It is hard to complain these days given the kind of “horrors others have had to bear recently”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/world/2004/asia_quake_disaster/default.stm but I confess to being a little disgruntled when after returning from holiday with my family we had to face:
My wife’s laptop’s batteries seem to have died
Our shower/bath leaked through to the neighbors below us ruining their ceiling while we were gone so the bath will probably have to be torn up around our ears to find the problem (we had a similar problem with our washing machine in the kitchen in the middle of the year to boot!)
A few days after our return an enterprising thief managed to steal the pannier bag off my bicycle while I was riding it without my realising it (probably while I was at a stoplight). Now he or she has my Palm T3 and keyboard as well as a very good bag of a kind I don’t think they make any more. While I wait for the insurance to come through I’m having to note things to do and other thoughts down on pieces of paper which I hate doing.
I haven’t made enough progress on my thesis methodology over the break and dealing with the above has slowed me down further.
So where is the silver lining? The failure of the batteries on the old PC laptop provided just the excuse needed to justify my “long delayed”:https://blog.org/archives/001282.html purchase of a “new 12 inch Apple iBook”:http://www.apple.com/uk/ibook/specs.html. So after a 14 year gap I will be a Mac user again. The last time I used one extensively (when working at “Mac User”:http://www.macuser.co.uk/) I was using System 7 – I look forward to discovering how things have changed! Who says you can’t spend your way out of a depression?
[…] It’s a young form, yet there’s plenty of academic research out there and it’s not supporting the revolutionaries. In fact, there’s evidence blogs suppress dissent (hat tip: David Brake). Research conducted by a number of US academics, shows how blogs can and do amplify the herd instinct as bloggers link to those they trust. They take the trusted source’s view into account when forming their own opinion to the extent that (in the face of so much linkage) any private doubts they have are forgotten. The psychology seems to say that if just two people you trust take a view, you’ll feel pressured to agree, that opinion cascades and dissent is crushed. […]
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