I abuse keyboards for a living. I’ve never had one fold quite as completely.
So the guy should have come today—but didn’t. Didn’t call. Nada. The situation has been ‘escalated’ in the Dell shop to reach ‘management’, and I get the feeling that the Spokane repair people are going to have some ‘splaining to do re their agreement re Dell.
TOmorrouu, they say. Mmmm.
I lost the “E” key off my old laptop keyboard. I managed to fix it myself for a short while, by replacing it with the key that had the “Start” flag on it, but after a while that one fell off too, and the spring vanished into the pile of the dreaded shag carpet in my bedroom.
Shag carpet: where all tiny items go to die.
After that, I literally redesigned my typing style include “copy paste ‘e'” whenever I needed that letter.
At least that wasn’t a situation that lasted long. The hard drive literally fell apart not long after, so I got a new computer.
Off topic: I always appreciated how your WordPress site would use the word “one” when there was only a single comment. It leads me to wonder, however, if it uses the word “two” and at what point it starts using numerals.
For those that are interested, the count switches at “2”.
We will now return you to your regularly scheduled program.
Er, isn’t this computer about 6 months old? Never have had keys make a bid for freedom, but I can’t imagine anything more frustrating!
I put a new keyboard in my laptop in about 5 minutes for less than $20.00. I was surprised how easy it was. I’m sure that depends on the laptop, though.
Aren’t you the one who got an IBM Selectric to shoot its type ball across the room?
Yes, and yes, and yes to the last 3. New computer, keyboard couldn’t survive me for 6 months. I used to install my own, but Dell has found a way to involve more screws than Robbie the Robot and a set of layers involving the hinge/video display somehow: they used to mail you one with instructions, but that only lasted a couple of rounds with the Latitudes. Then the repairmen were back in the picture. I have a feeling that customers weren’t happy with the diy or lost their screws or damaged things. Probably all three.
And yes, I could get a typeball airborne with enough velocity to ricochet. In the days of the old Corona, I could find m-slugs clear over against the wall—thank goodness a fairly short shag. I’d stick them back on and that would last until I launched them once too often.
Yep. Those pesky keys run for the hills when you actually use them all day long. I switched to an ergonomic mechanical keyboard just over 4 years ago, the Kinesis Advantage. It looks alien, but has lasted very well – still looks and works like new except for the crumbs.
I haven’t even managed to wear off any of the key labels yet, and that’s a first – that usually happens after just a few months. If I’m very lucky, I get 18 months out of a keyboard before keys start sticking, skipping, or falling off, and 24-30 months before I’m frustrated enough to bother replacing it.
The Kinesis has been a wonderful experience. To my surprise, my typing speed went up 20% within a month of switching, surprising considering I was at 92 wpm to begin with and have been for a decade or more, and after 2 months, had gone up to 115 wpm.
Best of all though, all hand/wrist pain vanished and has not come back at all, which makes the Kinesis Advantage’s spendy price tag well worth it, IMO.
I can report the machine is now fixed—they even sent me an extra power cord, which can be a hundred dollars in the catalog, a nice thing. They were due to replace a socket, but just in case,—they sent the spendy replacement cord, and lo, I now have one for the living room and one for the workstation. Yay!
Jane meanwhile had a computer glitch last night, has gotten next to no sleep, was up all night trying to get her machine working again and rescue all the editing she has done on Convergence. The good news is—she has the file. But she is falling-down exhausted.
Ow, Congratulations to Jane for rescuing the editing!
I hope she takes the rest of the day off to rest and relax, and something nice to celebrate the rescue, like a warm bath with a nice drink to help her fall asleep after the stress.
I tried to post something from my iPad about the glasses, twice, the second time with added links. It’s not showing up; maybe you can free the second one from the spamfilter?
Occasionally the spamfilter reminds me of the Sarlacc. Or possibly the Bug-blatter beast of Trall. 😀
It NEVER catches spammers. Just members.
Totally off topic and à propos of nothing but the big smile on the neighbors’ baby boy’s face today when his mum took him out for a ride (he’s nine months and a bit, a sturdy sitter, and has thus graduated to the handlebar-babyseat of his parent’s bike instead of only the stroller or the carseat), here’s a music video that perfectly captures that sense of the whole world being spread out before him to enjoy and explore, from the safety of being surrounded by the arms of his mom or dad at his back, and going much faster than in a stroller while still at a slow enough speed to see everything. The song is called King of the road, by the small Dutch band Anthony’s Putsch, it’s sung in English, and just looking at that video can cheer me up.
