|
|
by Hugh Cook |
|
Section 115 Entry 0001. Date: 2004 June 27 Sunday.
(diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) I was riding in a train with some other teachers a couple of weeks back and one of them looked at my battered computer, greasy with stains and spills, the screen unwiped for weeks, and asked "Does it still work okay when it's all dirty like that?" "Sure," I replied, confident that the computer in question still had years of life in it, even though I was aware that the video card was probably on the edge of failing. (I sometimes ended up with distorted images or with a bright green line down the middle of the screen.) However, recently the computer signalled that the hard disk was about to fail. In fact, on booting, a message came up on the screen telling me to back up all my data because the hard disk could go any time. I don't have the money right now for a new computer. And, on top of that, any new computer I bought would come with Windows XP, and I can't stomach the thought of messing around trying to get to grips with a new operating system (in Japanese, at that.) So I decided to get a second-hand copy of my trusty X21 ThinkPad running a Japanese version of Windows 98, which I'm reasonably comfortable with. After hunting around in Tokyo's Akihabara electronics district, which has a reasonable selection of second-hand computer shops, I ended up getting something pretty close to what I was looking for: a second-hand X20. But am I going to partition the X20 and set up a dual-boot system, Linux on one partition and Windows on the other? That's what I did with the X21, but it was such a hassle (the X21 had some kind of secret partion associated with a disk-to-disk recovery process, and dealing with that secret partition really overstretched my technical ability) that I just can't face it. So I decided to just run Windows on the X20, and, later, either get a new hard disk for the X21 and set that up as a Linux-only machine, or else (one day) go out and buy a Mac. Running Linux only just now is not an option because I need Microsoft Word and Excel for office work that I do at home. However, I can scrape by with Windows. A Note on OpenOffice But scraping by with Windows leaves me with a problem. If I'm going to be handling my e-mail using a Windows box, then I'm going to be vulnerable to all the viruses that people e-mail me. Of course, I've got a firewall and anti-virus software, but, even so, this stuff makes for trouble. Fortunately, Yahoo has just recently bumped up the storage limits for free e-mail accounts from six megabytes to a hundred megabytes, so a simple solution was to divert my hughcook@hughcook.com e-mail address to my free Yahoo account. (Sending a message? Use the subject line "MESSAGE" and please see the frequently asked questions before e-mailing.) And that's turned out to be a great improvement. My "bulk mail" just vanishes into a "bulk mail" folder that Yahoo has provided me with, and the incoming rush of delinquent stuff quite simply never makes it onto my computer. It gives me a lot of piece of mind knowing that any venomous code in circulation is Yahoo's problem, not mine. I'm in an uncommonly thoughtful mood, a mood in which I feel a need to extract meanings from what's happening around me. And I guess the meaning that I can extract from the new computer experience is that change is a chance to reconfigure how we do things. How to make improvements with things that we never knew needed to be improved. (I know that insight isn't worth climbing a mountain for. But one of the beauties of blogging is that there's no requirement to be a prophet. It's like walking: if you can keep moving forward, you're doing okay.) Transferring the data from my failing hard disk to the new computer, by the way, went very smoothly. It's true that the exterior of my old computer was a real mess, but my data backup practices are pretty much immaculate. In fact, I'd just made a backup CD-ROM of my key data the evening before the "hard disk about to fail" warning first popped up. "Pride goeth before a fall" and all that, but I do take pride in being one of the best backed-up people on the planet. (And what would you do now, right now, if your hard disk crashed in front of your horrified eyes?) Section 115 Entry 0002. Date: 2004 June 28 Monday. (diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) My BAMBOO HORSES project has been stalled, dead in the water, for weeks now. My life has been dominated, rather, by the new baby, by a big curriculum development project that I've been doing for the company I work for, and, generally, by that demanding mess known as "life." However, today I opened up the text file for the novel (during the composition stage, I like to keep the text of an entire novel in one big file) and surveyed what was there. What was there was a mess. At the top of the file there was the notation "Words to change/vary: !! figure !! in fact !! actually !!". Initially, I couldn't figure out what this meant. Then I realized it was a note to myself about overused terms, such as the "figure" of "figure out". I searched, briefly, through the text for "figure" and found multiple occurences of "figure out" and "figure it out". That's actually (another pet word in play!) the kind of editing issue that can be left until the tweaking of a final draft. And how far am I now from a final draft? Well, I have a novel's worth of material. The text file holds 132,527 words, which I'd like to trim back to perhaps 80,000 to 100,000 words of novel. Although the text is a mess, and although there is a lot of pruning and reorganizing left to do, the task is doable. If I find just a little time each week in which to make progress. Starting things is easy. Finishing things is much more demanding (on a technical level) and much less fun. Once you're nine tenths of the way through setting up an elaborate flower arrangement, you can't go explode a bunch of fireworks in the middle of it just because you find yourself in the mood for fireworks. Looking at the work I have on file right now, I realize (in fact, I've realized this several times over the last year or so) that I have an enormous amount of unfinished stuff on hand. The temptation is always to start something new, but I think I have to make a rule for myself that I'm not going to start anything new, otherwise I'll be another five or ten years down the track with no new finished book, and I'm reaching the stage of life where I have to face the fact that there are not all that many years left. Enough years, if I'm lucky, but life is short, and what I need to do I really have to do now.
