Blogroll!

Okay, I’ve been lousy at posting for a while. But I do still check in on old friends.

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Tinker Toys, Erector Sets, and Time

You, small male child: build things!

I got these Tinker toys as a Christmas gift, perhaps in the hope of encouraging my engineering skills. And there I was, with my nose stuck in a book.

Looking to pare down possessions, I look at this stuff now and wonder if anyone might want it, before I toss it out.

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darned socks

I took a year off from college once and traveled around the country. For a while, I stayed out on the farm where my grandmother had been born, living with my great-aunt.

I was helping my grandfather paint houses. I came home one day to find that my great-aunt had darned a couple pairs of my socks.

Really: she took needle and thread and created these deft cross-hatchings that patched holes. I remember I was touched.

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Adventures in Anachronistic Consumerism # 42,985

After waffling most of the summer, I finally committed to going back for my high school reunion in Minnesota, crossing a pair of time zones and spending too much time in airports (Phoenix, really??) to get there — but that was the price of delaying, which is my own fault. And while there, why not go see a Twins game at new Target Field? So I made arrangements with a friend, N, to go see a game,  and hoped to be able to buy tickets online but simply mail them to her home in a suburb of Minneapolis.

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Adventures in Anachronistic Consumerism # 42,984

It’s my own fault. I don’t need much from my computer, email, a word processor (all I want is just a fancy electronic typewriter, really), and access to the internet. Which I had, except that my arthritic HP was pushing eight years old (I think) and getting slower and slower …

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Just a Notion, for Two Oceans

 

There’s a vast continent-sized island of plastic debris floating in the Pacific. Meanwhile, the polar bears are drowning in the Arctic for lack of ice floes. I suppose it would be prohibitively expensive, but what if we could fuse a lot of that Pacific debris into plastic floes cast adrift in the Arctic for the desperate bears to clamber up on and catch their breath?

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Comcast and My Lost Emails

I sent an email to three friends about baseball. I got a reply from one of them, C, and in reading his message I noticed that he was answering an earlier reply from another original recipient, my friend R. But I had never gotten the earlier message from R, even though C had hit reply to all and his message clearly showed my e-address in R’s earlier message.

Concerned, I called Comcast. In explaining to the Comcast customer support technician what had happened, I offered to forward the message that clearly showed R’s earlier response, which never had arrived in my inbox. He gave me an email address and I forwarded the message. And we waited.

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Mouserly fits and starts

 I’ve mentioned before my woeful story of the mouse that died. How like an aging athlete it had trouble moving to the right. It still cut to the left okay, but at times I’d try dragging to the right and the mouse was moving but the cursor wasn’t going anywhere.

It becomes time to hang up the spikes—or at least the mouse wheel. Which left me at the mercy of the digerati and their love of all things new.

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Of Mouses and Morons – New Lows in Tech Support from Hewlett Packard

After years of faithful service, the HP mouse to my HP computer went on the fritz. Like an old athlete with aging legs, it had difficulty moving to the right. I’ve compensated by jiggling it, lifting and tapping it, babying it along, but increasingly it would lock in place, and it had earned its rest,  much as I dread replacing gear. For I firmly believe that New! Improved! in any consumer lexicon are merely synonyms for shoddy with fewer useful features and prone to breaking down.

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Ecliptical Shadows

 

I’m not really much for eclipses. I get the whole astronomical fascination with the topic. But the aspect of eclipses that interests me most is how predicting them was used to mollify or terrorize other cultures — pretty devious.

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