Sorted – sort of

Nisakiman Posted on 25th February 2018 by

As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve been having problems with my computer. And of course, those problems started at the weekend. And naturally, that weekend happened to be a long weekend, with the Monday being ‘Clean Monday‘, an important day in the Greek Orthodox calendar, marking the beginning of Lent.

I should mention here that the Greek Orthodox Easter (and all the dates around and pertaining to it), doesn’t often fall on the same date as the Anglican or Roman Easter (I think I can recall just one occasion in the past fifteen years when Greece and UK have celebrated Easter on the same day), due to differences in the way the different churches calculate when Easter should fall. Don’t ask me why – the arcane rituals and pronouncements of the various churches are a closed book to me, and have been since I was a young teenager and decided that it all seemed a bit, well, unbelievable.

Anyway, Clean Monday meant that I wasn’t able to take my computer to the guy round the corner until the Tuesday, which I duly did. Parking in that area, as in many parts of Patras, was as usual a nightmare, but I managed to find a spot not far from the shop, for which I was grateful, as it was pissing with rain at the time. I explained the problem to the guy as best I could, my command of technical Greek being somewhat limited (indeed, my command of technical English is pretty limited also, requiring multiple visits to Google to translate various words in computerspeak language). He seemed to understand what I was trying to explain to him (fortunately things like ‘HDMI’, ‘DVI’ and ‘VGA’ are deemed universal, and are the same in Greek as in English), and told me that he’d call me when he knew something, probably in a couple of days. So I left it to his tender ministrations, wondering if his ‘couple of days’ was going to be a Greek couple of days (that is, anything up to a month), or an actual couple of days. I must admit I wasn’t overly optimistic, as he was surrounded by tower units in various stages of evisceration, but having carted my tower unit there, I didn’t have much choice but to leave it with him. So it was a pleasant surprise when, two days later, he called me to tell me it was ready.

I hotfooted it up to his shop to pick it up, where he explained to me that one of the memory cards was dodgy, and that had caused the problems. He’d also removed and cleaned a couple of the cooling fans to improve the airflow, including the fan on the graphics card, which had apparently seized up completely and was causing the graphics card to run much hotter than it should. I knew that the graphics card fan wasn’t working properly, but to access it meant removing the whole thing and dismantling the casing to access the fan; something I was somewhat reluctant to do, my knowledge of the internals of a PC being rudimentary at best. He charged me €25, plus another €5 for a DVI to HDMI adapter I needed, which I thought was quite reasonable.

The removal of one of the memory cards, however, left me with just over half the RAM I had. When Manolis first built the computer for me about eight or nine years ago, we put 3 x 1GB memory cards in, which seemed quite sufficient for the XP I was running at the time. A few years later, when I went to Win 7, we decided that a bit more memory was required, so I got another card, this time 2GB, for the empty slot, thus giving me 5GB of RAM and a faster computer. Unfortunately it was the 2GB card which was causing the problems, so I’m back to 3GB and a very slow computer. He also said to me that it’s always best, if you use multiple memory cards, to use all the same make and spec. So now I’m looking at the added expense of buying 4 x 2GB cards to replace the ones I have – about €100 outlay. Bugger. Still, with 8GB of RAM, the old girl should be able to break into a gallop when I’m demanding it. Or that’s the theory, anyway.

So I’ve been checking out the suppliers websites looking for something suitable (for ‘suitable’ read ‘cheap’). Problem is, I don’t really know what I’m looking for by way of specification. A friend in NZ who knows much more about these things has been giving me some pointers, so I guess I’m going to have to bite the bullet and order something and hope that it works. The choice is somewhat limited, as being an old computer it uses DDR2 cards, and most stuff is DDR3 or DDR4 nowadays. And they’re not interchangeable. Oh well…

Last weekend was Carnival weekend in Patras, where on the Saturday evening they have the ‘foot parade’, where all the various clubs and societies participating dress up in their carnival costumes (as many as 30,000 participants) and march and dance their way along the route, and on the Sunday they return to the same route, but this time with their floats. I’m told that the Patras Carnival is the third biggest in the world, although I rather have my doubts about that. It is, however, well attended, with something like 300,000 people piling into the city centre for the weekend parades.

