Laptop Dancing

I'm addicted to my laptop. I own a Fujitsu Siemens Amilo widescreen, and I think it is my favourite possession. The marriage between it and the internet brings me so many hours of pleasure it annoys my wife. I'm sitting here listening to a downloaded Bob Dylan Theme Time Hour while I will get an alert if an email comes in and I can also check for links as I write this. Indeed, access to the web has altered how I write because now, once a question pops into my head I can instantly research it.

A favourite treat for me in summer is to sit out on our balcony listening to a downloaded BBC radio programme while I surf the web. Who needs television when you can have your own window on the world.

I store my music and my photos on my laptop. I have recently begun to store interviews on it. I watch dvds on it. If there were some way I could also eat from it I might never engage with the rest of the family.

Here it sits before me at my desk. I regularly change the desktop image at this website, though lately I have a favourite image that shakes off all other competition. I don't have a name for my laptop, which maybe shows that I am still somewhere this side of sanity. I don't pretend it has a personality and I don't speak to it. I also don't get angry with it - but then again it rarely lets me down.

unlike this guy's computer!

I don't travel with it as I used to - my trips away are too short and bringing a USB stick is the simple thing to do. But when I come home, first I kiss my wife and second I switch on my laptop to check my emails and what's new in the world...

Planet Water

The surface of our planet is 75% water. So what's with Planet 'Earth'?

Some time ago I read a great book about the intriguing molecule H₂O by Philip Ball - who has a completely enviable blog. A great way to get a small appetizer for the subject is to listen to the BBC 3-part radio science series about water.

Water is full of contradictions; such as it should in fact be a gas, it should get heavier instead of lighter when it freezes, and it has a disproportionately high boiling point. It is utterly essential to life: to the extent the space exploration is always seeking water as a likely sign of life. Yet arguably it is an alien substance to this planet.

There has been a huge amount of rain lately in Berlin - some spectacular storms and downpours. Yet less than one percent of the water on Earth's surface is available to us as drinking water.

Water is life. And as an Irishman knows, 'whiskey' comes from the Irish 'uisce beatha' which means 'water of life'.

At home, we have a peculiar wooden plate on which we keep a jug of drinking water. Inside this plate is a magnetised spiral containing spring water. The theory behind this item is that the spiral and water within somehow teaches the water in the jug to be like spring water. When my wife bought this plate, I thought she was crazy. Yet time and again in blind tests among ourselves and with visitors, water from the jug always comes out as tasting better than water either from the tap or a bottle. What's going on?

Masaru Emoto's book 'The Hidden messages in Water', which I learned about through the documentary 'what the bleep do we know' proposes that water has a personality and will react to good and evil thoughts as it will react to good and bad circumstances. This he linked, naturally, to the fact that we are two thirds water - so we are also open to such good or bad influences. His methods have been criticised, but the idea appeals to the dreamer in me.

The sky has just darkened and I think another downpour is on its way. The skies may also be darkening for the world in terms of water; a precious resource that may yet lead to war....

Toytown

I've just been helped by 'Editor Bob' to sort out the mess I had initially made in becoming a member of Toytown Germany, a website and forum for English speaking people living in Germany. I've been doing a lot of exploring of forums and chat rooms in the past months - not least to try and let more people know about my family book. I very much enjoy visits to Dublin.ie and to Rootschat.com. What I found with both of those was that older people are finding a way to use the internet to connect and I think that's wonderful.

Indeed, having WLAN at home has connected me to another part of times gone by: radio. I check in regularly for old comedy programmes on part of the BBC website. A favourite delight of mine is to sit out on our balcony on a warm summer night with headphones plugged in so I can listen to classic programmes like 'I'm sorry I haven't a clue'. Another wonderful link to the past is the fact that sites provide out-of-copyright books to download. I found Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray, and Nikola Tesla's autobiography - and even a charming book about bees that I referred to a friend.

I know there are plenty of racy and funky chat rooms out there. I know there are downloads of software and who knows what. There's even Second Life - to which my reaction after trying it out for a while was the quote from the teeshirt 'get a first life'.

But the web is for us oldies too.....