To drink or not to drink

It seemed I was the first patron to enter the coffee bar early that morning in October. The tables were still devoid of people; two staff members of Chloe Cleveland's were pretending not to be all too noticeably bored by the lack of custom, and were busy arranging or wiping things. Amongst the things to be shuffled, put straight (even when they'd been perfectly acceptable before), rearranged (in spite of a previous arrangement having been quite all right), wiped or dusted off a bit (even when they had looked flawlessly clean, at least from a distance), were dozens of cups of different shapes, sizes and colours.

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The topmost shelf board consisted of mugs rubbing brims, all handles neatly arranged in that they all pointed to the right, touching over its front the neighbouring cup that was always of a different colour. There were two different shades of green, violet, orange, red, a sunny yellow, some buff of sorts, at least, these are the ones that spring to mind in hindsight.

The board underneath that topmost one was filled with cappuccino cups, all sitting on saucers, and they all had a millimetre or two of space between them. They, too, were very neatly arranged, almost as if they had been put there by means of a template or some kind of positioning device. Their handles, too, pointed to the right. It all reminded me a bit of Egyptian wall paintings.

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The pattern was continued by the espresso cups in support of the Egyptian impression on the following shelf, under the cappuccino cups. The arrangement itself, handles to the left this time, cups on saucers, was clearly consolidated by the very same colour scheme, the only difference being that the saucers actually touched each other. It had to have something or other to do with how they ended up filling a single shelf, completing a row.

I couldn't help noticing all this, while I was hard at work reading all those fancy names and checking the prices. And I could see that one of the baristas watched me from the corners of her eyes and might have been hoping I didn't turn round on my heels to get out again.

I didn't. Yet I put myself at a bit of a distance from the counter to study the price list and must have put on a not overly encouraging facial expression so that I was left to myself for the time being. It was clear yet again that the coffee prices in town were not among the lowest of the country.

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It took me a while to make up my mind - which included the possibility of a decision in favour of, in fact, swinging around and leaving - about all those lattes, macchiatos, espressos, long blacks, short blacks, cappuccinos, soymilk instead of cow's milk still having to be paid extra, and I must have pulled a particular face at that one. The slow selection process allowed for thinking of a certain roadside café where they didn't, by contrast, charge extra for soymilk.

The urge to have a cappuccino eventually outdid the unwillingness to spend four dollars for it, and I approached the counter, setting one of the two young women in motion, who looked at me asking "Are you right there?" If I hadn't known this generic question all too well, I might have wondered "in my head"? Right enough, though, to be willing to pay four dollars, and, as it later turned out another thirty-five cents for a regular cappuccino? I was really beginning to have second thoughts.

There are four different sizes of pretty much all sorts of coffee, except for the espresso that's naturally smallish, and the short black that cannot be bigger without becoming a long black: small, regular, large and extra large. The difference in size between small and regular is noticeable. Expressed in price, however, it's just forty-five cents - try that in percentage of the whole expense. To have an extra large cup - a cardboard one, with a plastic lid, that you can shuffle to a table with or simply take away with you - you then only pay another sixty odd cents, but the cup is enormous. That's a marketing strategy.

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My idea of having a go at an extra large cappuccino was however too close to someone in fear of drowning, which is why I was happy to save those additional sixty cents and be satisfied with a slightly overpriced regular cappuccino but the added benefit of being sure about managing its size.

I took the cup, paid for it somewhat grumpily, and then decided, instead of sitting down at a table, to leave Chloe's place and her friendly staff, and let them continue arranging, rearranging and wiping the cups on the shelves.

Draining and Storing Water to gain more Land?

What about draining water from the oceans and storing it elsewhere to gain more land? What about trapping water in the form of ice, for instance? But how could one practically do this?

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Optimistically speaking, one might say, let's install something, much like water reservoirs for drinking water, that holds water as ice in huge blocks or mountains, icebergs, so that the oceans' water levels can drop.

Or let's secure the existing land-based ice masses of places like Antarctica and Greenland, and make these ice masses grow further by keeping them cold enough for rain to top them up. But then, what if the installations that freeze and hold all this frozen water together lose the energy to keep it all cold enough to remain solid?

That doesn't sound overly reassuring, or does it? Though the energy could in fact be taken from the sun via an array of solar panels. Yet still these, too, could fail, or couldn't they. Or could the whole system be so failsafe that it could never stop working in its entirety while the faulty parts are being attended to, repaired, maintained, overhauled? Enormous inundations would be the consequence of such a system failing completely.

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Or what about digging enormous cavities and heaping up mountains with the soil and rock that has to be removed for this purpose? Surely, there's space somewhere for cavities and mountains, and if that is in the world's deserts, these mountains would be made of sand, oops.

If this worked, it would result in additional surface to do something with, such as growing vegetables and fruit, or to construct buildings, much like Singapore's and Hong Kong's land reclamations, and the huge hollow spaces could then store surplus water, which would have to be desalinated first, of course, and that could make the world's ocean levels fall. But is this feasible?

There's a bit of "lateral thinking". And this isn't the end of it. The six-thinking-hat approach gives us optimism, drive and creativity, but also the tool of cautious criticism, such as taking into consideration the desalinity point or the consistency of sand, in particular when it's heaped up...

