More street art

Really this is an emergency blip, but I could claim that I’ve done this to continue the conversation from JoppaStrand’s comment yesterday that he liked the Eat Yer Bread street art from Leith Links. So, is this one the other side of the fine line between interesting street art and ugly scrawling/tagging? I wonder. It’s on the side of the Ebenezer United Free Church of Scotland building on Bangor Road.

I snapped it on the phone on the way out for a bit of a Friday wine walk, after a long day at the interface which included an hour presenting to a seminar “in Belgrade”. Amongst the audience were a couple of my Facebook friends who are lawyers, and retired to boot, so hopefully they found it interesting. The most annoying was my friend L, who is seeing out the pandemic with his wife in their seaside cottage in Greece. He was obviously (I could see as he kept his camera on) sitting in his garden, with blue sky behind. I was VERY JEALOUS.

This is the first entry I’ve done on my new (self indulgent) tech combo, which I’ve treated myself to. It’s an iPad Pro, along with the magic keyboard, which was horribly expensive, but is rather fun and could operate as a laptop substitute if needed. I’m still feeling my way with it. Although I downloaded the set up from my old mini iPad onto it using the iCloud, I’ve so far been unable to share my desktop and documents directly using the iCloud, as I should be able to, but I’ve got my (much used) Dropbox properly set up, which is good. I also used it for a zoom exercise class just now (back blipping on Saturday) and it’s good for that (I had been using my phone, mostly, and that’s not ideal, for the obvious reason of size...). One major advantage that it does have over my laptop is that it has an English keyboard. My laptop actually belongs to Tampere University, and I failed to pay proper attention when they were ordering it, in order to ask for an English labelled keyboard. Accordingly, when I changed the keyboard settings, I was left with a situation where a lot of the keys don’t do what they say they should do, and this can be confusing. For the record, the really confusing thing is sometimes when I restart the computer, which one has to do from time to time, it logs me out and reverts to Finnish language. I then have to remember the different key combo I need on the Finnish keyboard to get the special character in my password. This is a bit of a pain in the backside... The first time this happened, I couldn’t work it out, and thought I had been locked out of the computer (on which I am not an administrator...) and was in quite a panic. This is one reason why I thought it would be a good idea to invest in this iPad combo so that I can use it for more or less anything in an emergency.

Part of the reason why I’ve written war and peace here (sorry) is that I’m testing out using the keyboard. I have already reached the conclusion that it is an absolute joy to use. Really pleasant under the fingers. And the whole set up sits nicely on my knees when I’m sitting in my chair. It was Mr A who persuaded me that this was a worthwhile investment, and I think on this occasion he may have got it right.