language

Research . . . more

/ Tony / Leave a comment

As a bit of a follow on from yesterday’s post, I suppose part of the initial problem could have been the manual that was with the device. If you could call it a manual. It consisted of a piece of flimsy A6-sized paper folded in half. On the front was a company logo. the three other pages had the instructions in a) Chinese, b) Chinese characters and c) English. Or to be more accurate the English could probably be described as “Chinglish”.

Don’t get me wrong, I think it is quite brave of any person whose primary language is not English, to try and write English. To be honest, there are a good few people whose primary language is English who have problems trying to write readable English.

I still have the manual, and the instruction to connect the device to the computer is written as this: “4. To contract the DVD to the computer, you must utilise to cable provisions…” The word provisions must have led me to think that I should use both cables.

I now tend to look at the product website for a manual and use an online translator to convert to English. But even that can have its problems sometimes.

Still some lingering issues . . .

/ Tony / 3 Comments

After the last issue with my laptop, when it turned out I was using the wrong profile (see this post) I have been most careful with updates. Touch wood, the last couple have not been a problem. In fact (groping for more wood to touch) the computer start-up has improved from a poor 8 minutes to a more appropriate 3 minutes. Not too sure how long that will last though.

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I think I must be one of the very few people that are not really bothered about this Jubilee stuff. I just cannot get excited about it. Especially at this time with the current issues facing the country. I think of the billions being spent on these four days of ‘celebrations’ then I get angry at the people that say my youngest cannot be fully funded in his care home..

And all the plastic! Everywhere you look there are plastic Union flags. The great majority of them are upside down. Most people don’t know there is a correct way to show the flag. The red ‘X’ is set slightly off centre of the white ‘X’ which means (bear with me …) that the left-hand lower and upper legs have narrower lower white parts. This rotates to the right-hand and narrow bands become the upper side of the bands.

To the great majority of the country, I suppose it doesn’t matter, but it’s just another part of our culture being eroded. It’s as bad as the poor use of the English language that has pervaded the way some people speak. I get quite tetchy when I hear someone say “fustrated” instead of the correct “frustrated”. That and the incorrect use of the word “done” in phrases usually by football pundits. Phrases like “The boy done good!”

A bit of a nightmare . . .

/ Tony / Leave a comment

I opened up my laptop this morning as I had a couple of things I needed to do before R*** came home. To my total surprise and annoyance, there was that little box at the bottom right of my screen, telling me that my computer needs to restart to complete the update process. I thought it sensible to do it straight away. After about 10 minutes, the system began to start-up again. But what was that? A pop-up message telling me that my profile had failed to install and was advising me to sign out. This was duly done and the start-up continued. My laptop is always slow to start so I wasn’t worried.

That is when the trouble started. My desktop screen had changed. All my usual icons had gone, only to be replaced with some random ones. It actually made to screen less cluttered which is not a bad thing. I then had to check that a document had been scanned and I needed to print it. This is when the real nightmare began. All the documents I had saved seemed to be missing. Everything for the funding review had gone! Months and months of work were nowhere to be found!

I headed straight to Google, but that produced nothing helpful. After about an hour of frantically pulling out what little hair I have, I decided to search for one of the documents. To my amazement, they were still on my machine, only in a TEMP folder. It seems that when the profile failed, any saved stuff was moved into this temporary folder. All I now needed to do was to move the files back into the main part of the storage area. This is going to take some time.

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After a lot more hours on Mr Google things are still not right, but better than first thing. I’m not holding my breath that everything will get back to ‘normal’, this is Windows after all.

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I continued with the Googling and profane language when some of the basic apps just wouldn’t work. then hidden on one of the Microsoft ‘help’ pages I spotted something. It appears that I was signed into my machine with a temporary login. The puzzled look on my face got more and more contorted as I scrambled about looking for my normal login. I found it and signed in using this profile, and everything opened up as normal. Everything I had lost was back in the correct place.

I have to admit that the foul language did not lesson very quickly and I was still more than a little angry about the whole experience, but all is good again (until the next time!)

… and there’s more.

/ Tony / 1 Comment

Just when I thought I could put the week and it’s problems to bed, the issue with the dishwasher raised it’s ugly head again. Mrs H. had gone out for a walk and I thought I would sort the dishwashing out as there was quite a bit. It was all loaded and I set it off on the usual short programme.

I was upstairs and when I came down I saw that the wash was over. I began to unload, when I spotted the tell-tale sign that something was amiss. The machine had not fully drained again, and there was a swearingpool of water in the bottom. You would not believe the language that was flying about. All I could think at the time was that it was going to cost me another £50.00 to get it fixed!

DrainAfter a short time of deep breathing, I thought I would have a go at fixing it myself. I remembered what the plumber had done last time. So I began to try and get the water out so I could have a better look. It is surprising how much water lay in the bottom of the machine. At best I would say that there was about 2/3 of an average washing up bowl and there’s me trying to drain it out with a small plastic cup. It took about 15 minutes before enough water had been removed to enable me to have a poke around, to find what was causing the jam. Nothing! 

More of the bad language ensued before I remembered that there was a small plate that covered the pump, where something get caught. I tried to remove the plate with a small PhilipsTorx screwdriver and then a similar size Pozi Drive screwdriver. Neither worked and the screw would not budge. Out came the head-torch and magnifying glass which revealed that I needed a star screwdriver or “Torx” driver.

