I'm very sad to hear that Lord Lichfield died.

Technical Update

So after a lot of tears and strong coffee, I know the answer. If you ever have the problem where Adobe is obstreperous, and you can't add/remove programme in Windows, and you can't rename the directory in Program Files, so you can't reinstall, and you can't repair 6.0.1 because it hangs... I know the answer (now, thanks to my expert technical advisor) - rename the Adobe directory in safe mode, and then reinstall 7.0.5.

Mental list of other tech things I must do:

Fix the Palm synchronise thing - it's synchronsing back the mists of time, for some reason, and it takes too long/hangs/never ends, and now my diary doesn't work

My Vaio is apparently back next week, with a new motherboard and wireless card, but I agreed that they wouldn't do a factory reset, because I couldn't face having to resintall XP and office, but it does mean that "they have advised me" that some things might not work/need new drivers, and I don't know what this means yet

I am having a nice time with my HP Tablet, though. Small pleasures...

My mail is currently in two places: my old colo (who I love, guys, obviously), and my newer commercial set up. I need to centralise it, get with the program(me), and work out how to use their webmail.

Buy a digital camera. And a Tivo-like thing. And a flat-screen TV. Well, a new TV: my old one doesn't have scart sockets or anything.

Even though both Madonna (sorry, Esther) and my neighbour's DJ buddy go to the Kabbalah Centre, I'm a sceptic.

Partly, because I know a little about Kabbalah (pronounced Ka-Ba-La, all short As, not kur-bar-lar, in that weird way) and I know the last thing it includes is the crossing of palms with silver. My scepticism was validated by Rabbi YY Rubinstein on the Heaven and Earth show this weekend.

So I'm both apalled and not so surprised about last week's story about a poor woman who ended up donating nearly £30,000
for a fake cancer cure.

Say after me: C-U-L-T.

Side note:

This ridiculous paragraph at the end of the Guardian piece:
Backstory

Kabbalah has only gained popular appeal in the last 20 years, after being developed by a lapsed rabbi, Philip Berg, and his second wife, Karen. It originally evolved in the Middle Ages as a mystical interpretation of the Torah which aimed to reach a better understanding of the divine than could be attained by literal or metaphorical analysis. If the bible is a code of laws for man, then Kabbalah is the attempt to work out the laws by which God created and governs the universe. It was restricted to Torah students over the age of 40 because of its complexity and the ease with which it can be misinterpreted. The Bergs divorced Kabbalah from its traditional roots, simplified it, opened it up to all faiths and commercialised it. They created the Kabbalah Centre, which has branches in Tel Aviv, London, New York and Los Angeles. In the new interpretation, the drinking of Kabbalah water and the possession of books that have never been read can lead to magical cures for illness.

So. The bold is the Guardian's doing, not mine.

Thoughts:

Does the Guardian think we're so dense we can't read a whole paragraph without highlighting their version of key words? What do you think this is, the internet?

Kabbalah has not only gained appeal in the last twenty years: it's an ages old tradition that has been studied for generations

And it so hasn't been "developed" by Philip Berg. It's been bastardised, whatever.

I just don't care what his wife's called

At least they didn't spell Kabbalah with a Q

The tradition is so much more complex than you can get in a stupid soundbite

Why does Kabbalah have a capital K, and Torah a T, but bible doesn't have a B?

My pick of today's stories: Martin Rowson on Blair's defeat, Nick Lezard on the ubiquity of cocaine (I used to work with him at the Modern Review. I was not one of the aforementioned cokeheads), and is Tesco getting too big for its boots?

I am torn, so torn.

Matisyahu, the Jewish Rapper is playing a gig at the Scala on November 28th, and it's my writing class.

Checkout that wimp.com clip above: it's crazy. Remember in the Big Lebowski, the guy who was shomer shabbes? There's that disconnect: the TV interviewer asking Matisyahu how much it'll cost for him to play a gig on a friday night, and asking him if there's a lot of East Coast/West Coast rivalry in Hasidic Regge.

