Approaching the Shipyard

9.9C starting showery then drier late morning and dry through the afternoon. Wind WNW or Westerly with gusts to 60 mph overnight decreasing to 30 - 33 mph with gusts 44 - 51 mph though the morning and 22 - 26 mph with gusts 32 - 38 mph through the afternoon. Wind 31-33 mph with gusts 52 - 59 mph forecast for the 24 hours from 11pm. In short, a windy spell.

Maeve the Deerhound and I went for a walk after lunch. Radio Scotland on the Clip.

Optional reading:
Most of the programs at 1.30pm are what we call "G12" or "West End Wendy" programming, in other words middle class pretentious bilge, but I thought I might listen to this Brainwaves one about selfies (which seems to encompass any photo taken with the phone of the holder and one or more others despite the implied title of self portrait) to see if anything remotely of photographic interest was covered. The debate centred round narcissism versus a new world of communication though expression in images, the latter standpoint supported by an uptalking academic who at one point related a conversation with her husband during which she said something along the lines of "then I said like whoa dude ...". That did nothing to relieve me of my siding with the narcissism hypothesis although I would be tempted to add the adjective braindead and replace narcissism with exhibitionist xxxx. I have a word in mind to replace the xxxx. You may reasonably conclude that I was grumpy.

On being grumpy:
Earlier I had been informed by Microsoft Security Essentials on my desktop PC that the extended support period for Windows Vista will be ending in April 2017 leaving me with an annoying orange "system potentially unprotected" warning in my system tray. This means no further security updates for anyone who might not be aware of what will happen. Annoying. Not insurmountable. What did leave me grumpy was that after some judicious Google searches I found out that the Chrome browser (irrelevant to me) is no longer supported on Vista  and that sometime during the year the Firefox browser will stop supporting a Vista version. Once again no security updates will be the result which isn't great in our online world of cyber security threats. Since I have used Mozilla based browsers since the early days of Netscape Navigator I have to admit this left me a tad peeved bordering on grumpy. Opera will apparently follow a similar path. Definitely grumpy.

Like other Vista (and I imagine XP) users I have my reasons for not "upgrading" my OS. Mostly this is about unsupported software on Windows 7,8,8.1,and 10 which I use. Less importantly it is about the costs that the cycle of upgrades imposes and the insidious move of licensing to subscription and cloud based software rather than purchase of local use software with local data storage.

Back to the story ...
We went round to the harbour where there was a good bright spell then along past the ferry terminal to the park where we met the lady with the rescue greyhound we had spoken to recently. At the end of the park we turned and came back along the street side then came home through town past the town hall and the bookshop (open).

Once Maeve was back home and settled I went for another walk. Radio Scotland on the Clip. In hindsight I should have played music instead. I went out Low Askomill to the old shipyard. I wasn't quite far enough out to catch a passing the shipyard shot of this trawler so an approaching the shipyard angle will have to do.

On the way back I walked round the esplanade to the harbour and came back home through town. All the while I was debating with myself the options of staying with Vista, upgrading to Windows 7 or 8.1, or making the change to a distribution of Linux.

Afternoon music ... Vangelis, Blade Runner (Music From The Original Soundtrack) ... which is quite soothing so I am slightly less grumpy.

DMC-LX7 f/2.8 1/320 sec. ISO-80 10mm (35mm focal length 50mm)