bunn

If Great Cthulhu devours the Houses of Parliament during, say the State Opening of Parliament, and removes at a stroke all Members of Parliament, all members of the House of Lords, the Privy Council, the Monarch and all the senior Royals...

Who is left in charge?

The server and local PC backups are automated, of course.  But deleting them isn't, which causes me Issues.

One location my backup are stored at (I  have three lots of backups, each on a separate server belonging to a dfferent company) is on Amazon's S3 servers, at their Ireland datacentre*.  This service charges by volume of data stored.  So yesterday I was sitting there staring at the pile of lovely backups from April (each one a golden second chance to avert disaster or idiocy! Who cannot love a second chance???)

And I was thinking: probably I don't need 5 complete backups of absolutely everything from April. If I delete these, I will save money, and still have May and June. BUT WHAT IF SOMETHING AWFUL HAPPENED IN MAY OR JUNE THAT I'VE NOT YET DISCOVERED???

In the end I deleted all but one of April.  I also have a full backup from March, and January still lurking. This may be a form of hoarding.  Or it may just be prudence.  I can't tell.

( my datacentre routing angst, let me show you it )

I've agreed to teach a photo preparation course for beginners, and I'm trying to decide what software to show them.

It needs to be freeware, or at least start out as freeware with reasonable functionality, I don't mind a paid upgrade path. I've looked at Sumopaint, Pixlr, PicMonkey and Befunky, and am probably keenest on Sumopaint. No, Pixlr. No, Sumopaint.

I'm planning to take a look also at paint.net, Photopos, and Photoplus, but all of those have to be installed locally, which may cause my beginners some agony, and are also windows-only, whereas the web-based tools are more cross-platformy.

They all have their downsides! Any recommendations, thoughts, ideas? What functions do you think would be most useful/entertaining/fun for a mixed bunch of people, most of them old enough to have had no computer skills training?

I was reminded of 'From Elfland to Poughkeepsie', an essay by Le Guin about writing fantasy (it's in The Language of the Night, and I've just checked, there is a version of it online if you google).  This made me ramble.  I assume, from context, that Poughkeepsie (I have deliberately not looked it up) is a very dull and prosaic place in the USA.   But for me, it's a place that I have only ever  come across, so far as I am aware, in the context of that one essay. 

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I volunteered to help with a local hedge survey. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure what a hedge survey is, and the info supplied did not greatly enlighten me - but I thought it sounded interesting and assumed someone would tell me more before I got too involved.

Now I have an invite to a 'training day' with a form to fill in that asks (in Avenir 35 light, an unusual choice of font, though undeniably cheery):
"I would say that my skills/experience/knowledge of landscape archaeology is: poor / fair / good / high / expert

I would say that my skills/experience/knowledge of plant species identification is: poor / fair / good / high / expert "

I have no idea how to answer these questions. I'm tempted to say 'poor' for both, on the grounds that then I'm not raising expectations and presumably they are assuming a level of basic interest from the fact that I've volunteered at all?   But then my plant species identification is better than my landscape archaeology, so maybe that should be fair. Except I'm not sure how fair, good, and high are different, they sound like Tolkienien elf-descriptions. But presumably they are on a sliding scale of some sort.  If you were high, would you graduate to 'expert' if you wrote a book? 

It also asks about 'relevant qualifications' which I always feel is a 'how long is a piece of string' question in a very Dirk Gently, fundamental-interconnectedness-of-all-things manner.