Priceless.

Choices, choices, for me.

Forget West Side Story - I saw this short, West Bank Story at the Jewish Film Festival on Tuesday, and it was great. Sadly, it's the kind of thing that's hard to get to see, so you'll just have to keep your eyes peeled, but it's an entertaining, insightful, witty, humous-laden romp through Middle East politics. No, really.

You know how it is... a series of random conversations, and then I needed to check out exactly who Typhoid Mary was. So now you know. If the wikipedians know, that is.

I think I may be in technical melt down...

So I hired a laptop while my Vaio goes on a not-so-well earned vacation to Brussels. Except my hire machine came with the wrong power cable.

Then, something weird happened to Adobe Acrobat reader. A client sent me a contract via fax, and I use a fax to mail service so I always have copies and don't need a fax machine.

But Acrobat is weird, so I think I'll uninstall and reinstall, so I had loads of Acrobat stuff, removed it all in add/remove programmes, but now can't remove 6.0.2, and can't load 7.0.5 - both just hang my machine. I have googled, but all I can find is other people with the same problem, so it's a pooling of ignorance.

Do you think if I just delete the programme files I'll leave other trails of Acrobat which will upset other things?

I think it will. I have tried renaming the Adobe folders, but it won't let me ,and when I change the attributes from Read-Only, it won't remember it.

Also, I borrowed a digital camera from a friend, to take some photos of my parents seventies furniture that I'm supposed to be doing something with, and to a very strict deadline. But it's a Sony with a weird Sony Memory Stick that only works with a Sony machine. Which is now abroad.

Any ideas?

If you've got money, you can travel...

(I think that quote is from the You Don't Have To Be Jewish record, but the whole internet doesn't seem to know, and my memory's not what it was...)

So I decided to hire a laptop for two weeks. My vaio is going to Brussels on holiday, and even though it's kinda expensive, it makes my life easier, and I'd like that right now. And it means the couple of client projects that require me to go to someone's office with a laptop can happen. And if I've learned one thing in the last two years, it's that drama is very energy draining, and what I basically want is a quiet, nice life. One that probably includes a Succah.

So that's one less thing to worry about, even if I did give short shrift to Mr Trogwell from the Sony Vaio Escalation Department (can't help thinking I can't be the only customer with this problem, then) and tell him he'd lost a customer.

Because, as we all know, technical hitches are just that. Nothing to sweat about.

Apparently.

I'm kinda into eBay (even if it is capitalised like a bad nineties software package) and I like the karma of clearing out the stuff I don't need.

This one, however, takes the biscuit: Lot 328: a pair of embarrassing trousers.

£58? Priceless.

I am pretty high up on google for The Google Generation, which lead me to this very entertaining snippet on Gawker about how people talk like ad-agencies nowadays.

So my cable modem was slightly tempermental this morning, and then I did a speed test and realised that Telewest Broadband have upgraded me to the "elite" product, from 4Mb to 10Mb.

Know what? Uploads have gone up to 384bps, but I still can't tell the difference. I mean, it might be slightly, imperceptibly faster. Sure I won't be the only person to go back to the "complete" product which at 4Mb, is still faster than my original 1Mb.

Dead Parrot

I wish to register a complaint. And to tell you NEVER to buy a Sony Vaio - for the second time in a year or so, my Vaio is resting. Stunned. Dead as a proverbial.... parrot.

I used it yesterday, and it was well, fine and dandy, and we were both happy. Get home last night, turn it on, dead-dead-dead. No power, nothing.

I did all the things I vaguely remember from last time - removing the battery, etc, and even totally powered it down all night, but it's still more than unwell. AKA dead.

Luckily/unluckily, Sony service was so beyond par last time that the Head of UK Customer Relations extended my warranty till January 2007. However, I think, due to a combination of inefficiency and a distributed service offering, it's possible they will keep my laptop till then, and I won't be able to do any work.

