Recovering if just barely. At least I can sit at my desk. Thanks to Roberta
I was stuffed with hot soup and kept in bed to nurse a high temperature,
entirely stuffed up head, racking cough, and the feeling that this time I
wasn't going to get through this. But of course I did. It's astonishing what
a temperature and the general miseries will do to your ability to think
rationally. At least it astonished me.
The Space Access
Conference went well, lots of reports. If you want to know what's going on
in private space this is the conference to be at.
My lecture
was marked by the first Power Point presentation I ever did. I'll have more
to say in the column but it sure was easy to do, and I could add slides on
Lisabetta the Tablet PC even as I listened to other people.
Assuming the recovery continues I ought to be sane enough to
start the column tomorrow. Alas
It's Column Time
It's column time, but I have no
brain. So I have been trying to make do with Everquest II as a way to pass
the time. It keeps crashing.
Or is the whole Internet dying?
Man.
Something is terribly wrong. And of course there are minor problems here, my
brain isn't working and I can't figure anything out.
More tests -- it looks like Adelphia is dead, and it is time to
connect to the satellite. Sigh
To make
it even better, Earthlink has shut down webmail after first telling me that
my mail box is full. Why does all this happen at once?
Tried
going back to Adelphia. It works intermittently. And only intermittently.
Back to the satellite.
Will I be doing dialup next?
Adelphia OF COURSE makes it nearly impossible to report the problem or find
out if they are aware of problems. You must telephone. Of course they have
ways of making you think you can send them email but in fact they don't. Why
are they so deceptive?
I will have to telephone.
I suppose I will try that next.
(And did try it, and it
turned out to be a pleasant and productive experience: see below. I have to
say that Adelphia tech support was prompt, polite, and professional, and my
misgivings were based on obsolete data.)
Still recovering. Thank heaven for my nose pump. I'd never have been
able to get to sleep without it, and this morning, well, the results
were disgusting but greatly comforting.
Adelphia is once more the execrable Adelphia. If their web site has any
means for reporting problems I cannot find it; and I am not up to being on
hold for the mandatory ten minute wait that is now policy with almost all
help desks. Let them age; many will go away that way...
If there is anyone from or with Adelphia, there is a node out not far
from me, possibly local in Studio City since it is about the first hop:
Reply from 207.44.178.102: bytes=32 time=54ms TTL=51
Reply from 207.44.178.102: bytes=32 time=85ms TTL=51
Ping statistics for 207.44.178.102:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 53ms, Maximum = 101ms, Average = 73ms
C:\Documents and Settings\jerryp>tracert www.jerrypournelle.com
Tracing route to jerrypournelle.com [207.44.178.102]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
The system works intermittently and unreliably and the block is at that
24.48.220.217 node. It would be nice to tell the egregious Adelphia this
without having to spend time on hold, but they provide no way to do it
that I know of. Probably used the money for other purposes.
========
And of course there are minor problems everywhere and the column to do.
Sometimes I feel a bit whelmed. Utterly whelmed was I, thrown under horse
and all...
Sorry. I am sure I will be myself again. And there is mail. And the
satellite system is working surprisingly well.
========
Adelphia still not working. And I am still not up to spending the hold
time.
============
I was never that big a fan of "Roots", but banning the series from
schools seems odd:
There was a time when I was convinced that the entire Internet was a
conspiracy to see how many grown people you could get to stare at a computer
screen on which absolutely nothing was happening. Adelphia is trying to work
that magic with me again.
=========
I owe Adelphia an apology. When I finally did telephone, I got a nice
young man within a minute, explained the problem and the tests, and was
instantly transferred to a competent young lady who tried all the tests she
could do, and has now handed it up to a maintenance crew. We've established
the problem isn't here. They're now aware of it. I am a bit astonished that
there are not many more complaints, but perhaps there aren't that many
Adelphia Cable Modem users on this blade.
They're looking into it, and I have to say the reporting experience was
painless.
Clearly the problem is a unit somewhere in the chain is dropping packets
and probably it's very close to me.
We knew it all along, right? Which is no to say he made no contributions
to using other people's money to fund the early development of the Internet,
and we do have a long history of naming stuff built with taxes after the
politician who caused the money to be spent. Incidentally, I question Gore's
invention of the term "Information Highway", but memories aren't always
reliable. Perhaps so. On the other hand, I was present at a AAAS meeting at
which Gore, full of self-importance and surrounded by bodyguards who
searched the press -- they had no idea what a digital camera was and were
certain that a camera with no film couldn't really be a camera -- I was
present as then VP Gore made claims about his contributions that were
certainly a revelation to me and to the MIT people I was sitting with.
I am not sure if this was the AAAS meeting at which I chaired what was at
that time the session that broke the record for public attendance at a
non-plenary event. Of course having Niven, Minsky, Benford, McCarthy,
Forward, and Sagan as panelists had more to do with the draw than I did, but
I was the session chairman. Carl Sagan braved a fierce snowstorm to get down
from Ithaca to attend.)
In any event, he did see the value of funding what became the backbone,
so give him his due.
=
I am pleased to say that Adelphia has fixed the problem, whatever it was
(probably an intermittently failing blade) and my communications are back to
their crispy normal state. I can go turn off the satellite computer after I
make sure all its updates are installed.
