niq's soapbox

News headlines: Earthquake and Tsunami in the Pacific region.  Heard it on the news yesterday, half-heard it again today (just this minute checked – it seems there’s been another earthquake, bigger disaster than yesterday’s).

My reaction?  Well, “will this affect my asia-pacific investments?” did cross my mind.  Oops!  In my defence, it only crossed my mind about 24 hours after I first heard the news, and I haven’t checked my portfolio since thinking it.  And (barring the vanishingly unlikely event that it had hit my brother and sister-in-law in NZ without my having heard about it), this is my only link to the region.

But ultimately, this is surely the reaction of an Evil Capitalist!

I shall have to atone the Evil Capitalist way, with a contribution when the charity appeals come round.  Having received a small bonus in my August pay-packet, I had already budgeted that for charitable contributions, and this looks like a candidate for a Deserving Cause.

For a little over three years, I’ve had the Mac laptop.  Little shiny white affair: small for a modern laptop, but the sharp screen quality compensates for that, by enabling me to read much smaller print than is comfortable on a desktop machine.

Much to my surprise, I never liked the MacOS user interface very much: much of it seems to be a generation behind the Linux world, simple operations like cut&paste are a faff, and above all there’s the screaming inadequacy of control of windows and focus.  So I wouldn’t choose it for the desktop.

But on the laptop, the defects have been more than compensated by hardware (and drivers) that just work.  Minor conveniences like that great Mac power supply.  Much more importantly, none of the kind of flakiness and perpetual need to take it apart and jiggle some internal connection that characterised its predecessor, a Dell Inspiron that was just plain shoddy.  Decent build quality matters on a laptop!

But last night it suddenly died.  First some ticking, then in less than a minute it froze up with a spinning ¨busy¨ cursor, none of the open apps responded, and it refused to reboot.  Took it in to the local Mac shop this morning, and they extracted the hard disc and found it dead – ouch!  They can replace the disc for sixty squids, but it means I´ll have to faff about with reinstalling lots of apps, setting up prefs, etc.  Fortunately there is (I think) only a few hours of actual work on there with no duplicate, but I´m now down to one copy of quite a lot of important stuff, so spending this morning on a spot of backup!

This must be part of advancing middle-age.

The tennis-elbow is better than it was: I can even (with care) sleep on my right side!  But I still have my longstanding issues: can’t sleep in the wrong bed, sit in wrong chair, etc without the back suffering; even the wrong shoes give me back pain, and pretty-much any collar or wristwatch gives me neck pain.

Well, I’m used to all that.  Indeed, the difficulty with other people’s choice of desks and chairs is one of my main reasons for avoiding employment in a regular office: at home, I get to choose, and I can move around when I need a change of posture.  I last sat long-term in someone else’s office in 1998, and my back has in fact been much better since then, despite the expanding paunch.

But now it’s cramp.  I’m not at all used to that, at least when not engaged in exceptional activity.  But today, and once or twice recently while out cycling, I find that anything substantial in certain pockets leads to cramp in the leg.  Today it was the ‘phone: I was finding it annoying in my right above-the-knee pocket, so moved it to the left, and after a mile or so had cramp in the left leg (ouch)!  Moving it back to the right fixed that, but for how long?  Will I start finding cycling or even walking a problem?  Bah, Humbug

Just been spending a weekend with the parents in Brighton, ten minutes walk from the beach.  The second-best[1] thing about this is the chance for a good swim in the sea.  And the weekend has seen some great weather for it,  too.

Saturday was slightly rough, with breakers sufficient to pummel me a bit.  But past the breakers it’s beautiful: compared to our local rivers, the warmer water and extra buoyancy make for a lovely spot of luxury!  I much enjoyed bobbing about on the waves for a first swim.

Coming out, I went to sit on the beach, whereupon two small girls came and asked what the water was like.  I told them it was lovely, and eventually they believed me.  They then disappeared up the beach, and reappeared dressed for a dip.  That left me really wondering whether I should encourage them in or the opposite: unless they have the technique to ride the waves, those breakers would surely have them down and possibly in distress – and I don’t even know if they can swim!

Eventually an adult appears: the mother of one of them is happy for them to go as far as they want.  But she gets called back to the urgent needs of a younger child, leaving me with the two girls on the waters edge.  They only go half-in, and one of them does get knocked down by a wave.  She’s not bothered by it, confirming mum’s view that they can cope.  And we all have fun.

In a country where the meeja and government run a witch-hunt against adults having contact with children, I find this kind of healthy encounter as refreshing as a really good swim.  And I expect these girls, not surrounded by paranoia, will grow into healthy, well-adjusted teenagers and later adults, unlike some of those contemporaries who are denied any kind of spontaneous human contact.

Sunday and Monday (yep – long weekend) I went back again for a swim.  The water was by now much calmer (kite-surfers were gone, canoeists were out instead), and I had no more human encounters.

[1] I have to say second-best, as they sometimes read the blog