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And it's not the ultimate solution to work against climate change, though it may counter the rising sea levels to some extent, yet it won't do anything about the mess resulting from the changing climate such as a shift in climate zones, rising temperatures and stronger winds, the oceans' warming etc. And land gained from displacing seawater would be under constant threat from further melting ice in places that are not artificially cooled.

It's a complex scenario, but with a bit of creativity one might be able to get somewhere...

Fond of Microsoft

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Peter still likes Microsoft. That was his statement in September 2012. He's been with them ever since the days of DOS 3.2, he stressed, and five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy disks, no hard-disk drive, 512 KB of basic and total memory. That was the hardware Microsoft software was running on at the time.

People younger than 25 will never even have heard of DOS 3.2, let alone of PCs with only 512 KB of memory. Really? And that worked? What could you do with it?

And people in their early thirties in 2012 were most likely too young at the time of DOS 3.2.Though, surprisingly, in the index of a book about Windows 7 , which Peter had been browsing through only the day before telling me, he had read that there was something for people who liked MS DOS, and he could hardly believe it and said he was keen to find out what this was as soon as he found some time.

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Listening to Peter, I was wondering if it was the command-prompt icon that's been with Windows for so long or even more than that? A complete MS DOS 3.2 emulation? Peter will surely tell me in the fullness of time.

But for Peter, DOS 3.2 was the beginning, his entry into the computer age. And he's been following Microsoft through all its stages of software evolution, or one might be tempted to add "intelligent design" because in this case it is pretty certain that it wasn't just a sequence of coincidences, although outside influences to some extent, and mistakes and over-enthusiasm arising from within cannot be denied.

And Peter's  product loyalty also applies to Word and Excel; in the Windows 3.1 age Publisher came in too; and Access and PowerPoint came and went for Peter in waves of their usefulness to his professional ambitions.

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But since 2006 Peter has remained stuck in the World of Windows XP and Office 2000, and Microsoft is probably not going to like this: Peter is still utterly pleased with Windows XP and content to have read the other day that it is still the world's most appreciated and most widespread operating system.

As far as Office 2000 is concerned, Peter said he wasn't so certain. How many people might still be using is; or rather, how many have got a more advanced Office level taken there have been quite a few upgrades since 2000? But as far as Peter is concerned: Office 2000 does everything he needs and more still, things and functions that he's never even heard of, let alone used.

His greatest secret that he confided in me was that he still had an ancient old office PC that kept running and running, a PC that he was once allowed to take home, because the thing had been fully depreciated and wasn't going to be used any longer, and that was still running on Windows 98. I was flabbergasted.

He couldn't go online with it any longer, he whispered, because Windows 98 wasn't supported any more by Microsoft (which came as no surprise to me), but it was so nice and cute, and he used it when he didn't need to go online, and he had Office 2000 running on it, too, and to balance out the missing Internet connection to look up things he didn't know, he had a CD-based encyclopaedia that worked fine on Windows 98.

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He even let me know, top secret, that he still had a Windows 95 installation CD and that he would have installed that on the ancient PC if only, and that was it, that revealed the limit even for Peter, it supported USB ports. So that was one of Peter's minimum requirements. And even Peter had a mobile phone to be contacted, and even a touch-screen one. The two sides of Peter. I was amazed.

Peter just loves Windows XP (and Windows 98 a bit, too, one may assume), although he can surely imagine, he said, that Microsoft would appreciate it if he could at long last pull himself together and upgrade to Windows 7, now that this operating system, in late 2012, is already three years old and Windows 8 is about to be released, or has it already, Peter was wondering, since he'd read the other day that Mozilla was working at the adaptation of its Firefox browser to the new Windows-8 touch-screen environment.

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So Peter bought himself a plain & simple guide to Windows 7, and that's also pretty much the title of the book, and, wait for this, it's by Microsoft Press, and to such a convinced devotee of so many years as Peter, that was just marvellous.

But knowing Peter, he might, though getting to know Windows 7 in such a nice, colourful and entertaining way, still end up being happy with the knowledge and hold out and keep working with Windows XP until the end of its extended life-cycle in April 2014.

Knowledge Opportunities

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Here's a challenge. Nobody needs a university these days to acquire knowledge in order to just know and be a better neighbour or member of the community, or perhaps even to do something useful or interesting, or both, with that knowledge.

If it's not about science, technology and medicine (yes, well, to be honest, we might want a well-trained GP, not just one having read books on various medical subjects), studying, or let's just say "learning", that'll do, can be done even without having to do annoying assignments for some lecturer giving you a more or less lukewarm and frequently pointless comment and a result for an essay about somebody else's writing or story telling, or some events in history or current politics, some philosopher's remark...

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If you are not too keen on waving about a diploma or degree, saying things like "hey, hey, I can add 'BA' to my name now, and you are happy with just the bare knowledge instead, use the media. There are many documentaries, not just sitcoms and soap operas. Use public libraries, there are many interesting books, not just novels.

Learn to form educated opinions just by reading, observing, thinking (twice, if necessary), listening, comparing. And don't just repeat what others say or write, think about it; if you find you agree after careful consideration, you can still choose to repeat something interesting and valuable you've read.

