Simple PC repairs (not)
Four engineers are riding in a car when it suddenly sputters and stops. The electrical engineer suggests that the problem is the battery, the mechanical engineer pokes the valves, the chemical engineer sniffs the gasoline. The computer engineer insists that everything will be fine if everyone simply gets out of the car and then gets back into it.
Friday I logged into my PC to find that my Start Menu was corrupted. This would prevent short-cut access to any programs, so I checked on the internet and found lots of people reporting the same error and lots of guidance for fixing it.
Rebooting, disabling the antivirus, going to Safe Mode didn’t resolve things.
I tried to add a new user, the solution that most advisors advocated, but Windows prevented that.
I hacked into PowerShell and rebuilt the startup tables. Nothing changed.
Deepak, the Indian IT fellow living up the hall, suggested getting a Mac.
Worse, the problem was spreading. Search stopped working. The Associations, which link a program to a data file type so that clicking on a document, for example, starts Word, became corrupted. Repairing / reinstalling Office failed to fix anything.
Worried, I updated my backups.
The next suggestion was Reset my PC / Reinstall Windows 10 (Your applications will be lost, your data files will remain).
It took a few hours for the process to complete, and my data files and account settings came through intact. Microsoft kindly posted a list of everything that was uninstalled to my Desktop. All of the problems were, indeed, resolved.
So I’m now in the midst of a two-day recovery to re-install and re-set several dozen applications. It’s time-consuming, but likely will make the computer run better.
I also took advantage of the transition to migrate from Windows Live Mail to Outlook. Microsoft hasn’t updated Mail since 2012 and it has been getting increasingly unreliable.
Outlook 2016 is not a happy alternative. Bloated and slow, it’s been a hassle to set up and connect to my email accounts, and slow to download my existing mail files. I can’t drag and drop mail between different accounts, and Search will take weeks to finish indexing.
We treat our computers, like our cars, as an appliance: focused on using them to get from here to there and not worrying about how they work. When they fail, the cause can be difficult to diagnose, and any fix often seems like trial and error.
And when it involves IT, the fix is often counterintuitive and leads to a lot more work.
Hepworth and Auerbach
My investor meetings in London wrapped up at early today, and the follow-ups with my group ended by 4 pm. Even with my embarrassingly snow-white Senior Railcard, I couldn’t use my discount before 7 pm. No matter, I haven’t used my Tate Pass in months and there are a couple of shows on at the museum that are well worth a visit.
Barbara Hepworth is a modernist British sculptor: her gardens and workshops in St. Ives are a treat to visit if you are in Cornwall. Sculpture for a Modern World features many of her smaller works, arranged as an evolutionary retrospective.
When I was learning charcoal drawing, I always liked the fluid arcs and contours of Life Drawing as compared to the geometric precision and angles of Still Life. 
I’m similarly pulled into Hepworth’s works by their smooth curves and surfaces, the shaped stones made soft and warm.
The earliest works are of people and animals: repeated renderings of the torso (Interestingly, the fronts more detailed than the backs), evolving to abstract flowing blobs representing bodies and limbs.
Geometric forms follow, spheres and torus’s, progressing into encircling ovoid’s pierced with fine wire lines.
The exhibit ends with a movie of her working, determinedly hammering at stone wearing a smock and a smile (and no safety glasses), then a recreation of her 1966 outdoor exhibition at the Kröller-Müller Museum near Arnhem (NL).
Unfortunately the exhibit ends in another week, but it’s worth an hour to walk around the pieces and to understand her art.
Upstairs is a second exhibition featuring Frank Auerbach’s thickly layered oil paintings. The exhibit is new, running until next March, and displays a chronology of his portraits and landscapes.
Seeing a photograph like Reclining Head II (above) is not at all like seeing the work first-hand. Auerbach layers on the paints, and there are centimeters of relief in the works that creates flat sculptures.
Similarly, landscapes like Primrose Hill (below) are both abstract and depictive, full of energy and bold strokes of paint.
Some of his works are a bit unsettling, in contrast to the calm poise of Hepworth’s sculpture, but all are imaginative and unique.
I took a last stroll through the British Art through the Ages, admiring the journey from an ancient selfie to Hockney’s portraits.
Then the bus and walk to Waterloo, experimenting with my shutter speed before I caught the train south.
