De Se

Doramas

I've been watching doramas – Japanese dramas. Hana Kimi, and now Hero. Good stuff.

Crunchyroll is for you if you want a quick dorama fix.

A new calculator

I just bought an HP-35S, Hewlett-Packard's top-of-the-line scientific calculator. It was released last year, on the 35th anniversary of the HP-35, which was the first handheld calculator evar.

I have some essays to write so I have to make this fast, but here are some thoughts about it.

1. It feels great. It's not often that pressing the keys on a handheld device has felt so good. Click, click, click.
2. It's complicated. In a good way. It has a load of functions, it's programmable, and it defaults to RPN.
3. Build quality is great. It comes with a solid faux leather case, and you can operate the calculator without removing it from the case. The keyboard is, I have read, held down with 25 screws. Solid.
4. Even the bad stuff is good? I don't mean to get all continental-`philosophical' about this, but little things like sin(π) = -2.06761537357E-13 (as opposed to zero) just make me smile.

I'd actually wanted an HP calculator since I was in JC. I never got one because my Casio(s) worked all the way through uni, although my last one got wet one time too many. I think, though, that I'll probably be sticking with HP for a long time.

Liking the harder stuff

Sometimes I complain bitterly about being swamped by students asking questions.

But when I do it's never a personal thing. It's always an abstract complaint, one grounded in tiredness and a sense of futility. Once I'm out there in class actually fielding the questions, I love it. I love being in the middle of the action, somehow, until it's over. And then I resent it a little and dread the next time it happens.

It's not just in work; it's in tennis as well. I love tennis, of course. But often I look forward to having a break. It rains? I'm a little happy inside. I get to sleep in—of course I'm happy! But then when I start to play, I am really, truly content. Teaching and tennis are two things I enjoy. Strangely enough, I sometimes think I enjoy lazing about or sleeping in even more. But when my head is clear I know which one I find much more memorable—the hard, challenging, gritty stuff.

Funny airline complaint

Off-court training

I’ve been trying to do some off-court training, and it’s not been easy. It’s not the training that’s tough, it’s the figuring out what to do that has me stumped. So far swimming has been the most promising activity, weight training has been a heavy burden, and I’ve yet to see about Pilates.

Swimming’s easy. If the weather’s blazingly hot, it’s easily my favourite form of off-court training, because the water becomes that much more enticing. I just slip on my trunks, get in the water, and the time just flies—for the first twenty or thirty laps, anyway; then it gets boring. The only problem is that I can’t listen to music while I’m in the water, so it can get a bit repetitive.

Weight training is difficult, because different gyms have different equipment, and I’m not sure how much to do, or what should be on the menu. There is one machine at the university that I quite like. It provides resistance to torso rotation, which can help to build core strength. Perhaps I should work on strengthening my rotator cuff, too. But in a small gym, I find it hard to fill the time. I’d consider a membership at Fitness First or a similar health club if it could provide a good training programme and the machines to go with it. But money’s not exactly on tap at the moment, so there’s not much I can do.

When the new term starts, I will sign up for a Pilates class, and that should provide some worthwhile exercises. Or at least I hope it will. I’ve read that yoga is good for tennis players, and that Pilates is similar to yoga, so I inferred that Pilates is also good for tennis players. It almost makes me look forward to the start of term.