View 836 Thursday, July 31, 2014

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

A reader says

Every time I read about the chaos and machismo of the "pro-Russian rebels", something in the back of my head whispers:

COSSACKS!!

The tinge of excitement is palpable to anyone familiar with Russian literature. Gogol, Pushkin, Tolstoy, all wrote of the “Russian Cowboys.” One of Yul Brenner’s best movies was Taras Bulba, a Cossack leader from a Gogol novel. My late friend Claire Huffaker’s novel, The Cowboy and the Cossack, romanticizes both cowboys and Cossacks. (It’s a good read, too.)

Although most Cossacks were Slavs, the name has no racial implications, and can be translated as “The Free”; many Cossacks were fugitives, including runaway serfs, of various ethnic origins who were assimilated into the Cossack society and ethnos. There were several bands of them, and at one time the land now called the Ukraine was as often named Cossack territory.

Although the Cossacks were often rebellious, they enjoyed a special status with the Tsars, and considerable autonomy. They were instrumental in many Tsarist conquests, and served as Imperial guards; the rumor that the Cossacks had abandoned the Tsars was important in the early victories of the Bolsheviks. After the early victories of the Bolsheviks the Cossacks became a major part of the White (anti-Bolshevik) army during the Civil War. They were defeated by Trotsky and his new Red Army. Stalin’s vengeance against them was terrible, and most were exiled from the Ukraine.

Cossacks regard the Ukraine as their own territory, and many Cossacks, exiled to Siberia and other remote parts of the Soviet empire, have returned to claim their land. Numbers are unreliable, and since Cossacks are not an ethnic group, many adoptions have taken place to swell their numbers.  They are, after all, The Free, obedient to their hetmen, who may or may not be obedient to government. Cossacks are said to be a major component of the ”rebel Ukrainian” faction in the civil war in eastern Ukraine. Organized Cossacks were employed by Putin as guards and escorts at the Sochi Winter Olympics.

They served as both modern police, and in more traditional costume at Sochi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dryMojBq3Mg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiw0fw_sJOk shows them suppressing Pussy Riot

There is considerable sentiment both for and against the Cossacks in modern Russia. Their legendary loyalty to but independence from the central government looms large in contemporary thought. One thing is certain. If Putin is using the Cossacks, as Cossacks, in his efforts to destabilize today’s Ukraine, and this is successful, he will have gained allies who are not obsequious servants.

The melting pot

Hello Jerry,

I read Phil Tharp’s piece about immigrant’s casual approach to leaving their kids at home unattended. His example was a couple of kids 9 and 11 left alone at night.

It reminded me of an experience that I had back in the mid-70’s, when I was working for NSWC, Dahlgren, VA, and had occasion to do a job in Istanbul.

The other tech I was traveling with and I checked in to our hotel, then went to the Consulate, where we met our point of contact, and asked him about decent restaurants in the area. He told us about one in easy walking distance from our hotel, so that is where we went. We arrived about 5:30, not realizing that in Turkey restaurants are just getting going good around 9:00.

The place was deserted, except for us, and we were greeted by a nice English lady who gave us a menu and went back to the kitchen. A little later, a small girl, about 5 or 6, showed up, identified herself as ‘Ann’, and struck up a conversation with me and my companion. We told her our names. She disappeared into the kitchen, came back with a pencil and paper, and informed us that she would make us a book. The English lady came back and took our order. Ann worked on our books during the process of ordering and cooking, maintaining a conversation all the while.

My book was entitled ‘Bob’s Book’. With capitals and apostrophe. And no input from me, except for providing my name, verbally. It contained several pictures (mountains, trees, etc.), all labeled with properly spelled names. She made a similar book for my fellow tech, appropriately entitled ‘Dave’s Book’, again proper spelling, with no prompting from us, and a few labeled pictures. I put mine in my wallet and thanked Ann.

When our food was ready, Ann (5-6 years old) went to the kitchen, wheeled it out on a serving cart, and proceeded to serve us, including serving the veggies with the big fork/big spoon thing that I have never learned to do, and went back to the kitchen.

We were suitably impressed.

The next night after work, we decided that the food was great and we loved Ann, so we went back to the same restaurant. This time, we were served by the English lady, start to finish, with no sign of Ann.