Meanwhile, as I contemplate a big push on BAMBOO HORSES, daily life goes on. Today's household issue: "Hugh, I saw a strange insect in the kitchen." "A cockroach?" "No, like an ant, but with wings." Probably just an ant with wings, then. But the worry is that it might be one of the shiroari, the "white ants" or termites which do such devastating damage to so many Japanese houses. If we can catch one and examine it, we can find out. Unfortunately, the corpse of the interloper spotted earlier is not available for interrogation, since the insect in question (ant or termite) vanished from the visible world when it was sent down the plughole to a dark death by drowning. However, on the balance of probability, it was surely an ant. I say this because we were, on an earlier occasion, invaded by ants. Section 115 Entry 0003. Date: 2004 June 29 Tuesday. (diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) Yesterday, in the course of my busy day, I chanced by a place offering haircuts in ten minutes for a thousand yen a shot. I've never liked losing time at the barber's so I decided to try it. It turned out you needed to buy a coupon from a dispensing machine then give it to the barber. For some odd reason, I've always shied away from any of the places in Japan (typically very cheap eateries) which requires you to buy coupons rather than hand cash to a cashier. I don't know why, but I find something dehumanizing about the impersonal process of plugging money into a machine and getting out a piece of cardboard. I'd rather pay a human being. In this case, I didn't realize there was a coupon system until I was actually sitting in the barber's chair being asked for my coupon. That sorted out, I explained what I wanted and the barber, a rather surly guy who didn't seem happy with his job, went to work. It was a pretty quick cut which ended with the application of a vacuum cleaner. The flexible pipe for this descended (if memory serves) from the ceiling, and the noise of stray hairs being vacuumed from my head made a huge roaring noise, a noise so loud that I worried a little about hearing loss. Anyway. Afterwards, I thought my hair rather looked as if I'd cut it myself. However, it's good to have shorter hair now that the sticky summer days are emphatically with us. An account of a more leisurely haircut is at:- haircut Takasaki Section 115 Entry 0004. Date: 2004 June 30 Wednesday. (diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) Got a kind e-mail advising me of the existence of OpenOffice for Linux. This in response to my observation that "Running Linux only just now is not an option because I need Microsoft Word and Excel for office work that I do at home." It was nice for someone to take the time to write, but OpenOffice is not a hundred percent solution for what I do. Under Windows, I use Excel spreadsheets which contain (I think, because I'm fairly ignorant about Excel) certain embedded macros, and these particular Excel spreadsheets do not seem work properly when opened up with OpenOffice. Also, for the curriculum development work I'm immersed in right now, I've been provided with a lesson planning form, a Microsoft Word document in which a kind of grid appears on the screen, with text being entered into the separate sections of the grid. I don't know why, but when I try using this form under OpenOffice, it messes up the way the grid behaves, creating an unwanted page break between two sections of the grid. Maybe there's a way to avoid or to undo this, but I'm extremely busy, and I don't have the time to mess around trying to figure out some kind of kluge to get round this. For personal use, OpenOffice is fine. I have a Linux version and a Windows version, and I use it to make the PDF versions of my . But, for office work, I want a nice, simple, hundred percent solution to my compatibility problems, and, for my life here in Japan, a Japanese-language version of Microsoft Word running under a Japanese-language version of Windows does the job. Section 115 Entry 0005. Date: 2004 July 1 Thursday. (diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) Yesterday I had one of the more nerveracking experiences of my life when I cut my baby daughter's fingernails. I did so under orders. In the night, baby Cornucopia had lacerated her own face yet again with her sharp little talons, and the child's mother, who had business to do at government offices, was leaving me home alone with baby. (Sometimes I have a very long day, out of the door early in the morning and home late at night, but, on occasion, the company which employs me has nothing for me to do, which allows me a morning or an afternoon here or there which can be devoted to the important tasks of changing diapers and giving milk to the hungry.) Anyway, home alone with baby, I got the blunt-tipped fingernail scissors from Cornucopia's box of "beauty goods" and, very gingerly, set about cutting baby's fingernails. It's quite difficult because the fingernails are so tiny. At this stage, Cornucopia is just a