Wife had asked me to saw the main trunks of the olive tree that borders the school playground, because it is growing too tall and lanky; it's actually the traits of that particular variant (one called locally K-18). So I succeeded in sawing off one of the two, when school was out. There were lots of black olives on the tree, so I gathered these and intended to prepare them. However, on closer inspection I found that most of them had the telltale punctures of the olive fly - and at the bottom of the bowl where I stored them I found many live larvae. So I dumped them all in the compost bin and got on with my day.
I was intrigued by websites that offer the service of creating fonts from one's handwriting. You download a template, enter the characters, scan and upload to the site. It wasn't too difficult, but great effort must be made on getting all the letters to be the same size and to start exactly at the same height, otherwise the results are inadequate. In short: needs a lot more work.
Another computer issue I had to work with was a slow internet connection from wife's computer. After doing various things like checking available memory, deleting browser cache, restarting, doing upgrades, etc. I concluded it was probably a "modem" (in popular usage) issue and restarted the fiber connection box. That worked. I think the DNS coordinates , or whatever, go bad and need to be recalibrated occasionally.
I finished the novel I was reading, "The Coin", by Yasmin Zaher, a Palestinian journalist/poet living in New York. I enjoyed it - it sort of deserves to be read because it strikes its own distinctive note. Slavoj Zizek is one of those that heap lavish praise on it at the blurbs that publishers tend to include these days at the beginning. Zizek: "Those who dismiss Palestinians as the violent Other of the Western civilization will discover that a Palestinian can see the truth of our messy world better than we ourselves. The Coin is not a wonderful beginning that promises masterpieces to come - it already is a masterpiece."
Curiously Zizek also has a blurb at the beginning of the new book I had ready for as soon as I put down The Coin. Started to read Techno Feudalism by Yanis Varafoukis.