We went into town on the Saturday evening by bus. It’s still too cold for the scooter (I fall into the ‘fairweather rider’ camp), and parking in central Patras is a nightmare at the best of times, let alone on Carnival weekend. The bus service is actually very convenient for us, as it’s only a two or three minute walk from here to the bus stop, and then a ten minute bus ride into the centre of town. And they run every 10 – 15 minutes, so you never have more than a few minutes to wait.

Patras is a university city, so the students were well represented in the crowds; mostly drunk and doing the usual sort of studenty stuff, they were quite entertaining on their own. Dotted around everywhere were stalls selling half-bottles of Mavrodaphne (a sweet, fortified red wine that originated here – I’ll wager there were a few sore heads the next morning! It’s not my choice of drink, I have to say…), and of course all the peripteros (kiosks) had stocked up on beer, so many people were wandering around swigging on their booze and getting slowly sozzled. They don’t have any laws here about drinking in public as it’s not considered to be a problem. It was also interesting to note that despite the huge crowds and the booze flowing freely, there was no visible police presence. They stayed out on the periphery of the proceedings, ready to move in the unlikely event that they might be needed. They weren’t. Events like this in Greece are very relaxed affairs, and tend to be self-policing. No hard and fast rules and regulations, no restrictions on anything, and normally no trouble.

I grabbed this on my phone, so it’s not exactly high quality, but gives an idea of the parade. You will notice that ‘Health & Safety’ do not loom large in Greek celebrations! As well as the flares the marchers were brandishing, they were letting off fireworks, including rockets, although I’m not sure how they were launching the rockets, as they were constantly on the move.

All in all a good evening, lots of fun. We sat down at a table in the main square for a few souvlakis and a half kilo of wine, which came to about €15 for three of us – we met a friend in town, who I believe that apart from me is the only expat living in Patras, which is quite surprising given that Patras is the gateway to central Greece and the Peloponnese. There are probably quite a few who maintain summer / holiday properties here, but as far as I can ascertain we’re the only expats who live here all year.

The only other expat in Patras! (I think.)

(I pixellated his features as I’m not sure how he’d feel about having his image uploaded to the web, and I have no wish to upset anyone.)

Hopefully by this time next week I’ll have 8GB of RAM and be able to process images and video at a decent speed – at the moment it’s all a bit clunky.

So I’m sort of sorted, computer-wise, but not quite.

 

 

It all started out so well…

Nisakiman Posted on 18th February 2018 by

 

Last Wednesday, I had an email from my ISP telling me that the fibre-optic system they were installing a few months ago was now up and running, and would I like to upgrade from my ADSL package, which was nominally 24 mbps but in fact at best achieved 13 mbps download speed and 0.8 mbps upload.

As a valued customer of many years standing, they were offering me the VDSL package (which includes a bunch of free calls to both landline and mobile) of 30 mbps for just a couple of Euros more per month than I pay at the moment. So I clicked on the relevant links and ordered the upgrade. The following day, I had a call from the company to verify that I actually wanted to upgrade, along with the mandatory security question (in this case, my Greek tax number) to ascertain that I was actually the person who paid the bill, and she told me that I should be connected sometime within the next two weeks. Fine, no problem. I wasn’t desperate.

The next day, Friday, about mid-morning, the internet cut off. Not unusual, and it’s rarely for more than ten minutes or so, so I went out on the balcony to enjoy the warmth of the sun for a few minutes. We’ve had a fair bit of rain recently, so it was a welcome bit of fine weather, and I like to take advantage. As I was leaning on the railings enjoying a ciggy, I saw a phone company van appear from round the corner where the connection box is, and drive off. Now, having lived in Greece for 15 years, prior to my moving to Patras I would have thought nothing about it. However, Patras has surprised me on a couple of occasions before, most notably when I first bought the place and got the water and electricity connected. I managed, in a single morning, not only to do all the change of ownership etc paperwork in the two respective offices, but I also was connected to both by lunchtime the same day, which really is something unheard of in Greece. However, it happened, as I explained in an earlier post.

