It looks as if we’ve dodged a bullet once again. We (the south west part of Western Australia) have been in lockdown since 6pm last Sunday due to one case of COVID-19 infection of a quarantine hotel worker. He did the right thing and detailed all his movements and contacts, but despite it being the more infectious UK variant, not one new case of infection has been found in the last five days, from tens of thousands of tests. That’s remarkable. How lucky we are.

The result is that assuming nothing bad happens today, the lockdown will end at 6pm this evening. Unfortunately the government is going to mandate mask wearing in public until 14 Feb.

So, in theory, we have a reunion committee meeting at a cafe on Tuesday. I’ve made a booking but I haven’t had any confirmation from the cafe. If the 4 sq. m. rule is in force, they may not be able to accommodate our group of seven. I’ll have to phone them on Monday, I guess.

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Meanwhile, I’m waiting on a visit from a woman from Silver Chain. The appointment was for 10am, but that’s past and I’ve had no advice as to whether she’s still coming or not. They phoned me about it last Monday and said they or she would get back to me, but no-one has phoned since then.

Update: it’s past 11am and she hasn’t come, and no-one has phoned either. I’m a little annoyed. I can understand not wanting to come in this lockdown, but she might have phoned. I dressed up for nothing 🙂

They said it was to be about “social support”. I don’t know what that means but I was looking forward to talking to her. Silver Chain say that they can provide something like this, “even if you just want a chat”. Well, yes I do. Despite living alone all my life, I do like to talk sometimes. I can go a week without speaking a word except to checkout ladies. The internet has opened up email and that helps, but I would like a visitor.

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My love affair with Wish.com continues and I’ve ordered even more clothes. All these are coming.

I must admit, I’ve become quite addicted to this site. It’s not just clothes, it’s all kinds of gadgets, tools, electronic and electrical components and things I’d never even thought of, didn’t know existed. Being me, I’ve stored them all away in compartmented boxes awaiting the day I need them. But being addicted to this damned PC, I don’t actually get around to doing the finger work any more.

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Sink, sank, sunk,
Who woulda thunk,
That the ABC,
Would feed us such junk!

ABC announcers (Alan Kohler!) say, “The market sunk today.” Holy smoke, it’s not hard to get it right. This is elementary, primary school grammar. They also mix up:
Drink, drank, drunk: I will drink (future); I drank (past); I have drunk (past ?)
Also shrink, shrank, shrunk. (Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. Wrong!!)

I talk about the ABC but that’s because they are the ones I see most. All TV announcers and journalists worldwide, including on the BBC, seem to have lost the ability to use these words correctly.

And on this theme, can’t anyone write proper tenses any more? I learnt a simple ditty in my childhood:
Each, every, either, neither, nor.
Each of those is singular.
Every one of those is singular.
Either of the two is singular.
Neither of them is plural.
Nor is any one of them plural.

Last year I started collecting grammatical errors from the web, mainly from ABC News because I read that a lot but also from the Guardian (not so many because they are pretty good), and any other source I read. Wow, it’s been a rich mine of howlers and stupid errors. The list has grown to a couple of hundred now.

I’ve done it in Notepad, the simple text editor, and it’s grown a bit unwieldy. I’ve included a comma after each part of each entry, hoping to pour it into a spreadsheet as comma-delimited data, but my first attempt was a disaster so I’ll have to parse it and try again.

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Speaking of Windows Notepad, does anyone else get fed up with the bug that’s been in the program since about Windows 3 in 1990? The bug is that when you save, the cursor jumps up some random number of lines and you lose sight of it, meaning, it doesn’t show. You have to use the arrow keys to move it so as to find it (the cursor, I mean).

But worse, the Save can actually delete your new entry and part of your previous text as well. It’s unpredictable – you need to do a Ctrl-Z Undo, usually twice, to restore the deleted text, which brings back your new entry.

However, the one thing that is predictable is that this only applies to the first Save after entering new text. Once you’ve got things as you want them again, subsequent saves will be fine.

It amazes me that this bug has been in the program for so long – thirty years! – and hasn’t been fixed, but also that I’ve never seen it mentioned in any computer writings. Am I the only one who’s seeing it?

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