View 682 Tuesday, July 05, 2011
Heading for Home and Reviews
We spent the weekend in San Diego. We had intended to stay longer, but there were complications, and I will shortly strike this set and pack things away. For no especial reason I am reminded of a poem memorized in about 4th grade, when country school education in the United States included deliberate inclusions of what was then seen as the national culture. No reason was ever given for the inclusion of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poetry for the pupils in 4th grade at Capleville consolidated where the students were mostly farm children, because it would never have occurred to anyone to ask: the United States had a common culture, and many common metaphors and phrases, and that was that. Longfellow was part of our common treasure. You learned some of the beauties of English and some common usages, and by memorizing and reciting you learned other useful skills. In any event the poem was “The Day is Done”, and I dare say that most people my age will still recognize the last verse. There are other verses that evoke memories. If you have never read it, you may like it. If you once read it in school the remembrance may be pleasant. We had expected to stay at least another week, and I brought down two large boxes of books to be worked into the new launch of Chaos Manor Reviews along with some adventure stories. I let Chaos Manor Reviews slip a bit earlier this year. That was in part due to health matters, and in part due to the impending changes. The new BYTE will be launched shortly, and I will be doing Computing at Chaos Manor on a more regular basis – it will be in BYTE and also at the usual stand at www.chaosmanorreviews.com. BYTE will doubtless have its own commentary policy. Mine remains: write me. In any event I had intended to write a new column while I was here. I will start on that when I get home. We have not abandoned Chaos Manor Reviews, and my thanks to all those who have expressed concern. I seem to have recovered from what I can only conclude was a long term flu that attacked me early this year and didn’t relent until early June.
Evolution
This site evolves. We had several odd crises over the weekend. One of them resulted in the loss of mail from subscribers. Subscribers have a “Groucho” that is intended to escape spam filters and bring that mail to a higher level of attention than my general mail, but from Friday night until Monday evening, and mail that had the secret word tag got deleted rather than given priority. If you sent mail over the weekend it may have gone into a black hole. That is fixed now. Rick has made some new additions to the site that have not yet been fully implemented, but the intended result is to allow those who liked the old scheme of a file for a week given in the order it was posted for that week will be able to have that again. Those who like last in first out blogological order will be able to keep that. We’ll see. So far as I am concerned this place is very much under construction… I have tried another internal link system, this time to a header. We will see if that helps. I see it doesn’t work. WordPress really doesn’t like internal links, and although in theory it will link to a section, in practice it seems not to. Another time. I have another method to try. We will get there. I am very late on both the Mail here and Chaos Manor Mail. I’m trying to catch up. Meanwhile, I have to fold my tent and steal away. Back this evening.
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1815: Home, safely. Long drive, and apparently everything decided to update while I was gone: I was more than two hours installing updates to Windows and Firefox and the inevitable Adobe daily updates, and other stuff. But we are here, and all it well. Everything seems to be working.
The radio news was all about the Florida verdict of a case I have not really been following. I owe you all some mail, and a Chaos Manor Reviews Computing at Chaos Manor column. I have not forgotten. And I do seem up to getting the stuff done. Hurrah.
But it is dinner time…
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