It’s apparently (from some of the reactions to the video) a very Dutch way of travelling, taking the kids along on your bike, but it’s quite safe as the infrastructure has for decades been adapted to cycling safety, so the kids are not at risk – for us this is just normal everyday life; and maybe some of the others here will enjoy it too.
A great video with very cute kids (and one doggie). I love the handlebars the kids have.
Do folks in the Netherlands regularly not wear bike helmets? Many people in the States have switched to regularly wearing helmets, especially kids. I haven’t biked in years, alas, so have never been in the position of being expected to wear a helmet.
There’s a difference between ordinary biking (on upright bikes, at about 7.5 to 14 miles per hour) and cycle-racing, which goes much faster. The racers wear special clothes and helmets. Ordinary cyclists almost never wear helmets, unless they’re handicapped (epileptic or spastic or something like that) and have a higher than normal risk of falling off by themselves even though they’re riding a trike instead of a bike (or a mentally handicapped person riding tandem), or sometimes an old person on an electric ‘booster’/wheelchair will wear one.
It’s an individual assessment of risk whether to wear one.
Sometimes a young kid just learning to bike will wear one, but that’s not usual (it often indicates a child who’s starting later than usual, and so has farther to fall, or one who has nervous parents)- almost everyone starts off on a tricycle at home shortly after learning to walk, and graduates to a very small, low to the ground toddler’s bike (often with little slightly-raised sidewheels on the backwheel to learn the balancing) somewhere between 2 and 4, practising on the sidewalks and then beside a parent in the residential 18 mph streets or quiet bike lanes; at that point having a bike tip over and falling doesn’t do much damage, mostly just a scraped knee in summer, and nothing in winter (being bundled up).
For non-racing experienced cyclists the helmets add hardly any protection, considering the kinds of accidents that occur – a fatal crash involving an automobile would be fatal with or without the helmet, which is why the Dutch infrastructure has been built to keep cyclists and motor traffic apart except in the quiet 18 mph limit residential streets. At the “jogging speeds” most people bike around here, on the upright bikes, any accidents not involving motorised vehicles don’t often do much damage, not that a helmet would help with.
It would be a dreadful hassle having to take a helmet everywhere, no matter what you’re doing, in and out all the shops, carrying the shopping, carrying the kids’s helmets too because you might swing by their school to pick them up if the shopping runs late, or messing up your hair when you’d just got it neat to go to work or go out, or not being able to hop on the back of a friends bike unless you happen to have an extra helmet – it would mess up the way we live and do everything casually by bike if they ever made helmets compulsory.
Here are two short American articles with pictures I found about this at a site called Treehugger: helmets and kids. There are some better articles by an American running a bike shop in Assen who gives tours of Dutch biking infrastructure for foreigners who want to copy the better ideas. He worked out all the accident statistics for a decade or so, to figure out which roundabout design was safest and things like that – a much better documented site.
Here in Ontario, Canada, it is mandatory by law for anyone under 18 to wear a helmet when biking, and it is highly recommended for adults as well. That said, we don’t have a good bike-friendly infrastructure in place in most cities. Here in Ottawa, they’re starting to put in smarter bike lanes, but for the most part, cyclists are sharing the roads with cars at speeds up to 80 km/h. The most recent changes to our traffic laws now mandate that drivers are to give cyclists a minimum of 1 meter of space when passing them, but that’s not all that much room and it depends on the driver actually respecting that.
Yeah, I read a bit about those kinds of situations; it’s no wonder not many people cycle in those conditions. It’s also understandable that people who do bike will want to wear a helmet if you’re sharing the road with cars at speed, though I very much fear that if a car doing 80 km/h hits a cyclist, wearing a helmet won’t save the cyclist; but perhaps it gives the cyclist a sense of being at least a little in control of his own safety.
Here, that combination only occurs on very very quiet rural roads. On 50 km/h roads (inside towns) the amount of traffic determines if cars and bikes share (with a painted/colored sidelane for the bikes), or if the bikes get a separate bikepath – those can occur on quiet roads too, but the sidestrip isn’t used in busy streets.
Out of town connecting roads (with more than very minimal local traffic) all have separate bike paths, as sharing a road at 80 km/h is not considered safe.
