Monday, January 22

 

 

I woke up to find a thin layer of fresh snow covering everything. Fortunately the snow lay flat on the ground and simply served to cover any icy patches. I felt glad that I had bothered to clear away all the original snow though, before it froze.

Tomas and I spent from 10:00 until 13:00 with the Innovation course. Each group made a presentation of their research and the three initial prototypes that they had concocted. The presentations varied from the vague to the less vague, and occasionally to the well-thought-out and specific. I felt the same way about the prototypes. Two groups had prototypes that involved nothing more imaginative than inventing a hashtag and using it on social media.

At 13:00 I met Nathalie, Maria, and Gunilla to see how far we had got with the organisation of the Buddyschool launch. Not very, came the answer. I showed a draft version of an invitation that explained briefly what Buddyschool involves, who funds it, and how the design process worked. We agreed on food and drink, and Maria booked the small auditorium.

After this I had a brief lunch while dealing with a student who disappeared to Nottingham a year ago, and now wants to write a thesis about a YouTube channel she may or may not set up.

I got a mail from Nebula that explained where I had gone wrong trying to set up a WordPress installation. They cheerfully told me that “using the embedded WordPress installer is not recommended for experienced admins. The installation is done in a separate folder that you have no access to using FTP. Instead you should install the manual installation package for WordPress in your public root folder, and create your database credentials yourself which you can then use in WordPress’ own installer.”

In other words, they have created a set-up that means only dummies would consider using the tools that they provide. I read this and words escaped me. I went to their website to check. Not only did this make no sense, but the site contains no indications anywhere to suggest that you avoid their installer. If Helsinki did not insist that their data gets stored on a server in Finland I would move the whole site to a Linode based in Germany right now.

I left the building with my brain melting and forwarded their mail to Buster on the metro. I waited until the metro because I noticed when I left Arcada that the temperature had dropped ten degrees and my hands had frozen.

At home we have full-strength tv again because Irma had contacted the Antenna Man directly. He had expressed surprise and joy when he discovered we had the second signal booster, and had raced round to check it. It had broken, which explained everything except for the fact that the woman who organises this odd system had forgotten to tell him about us, and about the whereabouts of the “missing” booster.

I wander into Naa’s old room and take some photographs at odd angles. This begins with me lying on the floor and noticing that things look different from down there. It progresses to me trying to line different things up. Then I realise that I can get three glass surfaces in one image, with only the smallest standing at right angles to the frame. There you go.

We will waste the whole evening watching nonsense in order to check that the television actually worked. After a long programme about Welsh people addicted to tanning I will have to stop.