Chaos Manor Home Page > View Home Page > Current Mail Page > Chaos Manor Reviews Home Page THE VIEW FROM CHAOS MANOR View 430 September 4 - 10, 2006 |
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This is a Day Book. Pages are in chronological, not blogological order. |
This week: | Monday
September 4, 2006 Tomorrow I will go camp out at the CT scan office until they find out whether there is anything structural in my sinus and neck problems. Today I will just have to get through the day. It's Labor Day and BYTE never had the column up on Monday, so I won't either. I will have something tomorrow. Today is column day. There's plenty of mail to distract you... Including some Sunday mail
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This week: | Tuesday,
September 5, 2006
My CT scan is Thursday. Once we know what is and is not wrong, we can fix it. My apologies to everyone. I know I owe some essays and reviews. I guess you just have to think of this as a few days vacation. The hardest part of all this is not getting much work done.
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This week: |
Wednesday,
September 6, 2006 Today will be devoured by locusts. I have a dinner with Niven this evening, and at O Dawn Hundred I need to be out to the radiology lab for a CT scan of my head. People keep telling me I ought to get my head examined. Now I will. I am typing with a sinus headache I can't believe. It may not be sinus. Moving my head around can move the headache around, from behind my eyes to the back of my head. If I hold my head just right I can go a minute or more without anything pounding. None of this is fun. Watched Perky Katie on CBS last night. I've always rather liked her for no reason introspection can discover. I've never met her. It's pretty clear that the 6 O'clock News (which is now on at 6:30 and lasts half an hour) no longer has the influence it used to have, and the format probably ought to change. Dan Rather ended even the pretense of new accuracy -- the faked memos were somehow still true -- and there is no one with the credibility that the old news people had. The News Hour is largely partisan entertainment now. Maybe she'll be able to restore some sanity to it all by not taking herself so seriously? We can only wait and see. The President caves in to the Courts. Whether handing over part of the Executive Power to the Courts is a good idea isn't entirely clear to me. The situation is more complex than many seem to think. We are not dealing with people in uniform taken from a battlefield. In most cases it is not entirely clear that the people in our system were taken in arms. Some claim to have been sold to the Americans for cold cash. Some may not have been bitter enemies of the US before they entered the system, but they sure are now. It does make sense that if we can't sort out which ones ought to be let go and which detained, that we treat those detained as POW's, not at lifers at hard labor. And none of this makes a lot of sense, does it? I expect I'll have my brain back in a week or so.
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This week: |
Thursday,
September 7, 2006 Off to get my head examined. With luck we'll find out just what is happening in there.
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This week: |
Friday,
September 8, 2006 Well my blood work was normal. Waiting for the CT scan results. I have found a position I can sit in without blinding headaches so I should be able to do the column for Monday. Radiologists next week but it begins to look like this is related to muscle and nerve, and not a big lump in my head. We will see.
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This week: | Saturday,
September 9, 2006 I sit in a most improbable position, head braced hard against the back of a high-back office chair (my expensive and comfortable chair having been temporarily exiled), arm straight out, eyes looking at a level. It's not comfortable, but it does stop the headaches. If my head is held just right it doesn't hurt to sit here. At least not a lot, and when it does it's fixable by adjusting my position. That tells me that my problems have to be structural, pinched nerves, unstretched muscles, blocked blood flow, something of the sort, which is probably adjustable. I can't think that a sinus infection would be relieved by sitting in a particular position. I still get flashes of a sinus headache alternating with the hideous migraine-like whammy in the back of my head, but if I hold my head just right -- which means bracing against the back of the chair in just the right position -- I can get some work done without doping myself to the point of being unable to think. And since it is structural, I expect there's a treatment. Chiropractors, perhaps. Orthopedists. Physical therapy. Surely there's a way out of this, and I intend to find it. For those who don't know: several months ago I developed what felt like sinus headaches. They combined with an old migraine that I used to get when I was younger but which I hadn't experienced for years. The two then alternated in periods of minutes to hours, sometimes in phase so I got both, and they got progressively worse until it became very difficult to work. I have since had XRAYS, dental Xrays, CT SCAN, blood tests, and other medical witchcraft, and no one can find anything so far. I haven't got the formal CT Scan results yet, but I have discovered that certain physical positions will make the headaches go away. Not just the migraine which has always been associated with a muscle pain; but the sinus headaches as well. I find it hard to believe that posture can affect sinus infection pain, so it begins to look as if it's all in my head. Not psychological, but some kind of muscle spasm, pinched nerve, or something of the sort. And as I said above, if it's structural it's treatable. Anyway, that's where I am, which is why the columns have been erratic the last couple of weeks. I have been late on columns. Today, I am preparing the International edition of the September column now. Half of that will go up Monday, all of it goes to Tokyo and Istanbul and other places Monday, and the other half goes up a week from Monday. My apologies for missing a week. I won't miss a month. Sitting in a