Another news update
Enough events have accumulated in Real Life since the last time I wrote about them that it’s worth posting another summary.
Having enjoyed the two classes I did at the WEA last year, I recently booked for three more WEA classes. These are “Singing for Beginners“, “Great World Thinkers and their Great Ideas“, and “Drawing and Painting in the Botanic Gardens“. Unfortunately the third of these has been cancelled, so I will only be doing the first two.
The “Singing For Beginners” class has been going for two weeks so far (six to go). One of my main reasons for doing these courses is to meet people and hopefully make friends, and indeed I have established private communications with one other member of the class. The “Great World Thinkers and their Great Ideas” class starts on the 27th of May.
As for my recent kitchen renovation, I have now made a decision about what tiles I would like, so the next step is to make an appointment with the tiler.
My final piece of significant news is that I recently bought my first mobile phone. My parents have been bugging me for ages that I should get one (isn’t that traditionally supposed to happen the other way around?), and I also thought it might come in handy for taxis. I’ve been using it to send SMS messages mostly to my parents, and the phone also has video capacity but I’ve not used it. Getting the phone to connect to my computer via Bluetooth took several trips to the appropriate shops for assistance, but I got there in the end and I’ve chosen some wallpaper and ringtones. (Doesn’t work perfectly, though; an attempted upload fails about 50% of the time.)
Below is the wallpaper I created for the phone, based on one of the fractals on my website:
The ringtone I’ve currently chosen is a 40 second excerpt at 96kbps from Planxty George Galiatsos by Jimmy Gregory. The phone’s manual does not mention the maximum file size allowed for a ringtone, but I’ve discovered by trial and error that the limit is above 40 seconds for a 96kbps excerpt and above 60 seconds for an 80kbps excerpt. One of several complaints I have with the phone is that a number of music excerpts (all of which are awful in my opinion) are installed by default and cannot be deleted.
In general, my home phone is still a better way to contact me. About that, please note that my contact details such as phone number and address are not jealously guarded secrets - I give them out quite readily to those who ask. Let’s imagine, for example, that it’s really late at night, you can’t sleep, and you want a conversation with someone. All your local friends are asleep and you don’t want to disturb them, but you realise that it’s a perfectly respectable time of day in Australia. Well, provided you know me, that’s fine, no problem at all. One thing I like about phone calls from people who are actually interested in socialisation is that they reduce the proportion of calls from people who are just trying to sell me something.