little over seventy days old, and the cutting edges of her fingernails, the parts that need to be trimmed back, are the merest whisps of white. And it's very difficult to cut the fingernails of a wriggly person who doesn't yet know the meaning of the words "Be still!" At one point I thought, in horror, that I'd just gone and sliced through an arc of fingertip flesh. But, no, I'd just cut the nail a little closer to the quick than I'd planned to. Mission accomplished, and everyone alive at the end of it! Which reminds me of another mission. Back when baby Cornucopia was still at her maternal grandmother's house, in Gunma Prefecture, my wife sent me out shopping, my brief being to buy a pair of fingernail scissors suitable for cutting a baby's fingernails. At a nearby shop, I promptly found, and bought, what seemed to me to be the ideal item: a very dainty pair of blunt-tipped scissors. But my wife looked at them and said, "No, those aren't for cutting fingernails. Those are for cutting the hair in people's noses." (My wife later went to the store in person and got the nose hair scissors exchanged for the appropriate item.) Section 115 Entry 0006. Date: 2004 July 02 Friday. (diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) Pretty tired at the end of a long, demanding week, but, on the train going home, found some time to do some spellchecking for my working draft of the novel BAMBOO HORSES. The spellchecker suggests "oratorian" for "obatarian" ... "DVM" for "DVD" (the software is showing its age) ... "velocipede" for "VelociRapacious" and "Newtonian" for "Nizonian." And now it's suggesting "spa" for "spam"! And for "outsourcing" it wants "outpouring." The dictionary it's using is old ... The good point is that the software can be taught new words ... and teaching it the necessary is the kind of task that can be done in a depleted state ... needs to be taught that "fart" is a real word, and not an error intended to read "fat." I find this cryptic segment of text in the middle of the BAMBOO HORSES draft:-
Something has obviously become messed up, but it's beyond my power to figure out what. That's one of the problems with not working on a book for a while. Never mind. This is the kind of problem that can be ironed out pretty much effortlessly, if I can ever find the time to get down to serious work on this project. Section 115 Entry 0007. Date: 2004 July 03 Saturday. (diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) Home alone burping baby Cornucopia, to whom I've just given milk. Into the third month of fatherhood now, and I feel I'm doing okay. I haven't hit any moment, yet, when I've felt totally out of my depth. I find I know more about babies than I thought, including how to talk to them. From my family, I got a book by Dr Sally Ward called "Baby Talk," which asserts that you should only try to teach your baby your own native language (in other words, for example, if you're a native speaker of English then don't try to start by trying to teach your baby Japanese) because, allegedly, in every language there's a special way of talking to babies, and if you are a native speaker of a certain language then you will know that special method. I was sceptical of this, because I wasn't aware of knowing any "special way" of talking to babies. But my bubble of scepticism burst abruptly one day when I was talking to my daughter and my wife (whose English is pretty good) said (noncomprehendingly, totally baffled by what had just come out of my mouth) "What was that!?" What I'd just said (naturally, without consciously tuning my speech to baby level) was "Wakey wakey!" So, yes, I know a whole bunch of stuff that I'm not conscious of knowing (I was the oldest of four children), and what I know is often there to assist me when I need it. We also know stuff on an overt, intellectual level, such as stuff about Pavlovian conditioning. (Pavlov's dogs, of course, were exposed to the sound of a bell every time meat was served to them, until, in the end, the sound of the bell was sufficient to make them salivate.) Our instrument of Pavlovian conditioning is Cornucopia's mobile, which plays music: a choice of Bach, Beethoven or Mozart. We always choose the Bach piece at night, figuring that if Cornucopia hears the same piece of music at going-to-bed time every night, then eventually that piece of music will have the effect of automatically sending her to sleep. And does it work? Well, sort of. In terms of getting Cornucopia to go to sleep, its effectiveness is patchy, but in my case the sounds of Bach induce overwhelming waves of fatigue, to the point where I have to fight to stay awake. And I do have to stay awake, because at that stage I'm still carrying Cornucopia, who will cry (at that point of the night) unless she is being carried around by one of her parents. So far, then, so good. It's not an easy life (busy at work with work and busy at home with baby) but I'm taking things one day at a time, and, overall, I'm satisfied with the way things are working out. |
|
|
|