He ain't heavy

He's my brother - and I've decided to follow his inspiring example and try to set some goals for myself.

One of my goals was to use this blog to comment on interesting news. My specific idea was triggered by the notion that part of why the world and the general news is so depressing, is because of the sense of helplessness it brings with it. On 702 today, they were talking about exactly this issue, and a trauma counciller phoned in to say that she felt that a lot of South Africans were becomming "negatively resilliant" i.e. losing our ability to be empathic towards victims of crime, violence and war because we are constantly bombarded by these stories, and we simply switch off in a form of self defense. I think this is a real problem. I also feel that too few people actually voice their opinions about things - at least, too few people with non-extreme opinions about anything. So our society gradually becomes disempowered and disillusioned, and more and more permissive and depressing because not enough ordinary people feel that they can do anything about the negatives.

I am going to try to post a "what you can do" section for any news stories where I could think of something constructive to do about them. I may not always do what I suggest, but I'll try.

My next goal is to set some concrete goals. My general goals are: to get a handle on my job - to be more organised at home, and to eat more healthily, and to get my head a bit sorted. I'm aiming to be less stressed and happier - I should mention that I'm fairly seriously depressed at the moment, i.e. often in tears on the way to work, trouble sleeping, repeated negative thoughts blah, blah blah. I should be on anti-depressants, but my daughter, (who I will call Zeb for the purposes of this blog), is allergic to everything under the sun and so I'm still breastfeeding. Bye, bye happy pills.

Concrete goals will follow in a subsequent post, maybe.... I don't know if I want to make them public or not.

Gadget w00ts and woes

I got a cute bluetooth hands-free kit for my phone. Seeing as I'm in the car at least 2 hours out of my day - this counts as a necessity. It's very cute - and sounds very clear to the number of people I tested it on by phoning them from the car today! It has a little blue flashing light - and, most importantly, doesn't hurt my ear like the other one did. My boss feels that great excitement over a cool new cell phone accessory makes me a gadget-y person. Oh so wrong!

I am but an amateur when it comes to gadgets. Witness my complete inability to get the wireless router in the office to talk to the wireless RFID reader. Witness my lack of ability to load my robot compiler on to my Linux box!

I do, however, have a compelling technical reason for the lack of instant interoperability and connectivity heaven...... some days, machines just don't love me!

Here goes...

This is a place where I can vent, lament and generally air my feelings without fear that my friends will start avoiding me. ('Cause they can simply NOT READ it, if they don't like it, right?).

I'm also going to try to post a bit about work (which is often interesting, sometimes intensely infuriating - and a lot more stressful than I was hoping for), how I feel about current news (with a strong South African focus), and generally the stuff I would write in my diary, if I kept one, which I don't.