Tag Archives: memory

Fruit fly…

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I pride myself on a whole host of things, but one of the most important has been being able to keep a precision focus on whatever task happened to be at hand despite multitasking to keep up with emails, text messages, and the six dozen other things that crop up to distract us in the course of the day. Yes, it sounds ridiculous, but being able to hold multiple irons in the fire is a point of personal pride. Or it has been until the last couple of days.

I don’t know where that part of my brain that usually handles multiple relatively complex tasks at once, but it’s well and truly out of service at the moment. Focusing in on just one thing at a time has been more of a challenge than I really want to admit. Thank God it’s winter. If the weather was better every bird or squirrel passing the window would be cause to send me off on a wild tangent. Just keeping my focus with the myriad of conversations going on around me has proved to be something close to a full time effort. Quite frankly, work is traumatic enough without also dealing with the attention span of the average fruit fly.

It’s one of those inconveniences that I’m sure will sort itself out in a few days or a week, but in the meantime, I’m driving myself bloody crazy over here. The number of Post It notes now decorating my desk at work and the kitchen table is bordering on ridiculous. Getting back to an even keel where I can remember to pick up dog food or make a phone call without a reminder would be most appreciated. Until then, if I’ve told you I’m going to do something, feel free to remind me often, because there’s a pretty good chance I’m going to forget about it completely before it actually gets done. I really hadn’t planned on hitting the “always forgetting stuff” part of my life until much later, so hopefully this is just a temporary sneak preview of the impending joys of much later middle age.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Surprise overtime. I’m not naive enough to think that an eight hour workday means eight-and-out every day of the year. Sometimes unavoidable circumstances conspire to make getting it all done in eight impossible. Other times, we inflict ridiculous requirements on ourselves and then spend the afternoon and early evening running around trying to prove to someone that we can get job we just created done in a big way. Look, I’m just a working drone. I saw the other side of the fence and the long hours and sneaking way that it takes over every other part of your life has more than lost its luster. I’m more than happy to do my time and then head to the house… though honestly, sometimes it’s good to have a reminder just why I veered off the road not taken in the first place.

2. Forgetting to jot things down that annoyed you at the beginning of the week and promptly forgetting them before it’s time to blog about them. Sure, it’s probably a sign that it wasn’t all that annoying in the first place, but still, it leaves you scratching your head and really reaching for space filler on Thursday night when you’ve got half a dozen other things to do.

3. Something else, I’m sure… But I have absolutely no idea what it should be. Plus I’m tired and cranky. While sometimes that makes for some good writing, I’m pretty sure this is not one of those times.

Getting good…

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After giving a quick read to this Sunday’s Archive posts, I have to admit that I think they’re starting to get rather good. We’re up to September 2006, which is my first introduction to Memphis and the beginning of running myself ragged along the I-40 and I-81 corridors beating a path between work in West Tennessee and the apartment I was still hanging onto in central Maryland. Honestly, I expected this part of the story to be more angsty, but on reflection this was still part of the good times, well before the situation there became untenable for so many of us. Most people look back on things in their past through the filter of their own memory and rely on it to pull together the salient details. Conveniently, I have my own written record of most of my adult life, jotted down more or less as the events happened, to keep my memory in check. It’s been nice remembering that there was a time down there before circumstances and a few individuals conspired to suck all the joy out of life.

Enjoy this week’s blast from the past, late September 2006.

First impressions…

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First impressions count for alot and I can say that right out of the box, the new iPad has made a good one. The new display is absolutely remarkable. Hands down the highest resolution screen I have in the house at the moment. It makes everything else look bad in comparison. It is slightly heavier and thicker than the iPad 2, but not so much that you’d notice unless you were holding them side by side. Changing apps is snappy and the processor seems to have more than enough horsepower for anything I’ve thrown at it yet. I’ll save you the laborious description of speed tests and just say that yes, it’s fast. Unfortunately, I still have to go to Baltimore before I can try it out using a LTE/4G signal (thanks, AT&T). From what I’ve seen so far, the place where the new iPad is really going to excel is in the screen. I mean it really is something to see.

As I’m restoring from my old iPad, one thing I do notice is that the 16GB size may not be sufficient if you’re someone with a ridiculously large music library or if you want to travel with more than one or two movies on your divice. With 1500 songs and 40 apps loaded, I’m down to just a touch over 6GB of memory left. If you’re going to stream video rather than store it on your iPad, 16BG appears to be sufficient, though. If you’re worried about memory, I’d say the extra $100 to bump to a 32GB unit is probably money well spent. For me, 16 should be more than enough as I’m making a concerted effort to do more and more OTA syncing with the cloud and storing fewer and fewer things myself.

As usual, build quality is solid and it feels natural in your hands. I don’t think anyone would expect anything less. Needless to say, I’m still playing. I think Apple has delivered a good solid upgrade to the iPad family. Is it a game changer? No. No it’s not. Is it still a damned impressive piece of electronic wizardry? Yes. Yes it is.

Recommendation: It’s probably not a “must have” upgrade from iPad 2, but the retina screen makes it a damned attractive machine for movies and reading. I heard one guy describing it as a “glowing piece of paper” and I guess that’s just about right. Even at close range, there is no pixillation. Nice job, Apple. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have more, uh, research to do.