Finally, when we were ready to pay up and leave, we asked about Ann. The English lady, Ann’s mother, told us that Ann wasn’t able to come to the restaurant that evening, as she was home babysitting her little brother.

Turns out that Ann’s mother was English, her father was Iranian, and they owned and were running a very nice restaurant in Istanbul, Turkey. Ann routinely spoke English, Farsi, and Turkish, as required by the customer. While waiting tables, making and annotating ‘books’ for random customers, and babysitting as required. I don’t KNOW that she wrote in Turkish and Farsi, but I have no reason to believe that she didn’t.

I carried ‘Bob’s Book’ in my wallet for many years, before I somehow lost it, and showed it to a good number of people while telling them the story.

I don’t use this tale to demonstrate that Ann was a super genius (she just seemed to be a sweet little girl), but rather to demonstrate YOUR point, that you have made many times, that small children are ‘learning machines’ and are capable of what appears to be astounding feats of learning, by OUR ‘educational standards’, if simply given the chance and encouraged. Which our education system is seemingly designed to prevent at all costs.

Bob Ludwick

The American education system cannot believe that Ann can exist.  Some of us know better.  And many of the charter schools in Harlem and in the District of Columbia could show the Department of Education if anyone there cared to look.

DMV in VA

Hello Jerry,

When I came back from a tour in Germany in 1992 I had to go to the DMV to get re-Americanized. Winchester, VA turned out to be convenient at the time, so that is where I went. With no appointment.

It was ‘Take a number’ and watch the monitor; when your number comes up, go to the window directed. There were a few people in front, but the wait was reasonable. When I got to the window, the person behind the window was pleasant and competent. She told me what I needed to do, provided the proper papers, and got me out quickly and efficiently.

I asked her if her supervisor was available. She looked nervous, and told me the supervisor was out on a driving exam. I waited. When the supervisor returned, my window lady called her over, introduced me, and went back to her window. I told the supervisor about my experience, identified the person I had dealt with, and thanked her for the excellent service that her staff was providing (My experience was the norm; I watched.). The supervisor seemed to be pleasantly surprised, as I suspect that being complemented for providing excellent service was fairly rare.

Since then I have routinely dealt with the office in Front Royal, VA, with similar results. I have also made it a point to thank the ‘Big Boss’ in FR a few times.

At least in my experience, and realizing that when you are dealing with a bureaucracy things can ‘go horribly wrong’, small town VA DMV’s may not be the best of examples when I want to whine about government incompetence.

Bob Ludwick

Well done. I should have done something of the sort myself.

Congress is still dithering over immigration. I would think it obvious that the first move should be the repeal of the well meant 2008 amendment that entitles youthful refugees from Central American countries to formal hearings once they manage to get into US territory. The intent was to help those who were victims of sex slavery by the cartels, but the result has been a mass movement of youngsters toward the United States.

So long as that law is in place, they will come: and if we are going to invite them to run that dangerous gauntlet through Mexico, we must be prepared for them to be here – and to have some notion of what should happen to them. A program that allows them to become apprentice soldiers and administrators – Janissaries – is not likely to be favored.

Note that one of the murderers of the legally resident Chinese USC student was an illegal immigrant, who apparently was part of a group that makes a living by mugging people in the USC university area.

It’s time I went upstairs and worked on a large naval battle taking place right now in Mamelukes…

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

View 836 Wednesday, July 30, 2014

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

I had an appointment at the Van Nuys office of the California Department of Motor Vehicles. I made the appointment on line in response to a snail mail DMV letter telling me that my driving license would expire on my next birthday, August 7, unless I renewed it. The appointment was at 19:00 AM, and since the DMV is used as the horrible example of bureaucracy by most comics, I got out there at 8:40. There was an enormous line, stretching outside and half way around the building. I went inside hoping that wasn’t the line for those with appointments.

