We are off to Port-Vendres in the extreme south of France for two weeks (extreme in the sense that it’s right by the border with Spain, about as far south as France goes).
It’s unlikely that I will be allowed to spend any time in a local internet cafe (and after all, who would want to, surrounded by the alternative attractions available in the S. of Fr?)
So I hope to see you again in a fortnight or so…
I attended an excellent Monkeyfilter meetup the other day, marking another visit of Alnedra (see picture) to the UK, this time to visit the Terry Pratchett convention. With characteristic generosity Neddy distributed small jade monkeys and other gifts. Mothninja, Flashboy, and Quidnunc were there: alas, I missed Danger Is My Middle Name, who turned up after my bedtime. The conversation was as grave and sober as is usual, or perhaps even somewhat less.
For the first time (in a London meetup, anyway), we were actually online during the session, thanks to Alnedra’s laptop and the Chepstow’s wifi. Although we didn’t actually have streaming wifi, pictures were going up in something close to real time.
That was fine, but I wonder whether it’s the thin end of the wedge. I once saw a party of tourists in a posh restaurant in Portugal who reached an impasse: so many of them wanted to video the party that there was hardly anyone sitting at the table to be videoed. They were forced to circle warily round the table videoing each other videoing themselves.
There was speculation a while ago that the technology of storage and recording was approaching the point where it would be quite feasible for people to attach a small camera to their glasses or something and record their entire lives automatically. No more need to make a point of videoing things, you just dial up the relevant date and see again more or less what you were seeing then. It sounds a bizarre waste of capacity, yet I can imagine that the practice might become widespread or even universal on security grounds. If everything you do is recorded and stored in some central vault, you’re going to be somewhat safer: your location is always discoverable and anyone who attacks you risks being recorded (unless they creep up from behind – possibly a flaw there).
Of course it would also make it very difficult for you to commit a crime, and provide perfect vindication of an alibi if you had one (unless you could get someone else to wear your personal recorder…)
More subtly, I’m sure that using a comprehensive video record as a kind of secondary memory would affect the way you perceived the world. I think it’s already noticeable that some contemporary authors write in a style which is influenced by video. Terry Pratchett is an example, actually; many of his scenes seem to me to be written from the perspective of someone whose dominant idea of narrative comes from TV and film; I suspect a nineteenth century reader would find them relatively hard to read, in spite of the shorter sentences we tend to use these days. I think it would go even deeper than that, though: you would begin to think of your own experiences in more of a third-person, film-like way, and that would strongly reinforce the kind of philosophical view which I think is already far too current, which holds that everything is really in your head, and that we can never experience the external world in itself.
I’m hanging on to my nice new little Vado, though.
What does this look like to you? The UK’s first sub-£100 laptop? A rival to the Asus Eee? A cheap rebadged A-view (the digital picture frame that’s almost a PC)? No. Well, yes actually, but what it truly is in its inner nature is a small pile of rancid bat droppings (only less suitable as fertiliser).
You can’t read what it says on the screen (who can?), but the first part is:
The WEB CONTENTS CAN NOT BE DISPLAYED NORMALLY
THEPROBALE REASONS ARE AS FOLLOWS
The erratic text is fairly typical of the way this thing has been put together. That browser is Saramao, so cut down it has no facility for storing favourites/bookmarks. And no Home button. Hey, we all love typing in the full URL every time, don’t we? Especially on a weird rubbery keyboard and with a screen so small you can’t see what’s registered anyway.
Still, the keyboard is better than the strange pair of tits which have been provided in lieu of a mouse – one on the front and one on the back of the screen. This latter positioning is preferable, I find: it allows you to navigate while holding the screen within two inches of your eyes, which believe me is necessary – and it gives the consoling feeling of having the bloody thing by the throat. In recognition of the limitations of the kit, the software has extra small scroll bars which are almost impossible to hit: I find myself tapping the tit to try to get the cursor to move two pixels over.
It does, in fairness, have built in wi-fi facilities, although you have to set these up afresh every time you switch on. A real classic touch is that the dialog box you need to activate your profile comes up apparently without any useful buttons on it. You can look at the selected profile and then sod off without activating it, and that’s it, or so it seems. Actually the dialog box is twice the size of the screen, and all the main buttons are somewhere off the screen to the right! They got me with that one: it was at least half an hour before I realised what was happening.
OK, but if we only want to edit Word documents…? Yes. That can be done. Very slowly. I loaded a 99kb Word file and found myself waiting five minutes. Not just to load initially, but every time I wanted to scroll down a bit. With a 25kb document, it was slightly better, but the bottom line of text still smeared every time I moved, and I could not scroll along a row of text faster than one character per second (really – I’m not exaggerating here).
It’s no longer sub-£100, by the way. To obtain this machine, I had to put my name down months ago, and before they could deliver it they had decided to upgrade and raise the price (lucky people like me got the upgrade for the original price, fair play to Elonex). All the guts of the machine are behind the screen, which means it has a curious pull-out prop to stop it falling over backwards (don’t worry, you’ll be holding it up to your eyes anyway, like I said). The idea was that the keyboard could be detached so that you could operate in tit-only mode (easily sparing some of your tiny screen real estate for a virtual keyboard, oh yes indeed). But there is no guidance on how to effect this detachment, and some online sources say the upgrade version doesn’t detach. Who knows? I won’t be risking it.
The thing is positioned as being suitable for schoolchildren, and I’ve heard people say that while it might not be a man’s laptop, it would be OK as a first PC for your children. Only, I think, if you want to wreak a terrible vengeance on them, or make absolutely sure they are conditioned to associate the Internet with sore eyes and screaming hours of frustration.
Meantime, in another part of the forest, an unexpected development: investment in the railway infrastructure. Not, of course, more or bigger or faster trains; no. Better lines, perhaps? More electrification? Nicer stations? More staff? No, heavens no. Clearly what we really need now is more people on those trains: so for the first time in who knows how long, a completely new station has been opened on the existing line. This is Mitcham Eastfields, still not really in the middle of Mitcham, but somewhat closer to it than Mitcham junction. Needless to say, this is not a completeley original project, but the resurrection of a plan which was shelved about a hundred years ago.
The great thing is, the trains now get to stop even more, and those tiny residual spaces under the seats and between carriages now get economically packed with half a dozen extra people.
Negative? Moi?
By way of update, Katharine completed the ‘Race for life’ with her sister Deborah and Elizabeth and Sarah – here’s a picture of the triumph on Epsom Downs.
She’s now been through three cycles of chemotherapy (FEC): the drll has been that tshe goes in for a blood test, goes in the next day and has several very large syringes emptied into her, comes home, goes back the next day for another injection and then waits three weeks. Typically the first week she’s somewhat knocked out and loses her appetite. The first time was the worst; in spite of all the anti-nausea drugs, she began feeling sick that evening and spent most of the night throwing up what little was in her stomach, finally being readmitted for some intravenous drugs which sorted it out. On subsequent occasions the array of drugs includes something which from the packaging alone appears to be the nuclear deterrent of anti-sickness drugs (one tablet in a special silvery blister pack of its own about two inches square) and this has been effective. By the third week of each cycle, she is almost back to normal, although her hair has now fallen out apart from a few wispy white bits. She has a wig but so far prefers scarves. There is a treatment these days where they freeze your head for a few hours around the time of the injection (‘cold cap’) which should stop the hair falling out; but it means spending longer in the hospital, it’s uncomfortable, and people have told Katharine that in practice the quality of the hair is still not good. So she opted not to bother.
Having completed three cycles of FEC, we now have a four-week break including our holiday in France, and then she starts on three cycles of taxotere, which is administered in a drip.
