The Lair

Well, actually - I cannot, but go look anyway. Worldmapper provides maps of the world with sizes relative to various criteria; most of them arcane.

Endlessly fascinating if your interests include geography and a bit of statistics.

In other news, I seem to have more or less lost my self in activities outside the internet since I came back here. Trying to resume online behaviour in small steps. When I was living in the UK, life was more measured.

I do about the same amount of work there as here (different sorts of work, so it’s apples to research work really) but I feel more a bystander, more detached in the UK than I do here. Here, I’m somehow more in the middle of things and that leaves me precious little time to concentrate on internetterly activity. A large part of this can be attributed to living close to family - it’s much more difficult to lead a hermit-like existence when you’re sharing a city with my folks.

But in the meantime, at least life outside the internet is finally beginning to pick up.

So I’ve been a tad preoccupied with work recently. What else is new, you might ask… Well, when I stuck my head out of the gopher hole called work, peered around in a meerkat fashion … I discovered that there had been a beautiful little shooting war in Georgia.

So call me ghoulish, heartless or whatever but I happen to like Red Storm Rising and the bustup between Georgia and Russia seems to be the closest we’re going to get to conventional forces going at it. Despite getting a bloody nose in Chechnya a decade ago, the Russians won this one on the trot. Was anyone surprised? I wasn’t.

But then, I discovered The War Nerd. OMGWTF. VIDEO! Warporn!

So we have this new cordless phone in the house. The venerable and much abused unit packed it in. In retrospect, a cordless phone packing it in is unsurprising. No one in my residence is actually going to make it into a cricket team (or indeed, any sports team). Of course, in our mind; we think we’re sporting superstars.

This is probably why we launch the cordless phone on uncatchable trajectories and expect the recipient to grab it out of thin air. The gap between our expectation and reality is why the cordless usually bounces about twice on the floor before the intended recipient gets hold of it.

But I digress. New cordless phone. Dire warnings about not flinging it around etc

As the (apparent) resident technologist, it was my job to “figure out how it works and tell everyone else”. By and large, I can accomplish this task (only the early model VCR defeated me. I simply could not get that record-via-barcode-scanner business to work. I still smart at this failure). So I sit down with the instruction manual (not in Engrish this time around) and figure out how the cordless works. Among other things, the cordless allows one to set its name. You know, sort of like a screensaver.

Being in an inspired mood; I ingeniously settled on calling the phone “upstairs”. Because you know, upstairs phone. As opposed to the other unnamed phones which should be incarcerated downstairs.

Like I said, creative.

Later that day, I was accosted by an indignant parent. The phone, I was told, did not work. What did I do to it, etc.

I donned my best “who me? I did nozzin” face. I did nudding, guv. But do tell, what exactly is wrong with the phone?

“Well”, fumes the parent. “I came downstairs with the phone while I was taking a call and it still said ‘upstairs’. But I’m downstairs now. Why didn’t it say downstairs?”.

Oh. Err.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is going to be so inscrutable to ordinary mortals that they just should give up and not bother.

drac, 2008