It wasn’t. I didn’t see any information booth or anyone obviously an official who wasn’t working with someone, but then I saw an unoccupied counter window with someone headed toward it. I got there just as she did and asked if there was a separate place for people with appointments. She politely but abruptly told me Window 12, and when I found that I found it was quite well marked as the appointment window, and had about 4 people ahead of me in it. It took about five minutes to get to the window. I had put the printed copy of the appointment I had made online along with the letter from the DMV telling me I was about to expire in my messenger bag, and I took that – what I thought was that – out and handed it to her. She looked puzzled. I leaned over to see, and discovered I had handed her my travel packet from my Hilton Head Island tripe. I apologized and she laughed, and I found the actual packet. In another minute I had another document along with the code F006 and an indication of the screen that number would appear on. There were chairs to sit in while watching the screen. The place was packed, and a lot of people had obviously been waiting a while; but within five minutes F006 appeared, directing me to Window 4. A pleasant chap about 30 with tattoos – lots of tattoos – took my papers and directed my attention to eye charts behind him. He asked did I wear the glasses at all times, I said ‘Oh, yes,’ and I was told what line to read, cover one eye, read another line, cover other eye, read a line. More papers. “Take those to Camera One.”

The pleasant middle aged motherly lady at Camera One took my picture and handed me more papers, and I was directed into an adjacent room where they did things to the papers and handed me an examination, and indicated a booth I could use. A number of reasonable questions with three possible answers, in most cases all three reasonable but one stood out. I missed one, having to do with approaching fire engines with sirens and lights: the correct answer is pull over to the right lane and stop; I checked pull to right lane and go slow, since that’s what everyone actually does. More papers including a temporary license to carry with my expired license until I get a new one in the mail.

The entire process was efficient and everyone was pleasant. I thanked all those whom I dealt with, and they were pleasant in return, and I can’t think of any improvements I’d make to the system. It worked fine. Now I am sure that some will wait all day because they hadn’t made any appointment, but I can hardly fault DMV with that. I was out of there by 10:20.

I put the afternoon into working on a battle scene for Mamelukes. It’s a complicated battle and I have many viewpoints, so it’s hard work, but I think you’ll like it. I’m also working on Chaos Manor Reviews. It’s good to be back at work again, but it’s a bit tiring, and I run out of energy fairly easily.

the broken melting pot

Jerry,

As you look into the current situation, consider the melting pot and it’s proper function and the results of our breaking it.

In Northern California, we have large numbers of both intelligent, educated, legal, and not so intelligent, uneducated, illegal immigrants. A large majority of both groups are from the 3rd world. The result is a seeping in of 3rd world attitudes toward daily live. On the far end of the illegals, 12 to 13 year old crack moms having crack babies or sex as soon as sex is physically possible. On the educated, legal, side, attitudes toward children that would horrify our mothers when we were kids. One woman I know did not attend school until she was 10, and spent much of her child hood looked up alone in her room since her parents were being hunted by the cultural police and were on the run in China. So, to her, leaving her daughter mostly be herself, is no big deal. Another couple I know leaves their kids (9 and 11) alone at night, all night, in their house as mom and dad work to build their dream house. They trust the neighbors to look after their kids. These are the ones I personal know about. Except for the crack moms, which thankfully, I don’t know, the others are pretty much nice people. Their views on life are pretty extreme for our country and there is nothing to bring them to the norm.

I’m not expressing this as well as I might, but my systems engineering senses have been going off recently and I thought I would bring this up.

Phil Tharp

E Pluribus Unum

The American melting pot worked very well, but we have abandoned it for ‘diversity’; the result was predictable and in fact was predicted by many, including me. America was once one of the few counties you could enter, study to be an American, and become one. You can’t learn to be a Swiss. Your children born there might, but you never will. The same is true for most European countries. But you could and can learn to be an American, and millions did; it was the famous melting pot, and it worked as advertised. Of course the assumption was that you’d want to become an American; that’s why you came here. You might keep some of the customs of the Old Country, but a sentimental reminders, not as part of your core values; you left those behind coming here. But the Progressive notion combined with a preference for Diversity has ended that.

A certain degree of non-conformity was always part of the American system; but not a rejection of the core values that made us one people. But that too is being rejected. If all continues as it is now, the result is predictable.

Amazon speaks on the Amazon/Hachette dispute.

