tech revisited

A while back, I mentioned some of my concerns around my tech setup and the various machines involved. That was September and it’s now June and little has changed. The need hasn’t disappeared and I’m missing the portability of my old laptop, that ability to access all my stuff wherever I am, without being entirely reliant on the cloud. Some things I can do across all devices, some things need my main machine at home, a mac pro tower.

One important tech change is that I do have my new hearing aids, and got the final ear molds for them a couple of weeks ago. Working well so far and will blog about them later. Substantially less obvious than the old pair…undecided if this is a good thing or bad. I will be also be upgrading my Samsung Galaxy S2 phone to the new S4 in a month or two.

I’ve been looking at various laptop options including offerings from Samsung, ASUS, Apple, Lenovo and others. In my 7 years on vendor side, I went through several iterations of IBM/Lenovo thinkpads and remain ever fond of them. I also like some of the work being done with ultrabooks and laptop/tablet hybrids. I’ve especially liked the hybrid nature of my transformer prime.

an older setup, pre-tower

I will not be retiring my prime as it’s good for meetings and notetaking, not to mention reading the paper, and at the moment, occasional blogging. However it lacks true multitasking and hasn’t been particularly great as a development environment. The tower is fine if I’m in one place all the time but it’s not easily portable. Consequently I have decided to go for a dedicated laptop. Though a concern with laptops is that it means all my secure stuff will often be with me and thus more easily steal-able.

I suspect I have mostly decided on an 11″ Macbook Air. It’s still the case that some mac stuff annoys; on the other hand, I will be able to load mac software I’ve bought eg iPhoto onto the Air. The 11″ Air weighs just over a kilo and still feels good in the hand. On the downside, the mac pro hasn’t always played happily with my logitech equipment including trackball and wave keyboard.

I was ready to buy last week but I thought I’d better touch base with friends who are into apple and check development cycles. Sure enough, there’s a big Apple conference next week and everyone is anticipating several announcements including updates for their laptops. I’m now in a holding pattern and hoping that the Air includes Intel’s new Haswell chipset. It would be nice if it had the retina display but that’s not expected this year. I’m also hoping that the updated model will be available sooner and not later.

update: just noticed that Sony have released a new Vaio with Haswell and the 11″ version weighs 870g! Hmmm…

g is also for grog

I stopped drinking a couple of months ago. Particularly as I was concerned with how alcohol was affecting my sleeping patterns. I get very restless at night; to be honest I’m often fidgety during the day anyway :-) Also I figured it would be good to see if i could actually stop. 

I’m happy to report that stopping has been much easier than I anticipated. My sleep has improved and even better my snoring seems to have eased quite a bit too. Like my dad, I have a reputation for being a horrible snorer. On my trip to Borneo last year, it was reported that my snoring could be heard two rooms away. Now, I no longer sound like a strangled cat on steroids. 

My original intention had been to give up for a couple of weeks and then ease back in but drink less. Now it’s been a couple of months and I’ve had a glass of wine a couple of times altogether. Tonight I had a couple of glasses with dinner and felt light-headed, not felt like that in a long time. Happy to continue in abstinence. 

update: while the wine last night was fine, I didn’t feel particularly great afterward. My wine tolerance has definitely dropped substantially. Sleepwise I was much more restless and kept waking up. Thankfully, my snoring didn’t worsen…this time at least.

g is for games

I have to do a presentation tomorrow…just a 5 minute lightning talk but my consciousness is utterly lacking. I slept well last night and generally sleeping a lot better in recent months. Perhaps the buzz I mentioned yesterday has caught up with me. I don’t know.

I have managed to throw a few things together anyway and I have my topic sorted out: the preservation of computer games. However I’m not touching so much on the preservation itself but rather, what I believe is one of the controversies in the field. In book terms, we talk of content vs container especially as we describe the move from print to digital. For many books, the container doesn’t matter, however occasionally it does, and I have documented elsewhere my fetish for nicely bound editions of books that interest me.

So too, in gaming. There are numerous games that have been ported and for which there exist emulators on a variety of systems. This means that the content remains available as technology advances. I’m also interested in the potential for preserving the experience of gaming whether it be:

• the sound of a dialup modem “handshaking” at 300 baud (or even 1100/75)
• the whir of a C64′s 1541 disk drive as it loads data between turns
• the sore thumb from overuse of an Atari joystick

This is a harder thing to preserve as it means preserving working equipment and in that direction, there are some efforts to preserve hardware too. With that said, does anyone really want to destroy their bodies using poorly designed joysticks anymore?

#blogjune…again!

Oops, #blogjune has been running for 4 days and I’m already well behind. As I’ve commented previously, my mojo has been missing in action this year. I don’t want to speak too soon but there are signs that it may be flickering back into existence. In the last month or so I have managed to not only start but finish a book and start a second. I have read the final True Blood novel and made good progress with the third Sandman Slim.

