View June 26, 2011 0300
Corpus Christi
Second Day of New System
At the moment the WordPress system seems to be working but mail to jerryp@jerrypournelle.com is not getting to me. It will by the end of the day. It is very late and past my bed time. UPDATE: mail problems are fixed and all is well. Read on.
It is my intention to keep this open all day and add to or revise it from time to time so you should renew this if you look at it after an interval. I will have a new item for each day, but not multiple files per day. I add to the day book as needed.
Contempt of Cop
Coast to Coast tonight is on the contempt of cop arrest of the woman in Rochester who was videotaping the police and got arrested for it. Interesting discussions, but I am not sure much new has emerged. Any officer who thinks he can prevent people from making videos of his actions will regret thinking that if he believes that will cover up any bad procedures. Electronics are too good and too small and lenses are too good. I can understand a policeman resenting citizens making videos of their actions, but that is probably a mistake given the ubiquity of recording cameras. Police had best get in the habit of acting as if they are on stage at all times.
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And off to bed, it being very late.
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1630 Sunday After Adventures
We are in the process of moving to BlueHost after years of smooth and efficient service from Brian and Greg at zidane.mazin. Rick has been doing most of the work. Last night we moved the mail. This morning it was panic time. For reasons I won’t go into, essentially no mail sent to jerryp@jerrypournelle.com, my main mail address, got to me after midnight and before about 1345 this afternoon. That looked to be time for panic, particularly since there were trickles of mail to other addresses I own, one of which ought not to be getting mail. Eventually we got it all figured out, and in a good sized flood a pile came in, much of it commentary on the new site. That will make up most of today’s mail, which I will form up after I get this logbook updated and sent off.
The moral of the story is, as one might suspect, Don’t Panic. Be Logical. I used to tell my technicians and instruct the junior engineers in what I called ‘the relentless application of logic.’ That doesn’t always work in the electronics age – sometimes I think these things really do have minds of their own, and thus we are in the situation of a military commander in which no battle plan survives contact with the enemy – but in fact it almost always does work. See what works and try something beyond that. In the OR business it was the process of making as good a model as you could that would describe what you have, then take excursions from it. If those look reasonable, try physical excursions to test the model. And so forth. Bit harder to do when your model is the climate of the Earth, of course.
Anyway, mail now works. If you sent mail to me I got it. I mostly got it all at once when we solved the problem, but it wasn’t eaten, and I have reviewed most of it. I’ll get to the rest tonight or tomorrow. It’s all here.
The World Goes On
There is more happening in the world than my transition, but alas, the part of the universe I am aware of has been restricted to getting email working properly. Khaddaffi is said to be trying to negotiate a way out of Libya that doesn’t involve going to some kind of international prison forever. How much is it worth to keep him locked up? Not sure where he would go. Idi Amin fled to Libya, then the Saudis accepted him and even paid for fairly luxurious upkeep so long as he stayed out of politics. He didn’t exactly grow old gracefully, but he certainly lived better than he would have in an Dutch or Belgian jail.
Sun Tzu says that one ought to build golden bridges for one’s enemies, but Sun Tzu is concerned with strategy and victory, not morality and revenge. In any event, the question is, how much is it worth to whom, and who will pay, to get Qadafi out? I suspect that the cost of getting him out of Libya is less than we spend in a week of breaking things and killing people.
I’ll come up for air tomorrow. For today, the relief is tangible: we have View, we have Mail, and we have email. Life approaches normal again. And I’m feeling a lot better today than I did at any time last week. Time to get some work done. Thanks for the patience.
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