"I have been but little in," said Ninian hastily...

I don't often feel lucky. I don't mean fortunate--there are many reasons to feel that. No, I mean that most of my days are a string of events, mostly tiresome but not drastic, that suggest the nearby presence of an Improbability Drive starship. The backpack, quickly grabbed from the car seat winds a stray, swinging strap twice around the parking brake handle. Three lights in succession turn amber *just* that second or two before I can safely squeak through them. The pen that I'm holding slips free of my hand and doesn't just roll under the desk but jams solidly into the interstices between two cube panels in some position that, defying logic, can't be reached from my cube *or* any of the adjoining ones.

So, I feel that it really calls for remarking when something remarkable happens the other way.

The "enter" key (only one of the most critical) on my laptop had jammed, so I tried to *gently * prise it up to see if I could fix the problem. It flew into the air with what sounded distinctly like a plastic-snapping sound. Heart sinks. I looked at the position and there's a plunger (that actually operates the circuit), a wire that snaps into the key (to hold one side and let the other move up and down), and several indentations or clips on the back of the key that connect it to the wire and to a contraption of sliding plastic frames around the plunger.

So, what actually broke? Nothing, by some miracle. The jam was a tiny bit of pine-based cat litter that had gotten into the sliding frames and which I could abstract with my fingernail. The wire clips into the key and slides into clips on the board. The frames also attach with sliding tabs to the key. But here's the trick--the frame has to slide into the keypad at the same time the wire (snapped into the key) slides under the clips on the board. If I had a loud-hailer and a team of 2mm helpers, I might be able to do that. With my fingers... no way.

I snap the wire back onto the key. Slide the ends under the clips. Rest it on the plunger and see that, yes, that's how it sits, but without being able to slide the tabs of the frame onto the clips on the back of the key, it's just going to cant forward at an odd angle. I try typing "enter" a few times to see how odd that would be--could I live with it? It's kludgey, but it could work in a pinch. Grrr. I hit the key a little harder, in annoyance. Why did this have to happen.

There's a click. Apparently I hit the key just hard enough to bend the tabs around the clips and slide them into place without hitting it so hard they just snapped off. Truly amazing.

So, I'm ready for the coffee lid that isn't as tight as it should be. Or the tiny patch of ice that somehow survived the last couple of days. Or even the door that closes faster than I expect it to and catches the tips of my fingers. Because I've had my little moment of computer maintenance satori. And nothing can touch me now. :-)

Completely different, this one, about the financial disaster in Ireland.

But it has this wonderful simile (my emphasis):


I'm still not much further ahead with economics than I was after Professor Srinavashnan's Intro course in senior year, but I have a glimmering that this article goes some way to confirm what I'e always suspected: that if you can "create" wealth from nothing (which has always seemed dubious to my 17th century mind) that the reverse is also possible, and vast amounts of wealth can actually be consumed by the mysterious engines of commerce and leave nothing behind. Nothing, of course, but debt and misery.

This passage


Reminded me of the section in Charles Palliser's The Quincunx where the protagonist finds himself in a neighborhood of 19th century London filled with half-built houses, constructed, he discovers, as part of a huge confidence scheme. Just enough work was done to show investors in a development scheme, but once the capital for the whole project was accumulated, the projectors left with most of the dosh unspent. It seems as if the Irish housing boom was almost the same idea, just on a larger scale.