Wed, 18 Mar 2020

Coronavirus

Most of my time recently has been spent rearranging my home into a smart home. That means that my bricks and mortar are now higher up the intelligence quotient scale than I am. Smarter what is that? Will it let my home dodge the current mass of information/disinformation regarding the coronavirus outbreak? I doubt it. The only reason for the title is that everybody else appears to be saying that life has stopped during the crisis. I admit is is a crisis, my employer has forced me to work out of my smart home, my supermarket has no stocks of toilet rolls, all sport has stopped. But there are advantages to the crisis. I don't have to be polite to people, in fact I should avoid them. Solitude, you pay extra when a holiday provides that.

In this period of solitude I am hoping to install more Smart equipment. I am looking to improve my connected life. This is my aim but it will unfortunately I will replace the crowds of my fellow man with the modern autocrat, the internet. Spoken word replaced by alerts, poetry replaced by the voice assistants mono-tone, the symphony of LED lights flashing in sequences yet to be discovered will be replacing the noise of my music. I can crawl into my bed each night in the knowledge that while I am of average intelligence my home is Smart.

And yet do things improve? Is my life better? Of course it is! It is if like me your idea of fun is a reboot to ensure continued operation. It is if you enjoy a mobile phone bleeping every few seconds. It is if you have enough time to administer the system, it is a full time job.

But if you indeed what a better life, the freedom to do what you want to do or even just time to live then you may be in for a shock. Nobody will have time for social media. You will be responding to posts from your Smart Home rather than socialising.

posted at: 18:36 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Thu, 06 Feb 2020

First Post

This is my first post using my new blogging system. Hopefully it will make it easier for me to create my posts and keep thing as up to date as possible.

Not too sure what I will rant and rave about yet but I am ready. Since getting it ready little has annoyed me except for the obvious Brexit and Coronavirus stories. Both of which have been covered elsewhere. I must therefore just hope that somebody else is lamenting the passing of bygone ages.

Who else misses spanish? Not liquorice but spanish. In these days after 'getting it done' I am surprised that spanish is not making a revival. Spanish was one of the sweets that was NOT rationed in world war 2. It was a twig, a root in fact that you chewed. However in the parlance of the youth the name covered all forms of liquorice.

But what has happened to spanish? Wikipedia does not mention it. The term goes back further than my knowledge. The guardian has a query about spanish. One response mentions using the term in the 1920's and 1930's. Wakefield council publish a document about liquorice in Pontefract which tells a lot but does little to identify when we started to use the term spanish.

posted at: 19:10 | path: | permanent link to this entry