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back in Bloomington!
Nov. 29th, 2009 07:39 pmOver the break, Lindsey and I went to Phoenix to visit her grandfather (Grandpa Joe) and his wife Joy. They're really lovely people -- they took such good care of us while we were there, and told great stories about traveling (they've been all over the world), and neat things they've done. And they showed us around the neighborhood, brought us to Thanksgiving dinner with their friends, and kept us really well fed. Joy let us borrow her bikes, and the next afternoon we went for a run through Paradise Valley. Lindsey wrote some more about the trip on her journal too.
We tried to fix up her several-years-old Windows laptop -- it was grinding away so slowly that we were sure it was busy sending spam, but we couldn't find any malware. We're certainly not Windows experts, though; we tried a few different malware-finding programs (Ad-Aware and the one from Microsoft). The best we could think to do was to put it behind a router, so that it wouldn't be exposed to the unfiltered internets anymore. What would you have done in this situation? (waited for Chrome OS?)
It was pretty great to check out a different environment for a while; the warm sun and the desert were a welcome contrast from the drizzly, chilly Bloomington environment we've been in.
Oh, and on the trip, I read some fiction! This has been pretty rare for me. But I can heartily recommend Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics. It's about hypothetical people living at different stages of the universe's development -- say, before the Big Bang, or on Earth, but before there was an atmosphere -- and their struggles, mostly for love, or to be understood. One of the stories ("Light Years") has this wonderful premise: the narrator can look out to planets in faraway galaxies with a telescope, and see signs that the people there are holding up, ostensibly commenting on his behavior. He knows that they can see him through their telescopes, so he becomes increasingly concerned about his image, out in the cosmos... it's sort of like Twitter, or having your friends post pictures of you on Facebook, only he has to wait millions of years for the light to travel to his audience!
The more I find out about Calvino, the more I like him. A few years ago, I read If on a winter's night a traveler, and that was really great too.
OK: having had a nice break, time to get stuff accomplished!
We tried to fix up her several-years-old Windows laptop -- it was grinding away so slowly that we were sure it was busy sending spam, but we couldn't find any malware. We're certainly not Windows experts, though; we tried a few different malware-finding programs (Ad-Aware and the one from Microsoft). The best we could think to do was to put it behind a router, so that it wouldn't be exposed to the unfiltered internets anymore. What would you have done in this situation? (waited for Chrome OS?)
It was pretty great to check out a different environment for a while; the warm sun and the desert were a welcome contrast from the drizzly, chilly Bloomington environment we've been in.
Oh, and on the trip, I read some fiction! This has been pretty rare for me. But I can heartily recommend Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics. It's about hypothetical people living at different stages of the universe's development -- say, before the Big Bang, or on Earth, but before there was an atmosphere -- and their struggles, mostly for love, or to be understood. One of the stories ("Light Years") has this wonderful premise: the narrator can look out to planets in faraway galaxies with a telescope, and see signs that the people there are holding up, ostensibly commenting on his behavior. He knows that they can see him through their telescopes, so he becomes increasingly concerned about his image, out in the cosmos... it's sort of like Twitter, or having your friends post pictures of you on Facebook, only he has to wait millions of years for the light to travel to his audience!
The more I find out about Calvino, the more I like him. A few years ago, I read If on a winter's night a traveler, and that was really great too.
OK: having had a nice break, time to get stuff accomplished!