<http://www.amazon.com/forum/kindle/ref=cm_cd_tfp_ef_tft_tp?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=Fx1D7SY3BVSESG&cdThread=Tx3J0JKSSUIRCMT>

Barry Eisler’s take:

<http://barryeisler.blogspot.com/2014/07/so-real-authors-guild-is-amazon.html>

—–

Roland Dobbins

And we can hope that author associations will realize this. I certainly have.

Here is a good peace from techdirt.com that actually gets what’s really at stake between the Amazon vs. Hachette fight. It’s always about money and who is going to control it.

{ https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140729/16470728046/amazon-to-hachette-authors-here-let-us-explain-basic-price-elasticity-to-you.shtml }

The horizon can’t be seen…

http://warontherocks.com/2014/07/how-to-lose-the-robotics-revolution/

Hidebound and with blinders, protectors of turf degrade the ability to grow. This article is another reinforcement for the re-consolidation of the Army and Air Force.

David Couvillon

Colonel, U.S. Marine Corps Reserve, Retired.; Former Governor of Wasit Province, Iraq; Righter of Wrongs; Wrong most of the time; Distinguished Expert, TV remote control; Chef de Hot Dog Excellance; Avoider of Yard Work

The Air Force needs to give over the mission of direct support to the field army to the Army; there may have been a time when air power was so specialized and difficult to understand that it needed to be an independent service, and possibly the nuclear strategic mission – SAC – should be an elite separated from everything else as it was under Lemay, but the Air Force doesn’t want the close support missions, and shouldn’t be choosing the targets for interdiction and isolation of the battle area. One the other hand, gaining and keeping air superiority is important and that is complex and requires dedication.

Of course we end up with the worst of all worlds. I recall during the Viet Nam war the North Vietnamese air defense operated from three military airports. You don’t get rid of hornets by swatting one hornet at a time; you take out the nest. You don’t win air superiority by flying bombers toward the enemy, and having their escorts engage the rising interceptors in dogfights – the losing plan Goering attempted in the Battle of Britain. Had the Luftwaffe unremittingly bombed Fighter Command and all its fuel delivery resources, Germany probably would have won the Battle of Britain despite the skill and courage of the young RAF pilots; it was a near enough thing as it was. But having an independent Air Force didn’t give Germany a winning air strategy. Air superiority is won by attacks on ground facilities, not by dogfights. Bombers and their escorts are after the goal of ending the other guy’s ability to repair and launch his aircraft; shooting them down from the air is spectacular but it won’t win the air war.

In Viet Nam the mission was simple, but Johnson and McNamara allowed us to bomb one of them; the other two were forbidden. The result was a number of air crews spending years in the Hanoi Hilton. An Independent Air Force is not independent of a Secretary of Defense whose previous career high point was the Edsel.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

View 836 Tuesday, July 29, 2014

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

I was on TWIT Sunday afternoon from Larry Niven’s house. http://twit.tv/show/this-week-in-tech/468 He was on for a few minutes. It made for a good TWIT, and you might like it. Meanwhile I am pounding away at getting things back together for reviving Chaos Manor Reviews. Eric was over yesterday and we replaced the cable modem, provided by Time Warner when we first got cable internet – long time readers will remember it took years, and I used a number of gimmicks including having Dan build a Linux box dedicated to being what amounted to a firewall router for a commercial Wi-Fi company, then we had an EarthLink satellite; Chaos Manor is 19,000 feet from a DSL switch. But eventually we got Time Warner Cable, and it has worked ever since. TW is upgrading their fiber links, and out at Eric’s house in Castaic he got five time his Internet speeds simply by replacing the modem with a newer model. We thought we would try that here. Full story in Review; bottom line is we improved what’s here by about 10%. They haven’t improved their cable hardware in my area for a while, but the 10% improvement in speed is solid.

That took up Sunday and Monday. Today I got the urge to get going on Mamelukes, the next story in the Janissaries series. I had 150,000 words, and an idea on how to end this book; so today I spent the afternoon up in the Monk’s cell with the new and improved ThinkPad with the new SSD hard drive. Worked like a charm. Literally. And since we have installed new Wi-Fi repeaters throughout the house, I get better Wi-Fi up in the Monk’s Cell (actually the room inherited in turn by the oldest of the four boys as they grew up and one after the other left the house) where I do fiction work. No phone up there, and no Internet – that is, Wi-Fi works well enough to let me use Google to do quick research on such things as Venetian 14^th Century warships, but it’s not fast enough for games, and I don’t do amusements up there. And now I have 151,024 words, and we’re approaching the final battles, after which there’s some afterwards on political settlements… Anyway, that used up today.