Mandatory helmets won’t make cyclists or pedestrians safe, if their safety relies on all the drivers they encounter behaving perfectly – sometimes visibility will be poor, or a driver will be distracted, or will be so concentrated on the other cars they just don’t see the cyclist (like overlooking the gorilla on the playing field in that experiment). As it’s the cyclist who gets invalided or killed, in a conflict with a car or truck, giving the cyclist the choice to stay away from motorvehicles is much safer than wearing a helmet.
And mandatory helmets do decrease how much people cycle, while hardly improving accident statistics.
Using them as mobile speedbumps (even wearing helmets) doesn’t turn out well, as we’ve discovered here…
Here on Maui, bike paths wildly vary in quality, and many cyclists don’t use them right — they ride the wrong way on them (against arrows), or they ride on the sidewalks instead. There is a 12 mile long dedicated bike path paralleling one of the major arteries between towns, but it gets used by joggers and sometimes mopeds as well as cyclists, and sometimes the cyclists use the side of the road instead. Helmet use isn’t mandated by law, but many people act as if it is, police included.
One of the heavily promoted activities here is to go with a bicycle tour group to the top of Haleakala at dawn and coast down the mountain for 26 miles. Helmets are mandated by all tour groups (probably because of liability issues), but every year you hear about one or more accidents involving a car and a bike on the tour. The scenic road is narrow and winding, with many blind curves, and not built to be shared by cyclists and cars. Both cyclists and drivers are frequently busy looking at the scenery rather than the other vehicles on the road.
State and local governments are trying to make streets more bike-friendly, but there is pushback from drivers who don’t want car lanes repurposed for bicycles, and a general lack of money and room to create special bike paths. It doesn’t help that both drivers and cyclists sometimes behave very poorly, but they do that everywhere.
The one bad bicycle accident I had would not have been helped by wearing a helmet — I broke one wrist and sprained the other when I misjudged a curb and went over my handlebars. Do helmets prevent injury? The assumption seems to be ‘yes’, but I haven’t analyzed the statistics.
I finally re-found the page with the (links to) safety figures on David Hembrow’s blog, and the ones specifically about helmets. The conclusion is that it can sometimes help individuals, but as it discourages biking in general which diminishes the excercise people get, for every life saved by mandatory wearing of biking helmets in Holland, 25 lives would be lost to other health issues from less excercise and/or more car travel. In the USA, where biking is so much more dangerous, this number changes to 1:10 instead of 1:25.
To quote the article about brain injuries and the Dutch cyclist: “if a helmet is worn by that typical Dutch cyclist, it will save his/her life every 3100 lifetimes or so.”
That doesn’t mean that in individual cases it might not be a good thing, or save a person’s life; but where it would probably do the most good is for the elderly.
Twothirds of Dutch cyclists who die in accidents are over sixty, and the older the more chance they have of an accident ending badly, with the over-80s faring worst, simply because any fall (even at slow speed) at that age is dangerous. The only fatal accident witnessed by anyone I know was an elderly couple out biking, who tangled their handlebars and fell; the lady was very unlucky, hit her head or neck on the curb, and died the next day in hospital. That death might have been prevented by a helmet.
As more and more elderly people bike more and faster,with the increase of e-bikes, so that their part in the accident and fatalities statistics keeps rising, I expect the next safety campaign to start advising the elderly to cycle safely, and to consider wearing a helmet when biking.
Very few Dutch children die in bike accidents, and those deaths are mostly not of the kind that might have been prevented with a helmet, but by improving the separation between cars and bikes, from what I’ve gathered. Making helmet use mandatory seems to be an ineffective strategy to prevent children dying; taking back the town roads for people instead of cars, and giving the cars their own separate spaces, has proven to be a lot more effective.
This was triggered from a similar motivation by the Dutch action group “Stop the child murder” in the 1970s, and got a boost from the oil crisis in 1973/4 which made the government decide that less dependency on foreign oil would be a good strategy. Together that has lead to all the infrastructure improvements (designing for ‘sustainable safety’, e.g. not dependent on all drivers behaving perfectly all the time) that make cycling as well as other traffic participation a lot safer here now.
I hope the links are useful; if you want more statistics, you can follow the links provided by mr.Hembrow on the website and blogs that I’ve linked, he seems to have done his research and provided links to the sources.
I think I’ll step off this soapbox now, sorry for derailing the thread.
My city is very bad, strangely, about sidewalks and bike paths, also biking lanes. Here, a bike helmet is a good idea. I’m not sure if it’s required by law. Probably not, as I’ve seen people (adults and kids) cycling with and without.
