Taking a time out

View 786 Tuesday, August 13, 2013

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

President Barrack Obama, January 31, 2009

My son Phillip is in town with his wife Patty and their children Catherine and Emma. I will be dependent on my ThinkPad, and while I have this AT&T gadget that is supposed to provide high speed wireless – and it has in the past – my attempts to buy some more time for it have failed, and I’ll have to go to an AT&T store to get that straightened out. I suspect I end up with a new account and have done with it. I haven’t used this one since last summer, and apparently AT&T forgets about you if you don’t use their services.

So: if I can find an Internet connection or get the AT&T gadget activated, I’ll be on line sometime this week. If not, then I’ll have a nice vacation. The house is in good hands, and Sable feels good enough that I don’t mind leaving her with the sitters (old friends we’ve known for years who live in the house for us when we’re away). If I get a few minutes at an AT&T Store I’ll either buy another of those gadgets or more likely get a new sim card and account for this one, and I’ll be back on. If not, I have my iPhone, I have most of my current work on my computer, and I’ll just be out of communication for a few days.

My ancient – 1980’s! HP LaserJet has a paper jam that I can’t manage to fix. It doesn’t open up to where I can get at the tiny bit of paper that tore off and there is not manual way to make it just turn the feeder. I am sure it’s about 2 minutes to fix for someone who knows what they are doing, but it happened when I was writing the checks to pay the bills and I had to make out the checks by hand reading from the computer screen. That shot the say. It is actually not a bad week. We thought Sable would be gone by now but she still enjoys her daily walks, she knows she can beg from the sitters whom she loves, and she’s really not much worse off now than she was 8 months ago. I had some help in cleaning out 20 years worth of junk going back to DOS software days, so there’s getting to be a bit of room in the back room so I can move stuff from the Great Hall and finally turn that into a place where I can sit and talk with people. Slowly making progress on Mamelukes. It goes slow but I am writing.

The news isn’t very good and is even less interesting but then it’s the Silly Season. Oprah either was not insulted and the insult either was or was not racist, and everyone is sorry, and it’s still a dull story – and still the most interesting so far this week. The Egyptian Army continue to hope they can become the new Mamelukes as they were in the old days, with the Kemal Ataturk model to guide them in the 21^st Century. That is probably the best Egypt can get, but there are plenty who don’t want that. The Muslin Brotherhood thinks it has won the right to govern – one man one vote once, and they got a plurality, so get out of our way – and everyone else thinks that isn’t what they thought they were getting. And the Army says no, we will not assist in installing Sharia and suppressing minorities and generally breaking heads. If there are heads we must break then we will do so for our own cause, not that of the Muslim Brotherhood. And what happens next isn’t predictable. To predict it we would need a reliable estimate of the confidence we can give the gutted remnants of the CIA as the old hands retire and the new troops take over. We’d also need to know just how much damage the Benghazi hang up did when the Commander in Chief simply vanished from the control room for hours yet no clear orders had been given.

After Sadowa von Moltke said that he was the last field general to operate without a telegraph wire from the high command up his arse. The days of the independent commanders were over. Roosevelt delegated a lot to Marshall, and Marshall left most of the operations to Eisenhower. Truman tried something of the sort with MacArthur and decided that didn’t work in Korea: MacArthur skated too close to the winds of war with China, and it took a lot of diplomatic fiction to pretend that the US wasn’t at war with China as they killed our troops in Korea. W got through all that, but more and more power was concentrated in the White House. Jimmy Carter was on the phone to Charley Beckwith all during the Iraq operation and its failure.

Benghazi was another chapter in that story. What effect that had on the effectiveness of special ops isn’t something we’ll know for a while. It had one. You can be sure of that.

And Elon Musk wants to build sealed pneumatic tubes between LA and San Francisco, claiming that can be done cheaper and operate at lower costs than high speed rail. Just how much the effects of all those faults and elevation changes will impact on the pneumatic transfer scheme hasn’t been determined. It’s worth discussion when I get back on duty.

I may or may not be getting email, and I may or may not be able to keep up with much. Mostly I’m going to enjoy my grandchildren.

Back when I can be.

I did go down and play with the antenna, rotating it this way and that, and got the LG set to find two more channels.  I can now get channels 4 KNBC and 7 KABC but not 2 KCBS (nor 34 or 43 which seem to be where it broadcasts;  there is more to that story, but no time now).  KCBS seems to have the weakest signal of the bunch.  With digital you get it or you don’t  (and it breaks up more or less often depending on signal coherence).  With KCBS we just don’t get it here.  I’m not going to climb about on the roof.  I don’t think we get DSL here; just too far from the switch. But perhaps AT&T or DSL Extreme or someone has an offer. I’ll see when I get back.  Or maybe Time Warner and CBS will settle their dispute.  And pigs will grow wings.

Wednesday, August 14, 2013 1630:

As it happens I am at the beach place on Wednesday afternoon, about to go to dinner with Phillip and the grandchildren, and able to connect with the old reliable if a bit slow EarthLink dialup connection. It is slow and I can’t use it to cruise the Internet for information, but it does get email and let me update this page.  At least this is a test…

Odd.  Using the Lenovo ThinkPad and EarthLink dialup, it took less time to update this page than it does back home.  I’ll have to look into that.  Possibly something to do with Firefox and lots of open tabs?  Or Internet traffic? Or just luck this time.  I’ll pay attention but I suspect it’s nothing to be interested in. And I’m off shortly.