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Just when you think there’s never going to be anything worth watching on telly, along comes the Discovery Channel’s documentary about NASA’s Greatest Missions. It was a corker, packed with reconditioned footage of the early years of space travel, which were also the early years of my life. Laika, the Russian dog, went into space (never to return) when I was 3 months old, and although I was a tad too young to remember that, by the time I was 11, when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, I was completely obsessed with anything to do with the Apollo missions.
The men who went up on those early rockets must have been either incredibly brave or incredibly stupid. The original group of 7 astronauts all complained bitterly when NASA decided that it might be a good idea to put a chimp into one of the first flights before testing out the technology using a human being, just to see if its eyes fell out or its head exploded. “No“, they said, as one, “let me the first to be strapped to the top of an oversized missile, and blasted into oblivion!“
One of the most dramatic moments in the programme last night was close-up footage of John Glenn’s face during his first orbital flight, at the moment when he realised that there was a problem with the heat shield on his capsule. Although the “capcom” (the man at Mission Control through whom all communication was made) refused to give him any details of what was going on (the astronauts were always the last to know), you could tell that Glenn knew that there was a problem which, in all probability, would mean instant incineration on re-entry to the Earth’s atmosphere. Gripping stuff, and I’m already looking forward to next Sunday’s instalment. I’ve tried to get my boys interested, but sadly it seems that what was the height of excitement in the 60s is dull as ditchwater for the modern youth.
Dear Marge,
I’ve decided that I want to be Scandinavian. They have the most well behaved people, the finest cycle paths, and Abba. Not to mention the fjords, saunas and smorgesbords.
I’ve also realised that, after half a lifetime of using PCs, Macs are better.
Am I having a mid-life crisis?
Dave.
Dear Marge,
I have recently signed up to Facebook, but I’m not sure why. What is it? What does it do? Why do I need it? So far, I don’t really get it. And my wife tells me that I’m too old to have it. Is she right?
Dave (Bristol)
Got to work early today, mainly because the boys being back at school puts extra pressure on the bathroom, and I prefer to get up early to do my ablutions (sp?) in relative peace. That tawdry domestic detail aside, an early arrival at the coalface of IT has the added benefit that I can sort a few things out before colleagues get in and start phoning me about their computer problems.
But this morning there is extra pressure to get sorted, because there’s an experiment going on in Switzerland, which may bring about the end of the world. Apparently they’re trying to re-create the Big Bang, which could generate a black hole, into which we will all vanish. It’s going to happen in about 30 seconds, so I’d better say “Cheerio” and press the Publish button quickly.
I rather like the sight of wind turbines, but I’m glad I wasn’t admiring this one at close range…
There was an interview with some bloke in the paper the other day, in which he said, rather teasingly, that his most treasured posession is a “Chris Craft Runabout”. The name led me to believe that it was some form of transport, but beyond that I had no idea. A few google-seconds later, I knew that it was a beautiful vintage speedboat, and had a picture to prove it. In fact, I found so much information about the Chris Craft Runabout that I was left feeling somewhat ignorant and unworldly, and with the distinct impression that I was part of a very small band of dullards who didn’t know about this legendary style icon, the only other members being a few isolated tribes in Papua New Guinea. It also made me wonder how long it would have taken me to uncover this piece of trivia in the “olden days”, and realised that in that other reality that was life before Google, I wouldn’t have even bothered to try. So let’s hear it for the Internet, making us more knowledgeable by the day, albeit in often useless ways. (I did enjoy the picture of the boat, and it brought back fond memories of thrilling speedboat rides at Bognor Regis with my Dad and my sister, on our annual summer holiday. Happy days indeed, in Jolly Bognor.)
I still can’t share Stephen Fry’s enthusiasm for Mozilla Firefox (see the first part of this gripping tale below). However, I have to mention one significant point that it scored recently. A colleague at work was having trouble using a website which (idiotically) relied on pop-ups to work, even at a basic level. It’s an appallingly designed site, but one that this person had to use in order to update details of adult education courses available at our centre.
After half an hour of trying, I couldn’t get Internet Explorer to display the site in all its glory, despite my best efforts to enable pop-ups, tweak the security settings etc. – it just wouldn’t play. So I thought I’d give Firefox a try, and it worked perfectly. All I had to do was add the website to the list of sites for which pop-ups are allowed, and all was well. So that’s one up to Firefox – although it’s the first real advantage that I’ve found.
