I remember when computers were huge

I am writing right now on my good friend and companion Sony VIO. This is a small laptop that weighs less than one kilogramme. It is rather powerful; I can download and watch films, write and store any number of documents, communicate with anybody in the world writing emails or skyping, perform complicated calculations, read newspapers published anywhere in the world, listen to radio in any language… The list goes on. There are many functions my computer can perform that I even do not know about and I do not want to know more than I already do.  Enough is enough. And I know that my computer is already a couple of years old and that there are more advanced technologies widely available. We take it all for granted now. But the times when I saw a computer the first time in my life it was a totally different computer.

Was it in the late sixties of the last century or the early seventies? I think it was already in the sixties. I just got my seriously sounding diploma of a master of pure mathematics and did not quite know how this was going to serve me in finding an interesting job. I even did not know what would really interest me as a mathematician who did not intend to be a scientist or a school teacher. I had to have a job, though, and the caring communistic government found me one as a corrector of school manuals for math. It was a boring job and definitely did not require any serious qualifications or knowledge of mathematics. Ability to spell correctly was important here. So I read page after page with a red pen in hand marking my corrections in spelling. One of my colleagues realised that I might not be in the right job. Christine, I still remember the name, had an idea. Her brother in law had some strange job with computers and was looking for people who could be trained to be computer programmers. Would I be interested?  I did not know. Would I? I knew what a computer was; they taught me about them computers at uni, but it was a very vague knowledge.

So one evening, the brother in law of Christine, called me and casually asked if I would like to be trained to be a programmer. He could not tell me much about it as he has only started the job himself. Generally speaking, it was to develop systems for distribution of agricultural machines, combine harvesters and such. Just what any twenty-two years old girl is particularly interested in. Hmm… However, I said “yes”. This was a pivotal moment in my life and the start to a serious computer career that lasted decades. I was to become one of the first programmers in Poland, but that memorable evening when my professional life had started I had no idea what was ahead of me.

I had a right aptitude, but no knowledge of computers. A couple of courses filled the gap, and a couple of months later I started to program. It was great fun; they paid me for something that was akin to solving crosswords, one of my hobbies.

These were early days in working with computers, and the first computer I saw was ICL 1900. It took the whole big, air-conditioned room and only special people were allowed to enter this magic place. The data to be processed was stored on punched cards, perforated paper tape and on magnetic tapes that rotated mysteriously in their boxes the size of a grandfather clock. Scary stuff and difficult to comprehend.

 

There were only a few computers in Warsaw at that time and corporations that did not have their own computers had to hire computer time by an hour from the lucky institutions that had their own machines. My employer was not one of the lucky ones and had to hire computer time. That meant that my working hours depended on computer availability. Typically we were allotted time in the middle of night. I must say that I was a brave and determined girl, getting a taxi at 2:00 am to go to work for one hour. During the hour I was supposed to load a new version of my program stored on punched cards, compile it into the form understood by the computer and then execute it by giving the command: GO 20! With some luck, the program worked and produced expected results typically in the form of a business report.

  

This was the best outcome one could expect, but typically the program had further errors that rarely could have been corrected on the spot. So, back to the office and analysing the program, punching corrections on cards like the one on the photo, slotting them into appropriate places and back to booking a new computer time. Disasters of dropping programs and spreading the cards all over the floor were not all that uncommon. Who would dream of working in such a manner these days? But it was great fun.

Today, life is so much easier as far as using computers is concerned. I can produce any report; do my income tax return calculations using a standard program like EXCEL without any need for debugging. It is just there in my PC. My little computer is hundred times more powerful than the huge ones of the sixties and seventies. There is no need to be careful with my data falling on the floor and getting mixed up. But even if I have the computer all to myself I sometimes get up in the middle of the night and sing into work or play.  Occasional insomnia may be a reason for that, but the nightly computer work is still a part of my life

Tea drinking

Tea has been my favourite morning drink for quite some time now. In my new kitchen which has four big, deep drawers one of them is almost fully taken by various teas. Black, green, red, white, infusions, herbal teas…Too many really and I am trying to manage it by not buying any new teas except refilling the essential Lapsang Souchong. This has been for few years my favourive morning tea.

                                                    

Recently I claimed my birthday present at Kikki's as I found an interesting teacup which is a cross between tea glass and a teacup. Being a stationary junkie I found my way to the local Kikki shop and enrolled on their customer list. Now each September I get a $10 coupon to purchase my birthday present in the shop. As I have all the stationary I need I focused on their home line and found this glass-cup. It says :  Dream Breath Create Inspire. The writing is unobtrusive, hardly visible really. I like it. The reason why I chose such a present is in a way related to old Polish way to drink tea.

When I say “old Polish way” I do not think of all that very distant times. The tea drinking out of  a simple 250 ml glass is still done in many Polish homes. Tea tastes best when it is hot and drinking it out of a thin  glass burnt one's fingers. Sometimes such a glass did not have a saucer underneath and as sugar was widely used in my young days I had a dilemma if I should leave the spoon in the glass or put in on the table after I was done with stirring my tea. Then my mother typically gave me a beauty lesson saying: if you drink your tea with the spoon in the glass you will look like general Rokossowski. I did not want to look like him and have one brow higher than the other so I quickly took my spoon out of the glass. Funny things we remember and the lesson was rather interesting and saying things about my beautiful mother.