One of the houses a street over and a house or two down from mine apparently has a new family with a young child, I’d guess preschool age from the occasional sounds that drift over from the yard. This is a very welcome thing and the child and the mom sound happy.
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Re diet and exercise: I have not managed to really start exercising this year, but think I may start after all. I am not sure, but I think I’ve lost a little weight this summer, due to all the heat and a few small changes in eating habits and appetite levels. I’m not as heavy as either of my parents were at my age, but still, I’d like to drop a few pounds. It’s just that dropping them, and being borderlie hypoglycemic, and liking to eat (heh, who doesn’t?) are, hmm, impeding reaching the goal. But…I may still be making slight progress. I should weigh and find out for sure. If I have indeed lost, I’ll be happy about it.
We are still into the upper 80’s and lower 90’s for highs and lower 70’s and rarely into the 60’s for lows, at the end of September. I got curious enough to check average figures for my city, because it feels hotter than it ought to be. Well, record highs have been topped recently at 109 in August and September here, but apparently, we’re not too far outside the averages for this time of year. It just feels unseasonably warmer to me. I suppose I’ll find out in October and November. (Though it’s not uncommon to have highs in the 70’s on Thanksgiving and Christmas both. We can also have temps around/below freezing. Our winter weather varies a lot.) So…some indication overall of temps increasing over the past 5 to 10 years, but how significant it is towards global warming? Hard to say yet. … Except this is the second year in about five years where we’ve had highs over 100 for over a week straight in the summer. So…hmm. Still mostly shorts and t-shirt weather here. — I have a “new” sweater I still haven’t worn yet, which I bought a few years ago now and won’t give up. I want to wear it, and have an old favorite sweater which I need to see if it’s still good, put away.
Odd, this week, I heard a single cicada, a loud, large one, for the first time this summer and fall. Don’t know why I haven’t heard them before then. But possibly the season’s about to change toward fall. This would be quite welcome without A/C, but my heater works fine.
(I was amused about the double UU / double VV key, by the way.)
Unfortunately, Cambridge and Boston, Massachusetts (USA) are not kind to the many cyclists sharing the streets with cars (or, annoyingly and illegally, the sidewalks with pedestrians). We have way too many cyclists killed by cars and trucks. Most of the cyclists are commuting to work and, in Cambridge, are often riding in supposed bike lanes, which really are just a meter or so of reserved path at the edge of the street set off from regular traffic simply by a painted line. The cars mostly aren’t even aware the lane exists. I commend the Netherelands for their investment in a true biking infrastructure.
Yes, when I read about the avoidable traffic accidents and the circumstances in which people in other countries are supposed to bike, I was appalled. I wouldn’t take the risk to do so, in these situations
The investment in improved safety for the most vulnerable participants in traffic has turned out to be very cost-effective, when it’s done consistently over 15-20 years. Not just in lives saved, but also monetarily, in less costly infrastructure as bike paths and bike parking take a lot less space and cost a lot less to make while relieving pressure on facilities for cars (any journey made by bike is one less journey by car & one less parking spot needed) , less healthcare costs and disability pensions (both for the accident victims and because people take more excercise) – the death toll from traffic accidents fell from 3000 per year (including 400 kids under 15) in 1973, the year in which the policy in regard to traffic started to change, to iirc 650 total, 187 cyclists (including 14 kids under 15) in 2013, while population increased from 14 to 16 million and mobility & traffic increased a lot. That’s such a large change, it seems like other infrastructure planners would take notice. But apparently the English-language countries are so totally focused on doing everything by car that anything else is not politically viable, so perhaps the places where the greater gains in traffic safety could be achieved are those developing nations where some part of the population is still used to bicycles and not everyone owns a car yet, but car ownership and use is rising fast with increasing wealth, like China and India, and maybe Africa.
Those statistics make an excellent argument! Here in the U.S. (And in Massachusetts) we are especially concerned about the rising costs of healthcare. I actually sit on a work group/advisory committee helping our Massachusetts Dept. of Medicaid redesign how it delivers and pays for healthcare services, but I doubt it would listen to me if I said we should invest in long term infrastructure redesign of transportation to save on health costs. Sigh… Mind you, our state Dept of Public Health, where I have lots of friends, would likely agree… But they never have any money.
It seems that, despite the obvious benefits of long term planning, administrators and politicians can’t see past the next election cycle. Major projects sometimes get accomplished purely by accident.