Mindarie Beach on a cooler day.

“Diarist-at-large Richard Ackland flies about the nation.”

Well I’ll be fly-blown. The Saturday Paper listened to me and corrected a long standing error.

Ever since the Saturday Paper has been published, about a year, they’ve had a column called Gadfly written by Richard Ackland, a prominent Sydney lawyer and journalist. But the sub head always said “Diarist-at-large Richard Ackland flys about the nation.”

Flys?

Last week I emailed them:

“Like Sheldon Cooper, I’m overcome by twitching at this glaring misspelling. I’ve waited a long time to make my protest, thinking that it might be corrected eventually, but evidently I’ll be waiting for many more fly life cycles.

“I must assume it’s a deliberate play on fly. Nonetheless, I twitch uncontrollably. Bazinga? I think not.”

Well I’m flyblown. Today, Saturday 27 February, they’ve corrected the subhead to say “flies about the nation” and in the side bar as well.

I’ve emailed them to say thanks and congratulations, but to say I’m amazed that in nearly a year, no-one on the staff, or seemingly among your readers, has noticed this before. Well, thank goodness it’s fixed and I can stop twitching now. Bazinga.

______________

Trigg Beach today at 38C. Olympus E-PL2  (can’t fix tilt, sorry)

Phew, hot one today! 38ºC. I spent the morning, up to 2pm at a cafe next to the ocean so it wasn’t too bad, but when I got back to the car, I could hardly hold onto the wheel. Yowch. This is the sting in the tail to the end of summer. The ocean was calm as calm, ideal for the Rottnest Island swim (for my o/s readers, it’s an 11Km [sorry, 20Km] swimming race from a Perth mainland beach to Rottnest Island off the coast. It can be very rough if the wind is blowing, but it would have been a pleasure today.)

________________

Oh, bloody Windows! Damned Microsoft! Bugs, bugs galore. Constant stumbling blocks. Never ending hurdles.

I’ve sold my Sony laptop to a friend, therefore I’ve had to remove all my paid for software and my user name/identity before I hand it over. It’s a Win10 machine already.

But at every turn things have gone bad. I can’t add my friend as a new user without him having a Microsoft account. But I can’t make that choice! I can’t make a username and password for him. Anyway, talking to him today, it seems he already has an account, so he’ll have to send me the username and password before I can proceed.

So I thought, the simplest way would be to do a complete reformat and new install. But with Win10, we don’t have the install files. OK, I thought, I’ll download the .iso files on another of my PCs which is still on Win7 and make an install disc.

Hah! I run MediaCreationTool.exe but apart from a dark blue Windows 10 rectangle/logo, nothing happens! I’ve tried everything, registry cleaning, disabling my antivirus and firewall, but nothing helps. This tallies with my other desktop. Same deal, except that when I try to run this MediaCreationTool.exe on that, absolutely nothing happens, not even this logo.

I’ve got onto the MS forums and asked the question why. The answer I got was, “Are all updates installed?” Dammit, I’ve already told them AutoUpdate is enabled, so YES, all updates are installed. They suggested another step (a clean boot) but that didn’t help, so I tried to reply to their message, but my reply is constantly rejected by their server. I am so fed up!

At this stage I’m thinking of wiping and reformatting this laptop and installing Windows 7  from one of my fully legal copies. I HATE Windows 10.