… work out as planned, unfortunately.
Fitting the new hard drive into the little Acer laptop went quite easily in the end, but I went for double or quits in changing the RAM while the laptop was in bits. Dismantling it further to access the RAM went fine enough, but in reassembling it, I broke a pin holder on one of the data ribbons. They were a lot more fragile than I was expecting.
The laptop switches on fine but no matter what, the screen won’t light up and there’s no evidence that the disk is working. I put the old disk back in and that’s noisy enough to be heard when it fires up, but that’s not doing anything either.
Tomorrow I’m going to take it apart and swap the RAM back and see if it’s a RAM fault. If it still won’t work, all that I can think of is that the pin holder that I broke isn’t for the touchpad but for something else more important.
It was a shame, altogether, because it was looking so good. But you can’t win a coconut every time.
What was even better was never mind the third alarm or even the second alarm, I actually beat the first alarm out of bed this morning. And it’s been a long time since that’s happened. And having prepared a pile of music when I was in Leuven last time, I bashed away at the Radio Programme straight away and by 12:15 I’d almost finished.
“Almost”, I said, because somewhere along the line I’d miscalculated and I’d over-run by a whole minute. So I had to sit all the way through it and edit out a whole minute’s worth of speech. Luckily there are always little bits here and there that are specifically designed to be edited out if necessary if the programme over-runs but by the time that I’d found an excess minute I was scraping the bottom of the barrel.
After lunch I attacked the little laptop and we all know how that went But while I was doing that I was downloading and printing out all of the paperwork that I need for Leuven this week. Including the Belgian Government’s Passenger Location Form. Now that they are checking them at the station I mustn’t forget to take it with me.
And, unsurprisingly given my early start, I had a little sleep during the course of the afternoon too.
We had the afternoon walk today of course.
There was a really thick, heavy grey cloud out there this afternoon. Anyone looking out there would have immediately known what is meant by “leaden skies”.
However, although the cloud ceiling might be low today, the view was nevertheless quite clear as far as distance goes. There was a trawler right out to sea just about within range so I took a photo of it and to my surprise, I could see in the background the island of Jersey and even the buildings of the town of St Helier.
And considering how far away the town of St Helier is, the buildings have come out quite clearly. One of these days I’m going to nip over there on one of the freighters and inspect things for myself.
While I was leaning over the sea wall looking out at the trawler and the buildings of St Helier in the background, I found something else that I hadn’t noticed.
There’s a grid somewhere along the footpath but I hadn’t really thought about where it went and where its outlet was. But today, I noticed that there’s a pipe running from from where the grid might be, out over the cliffs.
Not that the pipework is going to be doing much good because, as you can see, it’s seen much better days. And I’m also intrigued to wonder why they bothered to drill a hole to pass it through the rocks down there.
And it’ll be interesting to see what’s happening to it when it’s pouring down, because it doesn’t seem to drain the pathway very much.
Having satiated my curiosity with regard to the goings-on around the Place d’Armes I set off on my walk around the headland.
The schools are out this week so there were crowds of people walking around this afternoon. Not as many as there were over the weekend but the weather was so much nicer then, despite the high wind. It had dropped quite considerably today but the overcast weather and the cold weren’t conducive to hanging around out there for long.
And you can see the sky pretty well from here. It’s all heavy, grey and miserable although it’s quite clear away in the distance down the Brittany coast.
Crowds of people about on the footpath going up to the lighthouse at the Pointe du Roc but that wasn’t all that was going on either.
There was a zodiac roaring up and down the English Channel just offshore and what was bizarre about that was that there were three guys in wetsuits astride it. And I wouldn’t have been surprised if they had snorkels flippers and aqualungs to go with it too.
They went back and forth out there for a few times as I watched, but I wouldn’t see what they were trying to do and they weren’t leaping out into the water. But the zodiac looked like an official one to me, something that the forces of Authority might use.
Having seen a trawler out at sea in the English Channel I was wondering whether there might have been anything exciting going on in the bay, so I headed off that way to look.
Nothing at all of any note, but we do have here a good example of how there are the heavy clouds in the sky but in the distance the view goes on for ever. The town of Cancale is quite clear over there this afternoon, silhouetted on the clifftop across the bay on the Brittany coast.
And over to the left at Cancale there is one of these builders’ tower cranes so someone is having some building work done over there.
And that’s really dismal in the sense that in the old days, they would have labourers, hod carriers and apprentices swarming up ladders carrying the bricks and tiles and the like. Nowadays with all of the automation there is no longer the demand for unskilled labour on a building site and it’s no wonder why there are so many unemployed people around.
Not everyone is able to be a financial consultant or a doctor or a telesales consultant.
The other day I mentioned that I’d seen a couple of people working away on the yacht in the chantier navale.
Today I walked on down the path on that side of the headland to see what was going on, and I was in luck because there they were again and I was lucky enough to catch them with the camera.
And there seems to be plenty of work going on with the hull at the moment. They seem to have patched it and it seems to be all masked off in places as if they are going to be doing some patchwork painting. That might account for them putting up that plastic sheeting at the side of it, if they are going to start on some respraying.
While I was out there looking at whatever was going on in the port, the trawler that I had seen out there in the English Channel came sailing … “dieseling” – ed … around the headland.
What surprised me was that it was Le Pearl, the new trawler that arrived in port from the builders a few weeks before Christmas. In the few months that she’s been here, I haven’t yet seen her out at sea and as far as I’m aware she’s only been out the once. So seeing her out there, presumably having been out there working, is good news.
The flags that were waving around on her stern were of interest too. I was trying to work out what they were. They looked far too much like “Jolly Roger” pirate flags to me.
Maybe she’s been fishing in British waters.
Having seen crowds on the paths around the headland and more crowds of people out at sea, it’s no surprise that there were also crowds in the air too.
A aeroplane went flying by overhead as I was there on the path overlooking the harbour. She was too high up for me to read her registration number and there were no details of any plane having taken off from the airport at Granville so I’ve no idea what she it.
Back here, I carried on with my less-than-productive work with the old laptop and when I’d finally abandoned my attempts I had a good play around on the guitars.
Tea was a stuffed pepper and rice followed by an old apple turnover from the freezer as afters.
Having finished my notes now I’m off to bed. I have my Welsh class tomorrow so I need to be on form. The photos from Sunday still haven’t been done yet so that looks as if it will be a job for when I’m in leuven later this week.
Not that I’m short of things to do, but it’s just one more raccoon skin on the wall.
