Onwards, onwards!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is always the temptation with a new bit of technical kit, to expect it to do more than the previous versions of it that one might have possessed.  And there is the expectation too that one will have the technical ability to push the envelope of comfortable achievement just a little further with something that is bright and new.

     So with my new watch.  In spite of the fact that I need it merely to tell the time and to count the number of lengths that I do in the pool to ensure that I get to my daily target of 70 and therefore 1,500m , I always hope that I can get it to do more.

      My relationship with my mobile phone is one of restriction.  Not, you understand imposed by anyone outside, but by my own limitations in using the device.  I use my phone to read The Guardian and the various volumes on the Kindle app and do my Spanish lessons on the Duolingo app.  And that is basically it.  You stand virtually no chance whatsoever of getting me to respond to virtually any form of communication, unless I am actually handling the phone at the time of the message.  I almost invariably have my phone set to silent and so phone messages come and go without my noticing them.

     At one time and with a past version of my present smart phone, I did have, for a limited period some sort of link between the phone and my watch so that when a message or telephone call occurred, it sent some sort of message and/or a vibration to the watch that could (on a good day) alert me to the fact that someone somewhere had tried to make contact.  This brief period of being ‘linked-in’ did not last and I accepted that watch and phone were devices apart and never the twain should meet in any digital sense.

     With my ‘new’ watch – which I might also point out is now ‘so last iteration’ as the next model is already being reviewed in the more salaciously flagrant hi-tec publications in certain parts of the world – I feel, yet again, emboldened to try and get some sort of link-up so that I can deflect the opprobrium that comes my way when I fail to respond to emails, telephone calls, or any other form of electronic messaging.

     Although, in theory, a great fan of linked-up electronic devices, in reality I have always been a separates sort of guy, with each piece of gleaming expense existing in its own little branded bubble of usefulness, while never quite achieving the connectedness that has been the vain aim of justifying all the bits and pieces of historical computing that I have acquired through the years-

     But this time (he says yet again) this time will be different and, behold, there will be an efficiency of through device computing that will link everything in a professional and useful way.  Well, at least I have got Alexa to work on the phone.  Though, when, by way of experiment, I asked Alexa how she was (I was ever polite, even to the inanimate) her reply that she was feeling ‘windy’ as so many people had asked her about ‘farting’ – was something of a surprise, as was also her unsolicited offer of doing her ‘rapping on farting’ if I so desired!  I did not and turned her off.

     It says something for the way that people are using the pseudo AI of Alexa that a perfectly civil asking after health gets such a scatological response!  What sort of depraved ‘conversations’ with the poor woman have been taking place for an ingénue of AI rapport to be so abused?

     The watch has now beeped, not to obliterate the racier utterances of Alexa, but to tell me that some twisted chess grandmaster is prepared to play naked to show that he is not cheating. 

     With news like that one almost turns with relief to the political situation in the UK where the Conservative Party has gone ‘all out and obvious’ in pandering to its paymasters and is now openly boosting the wealth of the obscenely rich at the expense of the obscenely poor.  A sort of refreshing honesty from a party that has previously tried to dress up its class preferences with mealy mouthed platitudes to try and ensure that the poor people that they are fleecing to feed the rich will not notice the Tories’ real intentions.

     As my (UK taxed) pension is paid in pounds sterling and transferred to me here in Catalonia in euros, every fall in the value of the pound is not a momentary worry about how much spending money you are going to have on the next holiday, but is rather more ‘here and now’ in the worry stakes for someone who relies on the cash being sent over to pay for basic living costs.

     If you are concerned about the cost of living, you might ask, why buy a new watch, rather than use one of the many that you have in reserve?  Well, you’ve got me there.  But I might point out that you are questioning a man who went out and bought a couple of new shirts rather than ironing one of the many clean but creased ones he had waiting to be attended to.

     I am not sure, exactly, what that little anecdote is supposed to illustrate, but it does certainly point towards an attitude to money where reality is only accepted when it bites.  Hard.

     Now, off to the first concert in the new season!  Make music as the pounds falls!

Cracked Time

 

This morning, while swimming back down the pool, my left hand inadvertently hit the side of the pool, not hard enough to hurt myself, but hard enough to find the sweet spot of my smart watch’s screen and crack the face and take a small but essential chunk out of the strengthened glass.  To be fair to the timepiece, it is still telling the time, but the touch sensitive quality of the broken screen is not irreparably lost.

     To someone like myself, a noted relojophile (I think the combination of Spanish and Greek in that neologism is more than satisfying) a broken watch is not a disaster, it is far more an opportunity.

     I could, of course, go to my boxed collection of older watches and choose one (or twenty!) to attach to my wrist, and there might even be a few rejected smart watches to choose. 

I could also, as I am at the moment, revert to and wear my ‘emergency’ watch, a Seiko that almost comically ticks almost all of the boxes for a perfect watch.  The model is a Seiko ‘Rail Road Approved’ smallish white face, with Arabic numbers, day/date, sweep second hand, luminous hour and minute hands, waterproof for swimming, and solar charging.  I leave it out on a sunny shelf and it is constantly ready to head wristward should anything untoward happen to my smart watch of choice: the Amazfit GTR.

     As I said, I do have choices, many choices, to replace the broken watch, and the replacement was on sale in Amazon and other outlets for a more than reasonable prime considering what the watch can actually do.  But, as I also said, I see destruction as a chance to try and better what I had.

     As with smart watches, so with mobile phones, we seem to have reached a stage in their development where we are asked to pay more and more for what I seem to remember from painful A Level economics classes is “eventually diminishing” returns.  The so-called ‘flagship’ phones of all the major brands (including those who used to be considered budget but excellent value for money) are absurdly expensive, and if you go to the extent of getting a foldable phone, astronomically expensive!  And, of all the much-vaunted attributes of the machine, how many are actually used by the individual purchaser?  Like computers and the programs that we use on them, we (well, I) barely scrape the surface of what they can do.