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Even reading about science, technology and medicine - if you don't insist on becoming a surgeon or rocket scientist - can put you in a position to understand better what a GP or an engineer tells you or what a science documentary is ultimately about, and you can put it all in perspective. And you can even find mistakes or flaws in someone else's logic.

But you've got to use the opportunities that weren't available to previous generations. You owe it to yourself and to your contemporaries, and at times even to future generations.

Greek to all of us?

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Democracy is a Greek word and concept. We all take it for granted and as understood, the rule by the people. The problem in antiquity, however, after the concept had come about and got its Greek brand name, was, alas, that though being much more direct than these days, the use and privilege of it was restricted to the rich Greek upper classes.

Not just about anyone could get his (yes, this, too, was another restriction: women were excluded) presidency, as we'd call it today, for one year before he got assessed on his performance. The neighbourhood baker, for instance, had no chance of ever being elected to be the top-decision maker for a year.

The downside for those who could manage Greek city-state affairs for such a period of time, though, was that when their performance was poor, they could be banned from even residing in the city for some years.

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So, one might wonder if Greek democracy, antiquity style, wasn't more of an oligarchy. But maybe that was still a lot better than a monarchy, where the sole ruler is, more or less, the head of a more or less drastically managed cleptocracy.

All these Greek words. We might need a glossary, pardon my Greek, before we continue: demos basically means people, monos is just one, oligoi are a few, kratein means to rule and a cleptes is a thief. Giving just a single English meaning for every Greek word isn't always enough, nor is a single meaning in any language for every English word, but it'll do for now. So, let's think on.

Monarchies may in fact already in pre-historic times, when bad things didn't get written down yet, let alone video-recorded, have come about in the shape of something like a bullying bikie gang, and not necessarily along the lines of the often so academically proposed benevolent community elders.

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Bikie gangs on horseback bullying villagers into submission, mafia style, and getting them to feed them and pay them a little extra for being left in peace, are a more realistic assumption when one looks at international news feeds and the history of just the last century or so; and perhaps occasionally the villagers also were privileged enough to get protected by the bikie gang against another one, but one would have been well-advised not to hold one's breath for this latter opportunity.

When would it have been best to live and work as the neighbourhood's baker?

Enforcing Peace

Neighbours can be a pain in the neck, and more often than not some of them force you to do something about them, of all people, whether you want it or not - and whether they want it or not. Peter's new neighbour, new for about six months at the time this happened and from whose perspective it was actually Peter to whom "new" would have to apply, was eager to ask him over for a drink after he'd been in the area for about a month.

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Peter doesn't generally drink but he thought it might be a good idea to show neighbourly spirit, thinking it wouldn't happen all too often, anyway, and that there might be a reason of sorts, beyond the obvious of saying hello, which might as well have been done over the fence, for the invitation that could more or less easily be dealt with.

Here's to good neighbours, the man uttered after a while of small talk, in the understandable hope of not being bothered by Peter too much. Well, Peter thought, it looked pretty much as if he wasn't going to be bothered by his neighbour either, and the latter could have had this result as far as Peter was concerned anyway, even without a glass of beer.

Alas, the neighbour's dog, an aggressive and noisy little automaton, performing the same annoying antics over and over again, meaning deafeningly bark at just about anyone in Peter's garden at any given time of the day or night, as if at the press of a button, got in the way of good neighbourhood relations. When Peter asked his self-proclaimed "good neighbour" after a few days if he couldn't control his dog a bit since its behaviours was having a negative if not outright unhealthy effect on life on Peter's side of the fence, the neighbour self-importantly answered he couldn't do anything about it and that Peter was going to have to live with it.

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What a good neighbour this is, Peter thought. Luckily, he knew what he could do about the situation and bought himself a dog chaser to pay the beast back until, necessarily and unavoidably bullied into submission already by Peter's very footsteps after a while, conditioned much like Pavlov's salivating dog, it stopped barking at him, preferred to run away at the mere sight of Peter, and finally also let him sleep at night.

Peter realised that the ultrasound a dog chaser emits was at least as painful to a dog as its barking was to him - or any other peace-loving fellow being. Sometimes, yes, peace has to be enforced, Peter concluded. And weren't there many parallels between micro- and macro-politics.

The Trouble of making a Warranty Claim

That's probably something you just have to do before you return anything to the shop where you bought it and claim warranty. The six-point powerboard came with a surge protector. Fine, basically, Peter thought. The surge-protect function works as long as the little LED lamp is on, most of them shining red as this one.

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But the lamp on Peter's powerboard didn't shine any more, only about three weeks after he'd bought it. Something had to be wrong, Peter was certain of it. Before risking the attached computer in case of a power surge, he thought it wise to return the board to the shop where he'd got it, and ask for a replacement.

After he had pulled out all the plugs from it to conveniently pass by the shop on the way home from work, Peter subjected it to another test, just to be on the safe side since hardly anything is more embarrassing in a shop than a warranty claim for no apparent reason; for when the shop assistant tries it for himself and everything seems to be just fine, what is one to say, Peter mused. So he tried it once more himself. And it was just fine!

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Oh, all right, he pondered. So it didn't look like he had to go and claim warranty after all. But he first wanted to try it yet once more on another power point. Still fine; then a third one, just to make sure. And there it didn't work. That was strange. Peter turned the power board off and then decided to try and see what happened when he turned it back on once again. And it worked. Off and on. It still worked.

