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Friday,
January 1, 1999 Countdown to Y2K and the end of the world begins. Man is
now so dependent on computers that there is no way to shut them down. If there were a war
that destroyed them it would kill the lot of us. Since the Y2K problem cannot be fixed, we
are all doomed, and this is the last year of civilization. You could be intelligent about
it and don white robes and sit on rooftops waiting for the Rapture of the Saints, but
better perhaps is to buy lots of guns and ammunition and beging shooting your neighbors
next New Years Eve. Be the first on your block to wipe out an entire neighbor family! Or
perhaps go hunting hoarders, to loot what they have hidden away. After all, there will be
no law courts and no police, no justice, and perhaps even God and all His saints will go
to sleep. And only one year to go.
From some of the mail I received in response to my Intellectual Capital columns on Y2K
(www.intellectualcapital.com, find my
name in the left index list and click on that) there are people who actually believe all
that. Or pretend to. Of course we depicted people like that in Lucifer's Hammer,
and if you want a story about where millenialism can take you (during a real disaster) try
it. (Or try it for any other reason.)
The Credit Card Subscription seems to be working: lots of new subscribers. Thanks. Now
go get some friends to subscribe...
You can find a demo of Myth II, the fantasy massacre game, at
http://www.bungie.com/mythii/demo.html
and if you like that kind of game you will love this. I am not myself a Myth addict,
but that's largely because I am at an age where clickfests aren't that much fun. I can
still think better than average, but I'm also a bit slower. "Methodical" is the
charitable way to put it. Myth isn't whack-a-mole, but you do need fast reflexes. For
myself, I have never understood the notion of "real time" games. Real time
battles often take many hours, even days, and while there can be time pressures --
Napoleon famously told a subordinate "Ask for for anything but time!" -- battles
are not often decided by split second decisions. Now the state of Artificial Intelligence
is poor enough that the game player must be his own company commanders as well as colonel
and general and commander in chief, else the battles are dull; but why that calls for
speeding up time to a ridiculous point I don't know. War Hammer games are the worst that
way: they are intrinsically interesting, and I would rather like the tactical puzzles they
present, except that the computer versions make what would happen in an afternoon on a
miniatures table take place in five minutes or less on the computer. To what end I am not
sure. The Myth people flat out told me that if they slowed their game down enough to
let people act without panic time pressure, it probably wouldn't be any fun, which tells
me that either I or they don't understand what's fun about games. Oh, well.
I hope to do some site reorganization, build the new subscriber list, get the Niven
party pictures off to subscribers, and generally get some housekeeping done today. Happy
New Year. Alas, it didn't rain in Los Angeles, which means that after the Rose
Parade pictures are shown nationwide about 10,000 more people fed up with winter will move
here. Sigh.
I HATE OUTLOOK. A bad mood to be in just as I am doing orchids and onions. A hideous
rotten onion to the people who wrote the OUTLOOK documentation. I have spent ten minutes
trying to figure out how to do a new REPLY message for a new RULE. The Rules Wizard wants
that message already created and gives you no opportunity to create one. The egregious
Office Assistant won't tell you that's what you want to do. The Tools menu offers
you a lot of options none explained. I know I managed to DO this once, but my memory
seems to be going, and in any event you ought not have to spend half an hour looking
through help files, the Que USING OFFICE 98 book, and black magic to find out how to
"create a reply template" or "create rule reply" or "create oft
file". The files are called .oft and they are apparently not simple text files.
Now you can make a copy of one of the .oft files and then OPEN it, after which you can
edit the text; then try to save it as the file name you opened it under. The directories
are wrong, it thinks it is a doc file, and it will take while but eventually you can get
to Program Files/Microsoft Office/Templates and save the stupid thing under the name you
opened it under as a .oft file at which point the imbecile Office Assistant will pop up
and ask if you want to save this over the old file name, then when you try to close this
thing it will again ask if you want to save it. This has got to have been designed either
by someone who never USED it, or by a distinguished person who ought not be allowed to
work on anything else. Including the French fry machine at the local burger joint. And
documented by an illiterate.
More: I get mail from News Dispatcher and Anchor Desk and other places. I would like
this stupid Outlook to sort it for me. It won't do it, because it will only see mail from
someone in a CONTACT list. I can't type in the return address I want it to choose for
sorting. This has to have been designed by someone who never tried to USE it. Why do they
DO this? If I know specific words in the sender's address perhaps I can put those in.
Meanwhile. I don't seem to be getting replies using the new .oft template I created, and I
can't find any instructions in the Outlook documents. This is silly.
OK, I will bite: does anyone know how to make
Outlook 98 reliably do automatic replies to messages? What must you do, and where can I
read about it, or look it up in help under what topic? I had it at one time or thought I
did, but clearly it isn't working now. Help?
Alas I seem to have tried what is suggested here. Apparently Outlook is inconsistent.
Perhaps you have to restart to make it work properly? Sigh.
Went to see YOU HAVE MAIL, which I will review shortly. Pretty picture, lots of
romance. I seem to recall seeing it in about 1945 as a black and white or a stage play? It
was real mail then, with letters, but there were two postal deliveries a day for 3 cents,
too.
I will make up the pictures page from Niven's party shortly. And send to the subscriber
list. Just give me a few more hours. Alas. there is only me to do all this... Poor
me. But it's a great life if you don't weaken.
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