Friday, February 22, 2013


Steam ironing seems to have subdued the bottom edge of the Relax all right. A great relief.  The fabric is lovely and drape-y, the yarn is beautiful. This is going to be a good one, if I can get the fit of the shoulders right.

My favourite madelinetosh’s are the nearly-solid ones. The range includes hand-painted yarns with more distinct colours, and others that are solid or effectively so. There was some variation in the electric red sweaters I knit for the  Big and Little Thomases but it sort of gets swallowed up in redness.

Christmas '11:



Lately, I have knit a sleeveless vest for my husband which he wears nearly every day – it’s time I got it off him for washing; and Ed’s Gardening Sweater; and now this. And they’re all wonderful.

I reached the fourth row of eyelets last night.

I paid a rare visit to Facebook yesterday. I had a friend-request from a real friend. It was fun scrolling through those lists of people who are friends of my friends. Talk about Six Degrees of Separation – the whole world was there. (And this morning I learn that Facebook has reduced the degrees of separation to four.) I signed up to be friends with Lucy Neatby and Brandon Mably and Lorna’s Laces and Annie Modesitt and some others – the Facebook pages in the Flipboard app on my iPad this morning are greatly enhanced.

If you have an iPad, get Flipboard. James told me about it. It’s great fun (and free).

(Some of) Life’s Other Problems

Cat, alas, it is true that the Surface won’t run Dropbox. Here’s a link to the Dropbox blog page. It’s full of the outraged howls of those disappointed by the App. Dropbox does, I gather, run perfectly well on a proper Windows 8 computer; just get the program, don’t bother with the useless App. Some of the howls are misplaced, for that reason.

But the Surface is advertised as a PC, or at any rate, an acceptable PC substitute. I don’t think I would have bought it if I had known about this difficulty. And I feel pretty sure that eventually it will be resolved – but eventually isn’t good enough. At some point I will write rather stiffly to Microsoft.

Presumably they see Skydrive as a useful money-spinner. You have to pay when you get past a certain storage limit, as indeed you do with Dropbox and LibraryThing.

Theresa, you won’t be surprised by now to learn that I couldn’t find RainbowDrive on the Surface. (That's a program which will synchronise Skydrive and Dropbox.) I wandered through the Store, which doesn’t seem to offer a search facility; and I searched “Apps” from that bar that scrolls in from the right – presumably that means that it searches the App Store. No luck. One of my Dummies books says that the Store shows only Apps which will actually run on the Surface…

I went to the BT website and tried their on-line chat facility for my router/call diversion problem. (See yesterday) I got only the suggestion that I ring Customer Service, with a phone number. It’s worth trying; I’ll probably do it. But I have a gloomy conviction that it’s no use ringing anyone big about anything these days – you’ll just wait half an hour to talk to someone in Mumbai who doesn’t understand the problem. Try phoning a bank!

7 comments:

  1. If you go to store and then launch search it will show up but only if you spell it with no space and the R and D capitalized.
    RainbowDrive
    I couldn't find it at first either. Now the question is will it actually be of any use to you.

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  2. Anonymous12:18 PM

    May moments of light illumine the darkness today, and may you fall upon the good will of a competent customer service representative.

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  3. Can you return it for an iPad? Sorry to hear that the world of tech is posing such difficulties. At least the knitting is going well!

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  4. Anonymous12:23 AM

    I've actually had good results whenever I've had to call my bank - the people in Mumbai have always understood the problem presented and have been able to fix it. We've had no problems understanding each others' accents, either. I hope you will fare as well.
    --stashdragon

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  5. i agree about returning it for an ipad. however, if you dont, what about GOOGLE DRIVE? if you sign up for a google account (you dont have to use that email you can set up forwarding to your new gmail account of your regular email and it will show up as your regular address).

    anyway, google drive is just like dropbox except much easier. there is a free amount (i think its 5 gb) but you can buy incremental storage space very cheaply.

    the good thing about google drive is that the web interface is closer to a file directory structure than dropbox. and it does sync down to your hard drive and vice versa.

    i work in the IT industry specifically with customer support for applications and all kinds of computers and mobile devices, if you want to do a phone call sometime (i am in nyc) to sort some of these things out.

    best luck!

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  6. well, i just searched... it seems that google drive doesnt work either. but a recent article i found mentions SURFACE PRO. .. which does support all the cloud apps - dropbox and google drive and skydrive of course.

    maybe you can exchange and upgrade?

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  7. I must admit that in the past I always dreaded ringing BT, press 1 for this 2 for that and sit for half an hour twiddling your thumbs, but to be fair to them if I've had to ring them any time in the last year (for work incidentally) the service has been much improved. Still lots of button pressing but the people at the other end have been really good :)

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