Odd though it was, Peter took it and went back to the original power point, right next to the computer desk. It still worked there! Off and on. It still worked. Well, be that as it may, Peter thought, He'd just have to have an eye out for it in the coming days to see if it kept working. He couldn't possibly expect the shop assistant to attach too much meaning to his little story anyway, and a seemingly working powerboard won't generally convince anyone a warranty claim is justified.

Paying up

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Charles was complaining the other day about the carbon tax, saying that he was sufficiently conscious of what he was doing and that he had for ages already been cautious about resources in general, so much so that he hated having to pay extra for the lack of concern displayed by others.

After all, he added, forcing people to adopt different habits wasn't a convincing approach from his point of view since that included wholesale everybody else willing to use their marbles even if they, admittedly, at times seemed to constitute a clear minority.

Instead the government might want to try and convince people via incentives, if appealing to most people's common sense wasn't going to help most of the time. Incentives could make some things cheaper for those who followed these common-sense approaches.

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It was exasperating, Charles went on. It was just like for insurances, he added, where he had to pay more just because so many other people were behaving so foolishly, inconsiderately or even outright recklessly. They were smoking too much, eating too much, becoming aggressive in traffic situations, there were all sorts of reasons, he moaned, and expensive ones, that left insurance companies having to pay obscene amounts for the consequences of foolish behaviour.

And for all that he, Charles, had to foot the bills more than the insurance companies themselves who simply passed the buck and raked the dough back in from ALL of their members, he cried, by increasing the premiums time and again to replace what they had to fork out for so many of their members.

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Peter found himself in not much of a position to help Charles out of this rut. In spite of seeing the point he was making, he couldn't present him with a quick-fix solution. He helped himself to another cup of coffee, uttered a furtive "oh dear, oh dear", and was happy enough about not being overweight.

On top of that he found comfort in coming in to work every day by bus, so that even on the occasional day that he was in a bad mood, he wasn't behind the steering wheel and couldn't cause much distress to others on the road; and last but not least Peter was content about not smoking - which brought with it his insurer's non-smoker tariff, after all, through which he hoped to have a somewhat lower premium, though he had so far never actually checked this out properly to be certain.

Nature, one way or another

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The other afternoon, there was a pretty severe storm and one of the two pencil pines, hardly two metres tall and thin, as you'd expect, standing at the back of the garden, had given way to it. Or so it seemed. Naturally, Peter's wife immediately asked him to go and have a look. "But it's raining," Peter complained. Well, wait till there's a break and then go and have a look.

Ok, let's wait, and Peter hoped that the rain and storm weren't going to abate anytime soon, so he settled back into his chair and continued reading in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice hoping to find out how Elizabeth was going to react to Darcy's letter.

Suddenly, though, his wife announced a break in the pelting rain's pattern. Oh, blimey, Peter thought, oh well, let's go and have a look then for heaven's sake. When he opened the terrace door it was still raining, though somewhat less, and Peter began wondering what his wife might call it when the rain really stopped.

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But he ventured through the raindrops anyway and arrived at the deplorable pencil pine in the farthest corner of the garden. Luckily, the stem wasn't broken, only bent over. Peter found it remarkable that a tree should be so flexible, but then, it's a pencil pine and they remain thin and flexible to a certain extent, at least for as long as they aren't considerably taller than Peter himself.

After Peter had realised that he could easily put the pine straight up again since there was still a strong wooden staff standing beside it and that the string that had previously held the pine to it had simply become loose, he tied everything back together, pressed the soil around the staff tight and went back inside, just, however, to find his wife asking him why he hadn't brought the three lemons that were lying under the lemon tree, and if he couldn't also bring along some parsley while he was down there anyway.

The Thing about Weeds

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Bruce had been wondering for a while whether it wouldn't be better to stop trying to get rid of weeds altogether.

When he had a closer look, therefore, at some of them last Sunday, out in the backyard, where his wife had sent him to do some weeding, and where he spotted every so many new islands of unasked-for green, he noticed that some of the so-called weeds actually had pretty little flowers, light violet ones for instance in one case.

Agreed, he told his wife when she joined him noticing from the kitchen window that he was just standing about without doing anything much, onions weeds are a nuisance, but then again, it's also a nuisance to keep having to rip them out.

He knew it was going to be hard convincing her that a change of attitude towards weeds might not be such a bad idea after all. It might even be a form of lateral thinking. Look, if you cannot efficiently get rid of weeds, turn them into a feature, or at least some of them.

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And the "some of them" bit was exactly the point. If some of them have got nice flowers, why not just rip out the ugly ones and leave more space to fill for the prettier ones. They'll then take over all the space where we ripped out the ugly ones, fast as they, too, grow. And then we'll never have to spray herbicides that aren't good for the environment anyway, and costly on top of that. And we can skip thinking about regularly weeding the garden, too.

Besides, the prettier weeds are low-maintenance plants, in a way, aren't they, love? They pretty much look after themselves and need little care and attention, or water for that matter, and you can forget about the fertiliser, too. They'll be just fine.

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On top of that you'll turn the garden into a nice Mediterranean paradise almost automatically, and without any particular effort or the need to buy or order new plants. The line between weeds and herbs is a blurred kind of field anyway. And, yes, there really are lovely weeds. Just look at them.

