There are just some things in this world that don't seem to go along together, for reasons pressing or trivial. Oil and water, chalk and cheese or -as the Japanese say- the moon and snappers. Never really questioned this paradigm much, just considering it something natural in the cosmic scheme of things.
In this record-breaking cold a seemingly ill-matched pair awaited me at work when I came in, late as usual. In the hour that followed, Azerbaijan and the PowerBook G4 dominated the conversation I had almost in equal doses. It took an old friend and colleague in the field of human rights, Rea, to bring these two disparate elements into a whole. Appearing on chat to say hello from Hanoi, where she was still residing after moving sometime last year from a two-year stay in Kuala Lumpur, Rea said she might move soon to another country, China most likely.
More important, she told me that she might pass by Moscow on the way to or back from a women's conference in Baku, Azerbaijan in April. Living by the same principles or ethics as me, Rea is a fun person to be with, a lover of the eclectic and true, multicultural if not quite multilingual. She is a kind of person one can just introduce to other friends and not feel in the least bit concerned about how she would treat or herself be treated by them.
I don't exactly remember now the progression of the chat but we got to talking about her favourite notebook computer, the Apple PowerBook G4. It just so happens that I possess the exact same machine as she does, down to the processor speed and screen size: 867MHz and 12 inches. And so, interspersing our chat with the next opportunity for a meeting and how to enhance our online lives (through veefy -Wifi- of course), we chatted for the better part of an hour about our experiences (or lack thereof) in both spheres. It was actually very helpful for me, allowing me to value my property a bit more and consider enhancing finally the harddisk capacity and, more important, finally buy for myself the AirPort Card that is important for wireless communication.
By this time, as you can gather, all talk about Azerbaijan and Baku had ceased, being replaced almost in toto by geek talk about installing an AirPort Card and the Intel Core Duo in the new iMacs. There were of course other off-topic things we talked about, such as asking her to take care of my Finnish friends, Timo and Hanna-Kaisa, when they visit Hanoi at the end of February.
Apples and oranges, indeed.
In this record-breaking cold a seemingly ill-matched pair awaited me at work when I came in, late as usual. In the hour that followed, Azerbaijan and the PowerBook G4 dominated the conversation I had almost in equal doses. It took an old friend and colleague in the field of human rights, Rea, to bring these two disparate elements into a whole. Appearing on chat to say hello from Hanoi, where she was still residing after moving sometime last year from a two-year stay in Kuala Lumpur, Rea said she might move soon to another country, China most likely.
More important, she told me that she might pass by Moscow on the way to or back from a women's conference in Baku, Azerbaijan in April. Living by the same principles or ethics as me, Rea is a fun person to be with, a lover of the eclectic and true, multicultural if not quite multilingual. She is a kind of person one can just introduce to other friends and not feel in the least bit concerned about how she would treat or herself be treated by them.
I don't exactly remember now the progression of the chat but we got to talking about her favourite notebook computer, the Apple PowerBook G4. It just so happens that I possess the exact same machine as she does, down to the processor speed and screen size: 867MHz and 12 inches. And so, interspersing our chat with the next opportunity for a meeting and how to enhance our online lives (through veefy -Wifi- of course), we chatted for the better part of an hour about our experiences (or lack thereof) in both spheres. It was actually very helpful for me, allowing me to value my property a bit more and consider enhancing finally the harddisk capacity and, more important, finally buy for myself the AirPort Card that is important for wireless communication.
By this time, as you can gather, all talk about Azerbaijan and Baku had ceased, being replaced almost in toto by geek talk about installing an AirPort Card and the Intel Core Duo in the new iMacs. There were of course other off-topic things we talked about, such as asking her to take care of my Finnish friends, Timo and Hanna-Kaisa, when they visit Hanoi at the end of February.
Apples and oranges, indeed.