And tomorrow morning early I get to go out to DMV and spend the day renewing my driver’s license, so I’ll have to turn in early.

There was a 60 foot geyser on Sunset near UCLA, where a water main broke. This being Los Angeles, aka Detroit Southwest, it took the DWP an hour to get someone out there, and while it’s no longer a geyser, the water is – ha. As I write this, the radio announces it has stopped. It started at 1530 this afternoon. Flooded the lower decks of several parking structures. Cars lost. Los Angeles has highly paid city workers, but not a lot of city work gets done. We have about the worst streets in a big city of anywhere including Detroit. We have a pretty good police department and it is fairly efficient, except they are threatening to strike for more pay and the politicians have spent all the money from the highest taxes in the country. Ah well, the Fire Department works well. Not a lot else does.

Meanwhile in Long Beach an elderly man was attacked and beaten up in a home invasion robbery. He managed to get a gun, and shot the female who was whaling on him. Her fiancé ran away, and she staggered out the door, shouting “Don’t shoot me again, I’m pregnant.” He’d been beaten pretty badly, and he had no sympathy. He shot her again. The police are trying to decide what to charge him with.

The is the Long Beach Police Department which found it good policy when four patrol police shot a man sitting on his friend’s porch holding a garden hose nozzle that looked like a gun. He was drunk and had gone to his friend’s house to avoid trying to drive home, but no one was home so he was sitting on the porch with the hose nozzle. The Long Beach Police patrolmen responded to a suspicious person call by sneaking up on him, not announcing their presence so there was no way for him to know they were there, and when he held the nozzle in a shooting position, they all four opened fire on him, killing him instantly with multiple gunshot wounds. This was held to be within police policy and no charges were ever filed.

We live in interesting times.

I am working on an essay about income discrepancy and how the income of the top 1% is rising, but that of the middle class is not rising or not rising much, and that of the working class is about the same as it was many years ago. Of course I grew up in a different era, and I see things differently.

For one thing, the poverty level now includes access to and ownership of stuff that my middle class family could never have afforded: like cataract operations that don’t lay you up and render you unable to drive at night. I drove Robert Bloch (author of Psycho among many other great stories and movies) to the big Studio Invitational opening of Star Wars because Bloch’s cataract operations rendered him unable to drive at night; that was half a lifetime ago; he wasn’t upper 1% but he was upper middle class, and he couldn’t afford better cataract surgery. I can, and so can almost everyone else now. I’m aware of this because it looks as if I’m going to have to let them do that to me. Niven and my friend Michael Galloway have had theirs done, and it was relatively painless and over in a day (a day for each eye), and they drive all right…

When I was growing up, and during the great boom periods following World War II, no one on earth could have afforded the radiation treatments that cured my brain cancer in 2008. I have more teeth than almost anyone my age when I was growing up. My income may not be growing as rapidly as that of Bill Gates – indeed, it’s not growing faster than inflation, another incentive for me to finish Janissaries – but I can buy things with what I have that Bill Gates could not have afforded back in the 1980’s. My iPhone is more powerful than all the computers anywhere when I first started playing about with the IBM 650. Anyway, there is more to income discrepancy than gets written about. Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton wrote a bit on the subject; it’s not something to be ignored; but it’s just not true that the rising tide in America doesn’t float all boats. Much of what comes as entitlements to those in poverty would have been thought wealth beyond the dreams of avarice when I was growing up…

Another new item: does Democracy promote rule of law? And of course it does not. Indeed, the prospect of America becoming a Democracy frightened most of the Delegates to the Philadelphia Convention of 1787. Democracy is the road to poverty. We used to joke that when the legislature is in session no man’s property is safe, but as America transforms herself from a Republic to a Democracy, as she is rapidly doing, that ceases to be a joke. Rule of law is necessary for there to be a stable Democracy; but Democracy does away with rule of law whenever possible.

