Chandra Clarke

Offering Whatever Light I Can

Too Fast? I Wish…

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I write a lot. There are letters to friends, replies to readers, articles, texts, social media comments, columns, and books. Some days I  live in front of the computer. I think my fingers are flattening out at the tips — a modern day version of the scribe’s middle-finger callus I suppose.

I hear a lot of people say that computers are hard to use. Apparently, folks feel that technology is moving too quickly, and it’s scary.

Personally, I also have difficulties using computers. I’m no techno-peasant — if it has buttons, and beeps, I own it. I’ve been using the home version of the computer since the first VIC 20 came out years ago. (Yes, I am that old.) For me, computers are difficult to use because technology isn’t advancing fast enough.

The thing you have to realize you see, is that computers are essentially stoopid. Using one is very much like talking to a three year old. When you a tell a three year old what to do, you have to be clear, concise, and keep in mind that they are very, very literal.

For example, if you’re on the phone, and you need to write something down in a hurry, you can tell your kid to go get you a pencil from your desk. However, if there are only pens on your desk, your kid will come back empty-handed, and look surprised when you get annoyed.

Likewise, computers follow your instructions down to the letter. Way back when, using your computer consisted of typing in lines, no, pages, of programming instructions. (Who else wants to date themselves by remembering PEEK and POKE commands?) No matter how carefully you typed, you almost always missed a small detail. If you tried to run the program, the thing would get a serious case of electronic indigestion. And, almost always, the thing you missed would be a @#$%^! comma in line 4657. No, I’m not bitter about it. Honest.

Computers today are a little better, but not much. The one I’m working on now doesn’t know I’m Canadian. Consequently, every time I run the spell check, it tells me I don’t know how to spell `colour,’ `centre,’ and `Tuktoyuktuk.’ I could add these things to the program’s dictionary, but this makes everything an agony of decisions. How many times am I likely to refer to Newfies in the future? Is the conservative leader O’Toole going to be around long enough to warrant the disk space?

Finances on the computer are fun too, because we’re still in a transition stage. We’re not an entirely cashless society yet, so you really can’t use the computer efficiently. To issue a paper cheque right now (and yes, there’s an astonishing number of places that still insist on cheques), I’d have to turn on the computer, access the program, enter the data, turn on the printer, oh yes – change the paper in the printer, or . . . I could go into my pocketbook and sign on the dotted line.

Likewise, my bank keeps haranguing me to go paperless with my bank account statements, and my accountant still wants everything printed out… which makes me think the bank isn’t really concerned about the environment so much as it wants to offload it’s stationary costs onto me. But I digress.

Yesterday, while trying to update the firmware for a monitor, my computer kept insisting it couldn’t possibly find the monitor I was trying to update… by displaying an error message on the monitor I was trying to update. My iPad insists that I update its operating system and assures me that it will be able to update itself overnight as long as it’s kept plugged in, yet every day for a week now, I’ve received the message from my plugged in iPad that it wasn’t able to update itself. I guess I need to make some time later to hold it’s digital hand?

So you see, I can’t wait for computers to get smarter. I want mine to take orders like the one on the bridge of Star Trek does (without reporting what I’m buying or doing to a corporate headquarters). I want it to learn my version of shorthand. I can’t wait for a “smart” home with a genuinely self-cleaning oven, and a freezer that knows when I am running perilously low on rocky road ice cream and adds it to the grocery list. I want my phone to know who’s on the other end of the line, and to only ring when it’s someone I want to talk to, and not the fake Canada Revenue Agency scam call (which I’ve received 12 times today and counting.)

Bring on the window-washing robots. Send me the automated lawn-mower. Ship ’em direct, and rush the delivery!

Image credit: Andy Miccone/Flickr

Papers of (Broken) Record

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Thank goodness for small town newspapers. What’s left of them, anyway.

I once read that a small town is a place where everyone knows what everyone else is doing, so the only reason they read their paper is to find out who got caught.

More importantly, small town newspapers are usually staffed with writers who either are just getting started in the journalism business, or who have decided they want nothing to do with the bigger presses. Either way, they haven’t yet been indoctrinated into the school of reporting I’m going to call “journospeak.”

I’m not sure if journospeak comes from ‘having seen it all’ and developing shortcuts for reporting on the same sorts of stories over and over again, or whether it’s just laziness. But you hear it all the time. For example, no matter where in the world they are taking place, wars `rage.’ They never just stomp around in a bad temper, they rage. Likewise, jets never just fly overhead, they scream. What they are screaming, I don’t know.

As every one knows, there is almost always some sort of conflict going on. Every day, one hears about a riot, or political protests, or a shooting. Yet announcers, perhaps in an attempt to make today’s round sound more interesting, insist on prefacing every report with “this is the worst violence since…”

There are numerous other examples. Police, for instance, are always making grisly discoveries. Personally, I had no idea we had so many bears running around loose, and I think it’s high time we did something about it. Protestors out on a cold day are always going about “braving the elements.” There could be a total of three snowflakes on the ground, but the protestors are always brave.

Canadian journalists seem to have a fixation on weather analogies. We refer to “a hail of bullets,” or the fact that “bombs were raining down on the countryside.”

On the financial side, deals are always forged. This usually brings to mind an image of some anonymous accountant, sleeves rolled up, glasses reflecting the light of the fire, pounding away on a two-foot thick document with a hammer.

Granted, there is a reason for the way journalists talk. They have to be succinct, and to the point. We certainly can’t have them talking excitedly about a bloodbath in terms of “oh gross, there’s lots and lots of red stuff all over the place!” However, it would be nice if they varied it, and maybe gave us some depth in their reporting. At least half of the dissatisfaction people feel with most “mainstream media” coverage is that it’s shallow, clickbaity, tries to evoke negative emotions, and doesn’t provide any background or explanation.

