Multiples

Hospital success, cars ruining everything and technology ruining what's left.

A few weeks without a note. It's almost as if those weeks weren't noteworthy, but yeah, they were. The big national act of self-destructive stupidity happened, and I'm tired of feeling things about it. I have a mix of fatalism and anxiety about it, but mostly try not to think about it. I'll have to at some point, but for now, no.

I did some gardening and managed to get a bunch of trees planted and a big patch of lawn mulched. Lawns are awful and need looking after and I want to smother ours with a jungle of amazingness. Another step towards that!

I had a repeat of a medical procedure again. Since the last one failed I've been pretty focussed on exercise and the results now really show in all my test results. It's really satisfying. It's also nice to have a busy consultant say nice things about all the tests and readings. I hope this time it's sorted for good. As an aside, it's also not a good idea to mishear "don't eat anything after 7am" as "don't eat anything after 7pm" because by the time you go into the operating theatre at 2pm the next day you can't think about anything but food.

Getting back from the hospital made another thing yet more painfully obvious, cars ruin everything. Cold, hungry and tired waiting for a bus that's late because of a traffic jam several miles away and all these people in their cars sailing past not giving a shit about any of it. Smooth perfect tarmac for cars next to broken crumbling pavements for people, no dedicated bike lanes, buses that stop running at 7pm, expensive trains delayed all the time with crumbling infrastructure. I get quite militant about it all, I want toll roads, rationing on 'car miles', to make it really fucking inconvenient and expensive to drive, put all the money into public transport, and only have exceptions for actual needs. Seriously, fuck cars.

Believe it or not, I've been trying to keep stress levels down.

We've been doing some research at work and noticed some quite specific ageism. We've often been talking to people in their 20s and 30s. They often describe their older colleagues as 'struggling' with technology, whereas teenagers 'can't be bothered' to learn how to use it. They themselves 'don't have time'. I'd guess these older users aren't struggling at all, they've seen it all come and go and are wondering whether it's worth the effort.

By the time I'm 60 I guess I'll be throwing my digital shoes into the mills like a proper luddite. I simply don't want to waste my time on dealing with the utter shite systems we've made as a society. Even the Mac, once so user-friendly, now every time I open the thing it pops up stupid time-sink dialogs demanding this be configured, that fixed, this downloaded, that upgraded. I don't care.

More tech ranting: I have to deal with hosting and DNS, and I really don't want to. Both my hosting provider and registrar got bought by companies I dislike. I considered deleting the lot, but I'm not at that stage yet.