     If I am truthful about my smart watch use, I need the thing to tell the time with an always-on display and count my lengths while I swim and the distance I go for my morning bike ride after my swim.  And that’s just about it.  My simple demands do not, of course, stop me from pouring over the almost unending list of things that my watch could do if I understood how to get it to do it.  I find it difficult enough to get my watch to evaluate my exercise before my swim and then to switch to counting my lengths – something to do with moisture on the touch sensitive screen, and it’s always touch and go about whether I can make the thing work.

     Informing me about the receipt of emails and messages, linking to Alexa, storing music, remotely answering my mobile phone and all the other things that the watch allegedly finds simplicity itself, become much more complicated when I get my hands on the thing and the functioning of all these add-ons becomes much more problematical.

     But, with watches, I am an eternal optimist.  I believe in the incrementally commercially inexorable movement towards horological perfection and that what I experienced only imperfectly in one iteration of the watch will become sublime in a later one.

     I suppose that all of the above is going a long way round the houses to say that instead of using one or other of my numerous watches to fill the gap left by my broken (but still time telling) one, I decided after a Nano second’s hesitation to buy new.

     And not only new, but also falling into the patently obvious manufacturer’s trap of a so-called ‘limited edition’ version of something I could have got cheaper in its un-limited form. 

     But, I am ashamed (and yet defiant) to admit, that I was seduced by a bit of bling (it is gold coloured) and by the fact that it comes in a much nicer and more sophisticated box than the common or garden version!

     Sometimes I surprise even myself by how gullible I am when confronted by blatant ego flattering commercialism, but, as I am sure Truss the Heartless Far Right Zealot would assure me, my purchase is doing its bit to ensure the ‘trickle down’ of wealth!

     For some strange reason that thought does not  comfort me.  At all.

Music as balm?

For the first time, asking Alexa to “Play Classical Music!” I have been provided with something other than blatantly recognizable Bach.  Though I have to admit that what I am listening to, although being played on a modern piano, would benefit by being plucked on a harpsichord.  The more I listen to it, the more it sounds like a modern pastiche of the style of something much older.  The great thing, of course, is that I will not find out what the actual piece of music is and so I am safe in what I have written.

As an experiment, I have just asked Alexa what piece of music had just been played.  She answered in a single gnomic word that I didn’t understand, so I asked, “Alexa explain more.”  And I got a neat little explanation of the grammatical uses of the word and a little historical note about Sir Thomas Moore.  Perhaps I should just allow ignorance to lie low!

As the Alexa terminal is hidden behind the computer I usually forget that she is lurking there, unless someone demands something from one of the other terminals scattered around the house and my Alexa jumps to vocalization.  And incidentally, while I have been typing this we have gone from Carmine Burana to Beethoven - it puts me in mind of the worst excesses of Classic FM!

I once listened to whole a day’s worth of Classic FM when I was in a friend’s caravan in Devon where I had sequestered myself because I had to get a piece of written work finished and I needed to be far away from domestic distractions.

The great thing about Classic FM is that it makes all the music it plays sound like sonic wallpaper.  No matter how great the actual music is, the smooth and slightly condescending delivery of the announcers and the sometimes-shocking juxtapositioning of the individual snatches of music means that it all flows together in an unbroken stream of comforting soundliness!

If that sounds dismissive, it isn’t meant to be, as I got the work done and the music obviously did what I wanted it to!

I must admit that I do not listen to as much music as I once did.  Yes, I play (religiously) through the box sets of CDs that I (still) buy for use in the car.  Though my purchases are obviously atavistic: our local computer and electrical store no longer holds CD book-holders, which just emphasises how out of touch I am in still continuing to buy CDs rather than give in and subscribe to Spotify!

I only listen to Radio 3 once in a blue moon, I even forgot to listen to the first night of the Proms and that had a performance of The Glagolitic Mass, I first heard that on an old Supraphon recording that I had in college.  And no, that is not going to be an opportunity taken to vaunt the superiority of the audio on disc rather than the rather more cramped CD.

I find that I am reading more than I am listening to music.  And the reading I am doing is mostly connected to current events, especially in the UK, and specifically political events.  You see how far I am prepared to go before I have to mention the dreaded “B” word.

And I have made an executive decision that I will never refer to the congenital liar who appears to be making his inexorable way to Number 10 Downing Street by his first name (which is of course Alex, and not the one that he has chosen to be referred to as) as I feel not an iota of familiarity or fellow feeling for the odious person that he obviously is.

Next week, I will start the process of applying for Spanish citizenship, as I have no desire to be associated with a country that can allow a character, described by the Guardian’s John Crace as “Priapic Mr Blobby”, to be its Prime Minister. 

Though, there again, will The Country actually allow this lying chancer to take the post?  The Conservatives have a working majority of 3, with the August by-election in Brecon that might well be down to 2 - so all it would take is one principled Conservative (sic!) to change sides for the majority to be wiped out, to say nothing of the machinations of the Neanderthals in the DUP whose bought loyalty to the Conservatives is problematic.

So, can May (you remember, she used to be that vicious Home Secretary and useless Prime Minister) in all conscience (I used the word lightly in terms of the ethics of the present day Conservatives) recommend the kipper-waving liar to Brenda, the unelected (so they will have something in common) nonagenarian Germanic dwarf?

I can hardly wait for the next exciting episode of the tediously unimaginative soap opera that political life has become nowadays.

Meanwhile I continue with my writing and preparing books for publication, which in the circumstances has more in common with Madame Defarge’s knitting than any cultural activity!  

Though, alas, without the end result of execution!

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