| Thursday,
February 25, 1999 We do have good news. I'm just putting things together
now. Stay tuned.
Carol Van Ness was wonderful in Traviata last night. Of course Carol can do no wrong in
my estimation to begin with: a couple of years ago I was introduced to her at a party by
Louis Lebhertz, the LA bass who's become a pretty good friend. Carol said "Oh, I'm so
glad to meet you. I've read all your books." And proceded to name some she'd liked.
Now any soprano who can find time to read my books cannot have any faults... In any event
she certainly made Violetta come alive (and then die) last night. Marta Domingo's
direction was very good, and the sets were outstanding. Great production. The LA Opera has
managed to become world class in a bootstrap operation that few expected to work properly.
Alas, General Manager Peter Hemmings is leaving us, and he has been pretty well
responsible for the achievement. Now if we can just keep it...
I find that I do not have ONE Windows machine
that shuts down properly, and my W 95b system crashes every now and then without any good
reason. I'm going to try reinstalling Windows 95b, and perhaps even doing it from scratch
with reformatting the disk to FAT 32. Eagle One works well, but it too won't shut down
properly. Even BIGSYS the Celeron doesn't always shut down properly. They work, all right,
except for the 95b system that crashes sometimes. One day I'll get in there and find out
what's happening.
Getting a good bit of mail on the shut down problem. Not
much relevant to MY difficulties, but useful knowledge. Watch Mail.
Also in mail, a reader discovers on the telephone what I have been
waiting to let CMP announce: BYTE really is coming back.
Following is my reply to the letter over in Mail:
BYTE is coming back, as an on-line magazine. I
don't know what all will be in it, but they have contracted for my column, and at a
generous rate, too. We hope to be doing show awards also. They're talking to some of the
other BYTE editors. I have been quite favorably impressed by the editorial people I've
spoken with.
I don't have the details, although I make no doubt there will be a steady stream of
them coming out if they're now giving this out on the telephone (see mail for details).
The impact on this web site will be minimal. At the moment you read
the column here; in future, where you would normally find it here, you will find a link to
their site. They will almost certainly have advertisements there. I won't have anything to
do with those, which is what I have wanted: I don't like having to go sell ads or have
someone do it for me. And needless to say, CMP assures me that I keep my traditional and
total editorial independence.
Thanks to the subscribers this site has been kept open, and assuming I
continue to get enough subscriptions to justify the actual expenses of keeping this place
going (as opposed to the research and editorial costs of producing the column and paying
for my time, which the new BYTE is taking care of) I'll keep this experiment going. The
result should be that the experience here will be unchanged for most of you, while I will
have some resources to work with, including press credentials for my staff (I have never
had any problems on that score, but I do worry about how many people I can accredit by
myself).
Watch this space for details, but mostly watch for the new CMP/BYTE announcements.
IN response to several requests: I have ZERO
influence or contact with the circulation and subscription people at CMP. I work with an
editor, who himself has no contact or influence with circulation. Sorry, but there's
NOTHING I can do about subscription refunds from BYTE, and in fact they owe me on one as
well. If they tell me anything I'll pass it along, but for the moment I know nothing...
A new installment of Ed DeJesus on Y2K and You
is now up.
Well, I have tried the REGEDIT in DOS trick described over in MAIL, and no harm
seems to have been done. The system comes up all right, and everything seems to work. It's
hard to tell if anything is different. However, one thing is certain: it doesn't shut down
properly yet. We get to the "Please wait while the system shuts down" splash
screen, and it stays there. Eventually I turn it off; and the next time it comes up it
runs check disk. If you try this be prepared for it to take a while: the registry files
are BIG, and DOS takes a long time to export them. Eventually the job is done, though. May
have been useful; hard to tell. But alas, it did not cure the "won't shut down
properly" problem. We will see if the machine blue screens again. Hard to
tell on that, too, since I do not know what causes it and the blue screen crash is not
reproducible at will; it just sometimes happens.
Aaargh.
If you really want to waste some time, try
getting something off the Internet about the Lisa Myers interview and Clinton.
AltaVista is taking forever to return nothing. WWW.NBC.COM
search engine returns 60 hits all about things like Jay Leno and the Homicide cast; not a
single thing about that. MSNBC insists on frogging around with plugins and things and I
hung up on it after a while since it never did show me ANYTHING other than "this is
your first time here and we want to do things to you".
Do people actually LOOK AT THAT STUFF? I find it hard to believe that grown
people waste that much time. And ominiously, Altavista on +Lisa +Myers +Interview +Clinton
is returning NOTHING as if it is being interecepted. I am sure it is not. I am sure it is
merely the Internet wasting time as usual transmitting so many ads that there is no room
for information. More and more I become convinced that my joke that the Internet is a
conspiracy to see how many grown people can be made to stare at screens on which NOTHING
is happening is no joke at all.
Anyway, I eventually went to washingtonpost.com and back to last Saturday's paper --
simple enough to do -- and read the story, which was all I wanted to do. But it wasn't
easy to get to. The Post seems to have covered it well, what there is to cover, which
isn't much. Given a 20 years story how could there be?
And that is it for tonight. Early airplane tomorrow.
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