T’was a cold start to the year to be honest. With that said I didn’t really spend too much time capturing pictures. Anyway for what it’s worth here are some snaps of the start of the downpour with the usual ‘Benson’ addition.
February 2021
Keeping it social
The death zone
Jesus Christ on his bicycle of love it’s cold enough to freeze a witches tit out there. Went for a woodland dog walk with Di today. The puddles were frozen solid. As in six inches of ice solid. We did the usual ten thousand steps over ninety minutes but gawd were my fingers and toes frozen solid when I got home

Falling in love again
Never wanted to, but what am I to do? Can’t help it…
Bought the new MacBook Pro 13” with M1 chip this week. Oh sweet baby Jesus what a beautiful beast of a machine she is. Let’s be honest here; I’ve always been an apple fan boy. Kind of fell out of love for a while and convinced myself of Android supremacy but oh my gawd was I wrong. The speed of the new Mac compared to my pixel book is beyond compare. Plus the design. I’m not kidding when I say the surround sound from the laptop speakers is better than my home tv and Yamaha sound bar. I’m blown away!

Light at the end of the tunnel
It’s hard to believe that it is almost three months since we all went back into lockdown. For the most part I have not let the house. Crazy world that we live in.
it does however look like we might have some light at the of the tunnel with an announcement due from the government on the 22nd. I suspect that will be one of the highest rated tv shows of the year with the entire population glued to their screens in anticipation of whatever they plan to announce.
I don’t expect to have any foreign travel this year but hopefully local trips will be allowed once more. My three long weekend camping trips may be just the ticket for letting off some steam.
count down is commencing…..10….

Houston
We’ve got a problem. Yup indeed we do. Although they say it will be seamless to move from one provider to another they all try to make it as painful as possible to keep you with them.
Moving email from google to ProtonMail is painful. Moving photos from google to iPhoto is painful.
Moving contacts from google to iPhone is painful.
all in all not a good week so far.

Never assume it is going to be easy
No matter how many times they say they have created tools to make it easy for users to transfer from one provider to another that’s just not actually real life.
I’m now on day two of trying to get all of my contacts from google synced to my iPhone. Absolute nightmare. Getting the photos exported will take days and I expect any roadblocks along the way.
Tried to import the important emails from gmail to ProtonMail yesterday. Google blocked it because it was insecure. ProtonMail is the most secure client out there.
As I said. Never assume it’s going to be easy.
Getting closer
To data freedom. It’s quite concerning how concerned I am about this whole privacy drive. I’m actually anxious about it. That in itself feels quite weird. I am so tied to technology that the thought of even trying something new is a little worrying.
There are so many things I have to do before I can really cut the Google/facebook cord.
- Backup all my contacts
- Locate and transfer all important emails (receipts especially)
- Transfer all photos
- Back up all docs from Google drive
- Change primary email contact on all logins
- Download all Facebook data
- Backup WhatsApp messages (there’s a tool for that somewhere)
Of all these tasks the important email task will be the most difficult. I know I’m going to miss something in the 3.5gb email inbox I currently run. Or inadvertently delete something in the mass clear out. Luckily I track all important logins in a password safe so I can easily go through them and change the account. I haven’t decided on what my final account will be. I’m assuming it will be the protonmail account, or potentially a spookydaffodils redirect.
Yesterday I took a major step by ordering a new iPhone and macbook. I guess this is really happening. Am I going over the top here? It feels like a possibility. Once I have the two set up I’m going to start the process of wiping accounts.
Vaccines
Interesting conversation with some of my colleagues this week. Apparently in Europe and the US the news outlets are saying the UK had been diverting vaccine doses from AZ Belgian plants to England (before they experienced the supply chain issues) which is why the whole debacle over the EU insisting UK product be shipped to Europe kicked off. Interesting that we did not get that news on the telly box over here. Makes you wonder who’s spinning what.















