Chaos Manor View, Tuesday, May 24, 2016
Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for Western Civilization as it commits suicide.
Under Capitalism, the rich become powerful. Under Socialism, the powerful become rich.
Under Socialism, government employees become powerful.
We’re reorganizing here. I’m going to spend at least two hours, with luck more, in the Monk’s Cell writing fiction. I’ve got my downstairs life organized well. Now for the fiction phase. This isn’t moving back into the upstairs offices with the Great Hall; that is still in the future. The problem with that part of the house is that while I have no trouble getting up there, getting down is tricky because of the twists in the stairway.
The Monk’s Cell is the large upstairs bedroom in the old part of the house. It does not connect with the Great Hall suite at all. It was Alex’s old room, inherited by the oldest son left in the house as the boys left, then became a sort of guest room. It has no telephone, and no books. It has a good console, and I set one of the first flat screen monitors up there – we still used large bottles, in those days – and a good keyboard, and brought to current laptop up there to work undisturbed by [phones and visitors. Got a lot of books done that way.
Came the stroke I couldn’t get up and down those stairs, so it got well cleaned out, and the ancient ThinkPad laptop slowly deteriorated. I never did have a high speed Internet cable going up there, and wi-fi was indifferent to slow, but that was fine – no distractions, but enough connectivity to save backups to other machines and to get to the Internet for the occasional research without any temptations. I don’t keep mail on that machine either. Or SFWA or any other Iternet distractions.
So now I need to replace the old ThinkPad, which worked quite well, and my first thought is to just get another one.
This morning I thought about it and sent this to my advisors:
The ThinkPad upstairs in Alex’s old room – the “Monk’s Cell” — is ancient and slow, and time for replacement. I will as before have a large screen and a Logitech K360 wireless keyboard for my writing, and it will mostly be upstairs all its life. I prefer a laptop up there because I can actually carry it downstairs if I have to, while getting a tower or desktop down would be a real pain.
But since I’ll be doing much of my fiction on it, the important thing is ease of use, and good wireless. Since I have a rather powerful wireless network set up by Alex and Eric, a good built in and non-distracting laptop wireless should be fine; the ThinkPad was except that sometimes the ThinkPad and the Windows wireless software tended to get into conflict, and that wasted creative time. Mostly what I want is fire and forget – when I go up there I don’t want to think about anything but what I’m working on. The wireless is for research.
I’m having a problem getting the new Word whatever number that comes with Office 365 to accept my older custom dictionaries; it insists that it can only install dictionaries in some weird format whose name I cannot remember, but it doesn’t like mameluke.dic and the procedures Microsoft help gives me are as usual incomprehensible. That’s a secondary problem, but if anyone knows how to transform Word 2012 dictionaries or import and old dictionary into the new default, it would help. I used to use a custom dictionary for each major work because there is no point in having the main dictionary know that Agzaral is a word, and things were slow and memory was expensive and you get the idea. Habits are hard to break and I had a habit of custom dictionaries, which Microsoft thinks is weird now. At worst I’ll just manually put all the correct words in the main dictionary now since search is nearly instantaneous and dictionary memory is trivial. Memory used to cost money.
Anyway, should I just get a new ThinkPad or is there a better top end brand? It will not be for games, should be reliable and trouble free, be able to connect to external devices such as the LASFS projector and con projectors in case I make presentations, and have good wireless. Much of the time it will simply sit upstairs with the lid closed waiting for me to come up for a couple of hours a day
For fiction. I want it pretty soon, and given the importance reliability and lack of distracting quirks is FAR more important than cost.
I realize the irony of this: that’s the sort of question everyone asked ME in the Byte era, and I was probably the best person to ask it of. Alas, those days are gone, but I still get good advice from my hard working advisors, but I don’t get to all the shows and have hands on ex[perience with all the new equipment any more.
One suggestion was
which looks pretty good, only I think I would like the 15 “ one. I see that Amazon (and surely many other vendors) offers a docking station for it. And I hjave at least one spare monitor I can put up there: the one at present is from the early 90’s, quite good at the time but a bit small and far too low resolution now. Of course the best doesn’t cost much now. Things have got marvelously inexpensive lately.
There will be more later today, but that’s the project for the week as I move into high gear to get my writing projects done. My computer project is to set up a good writing station for stroke victims who have to do two finger typing and stare at the keyboard. I’ve found a few tricks for adjusting Word to my needs but if a Word expert is reading this. I’d sure like a lesson on importing old dictionaries. It would save me a bit of time. I also think the Word 2010 procedure for adding to the autocorrect table was much better than the one at present; it used to be that right-clicking a red-wavy-underlined word produced a menu of choices, one of which was to add that word and its correction to autocorrect. You need to be careful when the typo could have been any of several words, but if you got a unique suggestion and that was what you meant, it was simple to add it to autocorrect so that you would never see that typo again. For instance, in the last sentence I missed a space so that I typed “typoagain”. The spelling program offered to correct it to typo again, which I let it do; but with Word 2010 I could have, with one click, added that to autocorrect. I could give many other examples.
Alex will be over shortly and we’ll go to dinner. I’ll post this now, more later.
Chaos Manor View, Tuesday, May 24, 2016
Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for Western Civilization as it commits suicide.
Under Capitalism, the rich become powerful. Under Socialism, the powerful become rich.
Under Socialism, government employees become powerful.
We’re reorganizing here. I’m going to spend at least two hours, with luck more, in the Monk’s Cell writing fiction. I’ve got my downstairs life organized well. Now for the fiction phase. This isn’t moving back into the upstairs offices with the Great Hall; that is still in the future. The problem with that part of the house is that while I have no trpouble getting up there, getting down is tricky because of the twists in the stairway.
