Moonlighting?

Are times hard in Caledon?  Are they really so hard that the Guvnah has to get a part-time job in a Buckinghamshire pharmacy, just to make ends meet?

Progress(?)

I'm unlikely to be posting all that much in the near future...

The obvious reason is, I am just getting back into SL and will need to spend time catching up with stuff, and therefore actually doing said stuff rather than talking about it.

But the real reason is, as I look at the evening news and see soaring petrol prices, show trials of dissidents in Moscow, police gunning down miners in South Africa, and the search going on for the Moors Murderers' last victim... the real reason is clearly that somebody has wound the universe's clock back to about 1970, and therefore the Internet has not yet been invented.

If you are reading this, welcome to the temporal paradox.  Goodnight.

Bloodied but still unbowed, sort of

Apparently, "I've fallen and I can't get up" was something deeply hilarious, a few years back.  I never quite got why it was so funny, myself, and having just had my mother in precisely that position, I find it even less amusing than I did to start with.  I'm sure it's just my defective sense of humour, of course.

The fun thing is, I wrenched my back at one stage, lifting her, and was darn near in the same condition myself.

So my activities have been severely curtailed, lately, not just online! - But things improve.  I am able to sit and type comfortably for short periods, and my mother was fit enough yesterday to go to a funeral (not her own). 

They say these things come in threes, don't they?  First a badger eats a junction box and puts my connection out of action (or whatever it was), then my mother's fall, now my back.  Well, hopefully, that is three over and done with and I can get back to normal.... and, once RL is properly sorted out, I can address the SL commitments which have been piling up!

(Neither of us is in any real danger, I hasten to add.  Just massively inconvenienced, and, in my case, slightly woozy still from codeine.)

Anyway, there we are.  Or aren't.  As the case may be.

If it's not one thing, it's another

No sooner do I get back online than my mother has another fall...

She's OK, I think, but I'm snatching time to post this in a tiny bit of a hurry!  Normal service will be resumed.  Promise!

Gagged!

Taking advantage of a brief opportunity (and a public wi-fi hotspot) to post something:  my home Internet connection is out of action, hence my unusual silence!  I'm hoping to be back to normal, or what passes for it, come Monday.  In the meantime, I am stuck in reality.  It's weird...

Recommended reading

As some people know, when I'm not shouting at my mother or trying to ignore her, one of the things I do is read aloud to her.  We've been through a number of books over the past few months.

The one we're on currently is W. E. Bowman's The Ascent of Rum Doodle, a spoof on mountaineering which narrates - in studiously po-faced and pompous "Boys' Own Stories" style - the attempts of a hapless crew of incompetents to conquer the 40,000½ foot tall peak of the title.  It's blessed with a foreword by Bill Bryson, who describes it as one of the funniest books he's ever read.

I mention it here because, for a sixty-year-old classic of humourous writing, it is weirdly little-known.  It's been compared (not without justification) to Three Men in a Boat and The Diary of a Nobody, but those books are famous, and The Ascent of Rum Doodle, inexplicably, isn't.  Oh, I'm sure there's a Wikipedia page about it, but that means nothing these days.

Probably my posting this here means nothing much, too, but... should you chance across this one, give it a go.  I mean, it's funny enough that both my mother and I are enjoying it.  How often does that happen?

Normal service will be resumed

... since it is unusual for me to leave more than forty-eight hours between blog entries.

Unfortunately, real life has rather intervened, in the form of a blazing row with my mother, over the merits of me spending time on the computer.  (Which, since both my social and my work life rather revolve around the Net, is a bit of a problem.)  My mother has reached that time in life when she disapproves of everything but the Royal Family and the Antiques Roadshow, and the Internet falls under neither heading.

It'll blow over - but I am keeping my head down until it does.  Sadly, I have to live with my mother.  Or, at least, someone has to, and there aren't any other volunteers. 

Scammers live in vain

Much annoyance in RL, from a spate of phone calls of late.  This is that scam where someone (usually with a very thick Indian accent) phones up claiming to be from"technical support department of Windows", tells you that your computer is generating error messages all across the Internet, and offers you assistance in fixing the problem.  Actually accepting such an offer - not that I have ever done so, myself - is pretty much guaranteed to sign you up for new exciting experiences in the area of identity theft and malware installation.  You too can be part of the thrilling new botnet everyone is talking about!

After a lengthy argument with our telecoms provider, we got a four digit code to punch into the phone, to flag these up as fraudulent calls - probably useless, since the scammers behind these things just buy time at a new call centre every so often; the hapless drones in Kolkata are reading off the scripts that are given them.

Needless to say, it is a scam, absolutely and completely - Microsoft do not make, or authorize anybody to make, unsolicited phone calls of this nature, and in any case the idea of my lone laptop ringing alarm bells across the globe is patently ridiculous.  If I'm in a bad mood, my response to these people is along the lines of quoting the Computer Misuse Act at them and advising them to get an honest job.  And, I have to admit, increasingly I am in a bad mood with these people.  I've had four of these calls in the past three days, now, and I am quite a cross Glorf about it.

Exercise for the alert student: given that I'm on a dynamically allocated IP address, how much work would you have to go to, in order to establish that a series of error messages all originated on my PC?  Answers on a postcard please.

rrr, I ot a nain problem...

The "G" key on my keyboard keeps sticking, or at least refusing to respond.  This is kind of a problem if you are called something like "Glorf", or if you spend a lot of time using present participles, or have other reasons for wanting to use the letter G.  (Which you do kind of have to, sometimes.  After all, we only have 26 letters in the English alphabet to start with, and some of them don't pull their weight.)

