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.

(Microsoft Media)

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.

(Microsoft Media)

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.

(Microsoft Media)

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.