Thursday, September 12, 2002

No golf for you: All my golfing partners have deserted me. And, no, it's not because I'm so ill-tempered on the course, it's just that fate has intervened. One of them has run out of money (his wife is going back to university), another has given up his car for a time to take public transport and the other has been given the four to midnight shift, which means that we can't keep up our early morning games. I continue to go to the range and I just took the last of five lessons for the summer. However I am planning to go out with the pro to a nine-hole course to have him try to understand what it is that I'm doing out on the fairways that I don't do when swinging from the mats. Perhaps natural depressives just shouldn't play golf. 7:30:47 AM    comment []

Speak up, we can't quite hear you: You know when a biographer is having trouble getting information from primary sources. That's when she/he writes "no doubt he felt a ripple of joy spread through him on that wonderful occasion." This means the biographer hasn't a clue as to how the biographee felt. A step further along this road, something I noticed in a column that ran in my local weekly, is the quotation of the permanently dead. In this case the columnist said that he knew just how the late Mr. X would have reacted to what the columnist was writing and quoted him saying something he'd never said while he was alive, unless of course he had been gifted at that time with the ability to see four or five years into the future. And, you know, I'm absolutely sure that my favourite novelist Graham Greene would have something to say about this item. Wait a minute while I get out my tape-the-dead recorder. 7:22:52 AM    comment []

Pay your money, and stop writing?: How very odd. The minute I paid my money for the software to allow me to continue this blog, I lost all desire to keep it up. When I was in the free period I posted almost every day, but now I notice it's been a week and a day since I was here last. This has not happened with other software. I didn't stop using, for example, my newsreader Thoth because I paid for it. Ditto TextSpresso and all the other utlities that make my day pass a touch more smoothly. What's happening here? I suppose it might have something to do with the fact that my paying was coincidental with returning to work after a month of sitting around doing nothing. But I don't think so. 7:16:15 AM    comment []

We've got no mail: For the past two days my place of work has been without e-mail. The hard drive died during a backup and, bam, nothing. The IT guys are working madly to get it back, but everything they try fails. This is the third morning I've woken up to almost zero work mail in my inbox . And that's unusual. What's even more weird is that the spam filter is empty. Apparently I don't get any pleas to use Viagara or messages from nubile teenagers in my personal mail (probably because I don't put the address out on the Net). I have managed to keep in touch as much as I can through my other accounts, but I know that this is not good enough. Before e-mail how did I work? One side benefit for those who phone me, I now answer almost every call as it comes in. 7:09:54 AM    comment []