The Monk’s Cell is the large upstairs bedroom in the old part of the house. It does not connect with the Great Hall suite at all. It was Alex’s old room, inherited by the oldest son left in the house as the boys left, then became a sort of guest room. It has no telephone, and no books. It has a good console, and I set one of the first flat screen monitors up there – we still used large bottles, in those days – and a good keyboard, and brought to current laptop up there to work undisturbed by [phones and visitors. Got a lot of books done that way.
Came the stroke I couldn’t get up and down those stairs, so it got well cleaned out, and the ancient ThinkPad laptop slowly deteriorated. I never did have a high speed Internet cable going up there, and wi-fi was indifferent to slow, but that was fine – no distractions, but enough connectivity to save backups to other machines and to get to the Internet for the occasional research without any temptations. I don’t keep mail on that machine either. Or SFWA or any other Iternet distractions.
So now I need to replace the old ThinkPad, which worked quite well, and my first thought is to just get another one.
This morning I thought about it and sent this to my advisors:
The ThinkPad upstairs in Alex’s old room – the “Monk’s Cell” — is ancient and slow, and time for replacement. I will as before have a large screen and a Logitech K360 wireless keyboard for my writing, and it will mostly be upstairs all its life. I prefer a laptop up there because I can actually carry it downstairs if I have to, while getting a tower or desktop down would be a real pain.
But since I’ll be doing much of my fiction on it, the important thing is ease of use, and good wireless. Since I have a rather powerful wireless network set up by Alex and Eric, a good built in and non-distracting laptop wireless should be fine; the ThinkPad was except that sometimes the ThinkPad and the Windows wireless software tended to get into conflict, and that wasted creative time. Mostly what I want is fire and forget – when I go up there I don’t want to think about anything but what I’m working on. The wireless is for research.
I’m having a problem getting the new Word whatever number that comes with Office 365 to accept my older custom dictionaries; it insists that it can only install dictionaries in some weird format whose name I cannot remember, but it doesn’t like mameluke.dic and the procedures Microsoft help gives me are as usual incomprehensible. That’s a secondary problem, but if anyone knows how to transform Word 2012 dictionaries or import and old dictionary into the new default, it would help. I used to use a custom dictionary for each major work because there is no point in having the main dictionary know that Agzaral is a word, and things were slow and memory was expensive and you get the idea. Habits are hard to break and I had a habit of custom dictionaries, which Microsoft thinks is weird now. At worst I’ll just manually put all the correct words in the main dictionary now since search is nearly instantaneous and dictionary memory is trivial. Memory used to cost money.
Anyway, should I just get a new ThinkPad or is there a better top end brand? It will not be for games, should be reliable and trouble free, be able to connect to external devices such as the LASFS projector and con projectors in case I make presentations, and have good wireless. Much of the time it will simply sit upstairs with the lid closed waiting for me to come up for a couple of hours a day
For fiction. I want it pretty soon, and given the importance reliability and lack of distracting quirks is FAR more important than cost.
I realize the irony of this: that’s the sort of question everyone asked ME in the Byte era, and I was probably the best person to ask it of. Alas, those days are gone, but I still get good advice from myh hard working advisors, but I don’t get to all the shows and have hands on ex[perience with all the new equipment any more.
One suggestion was
which looks pretty good, only I think I would like the 15 “ one. I see that Amazon (and surely many other vendors) offers a docking station for it. And I hjave at least one spare monitor I can put up there: the one at present is from the early 90’s, quite good at the time but a bit small and far too low resolution now. Of course the best doesn’t cost much now. Things have got marvelously inexpensaive lately.
There will be more later today, but that’s the project for the week as I move into high gear to get my writing projects done. My computer project is to set up a good writing station for stroke victims who have to do two finger typing and stare at the keyboard. I’ve found a few tricks for adjusting Word to my needs but if a Word expert is reading this. I’d sure like a lesson on importing old dictionaries. It would save me a bit of time. I also think the Word 2010 procedure for adding to the autocorrect table was much better than the one at present; it used to be that right-clicking a red-wavy-underlined word produced a menu of chjoices, one of which was to add that word and its correction to autocorrect. You need to be careful when the typo could have been any of several words, but if you got a unique suggestion and that was what you meant, it was simple to add it to autocorrect so that you would never see that typo again. For instance, in the last sentence I missed a space so that I typed “typoagain”. The spelling program offered to correct it to typo again, which I let it do; but with Word 2010 I could have, with one click, added that to autocorrect. I could give many other examples.
Alex will be over shortly and we’ll go to dinner. I’ll post this now, more later.
Papal Statements Shocked Me
I’m not sure what to say; I’m not sure if you saw this but I never thought I’d see such statements associated with a Pope — even
privately:
<.>
Today, I don’t think that there is a fear of Islam as such but of ISIS and its war of conquest, which is partly drawn from Islam. It is true that the idea of conquest is inherent in the soul of Islam. However, it is also possible to interpret the objective in Matthew’s Gospel, where Jesus sends his disciples to all nations, in terms of the same idea of conquest.
</>
http://www.la-croix.com/Religion/Pape/INTERVIEW-Pope-Francis-2016-05-17-1200760633
Maybe his Bible differs from mine, but I never read anything about beheading people who don’t convert to my religion, enslaving women, and so forth. I don’t recall any instructions from Jesus about this nor do I recall any pastors saying anything about any of this. Did I miss something?
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Most Respectfully,
Joshua Jordan, KSC
Percussa Resurgo
Popes are infallible only on formal matters of faith and doctrine, not on secular matters. Like many, His Holiness has a good heart and proper instincts, but his experience is limited.
“We’re just trying to slow things down. It’s all going to be ruins eventually. But people love ruins.”
<http://nautil.us/issue/36/aging/the-gravekeepers-paradox>
—————————————
Roland Dobbins
Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.