I’ve never been that interested in web browsers, spending no more time deciding which one to use than, say, choosing my underpants in the morning. But in the latest edition of his often interesting “Dork Talk” article in the Guardian, Stephen Fry has told me that I’ve got to try using Mozilla Firefox, just to see how much better it is than Internet Explorer (which, coincidentally, he describes as “pants”). Personally, I’ve always found IE to be perfectly good at doing what it sets out to do, namely to display the page that I’ve asked it for.
But Stephen Fry is someone whose opinion I generally respect, and who expresses it in an amusing way, so I’ll do as I’m told. Both at work and at home I’ve installed Firefox, and have resolved to use it exclusively, as instructed, for 2 weeks. He guarantees that I’ll stick with it at the end of the trial period, and I have to say that he’s probably right, not because it will have changed my life for the better, but because it won’t have had any appreciable impact for better or worse, and I won’t bother to switch back.
After a few days’ use, I can confirm that:
- Firefox is easy to install. (Albeit not as easy as IE, which doesn’t need installing at all.)
- It works. (Very much in the same way as IE works – you type an address in, and the web page appears. I’ll never cease to marvel at this, the whole web thing, but that’s beside the point.)
- It offers mutliple tabs. (Stephen makes much of the multiple tabs thing in Firefox. Well, I don’t know who knicked it from whom, but IE and Firefox seem fairly indistinguishable in this respect.)
- You can download “skins” for Firefox, about which Stephen also makes quite a fuss. (Well OK, whilst some skins are hideous and clearly done by amateurs without much of an eye for design, others are quite pretty. But none seems to make the thing easier or better to use. You don’t go around looking for skins for your kettle, do you? If it boils the water, you’re happy. Can you get skins for IE? Probably, but I’ve never bothered to look.)
Things that aren’t the same in both browsers (unless I need to do some tweaking of Firefox to make it like IE in these respects):
- The text on a typical web page is not rendered as smoothly in Firefox – it’s all rather pixellated and jagged. (Do they use a lower resolution, to make it load pages more quickly? It doesn’t seem faster…).
- I seem to be obliged to prefix pages with “www” in Firefox. Not all, but some pages which get served up without the “www” in IE don’t load in Firefox. I’m not technical enough to know why, but it’s annoying.
- In IE “open in a new window” means “open a new window within the tab that you’re looking at”, whereas in Firefox it seems to mean “open page in a new tab”. I prefer the former, simply because it retains the continuity between the pages.
Anyway, none of this is hugely important, and I shall obediently continue the 2 week trial. Stephen’s promised more delights in tomorrrow’s paper, so let’s see what happens then. Maybe we’ll find that Firefox not only dishes up web pages, but throws in a side order of lobster thermidor. I’ll let you know.
I do like toys and gadgets. My nephew showed me one of these recently - it’s called a Levitron, and it’s brilliant. You spin the little top, put it on the plastic cover, lift the plastic cover and watch the top hover above the base. Quite useless, and rather tacky, but wonderful.
The internet is a remarkable thing. At the weekend, I went to see “The Last King of Scotland”, which was not an easy film to see on a Sunday evening – I spent much of the film with clenched hands, and some of it with closed eyes. (My “enjoyment” was also marred by the idiots in the back row who, like so many cinema-goers these days, felt the need to talk loudly until several people had asked them to be quiet, but that’s another story, which I’ll save for when I’m with some other grumpy old men…) Anyway, I thought the film was really good, with an impressive performance by Forrest Whitaker as Idi Amin, well deserving of his Oscar. The film deals with, amongst other things, the expulsion of Asians from Uganda in 1972. This struck a chord with me, as I had a school friend, Shailendra, whose family was expelled by Amin. Shailendra turned up one day, part-way through the school year, to become the only Asian child at the school. Extraordinarily, he showed few signs of being traumatised by the experience of expulsion to an alien environment, or by the racism that he had to deal with, both at school and outside. He was a really bright child, good at everything he turned his hand to, and was always going to go far. After school, he went to Oxford to study medicine, I came to Bristol, and apart from a couple of letters, we didn’t communicate since.
But the film made me wonder what had become of him in the 30 years since we knew each other, so I turned to Google. Appropriate keywords (his name, preceded by the “Dr”, which I assumed he had become) turned him up at the top of the list, complete with a photo, in which he looks exactly like the teenager that I knew, albeit aged a bit, as if by a theatre make-up artist. He’s now a Professor of Medicine and Chief of Endocrinology at a university in the States, and the ample description of his ground-breaking achievements came as no surprise, but did make me feel something of an under-achiever! I shall now drop him a line, not in the hope of reviving our friendship, but more just to say hello.
10 years ago it would have taken me days to discover what took me 3 seconds this evening. This whole internet thing could catch on…
