Budge up!

Annette and I were never naive enough to imagine that being a parent stopped when the fledglings left home. But, since the nest emptied a few years ago, we have become rather accustomed to 'home' being a somewhat tranquil refuge to which we can both retreat at the end of a busy day or week.

That tranquility was interrupted at the beginning of this year when our son needed a roof over his head while he finished his nursing degree. Next weekend our youngest daughter joins him as the tenancy on her flat has come to an end and a replacement is not available. And so we find ourselves having to squeeze up our 'spread-outedness' as we loose our last 'spare' room. (Please don't ask to come and stay for a while - unless the floor will do.)

No, being a parent doesn't end when they leave home and, being a parent still comes with responsibilities. So, we squeeze up and make room, not only in a physical sense but in a relational sense too; for these returning children are not the same as those that left a few years back. They return with a maturity that they didn't possess before (and some lingering immaturity that we wish they had lost). They return with new habits and traits born of their recent freedom. Their expectations are different and have a validity that often challenges our own. There is a lot of making room to be done.

So, the cars are out of the garage. The garage is now 'storage' and the oldies must remember not to walk about the house in their underwear in the mornings. So much for 'retirement' :-)

The more things change ...

Sometimes I look back and marvel at the way things have changed in my lifetime. Take mobile phones for example - they have woven themselves into the fabric of how we do life. With a short text message, we can tell others why we aren't where we were supposed to be or arrange an impromptu meet-up across the other side of town. As a result, our social arrangements have become more spontaneous and tentative in a way that would have been unimaginable half my life ago. I like it.

So, there we were having lunch when Annette says, "why don't we check out a Suzuki Splash while we are in town?". So, I pull up Trademe on the phone and sift through the list of Splashes for sale. "Here's one that looks interesting," I say, showing her the pictures of a low mileage metallic black Splash. "Let's go and look," she says, so off we trot to the car yard.

This is the point where I complete the title with "... the more they stay the same." Second-hand car salesmen. Yes, they are nearly all still 'men' and they are just the same type of men as they have always been; jovial, instantly friendly, ready to rattle off the exemplary merits of  any car you happen to be looking at, all the while assuring you that it will be perfect for your needs and the price is the keenest it's ever been. We will, of course, be lucky if the car is still on the lot after the weekend - even though I've seen it listed for at least two weeks now!

It's been quite a few years since I last danced the car-yard tango and today it just fills me with amusement at its predictability. I'm not going to play or try to trip the guy up; it's not sporting and, in any case, I quite like this young chap doing his car salesman spiel with a broad Mancunian accent in a car yard half a world away from his birthplace.

The car checks out and we return to talk about a trade. He makes a call on his mobile and, without seeing the trade, offers me a price that sounds fair. We shake (yes, they still do that) and the deal is done.

For all the changes I've seen in this wonderful, wild, world that we live in, some things really do remain the same, like second-hand car salesmen and the excitement of getting a new set of wheels.

An old monarch

It's been a week for long-lived Monarchs.  On Wednesday, Queen Elizabeth II became the longest reigning British Monarch. Also on Wednesday, only nine days into the official start of spring, I came across this beauty sunbathing amongst the blossoms.

Monarch butterflies usually live for only two to three months and it's far too early for this one to be from this year's crop.  Most likely it's an over-winterer - a late autumn butterfly that has hung out in a cluster waiting for spring. Because their metabolism slows in the cold winter months, they live for much longer than the summer butterflies, waking ready to mate and lay their eggs. It must be a good day for old Monarchs.

Irene's view

Yesterday, I showed Tillie (The Sony RX100) our mountain. Today, it was the turn of Irene, the Canon Infrared.

I liked Tillie's take on the mountain but Irene, as usual, came up with her own unique perspective on the same subject. I think it's more graphic, the mountain more present. It's a good reminder that how something appears, depends as much on how we look at it, as it does on the thing its self.

Perhaps, when life begins to look a bit flat, we need an Irene who can look at the same thing and say, "Yes, but ..."

God, I love this place ...

Sometimes it all gets too much. As serious as the world's issues are, I just need to walk away. How many heart-wrenching refugee stories, TPPA shenanigans, Claytons flag choices and unending newsreels of human misery is too much? I don't know. What I do know is that there are times when I need to turn my back on it all and experience something else - something that doesn't need me to cry over it or give it a good smack around the head.

Fortunately, we live on this street and we have our own mountain. It isn't a big mountain - it's of the sturdy, stumpy, variety; not exactly Kilimanjaro, but it does have presence. As you drive across the plains, you can see it sticking up like a knuckle on a clenched fist; no one is going to push this mountain or its town around. Like any self-respecting mountain, it can get moody - some days it pulls the clouds tight about it and pretends it's not there. It's best just to go along with the charade when it's feeling like that.

But not today. Today, it was wearing a dusting of snow, reminding me of one of those chocolate cupcakes mother used to make. Today, it was a happy mountain, basking in the morning sun and making it clear that not everything in the world is munted*. Today, it declared a holiday and I took the day off.

*munted: a Canterbury word  originally used to describe things that got broken during the Canterbury earthquakes. Now in general use to describe anything broken.

The quantified life

I had been dabbling. When I first got the Pebble watch, I loaded up the Misfit app and had a go at measuring my activity and sleep. But, who wants to wear a watch all the time? I certainly didn't want to wear one to bed at night. And so my experiments at quantifying these things, gradually faded and died. And yet, as I get older and my health becomes more fragile, there is value to ensuring that I get enough exercise (but not too much) and that the quality and length of my sleep is as it should be. The numbers matter more today than they used to.