Case in point:

Judge Ruling Prevents Donald Sterling from Appealing to Keep Clippers Franchise

By Matt Fitzgerald , Featured Columnist

Jul 28, 2014

The Los Angeles Clippers have distanced themselves considerably from disgraced owner Donald Sterling, whose bid to block the sale of the franchise was denied on Monday.   

According to Billy Witz of The New York Times, probate court judge Michael Levanas ruled in favor of Sterling’s wife, Shelly, who arranged for the Clippers to be sold for $2 billion to former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. It marked the most expensive team sale in NBA history.

Judge Ruling Prevents Donald Sterling from Appealing to Keep Clippers Franchise

Sterling’s awful crime was to tell his colored mistress that he did not want her being escorted to Clippers games by black athletes. He told her this in private, but he was being recorded, and somehow the recordings became public, and Sterling’s wife wants to sell the Clippers; so she managed to get him declared incompetent.

Sterling is no pleasant person, and his ownership of the Clippers is bad news for the other stockholders, and the team manager, and the players, and the fans; it’s undemocratic to allow him to keep this team which, under his ownership and coached by Doc Rivers (black) got into the playoffs this year after being a  joke underdog in Los Angeles for many years.

And since this decision to fling Sterling out – after all, he’ll get a share of the $2 Billion Steve Ballmer is paying for the Clippers – well, it’s popular. It’s what everyone (including me, except that it makes a wreck of a vital principle of limits to government) wants, well, hurrah. Who needed that rule of law crap to begin with. But of course the lack of any tradition of rule of law is what has produced disasters in places that America has expended blood and treasure to rescue from tyranny.

If you establish a democracy, you must in due time reap the fruits of a democracy. You will in due season have great impatience of the public burdens, combined in due season with great increase of the public expenditure. You will in due season have wars entered into from passion and not from reason; and you will in due season submit to peace ignominiously sought and ignominiously obtained, which will diminish your authority and perhaps endanger your independence. You will in due season find your property is less valuable, and your freedom less complete.

Benjamin Disraeli

And it’s bed time.

Things I should write about, but at the moment I can only remind you of.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/21/world/middleeast/israels-iron-dome-system-is-at-center-of-debate.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 

Cthuhlu Power http://www.strategypage.com/military_photos/2014072021160.aspx 

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

View 835 Saturday, July 26, 2014

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

I should be on TWIT tomorrow (Sunday) from Larry Niven’s house.

My associate Eric Pobirs was over, and I spent the day mucking about with small computers, doing the sort of stuff I did for twenty years when I was the lead columnist for BYTE. We revived Alien Artifact, a very fast Windows 7 system that is destined to be one of the two main machines at my work station, discovering that he needed over 100 updates. That affected our next task, which was installing Office 365 on Swan, the Windows 8.1 system that will replace the more graphics oriented machine of the two Intel systems I do much of my work on; I don’t do it so much now, but when I was grinding out 20,000 high tech words a month it was very convenient to have multiple machines doing multiple tasks, all networked. I got in the habit of keeping that installation going, even though for the past few years I haven’t needed anything like that complex a setup. Keeping it going makes me feel like I am at least keeping up with technology – well some of it – and I’m keeping my hand in.

Installing Office 365 took longer than expected, but that was because Alien Artifact was eating a lot of the bandwidth as he gulped down updates. Once downloaded installation was rapid and after that, everything went enormously fast. One of the features of Office 365 is the ability to keep important stuff in the Cloud, with a local copy available in case your Internet connection is interrupted; this makes it a great deal easier to have Outlook mail going on more than one machine. Keeping multiple copies of Outlook synchronized isn’t particularly easy, and Microsoft doesn’t really help or want to – that is, they have a way, called Exchange, which involves a server and master policies and the like, and many like it, but after getting it set up and running here a few years ago, and going to some Exchange technical conferences, I gave up: those who need and like Exchange are welcome to it, and being an Exchange Master is a lot easier and less time consuming than being a UNIX guru, but it’s still more effort than I have time to give it.

