Not the best week...

 Well, obviously this week the main event was our internet router frying itself, but equally that's only of concern to those of us who were directly involved.

J, who had been working on the annual Arts Society exhibition, preparing the labels, a role which involved not only getting the labels for the artworks on display but also producing a set of checksheets, so that items delivered could be checked off against the list, titles and prices confirmed, and to make sure that the artists' contact details were correctly recorded, had a bit of a struggle when we were off line as Office of course wanted to save the documents to the cloud and couldn't.

As I've said elsewhere, having a machine with no external dependencies is a better solution for offline working, whether, like my distraction free machine, it's designed specifically for offline documentation work, or my Lubuntu machine, which come dependency free out of the box. However, neither solution gets you out of the hole when you lose the internet.

An ingenious work round, suggested by the local physio of all people, was to go to the library, save copies of the key documents to a USB stick, and the work on USB stick copies.

This worked, and what's more she could print the USB copies directly at the library, showing that sometimes sneakernet is best.

Down at Lake View I finished documenting the contents of the dining room and have moved on to the room that at one time served as a doctor's surgery and houses a mildly alarming collection of nineteenth century gynaecological instruments, all of which will need to be photographed using my cheap Temu light box - which should be fun, and a real test of the light box.

At the same time I've been working on and off on the heritage book collection, and reading through the spreadsheet, I've noticed a few inconsistencies and errors - perhaps the most spectacular being that Marian Halcombe is listed as the author of 'The Woman in White' - it should of course be Wilkie Collins, so it probably means checking each of the entries against the books themselves, which sound like a mammoth task, but actually, having once entered our book collection into LibraryThing shouldn't be that bad, especially with someone to help me with the reshelving.

entering books into library thing in 2011 using an eee PC701

And in the course of my readthrough or the spreadsheet I found we had a copy of The Opera House Murders - a 1930's mystery novel by Dan Billany . (Strictly speaking, it was published in 1940, but really belongs to the genre of 1930s detective mysteries)

The name seemed strangely familiar, and I'm not sure why.

Given that he was from Hull, my best guess, and it is only a guess, that they must have had a retrospective or some event about him at the University Library when I was a research student, but really, I've no idea.