Bad habits make for better lifestyles
I'm slipping into a different routine at my new location. I've broken the old habit of going out for an evening walk and then spending an hour in the pub with a couple of bottles of Newcastle Brown and a meal. I managed to do this by creating a new habit, going out for ninety minutes cycling and exercising, followed by a brief snack and a collapse into a hot bath. However, the exhaustion persists beyond the bath; I am now spending the remainder of the evening sprawled on the bed watching the least offensive rubbish I can find on the television. This part of the new habit is going to have to go. TV can be fun in short spells if you watch something you actually enjoy, but letting the world of the tube wash in and out of your mind when it is in a non-critical mood is slow death.
I know what I would rather do, but I don't have an internet connection. I like to talk by email, and not about what I've just watched on the box. I need a way to get back on the web, without paying my mobile phone company a fortune. Sadly, the only way that I can come up with at the moment would have me back on a diet of junk food; the MacDonalds near to my workplace is a WiFi hotspot. One good thing about realising you have bad habits is knowing when you are likely to fall into them again. At the moment I have a great temptation that almost justifies my slipping back into a diet of junk food, but I know my weaknesses. There will be another way, soon, I hope. Technology will save me from the very indolence that it induces in my lifestyle, if I'm canny enough.
Twenty years ago, I bought my first laptop, although if you saw it today you'd laugh at it. I paid a lot of money for a Tandy Model 100. It was an A4-sized block of two-tone ABS plastic, with an LCD screen showing 8 lines of 80 characters. It had a word-processor, an address book, terminal software, and Microsoft Basic as the programming language. All of the chips in it were CMOS technology, meaning that they used very little current, and so it would run for ages on a few small batteries. The downside of all this was that it didn't have colours, or even shades of grey, and it wouldn't play any 'real' games. But since I didn't play games, (at least, not with computers), I didn't care.
I took it into work, where the MoD were complaining about the lack of detail in some equipment failure reports the big IBM mainframe was churning out, and downloaded a chunk of information from the Database. That night, I wrote some lines of code to get a new set of figures out from the data. Back at work next morning, I temporarily unplugged a line printer from the server, put the plug into the priunter port of my Model 100, and printed out the report. I left it on the Quality Manager's desk. The MoD got their copy of it two days later, and I was asked back to see the Quality Manager. The report was very well liked. But could it be altered to do someting else as well? (Of course it could, did they think I was going to sing all my songs in one burst and not keep anything for an encore?) And so it was that I ceased being a filing clerk and once more called myself an engineer.
It is a point of pride with me that I am able to earn money with any computer I can get my hands on, providing that it is working. If only it could be by writing, rather than just by sorting out problems. When I became interested in cycling I came across an article about a journalist in the USA who had a Model 100, some solar panels, and a recumbent bicycle. He cycled around the USA from story site to story site, composing his articles on the little Tandy, powering it from batteries charged up both by the solar panel and the dynamo on his bike, and then sending the stories in to his editor by a modem with an acoustic coupler that allowed the handset of a normal phone to accept a set of warbling notes and transmit them to the destination. The modem he used was almost as large as the Tandy.
One day, I will be doing that. Well, not on a recumbent bike, but I like the idea of being a roving correspondent. Is there a warm friendly place out there that wants its hills and valleys exploring? I promise to protect your anonymity. Really, I do, you can trust me, I'm not a professional.
I know what I would rather do, but I don't have an internet connection. I like to talk by email, and not about what I've just watched on the box. I need a way to get back on the web, without paying my mobile phone company a fortune. Sadly, the only way that I can come up with at the moment would have me back on a diet of junk food; the MacDonalds near to my workplace is a WiFi hotspot. One good thing about realising you have bad habits is knowing when you are likely to fall into them again. At the moment I have a great temptation that almost justifies my slipping back into a diet of junk food, but I know my weaknesses. There will be another way, soon, I hope. Technology will save me from the very indolence that it induces in my lifestyle, if I'm canny enough.
Twenty years ago, I bought my first laptop, although if you saw it today you'd laugh at it. I paid a lot of money for a Tandy Model 100. It was an A4-sized block of two-tone ABS plastic, with an LCD screen showing 8 lines of 80 characters. It had a word-processor, an address book, terminal software, and Microsoft Basic as the programming language. All of the chips in it were CMOS technology, meaning that they used very little current, and so it would run for ages on a few small batteries. The downside of all this was that it didn't have colours, or even shades of grey, and it wouldn't play any 'real' games. But since I didn't play games, (at least, not with computers), I didn't care.
I took it into work, where the MoD were complaining about the lack of detail in some equipment failure reports the big IBM mainframe was churning out, and downloaded a chunk of information from the Database. That night, I wrote some lines of code to get a new set of figures out from the data. Back at work next morning, I temporarily unplugged a line printer from the server, put the plug into the priunter port of my Model 100, and printed out the report. I left it on the Quality Manager's desk. The MoD got their copy of it two days later, and I was asked back to see the Quality Manager. The report was very well liked. But could it be altered to do someting else as well? (Of course it could, did they think I was going to sing all my songs in one burst and not keep anything for an encore?) And so it was that I ceased being a filing clerk and once more called myself an engineer.
It is a point of pride with me that I am able to earn money with any computer I can get my hands on, providing that it is working. If only it could be by writing, rather than just by sorting out problems. When I became interested in cycling I came across an article about a journalist in the USA who had a Model 100, some solar panels, and a recumbent bicycle. He cycled around the USA from story site to story site, composing his articles on the little Tandy, powering it from batteries charged up both by the solar panel and the dynamo on his bike, and then sending the stories in to his editor by a modem with an acoustic coupler that allowed the handset of a normal phone to accept a set of warbling notes and transmit them to the destination. The modem he used was almost as large as the Tandy.
One day, I will be doing that. Well, not on a recumbent bike, but I like the idea of being a roving correspondent. Is there a warm friendly place out there that wants its hills and valleys exploring? I promise to protect your anonymity. Really, I do, you can trust me, I'm not a professional.
posted by Sopwith-Camel | 8:30 pm
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