Enter Misfit's latest gadget - the 'Link'. The Misfit Link is a small button on a clip. It weighs next to nothing and you can clip it to your clothing or just slip it in a pocket where it sits recording your every movement. Aside from clipping it on after the morning shower, the Link is very much a set-it and forget-it device and performs well as long as you don't think of it as a pedometer. Wearing the Link on the main mass of the body gives results that compare well with something like Google Tracks (which measures trips using GPS) but don't think it will accurately record every step you take. The results on the body were, however, much better than from a wrist-based device like the Pebble.

The Link can tell you how you are doing, with a series of lights that can show progress and even the time. But, if you are wearing it discreetly on the body you won't be looking at the pretty lights very often. So, you access the Link using the Misfit app on your phone. From the app, you can set your own goals, see your daily progress and chart activity across weeks or months. All this data is also uploaded to the Misfit server where it is available on your personal dashboard. Should you be so inclined, you can share your data and compete with your friends.

Aside from measuring your activity, the Link also has other tricks - it is a button that can be programmed to take actions you define. How about programming it to trigger an 'emergency' call to your phone when you are in a difficult situation? This, and a whole heap of other actions are available through IFTTT.com (If This Then That) and you can assign different actions to a single and double press of the button.

Oh, and perhaps the best part, the Misfit Link is only US$20 and runs on a coin battery that lasts 4-6 months. Those are a couple of quantities that make the quantified life much more sensible.

A trip to the Dark Side

After praising Windows 10 for an excellent upgrade experience (still loving it btw) I have just had a very different experience with my Galaxy Note 3 which, last week, decided to give me Android Lollipop 5.0. I admit that I had been waiting for this upgrade, largely because of the new features and the look and feel of Lollipop. So, I let the phone go ahead and upgrade.

Bad move. There has been a variety of issues with Lollipop ranging from lag to overheating. The problem I encountered, however, was Bluetooth stability. When you also use a smart watch, Bluetooth is vitally important. What's the point of having notifications come to your wrist if they stop without warning? Bluetooth started dropping its connection several times per day and at least once per day would actually lose its pairing information. This had never been a problem with the previous Android Kitkat.

First, I spent a week reading the web and trying various 'solutions' including a full factory reset of the phone. Nothing improved the flaky Bluetooth. In the end, I had to resort to downloading a Kitkat ROM from the internet and flashing the phone back to Kitkat 4.4.2. A procedure that found me surfing a wave of near panic, in case I bricked the phone. Fortunately, the phone survived and I now have a robust Bluetooth installation again with calming green leaves for a wallpaper.

This problem seems to have been around ever since Lollipop was rolled out, but no one seems to know who should fix it - is it Google's Lollipop OS, Samsung's implementation of Lollipop, or an incompatibility with the Note 3 hardware. Who do I bill for my time? Grrrr...

Windows 10

I have been with Windows from the beginning - when Windows shipped with MS Word  and Excel so that those programs had something to run in. I was there through most Windows versions, up to and including Windows 7. I learned to wait until Service Pack 1 before installing a new version, I learned to skip every other version of Windows because it would be a 'dog' (I'm looking at you Windows ME, Vista and 8.0). I learned that upgrading meant hours of reinstalling apps and searching for new drivers. I learned to be very, very, careful.

So why, on earth, did I choose to upgrade to Windows 10 only one week after official release? Well, because for once I wasn't hearing howls of pain from every corner of the Internet. For some reason, even the usual Microsoft haters were strangely quiet. Then there was the fact that it was free, I didn't want to fall too far behind in my versions, and I wanted to try Windows 10 to see whether my next PC needed to be an Apple device.

The upgrade process was a breeze. Going from Windows 7 to 10 seemed like a rather large 'patch Tuesday'. The download was 3Gb and, once finished I said 'yes' to the upgrade and then went out for a walk (madness, I hear you say). When I returned an hour later, the upgrade was almost complete - just a couple of setup questions to answer and a short wait later, Windows 10 appeared:

Moving from Windows 7 to 10 is no drama; it looks a bit different (in a nice way) but everything is pretty much where I would think it should be - not just because I have known Windows 7, but because I  also know tablets and phones - It's not a mish-mash but things have moved closer together in terminology and in use, and its all good. Everything just works; programs, hardware, the lot without having to hunt around for any updates. This, without any doubt, is the sweetest Windows upgrade there has ever been and it's hard to imagine that it could be any easier.

Lunch

At my time of life, having lunch with a beautiful, sassy, young lady is a thing of dreams or of very foggy memories. Yesterday, however, I had the pleasure of sitting opposite the lovely Rhylee for lunch.

Now, it's usually the job of grandfathers to tease their grandchildren but this young lady is much too smart for that - *she* does the teasing, thank you very much *and* you have to be pretty quick to get anything past her sharp little mind.

I could well have met my match with this one, and she's still only three years old.

Rainbow in infra-red

Most usually, when processing infra-red photographs, they are converted to black and white; basically because infra-red doesn't have any colour that we can see. In black and white, white means lots of infra-red, and black means little or none - it's a convenient representation of something we can't actually see.

However, our cameras have sensors that capture light in three channels; red, green and blue. Even values of infra-red radiation get captured in these three channels though infra-red wavelengths have very little red and no green or blue at all. So, when we process an infra-red picture, it is still made up of red, green and blue data and, if we produce a picture from these three channels of data, it is usually known as a 'false colour infra-red' - which can look quite unnatural; hence why black and white is often favoured.

However, when a rainbow appeared today, I wondered how it would show up if photographed in infra-red and the colour channels were retained. So, because every man woman and child in the world are dying to know the answer to this question, here it is:

Rainbow over Oxford - false colour infra-red photograph