En route now to Sumba and I am writing this in the Bali airport hotel, probably the last chance for Internet access in a few days. I have set up my new computer which is beautiful despite the annoyances of Windows 10 and Microsoft’s efforts to Malaysia one give ones personal information, set up an account, buy a subscription and ‘help out’ with its Cortana assistant.
The interface also has some new, unwanted features. I wonder why today, a couple of decades after computer use started becoming widespread, software types don’t have options for long term ‘power’ users to keep the functions and interface they are used to and that they use comfortably and effectively.
The Bali airport hotel is as far as I’ve ever got into Bali which, the immigration queue suggests, is full of the worst people in the world. We’ve stayed here thrice, once on the way to Flores, once to Timor Leste, and now Sumba. It’s a generic chain but that also means that it is comfortable and easy to get in and out of.
The GF’s mother is with us, in her own room of course. She is extraordinarily young looking for her age, which is 70, but the last couple of years, with her husband’s rapid decline and death, have taken a toll on her. She couldn’t bear to spend Christmas in London where she had spent it with him forum decades so we decided to go somewhere profoundly unfamiliar instead. I imagine it’ll still be hard, though.
Soon to breakfast. It is a bit odd always, travelling with his family members. They are white so it is always assumed that I am not with them.