                                                      

Tea drinking out of a glass rather than a teacup is rather tricky and requires some care and clever ideas to cope with it and enjoy the beverage without burning your fingers and harming your beauty forever.

With passing years glasses with handles appeared in Polish homes but they were typically made out of a thick glass and this was not particularly satisfying to me. There was another way and this was to put your glass in a holder with a  handle. This could be really a nice way to drink your tea especially if the holder was antique and pleasingly designed. This is really a Russian way to drink tea without burning your fingers, but also used in Poland.

My new cup satisfies my taste in many ways. The glass is thin, the shape (minus the  handle) reminds me of a regular polish tea glass. It has a simple design that looks elegant to me. I wonder if Swedish (Kikki is a Swedish shop) also drink tea out of a glass. My Swedish husband was not really accustomed to it and made funny faces expressing discomfort of burning his fingers. Very quickly he was served his tea in a little holder. My mother always tried to please her guests and her Swedish son in law in particular.

All this tea drinking thoughts came quite unexpectantly while drinking this morning my Lapsang souchong out of a Kikki glass.

New reading experience - Talk Talk

 

I always wanted to belong to a book club, and now my dream became a reality. One afternoon last week, I got a telephone call from the local library telling me that I now belong to such a club. The first book to read and discuss is Talk Talk by T.C. Boyle. I never heard the name of the author, but excited ran to the library to finalise the deal and get the book. Four days later, I finished the book, and my feeling now is that of disappointment. In a way, I have expected that the choice of books may not be interesting for me and the first book confirmed my expectations. One may wonder why I wanted to belong to such a club knowing that my taste in books may not be an average reader’s taste. Well, this is still about books and about discussing them with like-minded people. I still have hopes that the meeting with the fellow reviewers will be a good, interesting experience. I will meet new people, and I like that.  So I am looking forward to this evening in a couple of week’s time.

Now, about the book. It read well up to a point when I realized that this is all there is, just an easy read. I will forget the book very quickly; it will not leave any residue in me. At least I think so. The book is about stealing the identity of innocent people and breaking into their credit cards accounts. This may be a warning for me as I have been rather trusting not to say careless with my cards. Not that I lose them, but I use them too freely perhaps. This will change now, and I will use PayPal more often instead. This is a practical plus of reading the book, but such effect was, most likely, not intended. 

The story is told in two separate streams that at the end of the book merge. The victim of the identity theft is a deaf girl. She spends the whole weekend in jail after being stopped by police while speeding a bit. During the documents, check police discover that her records show many crimes and she is treated like a criminal, imprisoned till Monday as it is Friday afternoon. Being deaf makes it a particularly difficult and bizarre experience. The reader gets for a while into the Kafkaesque world to move later into a chasing the thief story. And this is what the book is all about. The story is about chasing the identity thief through the whole USA. From California to New York. Dana, the victim, together with her supportive boyfriend Bridger is looking for Dana, the crook.  They have  little information by which to start the chase, but there are many lucky coincidences on the way to help them unnerve the thief and upset his life in the process. So this is the story. Moderately interesting and moderately credible. If the book was written with some sense of humour, I would not be put off that much, but the writing style is very average and, some poetic descriptions of landscapes are rather misplaced. Little plugs of poetry seem to only slow down the action and not add anything to the book. Reading it was a waste of time for me.

One pleasurable aspect of the book was reading the parts describing food preparation by the bad Dana. He is a real foodie and knows his drinks as well. Reading about his cooking I felt like getting up and going to my new kitchen to prepare something interesting to eat. I even did it at one stage, but not having gourmet ingredients at home it was only a bake of  spinach covered with sauerkraut,  feta cheese and beaten eggs. When I write about it , it sounds revolting but, in fact it was quite nice.

During my days I spend time, sometimes even too much, on watching silly TV serials or bad movies that are now freely available on YouTube. I wonder why I do not have any problems with this type of waste of time, but reading Talk Talk makes me feel that I will not like to repeat the experience too often. Even if it is the price for belonging to the book club. Maybe it is because books have some magic value for me and I have particular expectations of learning from them either new facts, new better ways of living my life or being a better person? I guess that my reverence for literature seems to exclude reading “so what” type of books.

Would I recommend the book? Sorry – No.

Kindness revisited

                                                   

Kindness has been one of my core values for quite a while. It means to me affection, warmth, gentleness, care and concern for others. I love to be an object of others expressing kindness towards me and I like the idea of being kind to others. I believe I am. Lately, I included myself into the “others” and try to be kind towards myself as well. Not so simple for me.

