It’s a gorgeous day outside these four walls. but this time of year, it’s often a gorgeous day. consequently, i’m lazy.
Back in the cold of Cambridge, if there was a day like today, it was almost required to drop everything and soak up some vitamin D. You never knew if rain would inevitably rain on your parade, proverbially or actually, or if another crisis was around the corner. It was almost required to make hay when the sun was shining, and clearly that cliche came from a dank and drizzly corner of the world.
By the way, with that link to Boston’s latest dilemma, I’m beginning to think my old town is becoming Egypt of the Bible days. When will the locusts and frogs descend?
Here I am, safely drinking unboiled water after harvesting today’s lemon crop in my back yard, and I’m OK being indoors. It makes me feel guilty, all the while I know that statistical days of sunshine are greatly in my favor here.
I’m not a complete and utter slug of sloth, to mix a metaphor. I’m on laundry load three, the dishwasher has been loaded, run and unloaded, and a fresh shower curtain now hangs anew. I have not played in the sunshine.
Walt Whitman I am not.
I know not of these emotions. Not today.
The anti-Whitman, but not like in an Emersonian way or anything cool like that, I have succeeded in making my iPad into essentially a thin client.
Through the automagic of network computing, I can look at the desktop of one of my home computers, and tunnel into the files and do whatever the hell I want. Better yet, that desktop is connected to my backup disk with pretty much all of my data goodness, files galore I can now retrieve and manipulate iPad in hand.
As an aside, I was a total, arrogant douchebag to a chick at the boxing viewing party we went to last night. Fascinated to play with our new toys, after a while the woman declared the iPad inferior to her Mac Air (sheesh, talk about expensive toy), because it’s all about “access.” So, click click, I showed her my home desktop at my virtual fingertips.
Apart from party douchebaggery and braggadocio along with just seeing if I could actually do it, there is some method to my geek madness. It’s rooted in the black, dark days of my early foray into weblogging bullshit.
You see, one thing my old employer tried to do in trying to show me as the ill-will driven loon they needed me to be was to show I was using their computers and time to fiddle in my shitty craft. I hadn’t been, apart from the odd lunch hour (my time) or quick comment, but they tried, oh lordy-lord, they tried.
(Internet tip # 5,376, if you are going to ‘blog on the company dime, don’t date stamp your entries. I use Splee’s Fuzzy DateTime WordPress plugin. Thank you Lee McFadden and the development community on the world wide web for humanizing my time away from the actual precision my computer could be reporting. Nothing like “wee hours” or “today” to confound the time police.)
This job, therefore, one can’t even get to my website from their network. The IP address is blocked for all and sundry and their peering eyes, myself included.
It’s been a convenient excuse for my general malaise and writer’s block. Despite my boss’s own verbal notice that I SHOULD write in my down time and not to worry about the man’s keeping me down, I have kept off my own playground. No risk, no questions, no complaints, the lessons I took from my last gig.
Now, though, technology might give me a boost and perhaps switch off that writer’s block. During stolen daylight minutes when I am not too tired and eager to doze on the couch lulled by the TV, maybe I can write a little bit.
Tunneling to my own playground on my own equipment located 40 miles from work, I could have an out-of-body writing experience privately. We’ll see how it goes, but the man can’t be keeping my data down.