We are evolving other and simpler ways, and Office 365 makes that a lot easier. It also makes it a lot easier to install Outlook and bring all the files up to date. In less than an hour we had two new copies of Outlook going, not interfering with each other or with the “master” Outlook (which is really Office 2007) that I keep going on Bette, the middling fast system I’ve been doing most of my work on. I’m still exploring Office 365, and I haven’t done enough with it to know if it has developed any annoying new features, but so far everything just works, and it’s intuitive to an Office 2007 user. I’ve had Office 2007 on most of my systems since before I got the radiation treatments that cured my brain cancer (really I suppose I should say remission, but they can’t find any traces of it and it’s been years…). I didn’t see any need to install and learn Office 2010, although Niven had Eric install it on all his systems. We both have collaborators who still use dot doc files, and while we could have gone to docx, there didn’t seem to be a lot of reason to do that. Those who do fancy formatting for documents and forms and proposals find docx superior, but mostly I just turn out text, with a few pictures stuck in for illustration. But I did find it worthwhile to learn Office 2007 with its ribbon (and to learn to use control-f1 to suppress it when I am wailing out prose), and I expect I’ll learn to like the new features of Office 365; but we’ll see. I haven’t used it enough to be sure. Microsoft does have a habit of making it hard to use some of their improved software, like Windows 8, and the learning difficulties are often enough to obviate the improvements. Anyway, I bought the $99 package of Windows 365, which allows me to use five copies, plus have copies on tablets and my iPhone, and I’m looking forward to playing with them.

After all, the motto of this column has for years been “I do all these silly things so you don’t have to.”

A year ago we built some important new machines, using Thermaltake cases and power supplies, and in fact Thermaltake Keyboards.  About then I got a bit overwhelmed, and I stopped writing the monthly column – which was really unfair to Thermaltake.  I’ll have specifics when I do the Review column, but I should mention that for about two years I have had very good systems built in Thermaltake cases and using Thermaltake power supplies, and I am far more than satisfied with them.  Thermaltake does things with a certain elegance that I find many others lack.  It all looks good, the cables are sturdy and easily routed, and all their stuff was easy to work with.  It is certainly possible to build cheaper  systems, but there’ no real point in building your own computers if what you have in mind is saving money.  You build your own in part for better understanding and quality assurance, and in part just for satisfaction: and I have to say the handsome Thermaltake systems have afforded me that. 

And naturally we did a lot of experiments with Precious, the Surface Pro 3. When Eric first got the machine – at a big discount short term sale – they managed to sell him a Surface Pro 2 keyboard/cover, which works with the Surface Pro 3, but lacks some important features. It works well enough that neither of us noticed it was the wrong keyboard, but there was no problem exchanging the black Pro 2 cover for a purple Pro 3, which fits much better and looks nicer. Same number of keys, and indeed the same keyboard size but with a larger bezel around it. It’s not as good a laptop keyboard as the Lenovo keyboard, but then what is? But it works well enough. With Office 365 it might just be possible to carry the Surface 3 Pro as the only machine on a road trip. I’m not likely to try that – I tend to travel with seven elephants anyway – but you could. And the OneNote 2013 that comes with Office 365 is a great deal more useful than the clipped down OneNote that comes with the Surface Pro 3. When I was using the Compaq PC 1100 Tablet – which I did carry as my only machine on many road trips including WinHec – I found OneNote with a tablet the most useful research tool I had ever had. I am hoping to get the same experience with the Surface.

And while we were at it, we replaced the SSD drive in the ThinkPad with a slightly larger and considerably faster SSD drive. More on that when I do the column. It took about half an hour of actual work (and an hour of unattended file copying) but it all went smooth as silk, and the ThinkPad doesn’t know he’s had a transplant.

And we added Wi-Fi repeaters in the breakfast room and the back room, all connected to the master router through Ethernet-through-power-line systems. That works very well, and my iPhone now gets multiple bars of Wi-Fi all over the house.

And a bit more, all of which is enough, with some reviews of other stuff and a ramble or two, to make up for a new column, which I am now working on. Think of this as a preview.

