Procrastination

I've taken better pictures than these, but I'm quite proud of this pair nonetheless. Today was my day off, the time when I rest and recuperate and get myself all charged up for the week ahead; which is not a bad choice of words, for this week I have to deliver a charge and today was the only clear space in my timetable in which to write it.

Pistols have charges. So do courts and batteries and schoolteachers and the Light Brigade. So do bishops. We have to give a long and interminable speech at the beginning of synod, it's all part of the tradition, you know, and these valiant attacks on insomnia are known as charges. Because it has to be printed out I had to write a full script, something I haven't done since I talked on the radio in 1992, and the time before that must have been one of the sermons I preached before Bob Lowe got on my case in about 1982. For me, scripting a sermon is like scripting a conversation; as I labour over the keyboard there is a little voice deep in the inner recesses of my inner recesses which whispers, speaks, shouts then screams that this is not the way it should be done. But I did it. Or most of it. In the bits of the day when I should have been writing the rest I procrastinated.

Procrastination is revelatory in terms of the Myers Briggs Personality Inventory. J personalities procrastinate by not starting things. P personalities proacrastinate by not finishing, and today I found a hundred excuses not to finish.... well.... two, anyway. My newly built study now has books on the shelf, but they (of course) need sorting. And more importantly, the wireless  internet  took the scenic route on the journey from the kitchen wall, where the router lives, to the new space under my old desk where my computer skulks, and although it no doubt enjoyed itself, the signal was all tuckered out when it got to my place. Of the two issues, the internet was the one to which my procrastination genes bonded. I looked on ebay (ipad, another room) and found a brand of parabolic dish antenna which might solve the problem - a good hour wasted there - but they were expensive and the post is slow, and who knows if it would live up to its hype when it got here? Then it occured to me that any hemispherical metal object should act as a dish antenna, and so I held my usb wifi  thingummy in front of the the family colander and got an immediate jump in reception. So, it was off to The Warehouse to buy a shiny new colander ($9.95), and another happy couple of hours fitting it to a wall in the garage, drilling a hole between the study and the garage, running an extension lead from the computer and dangling the usb thingummy in various positions in front of the holey object.  It worked! Woohoo! Speed jumped from 11 Mbps to 108 Mbps. Signal strength went from 12% to 68%. I was chuffed and immediately used my new found connectedness to google and see if anyone else had come up with this idea. They had. Of course they had. In their thousands. There is a whole subculture of using kitchen utensils as wifi aerials. They're called woktennas or wokfi or wifry. Well I never! There was another happy half hour reading all about this, and looking at the ingenious pictures of aerials made from chip scoops, pringles tins, soup ladles and sieves. And I found another wonderful timewaster.

Somebody had invented a thing called the Windsurfer signal booster, which is really just another little parabolic aerial. Basically, you download a pattern, print it on card, cut the thing out, glue tinfoil on the back surface, and  fit it on the antennae of your wireless router. It took less than half an hour go to whoa to make two, put 'em on and boost the signal up to 80% and speed to 121.5 Mbps. Fantastic! Another boost in the figures, but of course, the increase was practicably unnoticeable. And then, oh happy day, it was time to cook dinner.

The charge is 3/4 written. Only a quarter to go, and I have the whole evening, unless I find some other atractive diversion, such as writing a blog post.