I knew that the phone company van would only be coming out of that road if he’d been doing some work in our connection box, and when I came in, I said to my wife that that was probably the reason we’d lost the internet.  Before Patras, that’s probably as far as my train of thought would have gone, but now it progressed to “I wonder if they upgraded the line already?” So I sat down at my computer and did a speed test.

Speed test results

 

Fuck me, 27.9 down and 2.71 up! I’m getting close to 21st century internet speeds! And connected the day after I’d confirmed the order! Patras is truly amazing! Anyway, just to double check, I downloaded a couple of movies. Just as an academic exercise, you understand. Blimey, they were downloaded in no time. I spent the rest of the afternoon playing with my new high(er) speed connection, until, for some unknown reason, the mouse stopped working. So I changed the batteries. Still no joy. Next, I moved the USB receiver to another port. Nada. Bugger. Luckily, I had a spare mouse stashed somewhere, and after much digging through boxes, I found it. Batteries in, USB receiver plugged in and off it went, working fine. I went off to do a couple of things, and when I returned to the computer, the monitor screen had lost all the red, and was a monochromatic blue-green colour. Bugger, bugger, bugger. As I described in a recent post, I just bought a new monitor because the old one had done exactly the same thing, and because it was old, I figured it had just come to the end of its useful life. But the monitor I now have is barely a month old, and the likelihood of it developing the exact same problem as the old one so early on seemed pretty remote. What had made me think that the old monitor was at fault was the fact that I also have a 42″ TV connected for when we watch movies or stream stuff, and the colours on that were fine. And the TV colour was still fine now, so It was unlikely to be a problem with the graphics card.

So I got onto Google to see what the problem could possibly be. After some investigation, it was starting to look like it was the cable that was at fault. The computer has two DVI sockets in the back, one of which has a DVI to HDMI adapter connected, with an HDMI cable running to the TV, and the other has a DVI to VGA adapter (the old monitor only had a VGA socket), with a VGA cable running to the monitor. The new monitor has both VGA and HDMI sockets in the back, so when I installed it, I just used the same VGA connection I’d used for the old monitor, and it worked fine. Until now. So I dug out another HDMI cable, connected it to the TV outlet on the computer, plugged it in to the back of the monitor, and after a bit of faffing around with the monitor settings, voila! Full colour! I gave myself a pat on the back for being so clever.

And then the replacement mouse froze. Bloody hell. Ok, a re-start very often sorts out problems like that, but with a frozen mouse, I couldn’t do anything onscreen, so I hit the re-boot button on the tower unit. Not ideal, I know, but I didn’t really have any other option (or not as far as I know, not being particularly computer minded). So the computer shut down, and started up again, displaying the first splash screen with ‘American Megatrends’ or whatever it is, and then – nothing. It just stayed on that page. At the bottom there was a ‘Press DEL for setup’ and something else, but the computer didn’t respond to ‘DEL’, or any other key for that matter. Damn. So back to Google (on my wife’s laptop this time), which mostly had stuff by computer geeks suggesting things which may as well have been written in Swahili for all the sense it made to me. But one thing I came across which I did understand was the suggestion that the small battery on the motherboard may need replacing. Well the tower unit was due for its biannual clean, so I dragged it out, removed the side and gave it a good hoovering, and then looked for the battery. It was quite hard to find, as it was right down near the bottom and was obscured by a bunch of cabling. It was one of those button batteries, and as chance would have it, it was the same size as the battery in the kitchen scales, which I happened to have a couple of spares for. It was a real bugger to get out, because it was very inaccessible and was quite tightly housed in a plastic case. However, I finally got it out, and bunged in the new one. I then put it all back together, reconnected all the cables at the back, and turned it on.

This time, the splash screen is for ASUS (the MB), citing ‘Stability, Reliability, Performance’, with ‘Press DEL to run setup’ and ‘Press TAB to display BIOS POST message’. Problem is, it doesn’t respond to either of those keys, or any others on the keyboard. And it doesn’t load any further than that first screen. And it doesn’t even respond to the on/off button on the front of the tower unit. The only way I can shut it down is by turning off the power supply. So I’m stuffed. I’m going to have to take it to a computer repair shop and hope they can fix it for me, because I’ve gone as far as my limited knowledge permits. I can’t think of anything else I can do.

