d than them for boosting my online security, it’s been a very productive exercise