I foresee keyboard-cleaning time in the near future.

Strength

If I may be serious for a moment....

There was a great deal in the news, today, concerning the start of the trial of Anders Behring Breivik, the man who killed 77 people in Norway last year.  And I'm sure I have nothing to add to the news coverage, save a few of my personal impressions.

The image of Breivik on the TV screen reminded me, in a weird way, of Trenton Oldfield, the guy who disrupted the Oxford-Cambridge boat race a little while back.  Not, of course, that there is any comparison between the things they did...  but there was something about both their expressions, that little, smug, "now everyone's looking at me" look....  I imagine quite a few evil people have worn that particular smirk.  Evil is, after all, banal, in the end.  People like these destroy because destruction is so much easier than creation; creation takes talent, and vision, and effort, qualities in which people of this kind are sadly deficient.  Make the world a better place?  Too much like hard work; so much easier to pick up a gun and make a "statement" with that....

But never mind Breivik himself.  The courts, and the people, of Norway, are doing a hard job now, and they deserve respect for it.  In a time when we are told that the threat of terror justifies all kinds of suspensions of civil liberties, Norway has a genuine terrorist on its hands... and it is treating him like any other criminal; humanely, decently, with regard to justice and his human rights.  They are giving him a fair trial in an open court, and (I have no doubt) a just verdict and a just sentence at the end of the process.  They are giving him all the respect and human decency that he denied to his victims.  And that must be a terribly, terribly hard thing to do.

There are people - and I should think Breivik is one of them - who would see this as a sign of weakness, of woolly-minded liberalism lacking the will to fight its enemies.  I would disagree.  I think it is a sign of strength - the strength to hold to ideals in bad times as well as good.  In treating Breivik with justice, the Norwegians are showing they are strong - too strong, in fact, to be bullied out of their convictions by one horrid little man with a gun.

The Old Glorf and the Sea

Post-Easter holiday holiday yesterday, I settled down into SL while my mother toddled off to visit friends, I got a few things done....

... and then I got one of those Phone Calls You Do Not Want To Get; my mother calling me on her mobile to say she'd fallen at the end of our street, couldn't get up, and would I come and get her?

It was the work of mere moments to get down to where she was sitting on the ground nursing her arm, and even fewer moments to phone for an ambulance.  (I will be berating her for not phoning the emergency services immediately, but I'll be saving that for when she's completely recovered.)  Even with the best efforts of the NHS (not for the first time, I thanked God and Nye Bevan for that institution), though, it took a while for her to be patched up, her dislocated elbow put back into shape, monitored for the sedatives they gave her, and finally discharged.  She returned home, rather in the attitude of Napoleon returning from Elba, shortly after midnight.

And, once she was settled with all her necessities (soft pillows, cocoa, painkillers for emergencies and copy of Mansfield Park), I returned to my computer, planning to leave a short message to people to explain where I'd been... only to find out I was still logged in to SL.

Shortly before I got the phone call, you see, I'd started a session at a fishing spot for the 7Seas game... and I had enabled the "auto-casting" feature which makes you cast your rod for fish automatically, without human intervention... and, it turns out, this is enough to stop you being logged out due to inactivity.  So, while the real me had been phoning ambulances and pacing hospital corridors and talking to a nurse with a bolt through her neck, I had also been engaged in an act of epic fishery rarely seen outside the writings of Ernest Hemingway.  Some time ago, I had stocked up on a quantity of bait equal to "all any person could reasonably need for a long time to come", and I had burned through most of it during the session.  No interruptions, no region restarts, nothing to disturb the even tenor of SL... it was a long and generally successful session; I only wish I'd been there.

I grabbed a very late lunch and ate it one-handed while declining fish and answering IMs with the other... I had to send apologies, after all, to all the people I'd inadvertently snubbed while AFK!  I don't know if I actually got the thing I was fishing for, though, or whether it was just lost in a long succession of unacknowledged inventory offers...  I shall find out soon enough, I suppose!

And speaking of races...

In the semi-mythical World Outside, that thing called RL where bad avatars go where they log out, the annual Oxford/Cambridge Boat Race was disrupted today, when the boats had to stop to avoid a man swimming across their path.

Now, it is too early to rush to judgment on this incident.  The man could, of course, have been swimming across the Thames for perfectly ordinary reasons - for exercise, say, or out of a desire to ingest raw sewage - and he may have just happened to collide with the boat race in a perfectly innocent manner.

Or he may be one of those Evil Terrorists we are assured are out there, planning to wreck our sporting events, and because of which our noble political protectors need indefinite detention without trial, and trials in secret, and unlimited powers to read our emails and listen to our phone calls, and the Olympics guarded by Royal Navy destroyers, because if such measures are not taken we will have to be re-running boat races all the time, and what would happen then?  Civilization would totter, that's what would happen.

Ahem.  Either of these things could be true, as could others I've not thought of.  But, as I saw this guy on the news, being led away by the police... as I saw the big smug smile on his face, and that general look of "Yay! I have spoiled something for other people, and now everyone is paying attention to me!"... well, my first thought was one simple word:  griefer.  They were in RL first, you know.

The best laid plans...

... of mice and men, yadda yadda.   The typist has picked up food poisoning, the silly moo.  So, today SL activities take a ... back seat ... to thoroughly unwholesome RL ones.

Meh.  Is there some sort of improved RL viewer I can get?  I think the one I have is bugged.

A vignette from the real world

A bitterly cold day where my typist lives, today...  My dear mother wins a special award for Good Taste, for going to a neighbour's funeral and remarking, on her return, "At least it was warm up at the crematorium."