blogs killed the e-mail star
If you don’t know what AliExpress (https://www.aliexpress.com) is, wherever you’re buying your stuff from, you’re probably paying too much. The best way to describe it is with an example.
The gimmicks in this picture are USB LEDs that light up when they are inserted into a USB connector. They turn any USB power source into a lamp. I bought them from AliExpress in a pack of 5 for US$ 0.68, postage included. Ridiculously cheap.
My Facebook account is now reduced to a groupie boosting Like-counts on my wife’s posts, but even this strange marital responsibility and my occasional anti-anti-China taunts are becoming less effective motivators for me to log into the social network.
I can’t deactivate the account outright because I know that there will be that one need for Facebook when it is least expected — like, an asteroid is hurtling towards Earth, and the only way to secure a passage to Mars is with a Facebook login. So I leave the account active but slowly undo the Timeline. The concept is simple: I ruthlessly eliminate old posts that have lost their appeal until only the bare minimum is left.
But recently when a post is deleted, Facebook moves it into a recycle bin. And for it to be gone completely, there is a hurdle of manually emptying the bin. I suspect that Facebook does this in order to retain the precious user creations that underpin its business model. Or perhaps users asked for a way to recover deleted posts. Regardless of their justification, Facebook is malign enough for me to remain sceptical.
A few months ago, picking up an old-new notebook from my stock of pillaged office stationery, I was surprised by my own handwritten quotation on the first page.
Remember to touch base. Base is where you were before you became lost.
I copied it onto a Post-It that is now stuck on my monitor, but I didn’t look for its source until today.
It actually comes from The Rules of Life by Richard Templar. I read this book in 2004 during a phase of self-improvement although I don’t remember being impressed by it.
Maybe it was prescient that I wrote dwon this particular ‘rule’ then only for me to find it now when the advice seems much needed. Coincidentally, last week whilst rummaging through boxes in the attic, I held the book in my hands, considering whether to read it again before putting it back.
Before Facebook and Twitter destroyed our ability to focus for longer than 15 seconds and to read more than 140 characters, blogs were kings. To me 2Blowhards was one of the best. Reading the authors’ thoughtful and inspiring posts, mostly about arts, was a pleasure. Their blog also impressed on me their peculiar salutation of ‘Dear Blowhards’.
I lost the link to 2Blowhards after 2010 when it was ‘frozen in amber’. For almost a decade, my searches with the misremembered and inadequate ‘Dear Friends’ were vain. But a few days ago, I stumbled upon it in the archives of my blog on the Wayback Machine.
This CNN video showing the opening of the net fishing season (“ouverture la peche la senne”) in Rodrigues brings back childhood memories.
Catches from the fishing sorties usually reached us late in the evening. We then had to clean and pack the fish quickly before they could be put on sale in the shop freezers. Too young to handle the sharp knife used to gut fish, I was mostly a spectator. But my older brother had to contribute to this unpleasant task, which often lasted into the early morning hours.
Later when I was about twelve or thirteen, I helped my brother-in-law Bambi in his octopus trade. Once or twice every week, he set up station to buy octopus. Sat on a low bench, with a weighing scale on the floor in front of him, he waited for the fisherwomen to return from their hunts.
One by one, they came with their catch. Together with Bambi, they checked the weights on the scale. When they were in agreement, it was up to me to pay the women and to record the transactions. To save time, Bambi unceremoniously dropped the octopus on the floor behind him before calling over the next person. The motions were repeated as in a ritual, as more fisherwomen joined the queue. By the time all the weighing and paying was done, the floor was covered with slimy octopii reaching up to our ankles. Now, other employees would clean and prepare the octopii for export: gutting, cleaning, packing, and storing them in cold rooms.
Even if octopus trade was serious and haggling was fierce, the exchanges between the fisherwomen and us remained friendly. They were filled with banter and laughter, the kind of gaiety you would imagine of islanders.
Since our first days in Tahiti, I had been obsessed with getting a perfect picture of the abandoned hotel at Tahara’a. But in the blink of an eye, time had passed, and our two-month stay was coming to an end. And a combination of temperamental weather and other holiday occupations limited the time I could allocate to photography.
Eventually I got two pleasing photos of the hotel.
One is taken from the hills of Arue in the afternoon light, and the other, from Lafayette Beach on an early morning.
The hotel has had many names over the years, but I like “Hotel Tahara’a” the most.
In Tahiti you feel like you can capture a great photo by just pointing your camera in any direction and pressing the shutter button. But for these ones, I had to climb up the steep hillside of Arue.
Yesterday morning driving from Arue along the northern coast and down the eastern coast to Taravao took us exactly 50 minutes. We were headed for Faratea — situated just before the town of Taravao if coming down the east coast — where local motor clubs had organised a drag racing day event.
With forty participating drivers and many cars on display, the event promised to be interesting, but we could watch only a few runs before we had to return to Arue.
Like earlier, we drove along the eastern coast and, even at a leisurely pace, were still able to make good time for our next engagement in Papeete.
Yesterday we walked around Papeete to see the colourful murals decorating many of the buildings in the capital. We had noticed them on a quick tour on the night when we landed in Tahiti.