My approach to work has also picked up and I’m feeling a stronger sense of ownership. I’m also approaching my 12 month anniversary. The last few days have been ticking over nicely and dare I say it, have had a nice buzz.

I have no idea whether I can manage to keep up the blogging in June, especially as I’m only up to “G” of April’s daily #atozchallenge.

We shall see.

f is for furniture

…and flat-packs.

A couple of months ago, I helped a friend move house and there was an almost array of items to deconstruct and reconstruct…not to mention additional items bought for new place. I seemed to spend forever stuck in a sort of Ikea-laden purgatory. At the same time, I was getting new stuff for me, including a new bed…moving from a double to a queen. Finally a new, decent mattress too – been two months and the mattress is still awesome.

However the bigger bed has presented one or two challenges in my room arrangement. On one side is a bookcase and side table and the gap on the other side is rather narrow. I had initially planned to have the bed against that wall but it proved too awkward to change the sheets. Was ok with the double, less so with the queen. the width is roughly equivalent to the depth of a shallow bookcase, about 240mm. I failed last weekend as I didn’t have measurements with me when I went to Ikea and bought a small billy bookcase…which wasn’t small enough.

Yesterday, I was wandering through Kmart and found a bookcase that is 235mm deep. I am just about to put it together…though dreading the construction. It does at least look more straightforward than an Ikea version. It’s just 16 screws with no odd twists. Fingers crossed.

e is for ears

I’m a bit of a deaf bugger (maybe a lot :-) and require hearing aids to be able to hear well in many situations. I inherited my current pair from my father when he passed away. I had new molds made for my ears and the aids were re-programmed…literally. They were connected to a computer via wires and had their settings modified. Dad got them new in 2002 and I was fitted around 2006. At the time, they were still pretty much state of the art and there hadn’t been new developments.

Now it’s 2013 and the hearing aids are coming to the end of their life. Hearing aids generally last around 6-10 years and anything greater is exceptional. Just as well as they’re rather pricy with the current pair costing dad about $4,000 per ear. I have embarked on the process for getting a new pair, which take several weeks, and has already proven to be a bit of an emotional roller coaster. I went to see a doctor last week to get my ears de-waxed and lost hearing altogether in one ear for a few hours. While I knew logically the ear would be ok, the shock was rather upsetting. This week, I’m doing it again and have drops in my ear prior to seeing an ear specialist tomorrow. Because I was mentally prepared this time, the loss of hearing has been more comfortable.

However, this is but the first stage. Once the ears are de-waxed, I then need to see an audiologist for a full hearing test to see where my ears are at now and whether I’ve lost any hearing since the last test a few years ago. Then I need to look at what sort of hearing aid best suits and what options I like.

While there had been relatively few improvements in 2006 there have been substantial improvements since then. A big improvement is that you can now get water resistant models: one of the things I’ve been paranoid with the current pair is getting them wet. I was told to avoid such and they could only handle a few drops. Given the expense I went way out of my way to protect them and always carry a protective beanie if there’s a sudden downpour. Otherwise I take them out and restore them when inside.

Colour! My current pair are a sort of grey, ugly colour. The new models come in a variety of colours including red and blue. I’ve been very tempted by bright, red ones but have been concerned about coordinating my wardrobe around so may choose a dark blue instead. Blue would go better with my eyes too. Other options include being shock resistant, some models have a remote control to provide greater flexibility. My current pair has about 20 possible settings but I can only ever have 2 or 3 active. To change them currently, requires a visit to the audiologist. A remote control would mean I could change them myself on the spot. And so on…

d is for dockhand

There’s a conversation on twitter about other jobs library folk had prior to becoming librarians. While working my way through uni, I spent several years as a dockhand on the loading dock at Grace Bros Burwood (now Myer). Over the course of 5-6 years, I worked my way up from casual dockhand to second in charge of the entire dock. Most of my time was as a regular casual though I did spend 18 months working fulltime while I paid off a car. I became rather adept at manipulating pallet jacks and stacking boxes…not to mention crushing boxes down for recycling.

I went to uni in Wollongong and when I changed to fulltime work, I planned to take a couple of years off uni altogether. However, I really missed the mental stimulation so after several months, I started studying two nights a week, driving from Burwood to Wollongong (about 90 minutes in peak hour) after work. The only subjects available in the evenings were in the History & Philosophy of Science (HPS) dept which I loved and ended up majoring in. I had initially been studying Philosophy and Computer Science, and had always wanted to try HPS but hadn’t been able to squeeze it in. Ultimately I finished off with majors in Philosophy and HPS and finished all the core components of Computer Science.