By the time he had finished painting his paradise of a garden in the most colourful of words he realised that his wife had gone back inside and that he had been left talking to himself. He was wondering, though, if she was having another look at that book she had order the other day: the little-water, low-maintenance garden, or something along those lines.

The Difficulty of Thinking bigger

Perhaps people should at last make a real effort to think bigger, I mean, all of us, Peter told George in a pondering kind of way during their lunch break. If we all kept our views and interests to ourselves wherever necessary, i.e. when we notice that someone else isn't really interested, and this happens more often than not, then we'd avoid difficulties between one another forever and a day.

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This applies to ideologies of all sorts, he added. If someone else wants to hear about them, fine, but may the narrator keep from being overbearing. If others don't, that should be fine, too. Accepting this would mean real tolerance, wouldn't it?

Maybe we should even all settle for one world language and speak our own native or favourite-for-whatever-other-reason languages at home or amongst our closest friends who share it, which is to say we shouldn't restrict our understanding of friend to common languages.

So what's the problem with humanity? There are the incurable bullies, for one; there are the people who enjoy controlling and dominating others, for another; there are people who are simply too aggressive for various reasons, there are all sorts of damaging characteristics out there, Peter shouted, that one could endlessly go on about.

George sighted assuming Peter had again witnessed something on his way to work in his train compartment in the morning. George didn't sigh for Peter telling him, he genuinely sighed out of compassion, and for knowing all too well that there was too much unnecessary trouble around.

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The problem is, he said, it often starts already with an inconsiderate neighbour and his aggressive dog that barks at just about anything, for the most part for no particular reason other than its own aggressiveness.

And when you kindly ask the neighbour to be more mindful of others, George added raising his voice which told Peter that this was about George's own experience, and to do something about the nuisance or even a potential risk to others, and the answer you get is "I can't do anything about it, you've got to live with it.", then that's it again, and you will find yourself compelled to do something about the problem on your own accord.

Doesn't this tell you once more, it is very unlikely the bigger problems, most of them man-made, will ever be solved? And doesn't that also keep holding you down and preventing you from getting up in the morning full of vim, thinking big by default?

I don't know, replied Peter despondently. You tell me where this is going to end.... We've come this far and we're still the ancient old stone-age people, aren't' we....

The Art of using Things until they fall apart

Admittedly, this is the age of smartphones and tablet computers. I had only just opened up a book about how to do things best with one's PC, published and printed three years ago in 2009. This was before tablets became so ubiquitous. And here I am with an ancient old office computer at home, running on Windows98 since its processor capacity wouldn't allow me to install Windows XP, and I don't want to spend money upgrading it because I don't know for how much longer it will continue keeping a stiff upper byte.

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Just imagine, you go and have its RAM upgraded from 64 MB, absolutely laughable these days, to today's minimum of 1GB which, even as the absolute bottom line, isn't going to do much more than leave the friendly technician at your local computer store shaking his head in disbelief. Haven't I recently seen something like 64 GB (that would be 1024 times my vintage PC's capacity of RAM alone, not to mention further improvements behind the scenes), or wasn't there even 128 GB, not to mention 500GB of harddrive capacity, and now people have even begun talking terabytes, 1024 GB equalling 1 TB. Where do I stand with my 64MB RAM Windows98 PC?

My ancient vintage PC, apart from its humble RAM, sports a 10-MB harddisk, wow, let's forget about the processor speed, there's not much of a point looking it up just for the sake of it. But it's happy running on Windows98, and so am I most of the time when I'm doing my work with it and it does reliably all I need it to do for me. Might I be seen as somewhat retro in the way I'm using my PC? Possibly. But I don't really miss anything.

Certainly, as soon as it stops working - Heaven forbid - I will spend all the time I need so spend in front of a computer screen at my "real" computer that runs on Windows XP - yes, that's the one I go online with; you cannot earnestly go online with a Windows98 PC any longer, the necessity of having a reliable firewall and anti-virus-worm-etc software running forbids the use of Win98 online.

Believe it or not, I read the other day that WinXP is still the most popular and most widespread operating system around the world, in spite of Windows7 (wasn't there something in between that most people using Win7 now prefer to forget). And there already is the upcoming Windows8, there are the first books announcing it in what-to-expect terms.

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And when - Heaven forbid that, too - my trusted WinXP PC decides to retire, I'll be forced to buy a new computer. Gosh. And then I'll have to think hard. Will I be bold enough to go straight for a very modern, state-of-the-art computer with Windows8 pre-installed on it, taken that I'll be trying to use it, too, until it falls apart? Or will I feel safer buying one of the last Windows7 computers sitting on the shelves?

If the hardware is good and I remember to vacuum the machine every now and then to prevent built-up of dust inside and out, it might last another seven odd years, and who knows what will be available by the time I'll have to face the next decision about what kind of computing power I might possibly need. I'm getting the feeling that I treat my PC pretty much the same way I tread my trousers and shoes.

I wear them until they almost become a liability in that I cannot possibly wear them outside my home any longer without feeling painfully ashamed. I'll then use them in my living room until they can only serve one last purpose - polish our car that I wash once or twice a year - before the bare fabrics may or may not still be good enough for recycling, unless staff in recycling plants decide otherwise and send them to the nearest landfill.

