what a week. first things first i suppose.

music server – still no joy. the “right” one came back from the techie guys, ostensibly fine and working, but when we opened it, set it up and connected it, it wasn’t ok. no power light, although there was clearly power, you could hear the fan. but it wouldn’t connect, either via the network, or directly. had a long talk with said techie guys, tried more fiddling and faffing about (taking out the hard drives, changing the network leads) but no joy. now we’re in the process of insisting on a refund. Hmph.

next thing, also computer related. have been trying to get iTunes to work in Ubuntu. well, what a performance. there are a number of software packages in Ubuntu which will do some of it. I need cover art, ripping, medata editing and syncing. none of them will sync, but one or two of them will do most of the rest. well, that’s no good. i knew about  “wine” which is a little package you can use in Ubunto to make Windows packages work. But not iTunes. Same with “playonlinux”, which was new to me, and quite exciting till I discovered it doesn’t like iTunes. but nowhere on my extensive trawl of the internet did anybody mention something absolutely fabulous called “VirtualBox”. It’s free, written by oracle, and amazing. you install it, and then you install Windows x inside it, then you install iTunes inside that. It mostly works – the only stumbling block is ripping, but it works perfectly otherwise. i guess most people download music these days anyway, i certainly do, so i’ll be using that from now on, rather than dual booting. my friend’s extremely techie partner told me, via her, about it. thank goodness there’s somebody to ask now, though don’t want to bother him too much.

and me. how am i? well, have been improving day by day but today have needed a tramadol, having managed without for the past three days. but that’s ok i think. am anxious because i’m supposed to have the cast removed next tuesday, and still have no appointment with the hospital. when it does come through, i then have to phone physio and try and get an appointment synced with them so i go to one department, get the cast off, then go to physio. not going to work, is it, they’re going to be fully booked.

and to finish on a lighter note, we had all five grandchildren to stay last weekend. it was absolutely lovely. they love being together, and played so well, lots of laughing and hugging. loved it. and here are a couple of photos of said weekend!