Diagnosis…

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Tech problems don’t usually sneak up on me. That’s one of the perks of keeping up an, uh, “aggressive” pace on upgrades. For the last three or four months I was completely perplexed by the cause of my laptop slowing to a crawl. I ran diagnostics on diagnostics and kept coming up with the general result that the system was clean. Unfortunately, I overlooked the most basic issue of all. It seems I have been asking my 2008 model laptop to run at 2012 efficiency with a scant 2GB of onboard RAM. Woops. That’s really something I should have caught as soon as things started bogging down on me. Total amateur mistake. Then again, it’s been a good long time since I’d kept a computer for four years that it wasn’t an issue I usually ran into.

The problem is solved and all is again right with the world. I can run Chrome, Word, and iTunes all at the same time without everything grinding to an agonizingly painful halt. There’s a sexy new piece of kit sitting on my desk serving up content to every other device jacked into my home network. It’s a happy thing. It was a purchase I wanted to make anyway, but the sorry state of affairs with my underpowered laptop gave me enough of a nudge to let me justify all out replacement (at least in my own slightly warped mind).

I haven’t quite decided what to do with the laptop yet. Picking up a RAM upgrade would probably run about $50 and would easily buy it another 2-3 years of life as a backup or secondary machine to use when I don’t need to be tethered to the desk. Then again, that’s mostly the role the iPad fills now. I guess the question I’m going to have to ask myself is if I even have a need for a laptop anymore or with almost everything headed for the cloud is it a form factor that has outlived its usefulness?

Lounge…

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Looking out the kitchen window into the inky blackness of 6AM, while I was waiting for the coffee maker to quit dripping, I got smacked in the head by a memory of a place where I haven’t set foot in over a decade. The old Honors Lounge was a half-subterranean affair stashed just off the boiler room in Guild Center. It had the benefit of not just being secluded, but also of being close to almost all your classes if you happened to be a social science major. Though the furniture was of suspect cleanliness, it was comfortable in that beat to hell kind of way that hand-me-down furniture tends to have. On most days it was a great place to find a conversation or an argument and it beat walking all the day down the hill to Lane Center or Cambridge if you needed to kill an hour between classes. More important than any of that, though, the Honors Lounge had a coffee pot and usually a giant drum of Maxwell House in the fridge. Sure, if you went in too early on a Monday morning there might have been mold growing in the filter or scorched sludge in the pot if someone left it on over the weekend, but the important part was that it was there at all. Fresh, hot coffee on demand. That was living big. As long as you liked your coffee black that is, since your chances of finding creamer or sugar stashed somewhere were nil.

I don’t know what made me think of that this morning. Maybe it was the smell of freshly brewed coffee wafting up at me. Maybe it was the last exasperated gurgle the machine made before giving up its piping hot wonderfully caffeinated beverage. Since I’m not a fancy big city psychologist, I’ll probably never know what exactly triggered that particular memory, but for a few seconds this morning, I was standing right there in Frostburg looking out the window towards Old Main waiting to pour a fresh cup before walking down the hall to class.

Memory…

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I read an article last week about human memory essentially being destroyed by computers that file everything from phone numbers to copies of the Gettysburg Address for us. Far from making my mind less capable, it was the interconnected series of tubes that let me take a passing flash of recognition and run down the rest of the story. It let me make connections that I could have never made on my own, adding a helpful boost on the weakness of 13 year old memories. If there was ever something to be celebrated, that would be it.

Ten years ago, if I had passed someone in the hallway and thought they looked familiar, that would have been it and I’d have gone on about my day without giving it another thought. But thanks to Google, any passing thought can become the focus of an entire day of searching out leads from four year old newsletters, generalized e-stakling, and finally putting a name with that long ago face. All for the simple moment of pleasure at walking up and saying, “I thought I recognized you,” and spending a few minutes reconnecting with someone who knew you a lot more hair ago.

24601…

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I’ve hidden it reasonably well from all except those who have known me the longest, but I can’t deny that at heart I’m the same band geek I have alwas been. I was flipping stations a bit ago and not paying attention, I landed on the local public television station. Not long after, I was surprised to find myself singing along with #24601 in his escape from Javert. I’d actually forgotten that I even knew the words. But there I was in the kitchen washing dishes, singing like a stark raving lunatic. Lots of memories from what feels like a different lifetime. It’s amazing what a few bars of music can bring back to you. But thank the gods that it does.

Smell…

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I’ve hear it said that there’s nothing as powerful as the sense of smell to carry us back to a moment or a place we haven’t thought about in years. I had one of those moments a few minutes ago. In smelling the combination of fresh-cut grass and the exhaust of a not-quite tuned gas engine, I was hit with an overwhelming recollection of my grandfather and his Allis Chalmers B-10 lawn tractor. I don’t think my grandfather was ever happier then when he was tooling around the yard on that mid-60s vintage machine. With that smell hanging in the air, for just a second, I was a kid again and could see people and places I haven’t set eyes on in twenty years. It was really quite remarkable and, I’m not too proud to say, it choked me up there for a minute. Memory is a funny thing like that.

Sense of smell…

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I’ve hear it said that there’s nothing as powerful as the sense of smell to carry us back to a moment or a place we haven’t thought about in years. I had one of those moments a few minutes ago. In smelling the combination of fresh-cut grass and the exhaust of a not-quite tuned lawn mower, I was hit with an overwhelming recollection of my grandfather and his Allis Chalmers B-10 lawn tractor. The mid-60s vintage machine was practically new even when I knew it in the 80s. With that smell hanging in the air, for just a second, I was a kid again and could see people and places I haven’t set eyes on in twenty years. It was really quite remarkable and, I’m not too proud to say, was the best warm fuzzy I’ve had in quite a while.