The California Sixth Grade Reader of 1914 http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00LZ7PB7E/ref=as_li_tf_til?tag=digichok-20&camp=14573&creative=327641 has been selling reasonably well in the few days it has been up, and I am hoping that home schoolers will find it useful. There was a time when the stories and poems in this book formed an important background to American culture and communications. These stories link us to our ancestors. At one time nearly every American was familiar with all these works — I had most of those stories in 6^th Grade in Capleville, Tennessee in 1943. I memorized Abou Ben Adam, and verses from Macaulay’s Horatius at the Bridge, and Longfellow, and Hiawatha, and while I didn’t know it at the time, I was learning to love epic poetry. Not then – it was a burden – but being exposed to great poems turns out to last you a long time, and becomes one of the joys of life. Anyway, it’s available.

This is meant for Chaos Manor Reviews, but I want to get it up before World Con. You’ll see it again.

Sherlock Holmes in the Modern World

 

The Case of the Displaced Detective: The Arrival: http://www.amazon.com/Case-Displaced-Detective-Arrival/dp/1606191896/

The Case of the Displaced Detective: At Speed: http://www.amazon.com/Case-Displaced-Detective-At-Speed/dp/1606191918/

The Case of the Cosmological Killer: The Rendlesham Incident: http://www.amazon.com/The-Case-Cosmological-Killer-Rendlesham/dp/1606191934/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1342470867&sr=8-2&keywords=Rendlesham+Incident+Osborn

The Case of the Cosmological Killer: Endings & Beginnings: http://www.amazon.com/The-Case-Cosmological-Killer-Beginnings/dp/1606191950/ref=tmm_pap_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1352221410&sr=1-4

The Omnibus

The Case of the Displaced Detective Omnibus: http://www.amazon.com/Case-Displaced-Detective-Omnibus-ebook/dp/B00FOR5LJ4/

Book 5 (currently available in eBook formats; print coming soon) A Case of Spontaneous Combustion: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00K98AI6Y/

Stephanie Osborn
Interstellar Woman of Mystery

There has been a spate of stories bringing Sherlock Holmes into the 21^st Century, some quite successful – I’m rather fond of the “Elementary” TV series, with Lucy Liu as Dr. Joan Watson and doing a very creditable job of it; but none of them are about the Sherlock Holmes we have always known. How could they be? He was a man of the Victorian era, and while we can conceive of him being alive and retired, keeping bees in Suffolk even through the Great War, he couldn’t have survived until World War II.

Stephanie Osborne in her Displaced Detective series has found a science fiction – not fantasy – way to bring Sherlock Holmes into our world. You don’t need to know precisely how that works, but she has managed to make it plausible; and unlike any of the current Holmes series, we now have the pleasure of seeing Holmes himself, a Victorian gentleman, brought into the modern world; where, of course, he is immediately confronted with criminal cases, and his abilities are needed. The administrative details – passports, credentials, and the paraphernalia of modern life are handled skillfully and believably, and we see Holmes able to function in this world. And since he has never burdened himself with the details of abstract science lest he fill his head with needless theory and leave no room for what he considered vital, the adjustment is easier for him than it would be for most time/dimensional travelers.

Holmes purists may not like this series: after all, here is the real Holmes, at the height of his powers, in 21^st Century America, much as I would imagine he would be. A bit nonplussed at being plucked from his world in a decidedly one-way trip, but he manages; and after all, this is in many ways an easier world to live in. Many of the details of Victorian life are unimportant now. Hygiene is easier, and there is good dentistry, and while Dr. John Watson was a good military physician of the time of the Afghan Wars, modern medicine is a great deal more reliable now.

He has to accumulate a new set of observations, of course. You can’t tell a man’s profession so easily now as Holmes could in his day; or perhaps you can, but it requires a different knowledge set, including a readjustment of expectations. This isn’t and can’t be the same Holmes we knew in The Canon, because that Holmes was inextricably embedded in his times; this is a Holmes who has to adjust to being rudely extracted, plunged into the 21^st Century with no way to return, and he has to change quite a lot to accomplish that.

But he’s still Holmes, and I found the series well worth reading. Recommended, for those who like this sort of thing.

1100 Monday:  Fair warning, at least one long time friend and reader has written to tell me he hates these stories.  It’s a matter of taste: I liked the challenge of seeing a Victorian Holmes put into a 21st Century military/scientific bureaucracy.   I was pretty sure that many of my readers would not care for them.  I enjoyed them.  To some extent it’s a matter of expectations.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.