Before you suggest, PC manufacturers had better stop producing computers that can last so long, always provided they are treated well, and Microsoft might want to stop producing updates, remember that PCs that fall apart quickly will only send people to competitors, and operating systems vulnerable to hacker attacks will make people shy away from them, too, and go elsewhere instead.

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It's a real dilemma. Passing the buck might become yet another artful way of dealing with modern technology. It may come to be expected of people, consumers that is, not to treat their PCs, laptops, notebooks, tablets and smartphones all too well. In that regard, the manufacturer of my new smartphone can count themselves lucky. I recently dropped my old semi-smart-phone, and though I still miss it at times, it was beyond repair after falling from a height of about a metre twenty.

This means, being clumsy is a certain plus for the economy, perhaps even a clear growth factor. But what are some manufacturers advertising their new notebook or tablet computers with? They can withstand being dropped and even getting wet. Just imagine. What do we have to think up and do next as consumers to keep our economy going?

The Art of getting the right Lift

More often than not, it is pure coincidence or simply luck. The choice of lift to go up or down a certain number of floors often matters far less than the actual fellow travellers or the people waiting on other floors, in short the overall to and fro, back and forth at any given time of the day or night, in particular when the six existing lifts in a hotel, as in the current example, are not properly, if at all, co-ordinated, possibly for lack of appropriate software to deal with demanding use of lifts as a means of transport.

(Microsoft Media)

It was once nicely explained how the lifts, much more than six, mind you, in one of those breathtaking new skyscrapers in Dubai (if it wasn't even particularly about the Burj Khalifa, aka the Burj Dubai, at the time of this writing the tallest building on the planet) were co-ordinated to such an extent that people, going down from the upper floors to the ground floor, for instance, didn't have to travel for ages because of other people wanting to use a lift, any lift for that matter, to achieve the same for themselves.

It would be a nightmare wanting to go down, let's say, after work at, let's say even more precisely, five o'clock, and then end up on the ground floor at 6.30 just because the lift had to stop at almost each and every floor for someone wanting to get on board and, on top of that, finding the lift to be already full to capacity.

Apart from that, no lift can go the whole length of a building that size anyway, which means that on certain floors, and be that two or three over the whole length of the building, people will have to change lifts since the building is so tall that it is physically impossible to have any one lift go from top to bottom, for sheer security if not outright weight and material-strength restrictions.

But in smaller buildings - and compared to the Burj Dubai most buildings anywhere are relative small, say fifteen floors that by comparison add up to hardly more than a bungalow - lifts can easily and without any problems go from ground to top floor. Yet in a fifteen-storey hotel with six or eight hundred hotel patrons at any given time, co-ordination of the existing six lifts could make an enormous difference - at least for the hotel guests and their nerves.

(Microsoft Media)

If they and their understandable desire to move around the building are left to mere chance then things like the following can easily happen:

Scenario 1. The first available lift stops on level 7 because someone had pressed a button. Unfortunately, the eight travellers on board the lift had already been forced to see their lift stop at the previous three levels further up and are becoming somewhat irritable.

Three seconds later, another lift passes level 7 with only two passengers on board who had been coming down from level 11 without any further interruption. They are certainly happy travellers, though unbeknown to anyone; and do they know, themselves, how lucky they were? The situation would have been quite different only three seconds earlier.

Scenario 2: A lift with five hotel guests stops for the third time in a row, this time on level four, the dining and rest area, on the way down because another patron had pressed the up button. Preventing this from happening would have been much easier than under scenario 1 that needs a more sophisticated approach. It is conceivable, though, that the patron on level 4 pressed the wrong button, the down instead of the up one, by mistake. Foreseeing or preventing this is, unfortunately, well nigh impossible for even the most sophisticated management software.

Scenario 3: A lift with ten patrons and some luggage on board on the way down early in the morning, when most people can be assumed to go down for breakfast or to leave the hotel for whatever reason, stops on level six. Unfortunately, there is no space left for the hotel guest wanting to enter on level six. Tough for the guest on level six, annoying for the passengers already on board, the only one not minding is probably the luggage.

Surely, there would be ways of preventing all these things from happening. Naturally, safety comes first and there was never any doubt about this. All the six lifts were state-of-the-art elevators. The hotel's patrons could have all the peace of mind about nothing untoward easily happening, and this is the most important thing. But next, once everyone has their peace of mind, there comes the modern-age convenience for tourists and, apart from this, perhaps additional time constraints for business travellers: How much time will I have to expect having to spend commuting, they may wonder, not just from one underground or bus station to the next, but also from my hotel room to the main entry and back.

(Microsoft Media)

Certainly, in one of those huge towers in Dubai, the Burj merely being the tallest of them all, this question is a lot more crucial since there is a potential for people spending more time commuting inside the tall buildings than in a fifteen-level hotel in Singapore, a city that, after all, sports taller buildings than fifteen-floor ones. And yet, the intensity of movement in and out, up and down, in a hotel, can lead to bottle-neck situations and clutter, and some time spent on co-ordinating the movement of people and luggage throughout the building can mean happy or frustrated patrons, i.e. customers, willing to come back or change to another hotel. And not all hotel guests are of the relaxed kind.

