Equilibrium?

Life truly is a series of ups and downs!

            On the one hand I am fighting off a sore throat and a bubbling cold and I am using up paper handkerchiefs as if I had not a care in the world about the vanishing forests; on the other hand I picked up a cheap pair of reading glasses to my prescription with built in mini lights!  They look chunky and reasonably hideous, but they do work and they have built in mini lights!  And owning them gives me a pleasure out of all proportion to the few euros they cost.  It doesn’t stop my nose running of course, but it gives me something else to think about.

            And, of course, I am using the glasses to play around with my new mobile phone.  This Chinese model, a Mi Max made by the international company Xiami – which I had never heard of until Toni discovered it as part of his survey to find a replacement for the exploding Note 7 that I had pre-ordered.  Trust me to pin my techhie hopes on a device which became world famous for exploding via its battery!  My new phone is more of a phablet than a mobile, but I have got used to the new size and, more importantly, it fits in my pocket.

            I am not convinced that I have managed to transfer all of my aps and files and photos and music; at least with Kindle all my books are in a library that can be accessed via the app.  The transfer of the contacts was a nightmare, mainly because I had not saved the things to my sim card.  I have no idea how the contacts finally got onto my new phone, I went to bed early to nurse my cold and sulk because things were not working out and, as usual, Toni then Did His Thing and managed to find the contacts, pack them up (electronically) and rehouse them in my new phone.

            Music has been transferred somehow.  Why does iTunes made it so difficult to enjoy what is yours!  Individual tracks are now on the machine, but they do not seem to exist in albums and asking the program to list them via artist caused the phone to go into an interminable period of ‘wait a sec’ which is the irritatingly false message for ‘nothing is going to happen’ on this phone.  However, I am enjoying the process of rediscovering elements of my past mobile phone and making them new, or at least given them a new context.  It is surprising how unsettling slight differences in the typeface or presentation of what were familiar apps can be.  Something to get used to.

            I feel like adding, ‘before I get bored with it and lust after another one.  At present, having owned my new phone for a period of less than a week, the candidate to supplant it in my affections looks like being the new Kodak phone.  It is perhaps ironic that Kodak (the company than invented digital photo taking) is returning to the fray with a phone that looks like a squashed version of a dated ‘real’ phone – I rather like the post-modern take and it is supposed to be the photographers phone.  It has been displayed, but not yet issued.  I shall be keeping a wary eye on the reviews – and wondering how to convince Toni that the extra expense can, in any way, be worth it!

            When, I ask myself, has any expense on tech ever been truly wasted.  I am also ignoring the hours of futile exasperation spent in front of an unresponsive computer screen or typed on a keyboard that stubbornly refused to recognise any of my increasingly desperate key thumps.  If nothing else frustration nowadays is at a higher level of technological achievement!