I’m not sure why small town papers don’t get clichéd writing. I’d like to think that it’s because small towns don’t normally have things like war zones, crime wave,s and serial murderers. Reporters don’t have a chance to get jaded and blasé about such nastiness.

On the other hand, I suspect it actually has a lot do with the fact that things that happen in a small town simply don’t happen in other places.

Take this incident as an example. A livestock trucker had stopped somewhere in a town, and parked the vehicle for a few minutes. An enterprising pig in the truck, finding itself alone with a loose board on the side, hopped out. What followed was a rash of swine sightings, ending with a quick capture early on a Saturday morning. Yours truly was called out for a photograph of the porker.

“You want me to come out and take a picture of a what? In where?”

Nope, it’s pretty hard to become jaded as a small town reporter. There are just too many surprises. And thank goodness for that.

 

Photo by Roman Kraft on Unsplash

 

A Book for Entrepreneurs

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Combining careers and parenthood is challenging; combining running a business and parenthood is downright nuts. Guess which I did? Yeah, the nutty option.

For those of you who don’t know the backstory: My business and life partner Terry and I managed to take a company — Scribendi.com — from basement startup to successful acquisition, while raising four kids. We’re now battle-scarred and a lot wiser, and we’ve written this book to pass on what we’ve learned to other entrepreneurial parents.

The book busts the myths surrounding entrepreneurship and work/life balance, walks you through the five phases of business life, and teaches you strategies to help you deal with your biggest issues: guilt, stress, and lack of time.

If this title isn’t for you (and it might not be, if you found me through this blog, my sci-fi book Echoes of Another, or my humorous fantasy Pundragon), that’s cool. Keep it in mind for any entrepreneurial friends and family!

If it is for you, you can find out more here. The ebook is available now, and the paperback will be available before the end of March.

Beware the Unusual Home . . .

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You too can have a home that looks like this… if you start with the one on the right and don’t mind not having enough money for food and water for several months.

Rearranging some photo albums today, and found some pictures of a previous home.

The real estate agent had said it was a house with Character. Everyone who ever visited told us it had Character.

Hmph.

Character, I’ve discovered, is simply a nice way of saying “high maintenance.”

It was a 117-year old home. We’d purchased it with the idea of restoring it to something resembling its original state. The motto for that little endeavor ended up being: “It’s not just a job, it’s a career.”

There are numerous problems associated with restoring an old home. It is very hard, we’ve found, to find contractors who can handle the old materials like slate (roofing), or real plaster (as opposed to drywall). If you can find someone here in North America, they’ll charge you more for a single project than you paid for the entire house in the first place.

So, we did a lot of the work ourselves. Due to time constraints (we had to work to pay for all of the materials, of course) this meant we were always living in a half-finished construction site. And anyone who tells you that old home restoration is a labour of love has never had to strip four very thick layers of paint from two dozen intricately carved metal hinges. I have, and I can tell you it actually should be called a labour of  barely-tolerated-mind-numbing-tedium.

The fact that specialized contractors are so expensive means that all the previous owners of the house also engaged in DIY… with… varying levels of competence. Somewhere I still have a picture of the wallpaper job in one bedroom, which featured kittens, bunnies, and puppies… and one poor unfortunate creature that was half kitten and half bunny because no one explained to the previous owner how to line up patterned wallpaper.

Aside from the renovation woes, just living in an old home can be an adventure. In spite of our best efforts, there were still hundreds of little cracks and crevices  for bugs to wander in. Going down the hallway at night is somewhat like watching a National Geographic special on Canadian creepy crawlies. It was really very educational, especially if you like spiders.

Then there were the other frequent visitors. To this day, if you want someone at my house to hit the floor in a hurry, you don’t yell “duck!” you yell “bat!” Works every time.

Those big windows in the old Victorian houses? They look amazing. They’re also single pane and the frames are made of wood that has shrunk over the decades. So they let more air in and out of the house than what flows through a wind tunnel. Give ol’ Ebenezeer Scrooge some credit: he was probably crabby because he was freakin’ cold. And before you suggest replacement windows, do yourself a favour and count the number of windows there are in that house you’re drooling over in For the Love of Old Houses. Ours? Twenty-two. That’s a lot of double glazing to install, at non-standard sizes…

We didn’t use coal to heat the house, of course, but we still froze in the winter while enjoying a sky-high heating bill. That place had a gas flame boiler downstairs that heated up water, which was then pumped through the house to cast iron radiators in every room. The surface of a radiator gets to a temperature that lies somewhere between fry-your-bacon and melt-the-lampshades. Lesson number one in the `living with radiators’ series: do not back into one of these puppies when the system is on. Trust me.

The floors creaked a little; not so much as to be really annoying, but enough so that you couldn’t sneak downstairs to the fridge at 3 a.m. without the rest of the family yelling out their room service requests. The pooches (mooches?) liked get into the act too: if there was a noise in the house they’d rush out to frighten away the burglars. Once they found out it was you, they pushed for the cookie bribe to prevent them from barking some more.

I suppose though, if pressed, I would admit that I understand why some people don’t like modern homes. And it does bother me when I see some of the finer pieces of architecture in other cities fall into disrepair. These places are an important part of our heritage. There was a lot of history in that home. Yes, if these walls could talk . . .

Hmph.

If those walls could talk, they’d probably say something like “Ha. Suckers…”

 

Image credit: Photo by Ludovic Charlet on Unsplash