October 22, 2023 – Hello Curns

Weeknotes #39: Palermo was 32°c

Week commencing Monday, 16 October 2023

A street in Palermo, Italy — Palermo, Italy

Quantified Self

This week: Stand 6/7; Exercise 5/7 and Move 7/7. (86%, feeling happy). No office days as I am on vacation. Total steps: 108,762

Life

Monday, awoke in Palermo: walking tour; beautiful churches. Fountain of Shame. Arancini, pomegranate granita and panelle were all tasty.
Holiday Apple Maps: Quattro Canti (passed); Orto Botanico di Palermo (failed, took us to the wrong part of town for the entrance); Famila supermarket (failed on generic search, passed when we worked out the name); Le Catacombe dei Cappuccini (passed); Maxim Theatre (failed when we tried to use Opera House as the look-up); Fud Bocs (passed); Hotel Politeama (passed) but it failed the Fountain of Shame as it needed the official name, Fontana Pretoria, which nobody uses.
Saw a snake in the botanical gardens. That wasn’t what was biting and I got off better than the others who suffered more.
First train sold out to Cefalù; we went on the later one. Nice lunch near the sea. Squeezed into a bar, with a view, for an over-priced limoncello spritz, which was new to me (the drink not the pricing).
Thursday, No Mafia Memorial and, then contrasting, a department store rooftop bar in the shade as it was 32°. Then, up a level for the unshaded fabulous view. Then, down a level, where it was Christmas!
Friday, tour of the third biggest theatre in Europe. The view from the royal box is as impressive as you’d expect to give dignitaries. Later the wind got up on the terrace – the weather warning coming true – and we had to remove anything that would blow away. It calmed enough for us to eat there.
The temple at Segesta was unfinished, impressive and you could see the bosses on the blocks of the base (used for lifting the stones into place but usually removed when finishing).
Erice is up a winding mountainside road. Our driver was great. That they built a town there is impressive.
Lunch with our guide and the Chilean couple was great (couscous with fish for me). I was schooled on the linguistic definition of a dialect.
The cannoli was enormous (and messy). The salt pans on the way back less impressive.
The restaurant we planned to go to was booked on a Friday night. So, our last Italian dinner was delicious but the most expensive.

Media

Does the goat cheese supplier drown himself in one of his own pasteurisation tanks? No spoilers, but I finished Ian Moore’s Death and Fromage.
Paul Gambaccini, talking to Steve Wright, looks back on his 50 years on UK radio. Legend.

Writer’s Block?

I just can’t seem to get it together to write the things I want to write. Is it writer’s block?

I really wanted to write something about motivation, but I can’t motivate myself to think about what’s buzzing around in my head. To be honest, I am starting to think my ability to compose sentences and string words together is leaving me. It’s not that I have any difficulty thinking about the things I would like to write here, but I have difficulty actually writing it. My head is full of random thoughts, but I can’t get them into anything coherent. Failing in this way is actually proving to be quite depressing, to be honest.

I wanted to write about a post on Strange Little Boy about using a wireless connection in a public place, but I can’t get to that point.

I also wanted to write about the development of online technologies and my frustration at seeing many of the technologies I am interested in being developed outside the UK. Again, I am suffering from some kind of block.

So, I am off to meet a friend for pizza this evening. This will allow me to clear my mind with friend-pizza-eating-trivia and also to avoid the television, which, after last night’s Dawson’s marathon, will be no bad thing for my brain. Perhaps I shall welcome tomorrow with a clearer mind.

Today On The Creek

Four episodes of Dawson’s Creek. I may need a doctor.

I just watched four episodes of Dawson’s Creek in a row. Have I, somehow, wasted an evening? Anyway, it included episode 611, where Jack and David finally kiss (review). The annual gay kiss was somewhat lacking in emotion. Still, you do get to look at Kerr Smith!

Hope I Haven’t Missed Your Birthday

My trusted Palm Vx– from which sprang the Listen To Musak blog (why just write stuff for my own reading when I can bore everybody else?) – contains many useful freeware/shareware and fully paid-up pieces of software that didn’t come pre-installed. The most useful is DateMate. DateMate is a simple little program that stores birthdays, anniversaries, and events, and can populate the Palm Date Book with updated information so that I can always recall how old somebody is and how many years they have been married. If you own a Palm, I would wholeheartedly recommend you look at it.

Sadly, however, I have done two silly things in the past months:

First, I changed my synchronisation settings in Outlook so all birth dates and anniversaries were removed from my Date Book. This is OK, as DateMate will retain the backup, and all I had to do was re-enter them, but…
Secondly, I updated DateMate and forgot to read the update instructions, so I have updated to a later version that won’t accept my registration number. As a result, I can’t export a list of all the entries to make re-entry easier. So now I have to upgrade, and I am not sure it’s 100% necessary.

Ah well, maybe it would be easier to maintain a paper diary but it wouldn’t be as much fun, would it?

Day: 22 October 2023