View 681 Friday July 1, 2011
I have been fooling about with Mail, and I managed to get a bunch of it up, but I am not very happy with the organization of it, and it’s a bit tedious. I will work on an essay later. Just for the moment Eric has managed to set up Fallen Angels, with a beautiful copy of the original cover by Steve Hickman. It will shortly be available for Kindle with a new retrospective from Niven, Pournelle, and Flynn. I got interested in that and it is taking up some of my time.
The AT&T device is working but it’s expensive; Henry tells me of a Verizon alternative, and that’s worth experimenting with; I’ll have to look into it. I am managing, and the AT&T device isn’t burning up the megabytes as fast as it did yesterday: we’ve installed some spam filtering at Blue Host. This is still all very much in the construction stage. I still don’t know how to include any of my gifs and animations in the new WordPress system, but that will come. For those wondering why I have not enabled comments: this isn’t that kind of place. I have never allowed open comments. We did have open commenting back in GE Genie days, but Genie hired moderators to keep the spam and poison pens and silliness out; I would never have time for that. If you want to comment on a View or a Mail, send me an email; I try to read all the email, and generally I manage to do that. Then I select from that and post with comments. That’s slower, and I probably miss some good stuff that way, but I also avoid a lot of other stuff. Anyway, that’s how this place works.
I have not decided on organization. One suggestion, which I like, is two web sites, one View and the other Mail, as we had in the older FrontPage system; but in fact we sort of have that with the Mail and View categories. You find those up at the top. They do work.
The big problem is bookmarks. When I put WORD in the “Blog” edit/publish mode, it disables the ability to insert bookmarks. To get a bookmark into something I have to compose it in a Word in the normal mode. Here goes a test:
This is an attempt to put in a bookmark. I am creating it in a blank WORD document.
This is bookmark2, also created in a blank document.
The real test will be whether we can reference a bookmark. This refers to the sentence above. Apologies for all this experimentation, but I need to see what it does, and how you will see it.
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This seems to have worked. It’s important because I have always used links, sometimes to insert notes, or refer to a previous essay, and that sort of thing. But I see that I can insert a sentence and a bookmark by composing them in a blank document, then copy and paste; that ought to work for Mail, which is good. Every day and in every way we are getting better and better…
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I am now going to work on some fiction. Rick Hellewell keeps taking suggestions on what to do about this place and implementing them, so it all changes like dream: we will get back to as near to the old ways as possible.
Meanwhile the Congressional Budget Office now estimates that by 2030 the United States will be spending 10% of GDP – that’s GDP, the value of all goods and services, not just taxes and budgets – on debt service. Since that’s impossible, what will happen? When something can’t go on forever it will stop. At some point we can’t continue to spend whatever we do with taxes. Canada was in that fix a few years ago, and bit the bullet. They really cut back on spending. Now the Canadian Dollar is worth more than the US Dollar, to the surprise of everyone who grew up when I did.
If something can’t go on forever, it will stop. Federal spending at these rates can’t go on forever. Or even for twenty years.
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