Goldtouch Go! Ergonomic Travel Keyboad

I've been using this keyboard for the past year and abit. It is the only keyboad out there tha is ergqonomic AND portable.

As you can see, it just craped itself.

I used t he exat same keyboad a work, and of course since it sa far more use, it did this ealier. GQot it replaed on waraty no problem. I don't hae the luxury this time aound. It wa, incidentally, the exactly same problem. Somethingq in the wiringq gqoes nuts, and suddenly the keys don't line up.

I've looked, but been unale to find ayone else reportingq on this.

Feelingq, ater tha lat post, ater statingq my only gqoal for the da wa to sit ad write my diay, thwated.

I've left my job, my home, my family, friends, loves and country. Scuttled my life to try build a new one, better suited to me now.

What more must I sacrifice?

Little wins. Let me have some little wins.

Mattress on floor,
Me on mattress,
Blinds pulled back,
Bats gone,
And one satellite flares, then dims, and crosses into the shadow of the Earth.

This is the last night in the home I made.

I know it's only because I'm suffering some serious fatigue and am PMSing like a feral bushpig, but today is horrible and I hope it ends soon.

Happy birthday, me.

The Ghost of Harddrive Past Does Not Walk

Took Eddie's old brain to a data retrieval centre. A quick diagnosis indicated that the reading arm was busted, a mechanical fault that would cost over $2,000 to fix and take up to four weeks. That was a punch in the guts, but I told myself I was buying my future self a present, and there was a finance scheme of sorts, but-

But that particular model of harddrive was built with a coating on the disk which comes off, clogs the head and erases the data.

He said they could give it a go, but the chances of retrieving anything were infinitesimal.

Sayonara, Hokkaido.

The Ghost of Harddrive Past

Eddie's first brain is dead. Long live Eddie. New brain has been installed. They don't make small 80GB brains anymore, so his brain is much bigger now.

Backups of all important work exists and is current.

Unfortunately, backups of files that are no longer active (not being worked on) were not so good. Or at least, if a backup of said files exists, I've put it in a Safe Place, which is pretty much the same as it not existing. One such casualty, in fact the only casualty I care about, is my Japan trip journal.

Most of it is online here, but there's still some two weeks of the trip I had yet to load up, and they're the best two weeks, Hokkaido, oh, Hokkaido, and uuuuurgh.

I didn't sleep well last night. It's hard to sleep when you're kicking yourself in the head repeatedly.

Data recovery is not cheap.

But trip journals stay with you for life. Travel writing is armchair travel, even more vivid when it's not poking your imagination, but nudging your memory. I'm buying my sixty-seven year old self a present (that's how I'm justifying it, at any rate).

And if any of you know where I put my legitimate paid-money-for copy of MS Office for Mac, I'd really appreciate a tip.

Sad Hands, Sad Face

My hands greatly enjoyed my trip. All that time not spent at the computer! They were very happy hands.

I spent three hours this morning taking care of my inboxes, and haven't touched a computer in ten hours. But now they are not happy hands at all.

All the things I want to do involve typing. All of them. I don't know what to do.

Heart Attack, Happy Dance, Can't Get This

I had a heart attack today, although not in the usual sense. It would be more accurate to say that I had an attack of the heart. Although not a day goes by in which my heart does not feel under attack from the world at large, so perhaps it would be more accurate to say 'this thing happened'.

Today, this thing happened.

I took a moment to zone out - from the report I was doing, the conversations around me, the various radios fighting for earspace, the office lights - and from nowhere felt sad. Not a wave a sadness, as that implies direction. It was a pulse, from the heart, and it thumped out like blood, just once, and faded away. It blindsided me. I hadn't been coasting near thoughts that made me sad, and I had not spent the day fighting off melancholy, in fact it was quite a cackle filled shift. It was pure sadness too, not tainted with regret, anger, despair or any other sort of emotion so easily confused with it. I sat quietly until it went away.

It's a puzzle, and I've been chewing over it since it happened. Normally I'm quite good at figuring out my own triggers, and why I react to something in any one way, but this sadness had no trigger. It was not a reaction. It shouldn't have been felt, and even as it spread through my limbs a part of me was already analysing and confused. I don't know where it came from, and having decided that I won't ever know that, I've started chasing sillier thoughts, and wonder if maybe some particular combination of lights and sounds or the way my gaze slid across this particular sentence triggered some flex in my brain, or connected the sadness dots, just for one pulse.

If I could find the sounds and movement to spontaneously trigger glee, I would bomb you with it.

Here is a video of people dancing around the world (as filched from boingboing).


Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

It is quite unabashedly full of joy, glee, dorkery, and is beautiful. It made me think of my sad pulse. Sadness is a strange emotion, elusive and quiet and rare. It is beautiful, perhaps the calmest of all the negative emotions. Joy and sadness are not so different, methinks. They're as hard to find as each other.

Someone came to this blog using "CAN I GET TESS" in google. The answer is "yes". The next question is "but why would you?"