Before this background, there was the story of the friendly room-service girl who couldn't enter the lift with her service trolley, full of linens, towels and things, for all the hotel guests in the lift. When I looked at her with an expression of sadness, she replied, all without uttering any words, with a gesture that clearly meant, oh, it's ok, I'll wait for the next lift.

When my lift, after a few interruptions along the way, arrived on level 12, still two storeys short of where I was headed, I saw her again, getting off one of the three opposite lifts, spotting me and waving her hand, being all smiles, making me see that she, too, had made it up to level 12, where he next jobs were obviously waiting for her. I was all smiles, too, after a few seconds of wondering what the waving was all about. At times, the simple things in life make your day. And would she and me have experienced this charming little scene had the lifts been synchronised, optimised and co-ordinated. Then again, she needs those lifts every day, and not all patrons are as compassionate as me. Bottom line: let's not overdo organising our lives, but let's be practical nevertheless.

How much did you say is a piece of software that can co-ordinate six lifts?

Don't be shy

(Microsoft Media)

On Wednesday morning last week, Peter was taking the hotel lift to the entrance hall on the first floor down from the fourteenth floor where his room was when, on level nine, another tourist came in wanting to go down as well.

Peter's guess was that the man was from Japan and now, in this modern and stylish Singaporean hotel, on his way to have breakfast on the fourth floor where patrons, who had also included breakfast in their hotel booking, could go.

Peter hadn't done that, wanting to mingle with the locals instead, as he had already done the previous year, and was therefore on his way down to the ground level and out of the hotel to go and buy his regular choice of bean-paste buns at the little bakery in the passage next door to the hotel where many commuters were already shuffling along on their way to the underground railway station to catch their trains to work.

But the Japanese tourist - who truly must have been from Japan, Peter had already decided, going by the way the man behaved, taken that Peter had worked for a Japanese company for a while until some years earlier - didn't know yet how the lift worked and was puzzled to find out that the fourth-floor button only lit up for a brief moment and then turned off again which also meant the lift wasn't going to stop on level four.

(Microsoft Media)

Peter quickly explained that one had to have one's room card scanned by the lift's security system and then press the number-four button again. Each hotel patron's room card, apart from opening the hotel-room door, contained admission to that room's floor and to the fourth-floor area only.

The other tourist then did just that in a bit of a hurry to make sure that, after thinking it all over, he managed the little trick before the fast-moving lift was past the fourth floor.

It worked. The Japanese tourist smiled a little shy and bashfully and then, his head slightly bent downwards, went out of the lift without turning around again and along to have his breakfast at the hotel's dining, rest and swimming-pool area.

The Pain of Lawnmowing

Lawnmowing is a pain in the neck for anyone who has or at least thinks he's got better things to do. One of my neighbours doesn't, and he cannot resist for more than two weeks; then he just has to get his lawnmower out and then eagerly turn it on. Do I really see withdrawal symptoms in the man's features and behaviour, or am I making this up against my best intentions?

(Microsoft Media)

As far as I'm concerned, I hate lawnmowing. And, no, I don't generally fight windmills instead. Sure, there are people who mow lawns professionally, but then, they are gainfully employed doing this, and apart from deriving at least part of their income from doing so, their bills contain a tax component, which is also why they have to title it "tax invoice", and along with it civilisation is being fostered. Who was it that said "by paying my tax bills I buy civilisation"? Or something along those lines.

But if you mow your own lawn for whatever reason, even against your will, don't you feel it always comes as a pain in the neck, whether you do it once every two weeks or once a month, or wait even longer than that? Isn't it always in the way and a bit of a nuisance? Have you ever tried allowing the grass to grow for eight weeks without interruption? And then you find your electric lawnmower is having a hard time eating its way through it; and it keeps humming to a halt.

Last summer I bought a pushmower thinking that maybe that will allow me to give myself a workout and make lawnmowing more useful. I began racing across the lawn with that muscle-powered mower before me. I even let the wind take care of the grass clippings, simply because I had found out that putting a catcher holder and bag underneath the handles turned out to be of little avail.

(Microsoft Media)

When I race across the lawn which isn't particularly level the grass-catching contraption skips and hops and most of the clippings end up on the lawn again anyway. Would I therefore have to do the mowing more slowly? Possibly, but that would turn the mowing into a nuisance again, making it slower and not much of a workout anymore. This would either make the push mowing counterproductive or the clip catching. Either way, that's a bit of a dilemma.

A fuel-powered mower is loud and stinks, and I hate having to muck around with such a mower almost as much as mowing the lawn in the first place. This, therefore, meant clearly having to stick with the electric mower. It skips far less than the pushmower, which prevents the grass clippings from being lost along the way, and it is a lot quieter than the fuel-powered mower, but apart from not giving you much of a workout, a mower with an electric motor is considerably weaker than one with a fuel-driven engine.

(Microsoft Media)

Apart from the mowing proper, there are all those weeds, and there's no end in sight as far as they are concerned. If you don't rip them out every now and then, they take over the entire lawn bed. Here's a good opportunity to thank the inventor of the marvellous lawn-weed leverage-rocker pivot-bridge extractor or whatever that wonderful tool is called, that you fork weeds out with by their roots; weed-extractor fork might be a suitable name, it swivels on a kind of rocker blade which makes it look like a little seesaw with the fork at one end and a handle at the other. It must have been patented at some stage, and it certainly goes by a name that can be expected to more or less speak for itself.

