Author: JH

Apparently becoming lazy, I looked into the options of how to best synchronize email on the phone, the computer, and webmail. That way, I can make short trips to the supermarket, etc., without lugging my notebook along, and not feel cut off from the world during the process…

Apple’s “MobileMe” I was prepared to like, for its uncluttered design and smooth integration. But who wants to send mail with the domain xyz@me.com showing up in the header? Please, make it as simple as possible, but not simpler! For the ambitious, there seem to be complicated workarounds, which I find ironic. For now, this is for kids only.

Gmail has this domain problem too – how serious can you take ‘professional’ email sent from a gmail.com account? However, Google just came up with a great mobile web app for mail, here. So perhaps the thing to do is use Google Apps (the Standard Edition is free) and link it to your domain. Same as gmail, but without the dreaded gmail-address. Google provides good help files to set this up. Those, and the simple information from here and here (it only took me three days to find these…), and things will work as they should.

Which leaves only one question for me – is Google going to be the next AOL, or are they unstoppably heading for world domination? Since I care for those who (can) read my email, I hope they’ll be somewhere in between.

So I am walking down Broadway next to my female companion, and for independent reasons state the following observation: “You have become incredibly fit this past summer.” She stops walking. I turn around and ask what is the matter. She looks at me with her mouth open, then closes it, then asks: “Did you just say that I’ve become incredibly fat this past summer?”

Which reminded me of Robert Altman’s “The Long Goodbye,” when Marlow returns to his apartment and one of the beautiful and ever-naked yoga-enthusiasts living next door asks him “Have you seen my cat?” and he, absent-minded, responds “No, you don’t look fat.” If two lines ever summed up relations between a man and a woman, there they are.

Here’s how you can truly horrify your entire family and everybody who cares for you, and perhaps to some extent even your enemies: float the idea that the European Alps are not enough anymore, and that you intend to summit one of the 14 mountains taller than 8000 meters (in the spirit of NFN: alpine style, of course). So far, I’m amazed how well this works!

Seriously, for the past several weeks, I’ve been giving this some thought. So far, I haven’t done any real high altitude climbing; I certainly haven’t come anywhere near what is commonly referred to as the death zone. And I’m not even obsessed with summits. More than once, I just walked by a summit less than 15 minutes away, because it was too crowded, or because I saw no photograph to be made, and so forth.

Here’s why I’m interested. Most importantly, a project like that clarifies things. I’m pretty radical in eliminating almost everything I don’t like from my life –– and still, like everybody else, I’m caught up in a lot of irrelevant chickenshit. Going for one of the tallest peaks puts things in perspective. If you take serious anything that does not immediately serve the purpose of getting up the mountain and back down again, you are not going to make it.

In my case, for starters, I’d have to train very hard for about two years. I’d have to take thorough medicals, take a hard look at the weakest links, and come up with a plan what to do about them (I suspect the first thing that might cave in up there is my right knee –– weakened from an old skiing accident). But overall I have the genes for this kind of thing, and apart from that I’ve two things going for me: I’m quite cold-hearted in assessing risks on the one hand, and I enjoy following through with things right to the breaking point on the other.

So, which one of the 14 eight-thousanders would it be? The majority of them are out of reach for me –– technically too difficult to climb even after excessive training and under ideal circumstances. Ironically, the highest of them all, the Mount Everest, is one of the technically “less” difficult. So here’s the rub. I certainly don’t want to be yet another amateur, dragged and pushed up the Everest siege-style, in a set-up that seems colonialist and ecologically offensive to me. Still, overall, the Mount Everest is not inconceivable. A more modest alternative: the Cho Oyu is a lot less popular and more accessible at the same time, and not too tough if everything goes well.

At his point, I’d say the chances that I’ll actually follow through with this are remote. Much speaks against the Himalayas, most importantly perhaps the lack of Italian food. But if NFN at some point in the future temporarily turned into a blog on high altitude mountaineering, you’ve been forewarned!