ComicFest, Chrissy Claus, Shutdown Four, and I hate Y!

View 792 Friday, October 04, 2013

I am down at the beach house and about to go over to the Town and Country where ComicFest will take place. Precisely why I am involved is a long story: I’m don’t usually go to comic related conventions, and I don’t recall doing anything for comics that ever got published.

Periodically I try to work on an episode for Chrissie Claus, a not very widely circulated comic I happen to like a lot, but even with the help of Marv Wolfman on fundamentals of writing for comics I find it’s not easy for me. I sort of wish I had started a few years ago when I could work really intensely for a couple of days on something. In any event nothing has ever come of this other than that I continue to like Chrissie when she infrequently appears in a new edition.

However, a long time ago in the earlier days of my science fiction career, my son Alex, then at UC San Diego, fell in with a group of science fiction fans who were involved in starting ComicCon, and I was invited as one of the guests in an early rendition of ComicCon before it became so large.I had a great time, but about the only other guest I met who had read anything of mine was Adam West. I didn’t know Marv Wolfman then. Anyway, as a Result I got a “Gold Card” which entitled me to attend any future ComicCon, but it wasn’t really my cup of tea. Recently some of the fans involved in putting on the first ComicCon decided they wanted a comic convention limited in size. They got Larry Niven as GOH, and remembered that I’d been part of the early ComicCon, and somehow I ended up agreeing to come although I can’t remember doing it. I’m sure I’ll have a great time. I may even meet a fellow Chrissie Claus fan.

The result of all this is that I am on dialup network access because I forgot to go to the AT&T store to renew some time on my little AT&T gadget which I’ve used in the past when I was somewhere I didn’t have a wifi connection, but apparently I didn’t use it often enough and AT&T has forgotten me, so I’ll have to go to an AT&T store and I just didn’t. And probably won’t.

And FireFox in one of its upgrades has installed the Yahoo Tool Box which means that it has somehow slowed down Google something awful and made Y! the default search engine. I can go to some trouble to search with Google and that is much faster and smarter than Y! – and it’s getting late and I have to go to Town and Country and I didn’t bother last night to seek out how to kill y! and that Yahoo tool bar. I don’t use any of this junk at home because I haven’t used the ThinkPad recently. For some reason the Yahoo Tooled Bar didn’t take over my home establishment. I’ll know more when I get home. Meanwhile if I have to abandon FireFox to kill Y! and it’s tool bar I am prepared to do that. I could live with Bing if I had to but Y! isn’t working for me and I have no incentive to explore its secrets. I wish it would just go away but FireFox seems determined not to tell me. I know it’s in there somewhere.

I used to make a living finding out strange stuff about computers – “I do all these silly things so you don’t have to!” – but lately I just wish I had me of the old days to consult. I suppose I’ll have to go back into questing mode. Capitalism beats bureaucratic socialism, but sometimes tricks like installing its own tool bar surreptitiously can mask that.

I have a friend who has been told she cannot answer her email because it is a government account and she is on furlough. I am told that the courageous armed security forces who shot down the deranged woman who wanted to talk to the President were unpaid but on duty, which seems a very odd situation – one can volunteer to be on Pennsylvania Avenue with a gun while the government is shut down and you are not being paid, but answering your email is an enforceable offense under the weakened civil service regulation? I am sure I have something wrong here, and someone will inform me.

I do think that the principle that the House controls the purse strings is an important one. The President having spent a week saying he won’t talk with reckless anarchists is now saying he’ll negotiate with the House, but in such ambiguous terms as to lead one to believe his notion of negotiation was derived from MacArthur on the deck of the Missouri.

Meanwhile apparently the government can find people to reinstall the barricades that prevent private busses from turning around on the federally built unmanned turnoff to the privately maintained Mount Vernon estate; someone removed them but they were soon restored. Understand, this is merely a paved strip where busses can turn around, not a gated or attended area. It has no facilities. It’s just a paved turnoff from the highway. There are not any barricades or police line tapes anywhere near it, so it cost money to put them there while doing nothing would not have; yet the government took the trouble to barricade it, and has renewed the barricade when someone pushed it aside. This is your borrowed government money at work in a budget crisis and demonstrates the great wisdom of those in charge in this critical time.

How the different agencies react to the shutdown online

I am fascinated to see the different agencies response to being shutdown when it comes to the on-line presence. National Archives still has their website up, but you get a warning banner that information is not being updated. On the other hand, Library of Congress has shut down their website, with the exception of the services provided to Congress. Similarly, NOAA is shutdown, except for information critical for preserving life and property. The Department of Transportation warns that some of their websites may not be updated. But the State Department’s website seems to be business as usual.

Go figure…

Karl Fritz

I have a sensible analysis of some health care problems from a cardiologist friend who has thought about it, but I won’t be able to get to it this weekend. It’s worth thinking about.

2100:  it was an interesting day. I have some good pictures of Niven, had a good hour with Marv Wolfman who renewed my interest in trying to write a graphic story, had dinner with Niven and Wendy All to discuss illustrations of a book we sort of did twenty years ago and let it flag and we may renew, and altogether had a great day.  I’ll have lunch with Niven and  Barnes tomorrow.

It has been a great day.

I am off to the Convention (this is Saturday Morning) but this seemed relevant. I’ll put it into today’s post when I do that one tonight.

Shutdown and e-mail 

Dr. Pournelle,

Just a quick couple of comments on shutdown rules.

If the employees are essential, e.g., the various federal police you mentioned, they are required to go to work on the hope of eventually being paid and the threat of punishment for skipping work if they don’t show up. They are required to do their normal jobs, plus extra duties caused by the shutdown, except they are severely constrained in any action that may involve spending money.

Non-essential employees are sent home and are not allowed to access offices, use computers, access official e-mail accounts, or work at home on projects from their job. They must have a method of being contacted in case they are called back by being declared essential (either temporarily or permanently), or their agency or office within an agency is funded.

—

Bryan

"Son, crying into your drink is bad enough;

crying into a hot fudge sundae is disgusting." — Heinlein