So when I saw the book by Adam Phillips, On Kindness, I thought that I would like to have it. It indeed started with just having it, but not reading it for a long time. The book landed up on my table together with two other unread books by the author – Missing Out and Unforbidden Pleasures. I became aware of Adam Phillips reading one of Ramana’s posts where he writes about the book Missing Out. The post starts with a long excerpt from the book. It caught my attention and woke up a desire to examine not only the book by my life as well. I bought the book, started to read and then realized that it requires being studied and not just read. I put it away. I just realized that the whole year has passed and I only have skimmed the book. I intended to read/study it and when, on two other occasions, I saw his other books in shops, I bought them. They have been waiting till the last week when I eventually read On Kindness. Adam Phillips is a psychoanalyst. His writing is elegant and vocabulary impressive. I like it. He writes about things that one needs to ponder on and reflect while reading. It is a “deep and meaningful” kind of a book. I like it even if for a while it confused me and even put me off kindness.

The book covers a short history of kindness and arguments against practicing it, its negative points and even its harmful nature. After some thoughts provoking arguments which are designed to be provocative, he re-defines kindness to be “the strongest indicator of people’s well-being, their pleasure of existence”. He says that when we experience love for life, we want to extend to others our being and our enjoyment.  He calls it “authentic kindness”. It includes seeing people as they are and not as we would like them to be. We often put people on pedestals and then expect them to live up to our desires and expectations. I have been guilty of that many times in my past. (Oh, oh! sorry friends J) Authentic kindness requires that we see people as they are, with warts and all and still accept them and maybe even love them. We can do it only when we have acceptance of our imperfect selves. Only then we can be authentically kind.

The opposite to “authentic kindness” is “magic kindness”. Adam Phillips gives an example of a child who is dependant on his parents and as a consequence needs to be lovable enough for them to look after him. Kindness and sweetness are magic and an insurance policy of a dependent child. The child also wants to protect his parents from getting harmed or unhappy so they can continue to meet his needs. This is a manipulation, and it has to be romanticized to be palatable. These arguments made me think that I should be off kindness and fast.

Another point that shook me up was that “too much kindness is a saboteur of development, of fully formed independence”.  I have recently seen an example of a grown up woman who dedicates her life to her mother. She does not work; she is not in a relationship. She lives to support her mother. This is an example of a “magic kindness”. She has not grown up yet and still needs her mother to fulfill her emotional needs; she has not been able to separate from her mother.  For many years I felt guilty that I left my parents and moved far away leaving them without my practical support. It was a kind of absolution to read that “it is only if the parents consent to be treated callously, that is without concern for their own needs, that the child can be the entrepreneur of her own growth”.  My parents gave me their consent and, yes, my actions were callous. It is clearer now that this was as it was supposed to be and that there is no need to feel guilty. I still wish I could have comforted them in difficult times, but I understand that this kindness would have stopped me to live as I thought best for my development and identity. This is the brutality of and the authentic kindness, but it is the kindness I am ready to embrase. 

My travels in time - from horse and carriage to jetset

My travels started early. I was less than two years old when my parents started to look for a better place to live their life than a small village somewhere in the eastern part of Poland, close to the new border with Russia. It was just after the Second World War and Poland was a troubled country with post-war borders just being enforced. We had a long trip ahead of us. Not so much in kilometers but in duration. It took few days to reach the destination but my mother and me, still a baby, traveled in the comfort of something like a gypsy wagon. My father was a very enterprising man, and he always knew how to take care of his family and how to create a good life for us. We traveled to this Promised Land, and for us, it was a small industrial town in the central part of Poland. The name of the town is unpronounceable, sorry.

I did not like the place because my mother did not like it and she was my role model. It was a small town, but perhaps not so by Australian standards. Even if around 70,000 people lived there, it had a feel of a small gossipy place, and it was full of fumes of the factories around. I was happy and excited to move to Warsaw when I finished my HSC. It was a move a little more to the west again. This time I traveled by train, and it was a great upgrade on a horse and cart of my first life trip.

Then I started my shuttle traveling between the town of my early youth and Warsaw where I studied. Warsaw was a big city, and I had to do many adjustments to fit in. Some were good some not so good. I learned to smoke cigarettes to be more like other students. This part I regret now. But generally I had a really good time in the big city, and after a while, I felt like I belong there. I became a Warsaw girl.

Then I fell in love with a man I met at work. He was Swedish and after few years of being married and living in two different countries, I lived in Warsaw, he in Vienna; we decided to move together and the place to live together was Paris. Not so bad, really, especially that being a true Pole I loved anything French. This is difficult to comprehend as French never treated Poland all that well, but we loved them with love without reciprocity. This time I traveled by car and I recall with fondness our Alfa Romeo sports. I thought it was an upgrade on the train that brought me from this smaller town to Warsaw.

We were very proud of our Grand Turismo Veloce

It was an interesting time, but after the three years of my husband's Paris assignment  and me being a housewife, it was a time to move again. We were looking for an English speaking country and even if Australia was not on our list at first, we were lucky to be directed by fate to come to Sydney. It was 1979, and the new life started then. With some stretch, I could say that I traveled west again and this time by a jet set. Another upgrade on means of transport. 

After being naturalized a few years later, I legitimately call Australia home. Yes, I have my “charming” accent which is rather strong and people sometimes ask me about my nationality, but I feel Australian even if I sound a bit funny for an Aussie.