And of course, it happened at the beginning of the weekend. And Monday is a holiday. So it won’t be until Tuesday that I can even think about getting it sorted.

And it all started out so well…

Bugger.

 

Driving

Nisakiman Posted on 10th February 2018 by

 

I’ve always enjoyed driving. All kinds of driving and all kinds of vehicles. I enjoy the cut and thrust of city driving, and I enjoy the leisurely relaxation of country driving. I enjoy being able to look at the views around me during the daytime, and I enjoy the isolation and tunnel vision of night driving. I’ve enjoyed the challenge of operating different types of driveable machinery – diggers, tractors, front-end loaders, dump-trucks, forklift trucks, tracked vehicles – of all shapes and sizes. And I’ve enjoyed experiencing the gamut of road vehicles, from mopeds to articulated trucks.

From a very early age, I wanted to drive. I always associated driving with freedom, as indeed I still do. I’d look on with envy at the grown-ups as they hopped into their cars, or onto their motorbikes, turned the ignition key and – vroom! The world was suddenly their oyster. Free to go whither they would, the wind rushing through their hair, the road unfolding endlessly ahead of them.

I wanted to be able to drive so much, I could taste it.

My first opportunity to drive a motorised vehicle came when I was about nine or ten years old I think, and my mother bought a Corgi motorbike thingy.

Corgi bike

My mother, bless her, had absolutely no rapport with any motorised vehicle of any description. I don’t know how many times she took her driving test, but it was certainly more than a dozen; and she failed every time. She used to say to me: “I can drive a car alright (which was itself a debatable point), but it’s the other traffic that’s the problem. If there were no other cars on the road, I’d be fine…”.

Yes, but mother, the fact is…

This was a woman who, when out on a bicycle, would dismount at roundabouts and walk the bike round on the pavement, so as to avoid having to actually negotiate the roundabout. And I’m talking about back in the 1950s, when traffic as we know it today just didn’t exist. By the mid – sixties, she’d given up the bicycle altogether because she thought there were too many cars. No, my mother was not to be counted among the world’s ‘natural drivers’. She was an intelligent woman, and had many talents. Driving a car, however, was not among them.

But she persisted with buying various bizarre vehicles that she thought she might be able to drive, and the Corgi bike was one of the first. It was painfully slow (only the one gear) and not very comfortable, and unsurprisingly never really engaged my mother. I, on the other hand, thought it was wonderful. Heaven sent. A dream machine! And I had the luxury of a two acre garden in which to buzz around on this most amazing opportunity which had fallen into my lap. I would zap up and down the gravel drive, power-sliding (as much as a low-powered, single gear Corgi would allow power-sliding) at each end to go back the way I’d come, all the while dreaming of the day that I’d be able to break free of the confines of the garden and head off down the open road.

I learned to drive a car when I was twelve, maybe thirteen. I’d grown enough by that time that I could reach the pedals and see (just about) over the steering wheel. A family friend had a Hillman Minx convertible, and offered (read ‘was relentlessly pestered’) to take me to a disused airfield to learn to drive it.

Hillman Minx Convertible

It was the same model as the one in the photo above, although not in the same pristine condition! In fact, it was quite scruffy, and a shitty green colour. It had a bench front seat and column shift, and in my opinion at that moment in time (since I was going to be given the opportunity to drive it) was the best car in the world. The nearest I’d got to driving a car at that stage was sitting in my dad’s car, holding the steering wheel and going “VROOM, VROOM!”, and a spin on the Dodgems at the fairground.

I’d already got the hang of the clutch thingy when playing on the Corgi, albeit hand, rather than foot operated, so it wasn’t a huge leap to transfer that skill to the car. In fact the whole thing felt completely natural – I took to it like a duck to water. It probably took me half an hour or so to get the hang of it all, and from that point on it was pedal to the metal. With the airfield being quite long, I was able to get up to a good speed (probably only 30mph, but it felt like Mach 1 to me), and actually feel that wind through my hair. Oh bliss! The only downside I remember was being constantly told to slow down, but even that didn’t impinge on the exhilaration I felt that afternoon. I was driving! A real car! This, it seemed, is what I’d been waiting for all my short life. Nothing else mattered.