PlasticOnce I found the correct size it was an easy task to remove the plate. Almost at once I saw the offending matter. It was again, a small piece of plastic that had caught in the flow pipe. I removed it and fished around to see if there was anything else in there. There didn’t appear to be, so with bated breath I set the machine off on a cold rinse. It seemed to have worked. All the parts were put back, and I programmed the machine for a hot wash as before and everything was working as expected. At the end of the wash I trepidly opened the machine to find that everything was all normal again and much to my embarrassment I exclaimed out loud “Who’s the Daddy!”

Fingers crossed that is all the stress for now.Fingers

Block Editor spell checking . . .

/ Tony / 1 Comment

I wrote the ‘coincidence‘ post, as this one, using the new Block Editor. I’m determined to get the hang of it somehow. It became clear that the spell checker that was being used was using a US English dictionary when it tried to make me spell ‘theatre’ as ‘theater’. This is all well and good if you’re an American writer, but I wanted UK English . Try as I might, I could not find a setting that related to the spell checker. Both Bing and Google did not help, so I post a topic in the WordPress.com support forum and waited.

One of the more obscure Bing articles mentioned that WordPress uses the browser dictionary. But if I’m using the WordPress Windows Store app, surely that does not use the browser? I couldn’t find a language setting in the Opera browser, so I had a look at Internet Explorer 11 settings, which picks up it’s language from the Windows settings. It was there that I found it. The ‘Country or Region’ setting showed the UK, but the ‘Display Language’ setting was showing ‘English (United States)”. In order for me to use the ‘English (United Kingdom)’ setting, I had to download a language pack from Microsoft. Who decided that we are all American?

Nightmare …

/ Tony / Leave a comment

Quite often, when I’m knitting from a pattern in a magazine I find I get lost when there are the famous “ ** xxx  *** “ closely followed by “ rep from ** to *** ” repeats in the middle of a row. In those cases, what I tend do WIPis to hand write the pattern repeat and use that when it is needed. My current ‘project’ has a 36 row pattern. Each right side row has a 12 stitch start followed by an 8 stitch pattern repeated 8 times. So I did as I often do and wrote out the repeat. Now this is where I made a mistake! For some reason, when writing out, I missed a yarn over after a decrease on row 13. This meant of course, that when I got to the end of the row, I was 8 stitches short. Bearing in mind that this was the second attempt at this pattern (first time, I dropped a stitch, which ran to the bottom before I could pick it up), you can well imagine the sort of language that was about.

However, after an hour of carefully picking back, I have finally got it back to the place where I went wrong. I am now able to breath again! I didn’t want to rip it all back and start again.

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While on the knitting theme, after some gentle persuasion in the comments of my last post, I decided to have a look at the other three groups. But, to no avail! The first group I tried explained that because of the size of the place where they hold their meetings, the number of members was limited. They did say that they would be happy to put me on a waiting list, so that’s good. The second group was basically a crafting group that had a (very) few knitters, but I was welcome to come along and try out. The third one was a strange affair. Membership was by referral from another member of the group, or at the discretion of the chair. I was waiting for her to say that she would use her ‘discretion’ but it never happened. At least I’m on a waiting list Eye rolling smile.

*** Update***

Guess what! When I recounted the stitches at the end of picking the work back, I find I now have 4 extra stitches that seem to have picked up somewhere. I can’t for the life of me see where they have come from, so there is very little alternative but to pull it all out and start again.  Steaming mad Crying face

Too stupid for words?

/ Tony / Leave a comment

I was scanning my Facebook for anything interesting and I saw this in a comment thread. The thread relates to a meeting held by one of the prospective leaders of the Labour Party. It doesn’t matter which prospective leader, but someone had mentioned that there were ‘thousands’ in attendance. When this was queried, the original writer explained that the room held three thousand and that it was completely full. Now for the best bit, and this is a direct snip from that thread.

3000Now, I don’t know the person, and I don’t know the level of their math(s) skills, but I think even an idiot would know the answer to that one.

It annoys me to think, that people that make a comment like that, are probably the same people that complain about migrants not being able to speak English. I should probabley call it “The Queens English” so as not to offend those that feel the lanuage is actually owned by Queen Elizabeth II.

Rant over!

Our language corruption

/ Tony / 2 Comments

Why do we still allow the media to corrupt are wonderful language. On the Guardian website today we are told


Trooper’s death brings Afghanistan fallen to 200

Grim milestone reached when soldier wounded in an explosion in Helmand died in hospital

Since when did our fantastic soldiers become ‘Troopers’. The Americanisation of our language is on the increase. It is everywhere. At work, we no longer have a Personnel Department, we have ‘Human Resources’ we are now commodities, not people. Then there is the food industry. What does ‘Pan Fried’ mean ??? How else can you fry something, except in a pan ? Is there such a thing as ‘Steamer Fried’ ? Of course, as you now see ‘Oven Fried Chips’, some people would say, that is the reason. But we bake or roast in an oven … we don’t fry.

Now don’t get me wrong here, I’m not against different countries having different takes on a language. No my problem is with the British media, that try to appeal to the overseas market, by trying to change the way we speak. And because it is a respected medium such as The Guardian (and they are not alone, the BBC are one of the worst), the changes find their way into everyday language.

Rant over for now