ridiculous position to write is a small price to pay for being on time monthly for 27 years. The old paper BYTE column was 5,000 words. Sometimes they wanted longer, as for example when they sold a lot of advertisements and needed editorial content to hold the ad pages apart, so it might go up to 7,500 words. When we went over to On-Line I wrote the column monthly, and it generally came out to about 12,000 words, sometime creeping up to 14 or 15 thousand. The editors chopped it into segments and doled it out weekly. This went on for a while until someone made the mistake of chopping it into 4 segments when there were 5 Mondays in the month. I saw they had fired themselves dry and rushed in 2500 words to cover. This happened a couple of times. I still did the columns monthly but sometimes with a weekly supplement. It was interesting being able to comment on things that had just happened. IN the paper BYTE days, I would prepare the April column and get it in before 7 January; it would be on the stands in mid-March. That meant having to write things that would still be interesting when they came out. I have been doing the Chaos Manor Reviews columns weekly. For a while that was easy enough, and left plenty of time for fiction; after all, I am primarily a science fact and fiction writer who found a great gig as a computer columnist to bring in a steady income. Now that it doesn't insure a steady income (more on that in a moment) fiction has to come first; still, it was no problem at all, until the headaches hit me. Why they happened I don't know. Is this a message? Memento mori? Bones getting soft? But it sure did remind me; after all, we lost Charlie Sheffield just as we were about to do another Higher Education book (my turn to write most of it; he did most of the work on the first one), and Bob Forward, both to brain cancer, and both without much warning. That doesn't seem to be the case here, but it sure scared me. Anyway: I will continue to do the columns, and I will continue to try to post a new one ever Monday; but the guarantee will have to be about 8,000 words a month. More if I can do them. Plus the mail bag. I contend that Chaos Manor Mail (part of this web site) is one of, if not the, best mail columns on the web; and I contend that the mail bag at http://www.ChaosManorReviews is as good as any computer-related mail feature you will find on line or in print. I also do this page, which is arguably the first blog; certainly I was doing an on line public daybook long before anyone else I know of. I didn't -- and don't -- organize in "blog format" with the latest on top, because I find that hard to make sense of. I don't call this a blog -- I find the name ugly. This is a daybook, or journal, and while the subject is often political I don't think of it as a political journal. I have had my successes in politics, having successfully managed campaigns for Congress and Mayor of Los Angeles and having been an advisor to a President and a Speaker as well as to several Members of Congress. I still have a have a few political contacts, but I don't often use them. Politics has left me a bit behind: I am frightened of both parties and the continuing trend to make everything a federal case, leaving nothing to the states and to the people, and I don't find either party very sound on those matters. I do not believe in "big government conservatism" and I find the term self-contradictory. I don't believe in "compassionate conservatism" in any political sense. One ought to be compassionate, but to the extent that this should be a government activity it ought to be local; and for the most part it ought not be governmental at all. The major benefit of charity is to the giver. There may be necessities -- for a man to love his country, his country ought to be lovely, and it is not lovely when one lives in a land of beggars -- but in many cases the welfare bureaucracy is self perpetuating. And I see I am rambling: my point is that I try to be more philosophical than political. Political victories can affect principles, and have done so; but if one has a nation with strong enough principles, then it ought not matter much which party prevails, except that no party ought to govern for too long. If you wish to call this page political, it is hard to disagree, yet I do disagree in that it is not just political: I am concerned about principles which endure long after elections are forgotten. I suppose, though, that this page is a result of my having been offered a position teaching a senior seminar on technology and civilization to a technical university, only to have that withdrawn because of my work in "Star Wars." I don't apologize for being one of the founders of a strategy of Assured Survival -- that was the title of a chapter in Possony and Pournelle, The Strategy of Technology, 1970 -- nor will I ever; but that did cost me the professorship, so this page is my compensation, so to speak.
Strategy of Technology in pdf format: And enough rambling.
All of this is, of course, a pitch to get you to subscribe. I do thank all those who have subscribed, particularly those who showed great confidence by sending in new subscriptions or renewals in the past couple of weeks while things were erratic. The simplest way to subscribe is through paypal: That button makes it painless to send in a patron subscription. There are other methods, all described here. I do both the computer columns and this page in part because it's usually enjoyable, but they do have to make enough money to justify their continuance. And I am doing more fiction, and now that I know how to sit to write fiction I'll be doing more. It's sure an odd position to sit in, but it does seem to be working. And now I have to go work on the column. In part this ramble has come about because it is taking more than two hours to download the newest VISTA. More on Vista in the column.
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This week: | Sunday,
September 10, 2006 The position lasts only so long. Then it's back to pain killers, or lying flat on the floor again. We will get through this. I am doing the column. There's not a lot of energy left over.
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.
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