Christmas Tree Festival Begins

Friday 4th Dec 2015 (1196)

No day off, a very full working day. Our Christmas Tree Festival opened at 11am. It was a very moving moment when it was declared open and the lights on 49 trees + around the columns all went on together. Local school choirs have been in to sing today but the number of visitors has been low. We're hoping it will be popular tomorrow. There is a concert on this evening in church.

Laptop saga (please jump to last paragraph if you're not interested in the ongoing saga!) - I collected my laptop today. The manufacturers replaced the motherboard and the computer shop have reloaded all software and apparently it seems to be working ok ... I will wait and see. I did have another problem two weeks ago. With swapping laptops etc etc the other week and being driven round the bend I ended up relying on my backup external hard drive. All the document files got copied to the computer on loan but not the pictures, music and video. As I was running two computers I used the external drive, which was fine until I dropped it and then it stopped working. I didn't say anything at the time as I was too horrified and I have been holding my breath for two weeks knowing if we couldn't get it back I would have lost nearly 60,000 pictures ie all my photos from forever! However, I found today the computer shop are miracle workers and they have retrieved all but 4 files from the drive!!! Words cannot express how grateful I am to them. Not only that, they didn't charge me for any of the work they've done on the laptop endlessly reinstalling software etc, or for the time they've spent this week retrieving my data even though the problem was nothing to do with them ... and they've even given me, free of charge, a new 1TB external hard drive (which now contains my data) as "an early Christmas gift". I can't speak highly enough of them and I am so grateful. From now on I will have multiple backups of all my data, I don't trust any technology.     

Then there is the news on Blip. I don't have time at this time of year to read through a business plan and get my head round all that and I don't see why I have to register to invest before I can be given more info. Can anyone shed any light on it?
UPDATE
This link has been provided which I found very helpful.