Well, that made no sense

I brought home Butterfly, the work XP laptop, this weekend, and was pulling my recently-updated files over to Diamond, the desktop that was recently upgraded to Win7. Some of the files -- presentations that I'd got from other people at some meeting or other -- wouldn't copy to eother Butterfly or the Vista laptop, because of "permissions" problems. (In fact, apparently I don't have permission to look at the permissions over the network, and XP doesn't offer any access to file permissions that I can find, other than toggling read-only on/off. On the Butterfly end, they're marked as "This file came from another computer and may have been blocked", but checking the box to unblock them doesn't help. On the other hand, from the Butterfly end there's no problem in pushing the file over to either machine. Go figure ...

I can see why MS would be trying to get more serious about file security, but it would be nice if they made it compatible with the grown-up computer world and slightly more transparent.

Elizabeth George, For the Sake of Elena

This is one of the Inspector Lynley mysteries. The Elena of the title is a Cambridge undergraduate, daughter of a professor with ambitions, who's murdered on her morning run; she was profoundly deaf, but not brought up in Deaf culture. Lynley and Havers are called in to investigate. There's a complicated web of relationships and possible motives to untangle, while Havers is distracted by her mother's slide into dementia and Lynley tries to revive his own relationship with Lady Helen, who's in Cambridge nursing a sister with a bad case of post-natal depression. The damp and cold of Cambridge in winter are vividly evoked, enough to feel chilly when I read it in Tucson in August, and the whole thing is depressing because there's hardly a contented life or a decently-functioning relationship to be seen; the flawed Lynley-Havers dynamic is about as good as it gets. (And I've never been able to understand what it was about Lady Helen, with her indecisiveness and self-doubt, that Lynley found so attractive.)

( Slightly spoilerish comment on the ending. )