The Three Cobblers of Serendip Get Motivated

[unixronin]

Well, OK ... there's only one cobbler.  And I'm not in Serendip.

So what, do you ask, does Serendip have to do with this?  Well, there's a story titled "The Three Princes of Serendip" which turns out to be the origin of the English word serendipity, basically meaning a discovery of something you didn't intend or weren't looking for.

You see, a friend in Florida, Dave McGuire, just sent me a Sun 15" monitor.  And it came packed in a huge box well packed with bubble-wrap and assorted chunks of different kinds of foam.  (How the hell he got FedEx to haul a box that big and heavy from Florida to North Carolina for $10 is a mystery to me.)  Anyway, among this assortment were a couple of sheets of black rigid foam, one 1" and two 1/2" sheets, which turned out to be absolutely perfect for (respectively) making a wedge block to fill the gap under my heel in the post-surgical boot, and making an extra insert to put in my right shoe to pack it up to the same height as the boot-plus-wedge.

The upshot of all this is, I can now walk with the post-surgical boot, too, with the aid of my cane.  So we don't need to haul my crutches around any more -- in fact, I'm about to go put them in the back room for storage again right this minute.

Walking is good.

Comments

[micheinnz.livejournal.com]

Woohoo! Go you!

And in the trivia corner... Serendip (or Serendib) is the Arabic name for Sri Lanka.

Indeed it is.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

And the reason I knew that is because Arthur C. Clarke wrote a book titled The View from Serendip, in the beginning of which he explained about the name, and about the story of the Three Princes of Serendip who were always finding things they hadn't been looking for, and the introduction of the word serendipity into the English language from that story.

So how did you know? Read the same book, or otherwise? :-)

Re: Indeed it is.

[micheinnz.livejournal.com]

I had a Sri Lankan supervisor for a while, and she called her computer Serendib in memory of her homeland.