Crazy fortnight of the usual end of term stuff … the kind of weeks a lot of teachers go through round about now, their schools entering states of extravagant levels of activity: invigilating, marking coursework, marking exams, writing reports. (Come back Andrew Pinder, all's forgiven - this is a very inefficient "industry".)
Then, moving. Surreal sense of time blurred all together, days melding into nights into days. So when a friend emails me with this from our leader:
Our tolerance is part of what makes Britain, Britain. So conform to it; or don't come here.
… I find I'm coming to, like the morning after, my head aching with the realisation that this is yet another example of a politician out-satirising satirists. Then John Naughton posts:
Sometimes, one has to rub one’s eyes in disbelief. Yesterday, a Labour Prime Minister was interviewed by detectives investigating a corruption scandal engulfing his administration — and it was judged a triumph by his staff that he wasn’t cautioned. This meant he was ‘just’ a witness, and not a suspect in the inquiry. And at the same time, his government’s chief law officer halts an inquiry that was on the brink of revealing illegal payments of perhaps £1 billion to a posse of Saudi princelings and their hangers-on because they were (as the BBC’s Security correspondent intimated this morning) livid at the prospect of having their ‘privacy’ invaded.
Eugh indeed. Inglorious times.
Somewhere in this gap of time, I spent about a week saying 'plutonium' when I meant 'polonium'. (In David Weinberger's great phrase, 'I have become all cracks, no flooring'.) Bless the internet for underscoring so readily why it's important to tell the difference.
And then, the afternoon of my move out of Radley and back to Marlborough (prelude to a move to London in the new year), my laptop's fan, origin of strange noises for a while now, packed up and the machine became, of course, unbootable: 'Fan Error'. You bet. The next day was spent lost in Reading's seemingly all-look-alike roads: Lenovo has this relationship with TNT and Reading's my nearest, relevant TNT drop-off point. Sheesh.
I get by at times like these by borrowing family machines. My wife's laptop will go back to her with various bells and whistles installed. (That's my bargaining ploy for the extensive use of her machine.) Thomas' woes are of another order, though:
I am currently limping along on an external hard drive for my laptop with the last good back up from two months ago. I am missing notes from the last few conferences and my kGTD, which I just got running well.
I do sympathise. What do we need so as to make all this business of machine-hopping and machine-breakdown bearable or better? Thomas again:
Many people are trying to sync and back-up their lives on a regular basis, but the technology is still faulty. So many people have faulty syncing, no matter what technologies they are using. Most people have more than two devices in their life (work and home computer, smart phone, PDA, mobile phone with syncable address book and calendar, iPod, and other assorted options) and the syncing still works best (often passably) between two devices. Now when we start including web services things get really messy as people try to work on-line and off-line across their devices. The technology has not caught up as most devices are marketed and built to solve a problem between two devices and area of information need. The solutions are short sighted. …
Having trusted devices working together helps heal the fractures in our data losses, while keeping it safe from those we do not wish to have access. The secure transmission of our data between our trusted devices and securely shared with those we trust is quickly arriving.
I am hoping the next time I have a fatal hard drive crash it is not noticeable and the data loss is self-healed by pulling things back together from resources I have trust (well placed trust that is verifiable - hopefully). This is the Personal InfoCloud and its dealing with a Local InfoCloud all securely built with trusted components.
Having said which, and bearing in mind that, unlike Thomas, I'm not running my own business or attending multiple conferences, etc, etc, what has struck me this year, whenever I've lived temporarily without my own machine, is how well I can now get along. As Robert said just recently:
Google is delivering the Web goods and is taking over more and more of my life …
Hook another machine up to the web, and it's almost business as usual, plus or minus some favourite desktop shortcuts or bits of software.
And for me, it's also turning out that there are unexpected benefits to be had from these little hiatuses. (ThinkPads are supposed to be utterly reliable. No thing is utterly reliable. In nearly two years of owning it, this one's been back to Lenovo three times — once for a new motherboard.) To draw from Eng Lit a moment, Coleridge has this notebook entry:
The extenders of consciousness — Sorrow, Sickness, Poetry, Religion. The truth is, we stop in the sense of life just where we are not forced to go on.
Habit holds us back, holds us in — so much — in both big things and small, even in the lesser matters of software choice. I couldn't figure out how to get FeedDemon running from off of my own laptop's hard drive (running this as an external drive, talking to my wife's laptop's hard drive), so I switched to Google Reader using a not-very-recently-backed-up OPML file. And guess what? Google Reader is not only as great as people have said it is, I'm reading stuff faster in it than in FeedDemon because there are fewer options, fewer possible enrichments … fewer distractions. (Joel Spolsky: 'People, for the most part, are not playing with their software because they want to. They’re using the software as a tool to accomplish something else that they would like to do'. Good software should … disappear. I was so delighted to find an easy way to get Live Writer to run, on my borrowed laptop's drive but using my bank of draft posts from off of my own hard drive. Live Writer's a dream blogging tool: it disappears and lets you get on and do what you want to do.) I've been wanting for some time now to speed up my reading of feeds without (I hope) losing too much, so as to get back to reading more books alongside my online reading. This unlooked for nudge has broken me out of one habit and started me off on another which may give me some more time for offline reading.
So Gmail, Google Apps, Google Calendar, YouTube, Google Video … and del.icio.us, Last.fm, Flickr … (Not quite a Google flush — not by some way, in fact). And there's something magical about finding that all those settings that seemed like they were part of your desktop are, as you always knew they were but had ceased to experience them as being, out there — waiting for you to pick up and carry on as if nothing much had happened after all.
