Tech Support: the Admin version.

Today I was sitting happily subjugating spreadsheets when one of our researchers came in, to provide me with an interesting example of a dichotomy in technical knowledge.
"Hello! I have a difficult IT question for you. The external mouse for my laptop isn't working, and I was hoping you could come along and fix it."

So, I trotted along to her room, to find that what she was waving around was... not remotely a mouse. It was, instead, a receiver for a wireless mouse which she'd dug up from the depths of the stationery cupboard. (Where I'd hidden it for exactly this reason. There's no mouse to accompany it.) Now, it was round, but it had one teeny little button, and a huge dip in the middle, and wasn't hand-sized at all. In short, it didn't really look like a mouse.

I didn't have the fortitude to explain, so I ran off with it, and returned with a shiny new mouse.

What makes this interesting to me, is that this same researcher is completely fluent in statistics programmes and GPS and mapping programmes, all of which are so complex that they make my toes curl* just looking at them.

People are so interesting!

*not in a good way.

Picture post: More from East Lothian in May

While I was in North Berwick, some people I am in chaoots with came down for a visit and a picnic. We stopped off at the butcher for Serious Sausage Rolls (they're HUGE and taste good and are very filling. Just what's needed when going exploring), and then went to explore Dirleton Castle, stopping off at the very pleasingly round doocot first:


We then walked round to the castle entrance, which is still very imposing:


The castle was attacked by cannon; the damage wasn't ever repaired:


The entrance reminded us all of the castle in Knightmare:


We had a good poke about round the castle. This is the passage to my favourite room:

(The doors are as small as they look - people were shorter then.)

In which my father has a sense of humour.

There's a major dinghy sailing competition in North Berwick* this week, with sailors from all over the UK. Most of them are adults, and many of them usually sail on lakes.

One bloke (an adult) wandered up to my dad, who is performing cat-herding duties on the beach. He looked across the beach - where the tide was half way out, and said, "Is this place tidal?"

My father replied, "Oh, only twice a day."

This bloke had driven himself and his boat up from England. Apparently he managed to do so without looking at a map.


*North Berwick is a seaside town, which - if you look at a map - is very obviously next to the North Sea.

Picture post: North Berwick at the end of May.

At the end of May, I went down to North Berwick a few times, taking lots of pictures of course. All of the pictures below link back to my flickr album, where you'll find more pics that I haven't posted here.



The apple trees had bloomed with lovely delicate pink flowers since I was there last (nice weather has been a long time coming this year). We've got two apple trees: one that produces enormous cooking apples, and once that produces lovely crunchy cox's pippin type apples. The sort that make wonderful apple pie.


We went for a walk down to the harbour, where I had a pang of jealousy:

My boat is in storage at the moment, and I have to get club membership before I can borrow their boats. Hopefully I'll get dinghy sailing soon: there's nothing so exhilarating as the feeling when you catch the wind and take off, flying over the waves.

We wandered back along the beach, where we met a rather friendly collie and his owner, who was someone my father knew in the sailing club. The collie sized us all up, then deposited his stick at my feet. After having me throw it along the beach numerous times, he decided he wanted a swim. I tried to resist his attempts to take me paddling with him:


But ultimately, who can resist an enthusiastic (if somewhat damp) collie bouncing about and grinning at you? Certainly not I. He was successful:


More pictures under the cut:

Connections: Things I did today.

My job involves administrating a research department with an interest in health. We have a working relationship with the Scottish health system.

Today I got information from the CIA, which I then passed on to a part of the Scottish health service.

It's the connection between the two, facilitated by the internet, which fascinates me, because they are such disparate entities. Somewhere in America, there's a little person who did the inputting of the data, which was then uploaded to the internet, which was then found by someone in Scotland, which was then downloaded, which I then passed on to a member of the health service to use[0].

Amazing. When you look at it like that, the world is a small place. But if I wanted to say thanks to the little person in America, the world suddenly expands again - being too low on the totem pole, their name won't be recorded anywhere. They'll never know how much their data improved my day.


[0] I know, it's an atrocious sentence. My inner English Teacher is cringing.

Darkness in Edinburgh.

I've just finished transcribing 100+ Presargonic inscriptions into my Excel Spreadsheet O' Doom, so have rewarded myself by playing with some photos. Here are the results - partly inspired by 's complaint about stolen snow. (Thank you, my dear!)



It snowed last night, at about 3am.

From Edinburgh at night.

From Edinburgh at night.

It was lying on the roof outside my window:

From Edinburgh at night.

From Edinburgh at night.

It got up to about 1.5cm by the time I went to bed, so everything began to look magical, the way ordinary objects begin to when they are covered in a dusting of snow. Sadly, it had melted by this morning.

~~~

The moon has been interesting recently:

From Edinburgh at night.

Leith Photographs.

Since it's heading for Autumn now (although I'm still holding out hope for an indian summer), I thought I'd post some pictures from what little summer we had.

Back in August, P and I went for a little meander along The Shore in Leith.