Now, everyone instinctively knows that a retired person just doesn't know what to do with his or her time. In fact, if its their parents, the grown children automatically assume that mum and dad slipped into sedentary somnolence the moment the kids left home...
The only reasonable employ for their sudden, undeserved hoard of leisure is for the benefit of their children and grandchildren! So reasons (?) Giulia, for example, who rings from 300 km away for dad, barely turned 68, to bring his tools and a ladder nest time he wants to see Raphael or Benjamin because "there's quite a few little jobs to attend to". Whatever happened to handy husbands, you might ask... (Of course Isaac is excused on account of having his arms crossed over his guitar, or making stock, or changing nappies, or walking the toddler - on the three days when he doesn't go to work. Or is it four?)
Cristina also would like a few shelves to be put up in her flat, but she's now got the knack of whistling up a tradesman...
Gianna, bless her cunning little heart, is absolutely absorbed with sole motherhood, and she hardly finds the hours needed for furious blogging. So allowances are made and dad duly collects a shopping list and spends his ample spare time in town rustling up the necessary. Thus at least Bianca can shop in peace, without having me constantly nipping at her heels in Coles or Woolworths'...
So what exactly do I do with my days, now that I've given up consulting on networks, penning letters to editors or even spending the odd moment blogging? I was curious myself, so I'm making a deliberate efforts to keep track of my movements (no, nothing wrong in that department!):
One thing I can already disclose is that in an expanding universe, the time taken to complete any action also seems to be expanding.
Digital doldrums
Take the banally simple installation of a digital TV tuner/decoder card in my video-editing machine, Merval (no, that's not a misspelt Marvel, but a name taken from Jacques le Fataliste, from which all my network nodes derive their monikers). My 18-year-old Philips Elegance analog TV had been declared unworthy of ressuscitation by an expert, and after spending a weekend looking at a Chinese-made TEAC TV I figured the time was ripe to go digital - on the cheap, of course. I returned the TV to K-Mart and earmarked the refund for a digital add-on for the PC.
Deciding which PCI card to order took days arduously spent in bed (the only habitable place in our hovel in winter) winkling out the pros and cons from magazines and computer catalogues. Luckily I discovered just in time that K-Mart offloaded $A10 computer magazines for $A1 halfway throught the month printed on the cover... (In 1981/2 I spent a fortune on imported U.S. computer publications before charging ahead and building my first PC, a brilliant state-of-the-art S-100 bus-based machine which was promptly superseded by a dinky little newcomer from IBM.)
Having decided on a nifty little South Korean job from DVICO, the $A249 Fusion HDTV, for sporting the best features (such as S-video and composite in, apart from the antenna input, plus a good remote), the remainder of that day is spent ripping Merval apart pending the board's arrival. The Canopus RaptorRT editing card comes out, in case there are conflicts, and the Matrox MG450 dual-head card is displaced by a faster Leadtek model with more memory on board that was "found" on my machine Jacques.
The Fusion package lobs in, and another day is spent fiddling with rerouting cables left right and centre and watching a stop-go display of reasonable quality on the one channel apparently available.
Another day on the phone to the supplier and sundry experts, and seeking reassuring handholding via e-mail and on digital forums of others who'd been there, done that...
It appears I need a new Band Three VHF antenna and new quad-shielded RG-6 cabling from the antenna to the card, all connected with crimped RG-6 connectors. That means hunting down $A100 worth of cable and connectors and $A100 crimping tools all over the state. The antenna required an extra half-day field trip to haul home, but it's an 18-element beauty that's well worth the $A168 I had to shell out for it.
Watch this space!
Now, after spending more days climbing on to the roof and down again innumerable times, crimping and rolling out cable and making sure the crimps have 'taken', even Bianca is impressed:
We watch pristine ABC and SBS digital programs on the 34in CRT computer screen, as clear as the hills on the other side of Wallis Lake on a day of bracing westerlies! Was it worth it? Well, the programs are usually not worth the investment in time and money made to watch them, but one sure had fun encountering all the challenges and meeting them, one by one!
And, come to think of it, I could now insert digital high-definition screen shots in my blog - under the fair-dealing for review and criticsm provisions of the copyright laws, obviously - if I could find the time to read the Blogger instructions on how to post pictures...
If I had the time I could always fine-tune my newly refurbished SuSE Linux 9.1 machine LeMaitre, which has taken days so far to revamp. After a nasty trojan/virus shock on trusty Jacques, I've forsworn Win2K in favour of this safe machine for net connections.
Até jà!
Carioca
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