technical matters and toot

Is it the dust perhaps? I seems to settle over every surface, indoors and out. It’s very fine. I think it gets into the plastic casing of floppies and buggers them up. I was going to buy one of those USB storage units last time I was in Tripoli, and wish that I had now, because the floppies I use to transfer documents between my laptop, the internet café and the PCs at the training centre are forever losing their formatting. ‘The disk in drive A is not formatted. Do you want to format it now?’ So you lose all the data on it.

That’s not the end of the world, because you’re merely transferring copy data. But it is inconvenient; not to say a pain in the arse.

Speaking of which, I set up a new flickr account for the blog last night – the idea being to publish photos thereto. I can’t use Hello out here in internet cafes. I was doing something wrong last night. I thought I’d set the whole thing for public viewing, but apparently not. I hope to have it sorted out today.

I learned from my students yesterday that now is the mulberry season in Libya. Hmm. Don’t think I’ve ever had a real fresh mulberry. The Arabic name for them is easy to remember: ‘toot’! So I’ll get some today, inshallah.

Years ago I was visiting the Inns of Court on business. I sat under a magnificent mulberry tree at lunchtime with my sandwiches and wondered what it’s story was.

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