But it was still bloody years – eons – before I’d be allowed to get out on the highway. Damn! What to do?

The Gods must have smiled on me, because a year or so on, I got a weekend job on a nearby fruit farm. The pay was terrible (the owner was using a 1949 copy of the ‘Official Guide To Pay Rates For Agricultural Workers’), and I think he was paying me 1/3d an hour (a tad over 6p in new money), but the bonus was that he had a tractor and a couple of small tracked vehicles (called ‘cats’, as I remember) for pulling trailers around the orchards. The tractor, a smallish Massey Ferguson, was used mostly for grass cutting or rotovating a few fields he had where he grew vegetables.

As an aside, my boss, the owner of the fruit farm, was related (I’m not quite sure how) to the Mitford sisters, and on more than one occasion while I was there Diana would turn up with her husband, Sir Oswald Mosley. I have to admit, it didn’t mean much to me at the time, but I now wish I’d paid more attention when I spoke (briefly) with them, as I have no real recollection of them or what they said to me. Ah, these moments of history which pass us by…

Anyway, it didn’t take me long to persuade (pester) my boss that I was the ideal candidate for tractor and cat driving duties, so I inveigled my rear end into a driving seat again, much to my delight. It was the only thing that kept me there. The boss was a real task-master, and the pay, as I said, was lousy. But I got to drive! And for that pleasure, I was willing to endure all the negatives about the job.

A little anecdote which comes to mind as I recollect my time there, was when I was rotovating one of the fields. On a strip of land separating the field where I was working and the adjoining apple orchard, there were several bee hives. He got nice honey from these, but I would imagine his main reason for having them was for pollination purposes. Anyway, I was trundling up and down this field, turning the earth over, and as I passed the hives, something, maybe the noise of the tractor, or perhaps a stone flung at the hive by the rotovator blades, disturbed the bees, and they poured out of the hive in an angry mob, looking for the cause of their discomfort. With me being the only foreign object in the vicinity, I was what attracted their attention.

I can highly recommend not being chased by a swarm of angry bees. It’s a disquieting and painful experience. I fortunately noticed them amassing around the hive before they launched their attack, and in one fluid motion raised the rotovator, engaged high-ratio and hit, at speed, the adjacent track back to the farmhouse. The old Massey Ferguson was not, alas, a match for the speed of the angry mob in hot pursuit, not even in high-ratio, and it wasn’t long before the bees had overhauled the object of their ire.

Fuck.

I was kind of stuck, really, as I was trying to keep control of the bucking bronco I was driving (the gravel track I was on wasn’t exactly billiard table smooth) and at the same time flailing madly to try to discourage my attackers. It wasn’t too far to the house, and I skidded into the courtyard, leapt off my mount and headed for the hosepipe, which I turned on full and doused myself with. The water was bloody freezing, and I didn’t have a change of clothes, but those niceties had to be put to one side under the circumstances. The water did the trick, and my tormentors lost interest and presumably went back to the hive, doubtless satisfied with a good job well done. The would-be invader had been repelled – routed, even, and the hive was once again secure.

I was a bit lumpy for a few days after that, but it could have been worse. In the end I only had about twenty stings, mostly on my arms and head. However, not something I’ve ever wanted to repeat.

I left that job eventually, tractors notwithstanding, as I’d reached an age where other things were starting to take priority, like girls, music and going to the pub. Back in those days I could get a drink in many pubs at the age of 15 – the landlords must have known I was underage, but the attitude was much more relaxed back then, and as long as you didn’t get paralytic and make trouble, you’d be ok.

Thus ensued a hiatus in my driving career which lasted a few years, as when I reached an age at which I was legally permitted to drive a car, I was on the cusp of heading out for parts unknown, and driving, if you’ll excuse the pun, took a back seat.

So it wasn’t until some years later that I was able to re-visit my passion for driving. However, by this stage it was a whole new ball game. The confines of the garden could be left behind and the open road beckoned…