Good Friday

View 719 Friday, April 06, 2012

Good Friday

Yesterday we took Roberta out to her regular doctor, who confirmed that everyone else – two trips to the emergency room and three to urgent care – had done the right thing, and the only thing we can do now is be patient. It’s what I expected to hear, and under the circumstances it was the best possible news, but it will be weeks before her hand is anything like normal again. Which makes for a difficult routine at our age; my apologies to subscribers for being a bit slow on updates and comments.

I took Roberta to dinner to ‘celebrate’, so yesterday was pretty well used up. I have to visit an old friend in the hospital today. He has been a character in a couple of my stories. And it’s Good Friday.

Alien Artifact, the new system built with an Intel Sandy Bridge in the beautiful Thermaltake case runs just fine except that we’re having trouble setting up the cache system which uses silicon memory and is supposed to work just fine: it doesn’t, and that’s probably because I’ve been so distracted I haven’t been able to go through the manuals and on-line stuff to see how the RAID system that works this magic is properly set up, and whether there are memory tests I ought to perform. A side effect of this is that if I let the energy manager put the machine to sleep, it wakes up, looks for the cache, can’t find it, and reboots. So long as I set sleep to ‘never’ the system works just fine.

It is running on the Sandy Bridge on-board sound and video, and it does that just fine. I’ve been testing it with really complex video stuff like Total War Rome Barbarian Invasion, which can involve a lot of individual figures in combat, and the display is just fine on the 21” analog bottle monitor at the test stand. I’ve been meaning to replace that monitor with a larger flat screen and one of these days I’ll get around to it; but in any event, I can say that for all business applications and for anything but the really latest fast shooters, Sandy Bridge is just fine for video. The sound is all right, too. At some point I may put in a sound card that lets me do some selective amplifications of different frequencies: as it happens my hearing losses are rather specific and narrow, and if I turn up to a high enough volume to be able to understand, some speech frequencies are over loud to the point of making some announcers nearly intolerable. Not their fault. I have a very strange hearing loss pattern and any kind of hearing aid to adapt to that would cost a lot more than I want to pay. Once we’ve fixed the cache adjustment problem with Alien Artifact I’ll do a column catching up with 2011 Orchids and Onions, and details on Alien Artifact. I got the Thermaltake case and power supply after the end of 2011, so I can’t give it an award in that column, but I sure like the way Thermaltake has designed the case for ease of maintenance, replacement of disk drive, and all the rest. It is costly, but that’s a cost I’ll be willing to pay in future: I’m tired of having to fight case design when I maintain computers. Of course for most computers that you’re never going to update or make changes to that doesn’t matter, but most of our machines end up as lab rats at some point. Anyway I’ll cover all that in the column as soon as we have a happy ending.

If you are looking for some good short snippets to read, try http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.com/2010/02/economic-political-wisdom-jerry.html which is, of all things, a compilation of ‘the wisdom of Jerry Pournelle’. Needless to say I didn’t do it, but I rather like what has been done. It’s a number of snippets of things I have said, mostly in the old View and Mail columns before we moved to Bluehost, and some of them are pretty good. This was good editing. There’s also other good stuff on that site.

And with that I’m off. Thanks.

For those concerned about Roberta, there is no reason to be. She managed to bash her hand in a way that made us think it was broken, but it was not; still it ended up half the size of a football, and hurts like anything, and there were these dark line on her fingers and up her arm, and they had to cut her rings off, and it was a mess.  The various visits after the first were precautionary so that someone better qualified than me could have a look, and the last visit to our regular doctor was something I insisted on just be be sure. The remedy from here on is cheap – it is called patience. That isn’t an easy virtue to develop. I won’t say all is well because it’s painful and taking forever but it is daily looking marginally better and comparing it now to the photo of what it was at first is reassuring. Still ugly, and we were worried about infection, but there hasn’t been any. Danger of infection is why the surgeons didn’t want to do anything. So we wait. With patience…

I see that The Legend of Black Ship Island remains fairly high up on the Amazon sales list for science fiction, and there are a couple of good reviews. It will be interesting to see what will happen to this novella. We could certainly have sold it to one of the SF magazines, but it wouldn’t have come out for several months that way, and magazines really hate that length – too long for a since issue, not long enough to be in a three part serial, just awkward length – and it’s not the kind of story that ought to be broken into chunks anyway. I suspect it has already sold as many copies to earn more than we’d have got for serial rights – sf magazines haven’t changed their rates in years – and I doubt that any magazine would have wanted to print the Foreword and Acknowledgements. It was tricky to work out a story that could fit between two published stories, be significant enough to bother with, and still never be mentioned in Beowulf’s Children. All the comments I have got from readers have been good; a couple of people have spotted a minor error that ought to have been caught in the final edit (not a typo, an actual minor inconsistency in the story) that caused us to do another pass through the book. We didn’t do any significant change – about five words I think – and we didn’t find many more typos (probably about a dozen) so there’s no point in waiting for the republication. It really is a trivial error, and few seem to have noticed. I sure didn’t, and I did the final pass on the story. And the new alien is interesting…

“Self” publishing – in our case the novella was ‘published’ by our agent by posting it on Amazon and now I think at Nook – will become increasingly important as eBook readers continue to sell. It’s a publishing revolution.

It Is Later Than You Know…

When I was in school we all had to read Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities, and in 9th grade we also were shown in class the 1935 film of Tale of Two Cities in which, after some arrogant acts by aristocrats, Defarge goes to a church plaque inscribed “It is later than you know” and scrawls BLOOD on the stone. After the revolution we are shown the beheadings of the aristocrats: whose who arrogantly took their lifetime privileges and laughed at those who had to pay for their revels.

New subject. It took a couple of years for it to leak out, but we now know the attitude of at least some of the civil servants whom we pay with increased taxes. We have from the Huffington Post the story of tine Las Vegas GSA Team Building conference paid for by federal taxes. We also have videos of federal employees in their cubicles doing videos of – well, see for yourself.

And those who “lost their jobs" over this turn out mostly to have been transferred, possibly demoted, but pension rights are pretty well unaffected. So it goes. And we need to raise taxes because the government doesn’t take in enough money. You can’t balance the budget on the backs of the poor.  Or something.