Like I'd planned to go into some friends' office this week - I' having a bit of a hard time concentrating - but I can't if I haven't got a laptop.

Bugger.

I have a spare laptop, but it's a 1999 ThinkPad running Windows98 and it won't read my USB keys, can't do the internet, and weighs the same as a small Scottish island.

I know shit happens (brief moment of victimhood, which will be over before it's even begun, I promise), but why does shit always happen to me?

The view from my window.

Mostly, I work from home, my spare room turned into an office-sofabed space, with lots of books and geekery.

My window looks out over the garden, and for a London garden, it's pretty big. What I like about it is that it's moderately unkempt: my downstairs neighbour mows the lawn and looks after it, but it's not manicured or chichi, it's just outsideness.

I derive a lot of pleasure - sustenance - from looking at my garden. And my neighbour just planted some pink flowers under my window, and they make me happy.

The last couple of weeks, I've noticed that the sky is a bluer-than-blue colour. The blue of the Windows 98 screensaver, with perfect white clouds, and the greens and browns and reds and oranges of almost-autumn starting to happen (global warming permitting).

But there's this one thing: for the last two weeks, there's this one, perfect, grey cloud sitting atop the roof of the people at the end of the garden.

And I think what it's saying to me, this cloud, is that everything will be ok, there might just always be this one grey cloud on a sunny day. Life isn't perfect.

I think I may have lost my mojo.

Y'know, I'm never really comfortable with call waiting.

I don't have it any more on my home phone, because I was constantly not-really-having attention on the person I was talking to because someone else was calling, or playing phone call arbitrage in trying to keep everyone happy.

Now, I have one voicemail if I'm on the phone, and my answerphone if I'm not home. I know, I don't get that many calls, it's not really worth it.

But when I call someone who's got call waiting, I don't feel good. I feel like I'm interrupting them - they're talking to someone else, and invariably they'll pick up, say a hurried hi and juggle calls for a minute and then either ditch you and call you back, or ditch the other person.

Either way, it's not a good scenario.

So usually, when I get call waiting, I spend a couple of seconds wondering if they'll pick up, and then give up, and then they call back and say "I got your call waiting, but you'd gone".

The whole thing is not exactly what you'd call quality communication, and as I get older, I'm more thoughtful and careful about how and when I talk to people.

Seems to me, the only people who win out of this situation are the phone companies: two calls at one time, you can't make more money than that.

I think they should invent a new thing: a special tone that when you call, and someone's on the phone, you hear it, and you know they're busy, and you hang up, and if it's really important, call them again.

I know, they could call it the engaged tone.

Image(649)

Image(649)
Originally uploaded by sashinka-uk.

Sometimes, only a picture can speak.

Did you know the UK is the worst place in Europe for asthma?

Hidden History

Hidden History
Originally uploaded by sashinka-uk.

Last week, I had a meeting in Farringdon, and found myself walking past the Guardian's offices, and the Newsroom centre across the road.

I spent half an hour or so at this micro-exhibition about the history of the Guardian and the Scott Trust, which is quite fascinating: all sorts of ephemera, including a signed table plan from the Guardian-hosted Israel/Arab talks in 2002 - quite something.

Not entirely sure why I'm mentioning this now, as you'd need to get down there before 5pm today, and I guess most people are at work.

edvard munch

edvard munch
Originally uploaded by sashinka-uk.

Remember The Scream? The image on the front of nearly every personal development book you've ever read?

I think I'm quite up for this Edvard Munch exhibition at the Royal Academy.

That incident with Rebekah Wade and Ross Kemp?

I know this isn't the most important thing, but they'd just returned to their South London home from a birthday party at 4am. Let's say they returned at 3am, as the police were called at 4am.

How could she possibly expect to get to work in good enough shape on a daily newspaper if she'd had such a late night? Or perhaps she thinks that special celebrity rules apply to her, too.