In order to get rid of the weeds, simply mowing the lawn won't help, though, even if you cut it all down to a millimetre above the soil. Those weeds will grow back faster than the grass, and perhaps even faster than you can say "I think the lawn needs mowing again".

(Microsoft Media)

If you therefore look at your lawn and can't convince yourself to mow it, at least grab one of those extractors and pull out the weeds. This will, as an added bonus, give you the feeling of having done something about that lawn instead of just putting off the inevitable, time and again, until you grow such a painfully bad conscience that you wish you didn't have a lawn at all, unless you can live with a wild meadow beside your house - it sounds worth giving it a try, though - or decide to do something for civilisation and have a lawn-mowing contractor do it for you.

Not quite a misanthropist

When Peter told a colleague of his, Vic, while they were standing beside the coffee machine at his place of work, that he was wondering how some people might behave in other social environments going by the way they drive on the road, Vic answered that he'd want to suggest introducing IQ tests for budding drivers on top of the regular driving test.

While he was saying this, he pointed a finger at his temple. This meant that Vic had seen his share while being out on the road. And example that he added immediately had obviously taken place just a few days earlier.

(Microsoft Media)

He said there was this little blue car, sporting a P-plate, with two people inside who seemed to be chatting and not paying attention. Their car was drifting ever so slightly across into the other lane until someone had to blow the horn and did.

This made the blue car drift back into its own lane, not too quickly, though, but steadily. The car that had hooted from then on remained at a safe distance, at least two car lengths away, in spite of the busy morning traffic when space is always at a premium.

A few moments later the drifting began again and Vic, being two or three car spaces behind the understandable hooter was beginning to ask himself, as he told Peter, whether the driver in that little blue car was sober at all, or well-rested in any way. Drifting on with the empty space behind it growing, the blue car then virtually floated into a turning lane leading up to a driveway into a shopping centre.

Vic said he hoped at that stage that the driver and his passenger were heading straight for a café and ordering a strong, a very strong coffee. And since Peter had mentioned the term "social environment", he had virtually added a statement to his piece of information that was almost political, but at least philosophical.

(Microsoft Media)

Yes, he added, to make this point clearer still, he really thinks about other people, too, out there on the road. Out there one is just as much a part of a social system as here in the office environment or anywhere else, for that matter, anywhere that one isn't alone. But some people in their cars seem to exist in a universe of their own, regardless of who else is there alongside them.

Peter was really getting worked up a bit by then. For him, driving on those major and minor roads was being a part of a system that was meant to work for everyone involved in it, so that as a result there weren't any, or at least not too many, problems getting in anyone's way because of the inconsiderate behaviour of a few.

But George, who had remained standing in the doorframe and listening, was wondering if Peter wasn't caught up too much in idealising things. Wasn't history full of examples - and police records, too, for that matter - with events pointing to the contrary?

And wasn't it, therefore, better or at least more useful or practical to be alert and prepared, and expect pretty much anything on the road? Did that mean silently accepting the things the way they were? And stop hoping for any kind of improvement? Was this already resignation, George was beginning to fear.

(Microsoft Media)

Yes, there certainly was a human potential, but, alas, George silently sighed to himself, this was the potential and unfortunately all too often just wishful thinking, though manifest here and there, more as an exception to the rule. In the end, though, he knew that Peter and Vic were right. Ever so many people's lack of respect and consideration for their fellow beings was a problem with no early end in sight. But if an IQ test would be the solution, George simply couldn't tell.

Mr. Nice Guy

That's what can happen when you just want to be nice to people. And wasn't it, Peter pondered, that some time ago someone had told him it was so nice to see his smiling face in the shop taken that most people couldn't be bothered to even say hello. Peter had taken that to be a compliment, and although he didn't now go around smiling on purpose or even expediently, he had never expected to be so radically misunderstood.

(Microsoft Media)

The other day, when he was in a take-away café of one sort or another, he said yesterday, he engaged in a bit of small talk with the girl behind the counter who was preparing his cappuccino. Her colleague who normally served at this time of the day seemed instead not to even want to serve him and didn't even look at him, so girl number 2 was now preparing the beverage for him.

Initially, he didn't think much about it, but later the thought crossed his mind that perhaps girl number 1 had refused to serve him - which was underlined by her not even looking at him - because she might have found him creepy as if he had wanted to chat her up.

Nothing, however, was further from the truth. Peter was simply a light-hearted fellow who couldn't just stand there and wait for things to be ready for him and in the meantime look grumpily at people as if they were mere characters in a TV movie, or look at the floor or the ceiling or out the window.

(Microsoft Media)

Instead, Peter was a bit of a chatterbox in order to pass the time and in the hope of making other people feel better and more appreciated instead of simply looked at as if they were mere extensions to the cash registers or coffee machines, not worth having a decent conversation with.

How could that girl have misunderstood his motives so much? It was almost as if being publically reprimanded for making a slimy pass at a young woman who could have been Peter's daughter. How disgusting, Peter concluded. He was determined not to go there ever again. He was outright appalled and couldn't calm down about the matter any more.

He finally found solace in his decision to give that café a wide berth from then on and even decided to spend less on coffee anyway.