I will also have to say that even in my debilitated state -- and I think
of few people grumpier than a debilitated curmudgeon -- the experience of
reporting the problem to Adelphia was not unpleasant, and their technicians
were polite, even cheerful, and thoroughly professional. The second-tier
young lady I was referred to admitted to reading User Friendly ever day, and
laughed when I asked if her name was Miranda.
======
The Wall Street Journal has a pair of articles about the "Christian
Right" on the editorial page today. The lead editorial is pretty good but
misses an important point. Christopher Hitchens' rebuttal is typical and
completely misses the point, but then he often does.
What no one seems to understand is that if you abolish local control of
important matters, and do it by judicial fiat, you have imposed a tyranny,
and you will call forth anti-tyrannical measures, some of them extreme.
There are probably a few nut cases among the Christian right who want to
impose their views across county and state lines; but most of those have
arisen in response to judicial destruction of their local control of their
communities, local schools, and public squares. Now I make no doubt there
are those who want to nationalize their social policies, but their influence
was waning until the judicial imposition of fresh new Constitutional rights.
But that's another story for another time.
=============
Went out to Kaiser this morning to have starving blood drawn -- farewell
hungry little corpuscles. If I am up to that I am probably up to anything
but I do seem to be thinking slow. Coming back I heard Rush Limbaugh for the
first time in months.. Apparently Laura Bush made some jokes about her
husband's Texas Ranch experience -- "We didn't know much about ranching when
we bought the place, ranching is not a big program at Andover and Yale --
but he's learning. Much better now than the first year when he dried to milk
the horse. The worst part was it was a male horse." And
apparently there are people who are offended by a joke that I first heard in
about 1937.
Now think about that in light of the speculation about the Christian
Right.
=============
And this just in:
Last night's O'Reilly Factor had a clip about
high-school girls wearing lapel buttons saying: I LOVE MY VAGINA. The school
officials asked them to take off the buttons. There was a controversy about
this. A controversy.
John
Now if you want that sort of thing in your local school, fine; but surely
the people of Resume Speed, Missouri, have some rights to control this sort
of thing in their schools?
Recovered enough to take our mile or more hike
this morning. A bit weakened but in pretty good shape. Now to get some words
written.
I probably ought to have some thoughts on the British elections, but in
fact none of it was a surprise. When there are a lot of undecided voters the
incumbent generally wins.
Review in today's paper of a new book about the Kent State affair. Some
of you may remember that. After all these years and all the investigation
there seems little new to think about.
A group of vandals used the Viet Nam War as an excuse to torch local
businesses, most small businesses locally owned by people who had no more
control over the national war policies than anyone else. Other students
chose to emulate the vandals in confrontational language and attitude but
not in violence. Some chose to associate with those emulating the vandals.
Into that mix stir some young National Guardsmen drawn from the population:
but of course these armed young men were those who chose to answer the call.
Now they were subjected to trash talk by those who didn't burn buildings,
but didn't really mind being taken for those who had, and who used
confrontational language intended to humiliate the young armed men they
faced.
Stir this mixture well. The results are predictable.
One of Niven's laws is "Do not throw excrement at an armed man." Another
is "Do not stand next to someone who is throwing excrement at an armed man."
When the Vikings came to town I am sure there were some who were not real
berserkers and who actually didn't participate in the arson, rapine, and
murder. There may have been some who disapproved, and who didn't even take
part in pillage, but were there to give moral support to the real Vikings
because, let us say, they disapproved of the the religion of the White
Christ and wanted to show their support for the Old Gods. Imagine some of
those taken alive by the local sheriff, and imagine their defense against
being hanged for the sins of their Viking colleagues.
My advice: if you are part of a "peaceful protest" that brings out armed
soldiers who look scared, run like hell. Find another means to express your
disapproval of the state and its policies.
================
Now back to work.
=======================
In the old DOS and FAT days, we had tools that would entirely delete a
bad folder. I have one such on an NTFS disk and I either never knew or do
not remember how to simple NUKE that thing, get rid of it, make it go away
forever. Does anyone know? The folder thinks it has files in it, but they
don't exist. I don't want to delete file by file I want the entire foldr
never to have existed.
The column is done and sent off to BYTE in
various countries.
Tuesday morning we are off for a ten day trip that may or may not include
Internet access; I won't know until I get there.
I will be around tomorrow, but mostly getting ready for the trip, so I
won't have a lot of time. This is a bit more than a vacation, and I'll have
some good stuff for all of you when I get back. Meanwhile it is likely to be
fairly thin pickings at this site for two weeks.
This is a day book. It's not all that well edited. I try to keep this up
daily, but sometimes I can't. I'll keep trying. See also the monthly COMPUTING AT CHAOS MANOR column,
8,000 -
12,000 words, depending. (Older
columns here.) For more on what this page is about, please go to the VIEW PAGE.
If you have never read the explanatory material on that page, please do so.
If you got here through a link that didn't take you to the front
page of this site, click here for a better
explanation of what we're trying to do here.
This site is run on the "public radio" model; see below.
If
you have no idea what you are doing here, see the What is this
place?,
which tries to make order of chaos.
Boiler Plate:
If you want to PAY FOR THIS,
the site is run like public radio: you don't have to pay, but if no one
does, it will go away. On how to pay, I keep the latest HERE. MY
THANKS to all of you who have sent money. Some of you went to a lot of
trouble to send money from overseas. Thank you! There are also some new payment methods. I am preparing a special (electronic)
mailing to all those who paid: there will be a couple of these. I am also
toying with the notion of a subscriber section of the page. LET ME KNOW your thoughts.
