| Wednesday,
July 14, 1999 Viv' La France Although in fact the
Bastille was not what it is purported to be. There were precisely 7
prisoners "liberated" in the storming of the Bastille, all
aristocrats because only aristocrats were kept there: it was more like a
luxury hotel than a jail.
There were four forgers, two madmen, and a young man who had challenged
the best swordsman in Paris to a duel; his father had him locked up to
keep him from being killed. The forgers were there to escape being sent to
the ordinary prisons, and the madmen were there because their families
were influential enough to get them confined there instead of to one of
the asylums which were literally snake pits.
The garrison of the Bastille were invalided or elderly soldiers who
were there as a retirement: the place was the Old Soldiers Home. They were
butchered to a man by those who liberated the Bastille. The forgers
vanished. The madmen ended up in snake pits. The seventh young man became
a revolutionary and was eventually executed by Robespierre for
insufficient zeal.
But it was a symbolic blow against oppression and it's the official
birthday of the Republic of France.
There is something ghastly wrong with Outlook 2000. For a start, WABMIG
doesn't import to the Contact list any more. It imports to a personal
address book from which you can't make a list, and which only exports to a
PAB file. You can't import those to make a list either. So far as I can
tell you cannot use Outlook 2000 to take a pile of mail in a mail folder
and turn that into a mailing list. Oh joy. Oh Stupidity.
So I have Outlook 98 running on another machine. I export the folder
file to a csv here on Princess. I copy that to the other machine, where I
use wabmig to import into the contacts folder. I then export the contacts
folder on the 98 machine to a pst file. I copy that to Princess, and
import that file, and LO. This is pretty stupid, and a lot more work.
Thanks a bunch Microsoft. The documents for Outlook 2000 are like the rest
of Office 2000, non-existent. I have a big third party book on Office 2000
and it's not helping either. This is really stupid.
Outlook 2000 also glitches on big mailing lists: either Outlook or
Dirtlink, one or the other. In any event, neither of the messages I sent
yesterday got out and eventually both were returned by the System
Administrator, presumably of Earthlink. I have tonight broken the
subscriber list into two lists, and sent the same message to each.
IF YOU DID NOT GET YESTERDAY'S MESSAGES please do not bother to tell
me; I think none of you did.
IGNORE THIS ONE TOO: IF YOU DID NOT get a
message that says it is to the list in two parts, I do need to know it (if
you are a subscriber, that is). I will get this straightened out. Yet.
FLASH. PART TWO OF THE LIST DID NOT GET OUT. I have mail from the
SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR to that effect.
I have built the subscriber mail list up from scratch and sent out yet
another mailing giving it the old college try. If you did not get THAT
mailing (the one that says it's a college try) then worry. If you didn't
get any of the previous ones you aren't alone. No one else did. Or few
did. But this one was done from a clean new list. A few address changes
were not on it. It appeared to go out fine, meaning that the corrupted
list was choking the mail server before. All seems well, but I think what
killed the old list was Outlook 2000, which uses WABMIG in a much
different way from Outlook 98.
I need to do more experiments.
It is now late. The Hollywood Bowl concert was Prokofiev, the 2nd
Violin Concerto, and scenes from Ivan the Terrible with the LA Chorale and
the Phil doing the sound track and a huge projector of actual movie scenes
hanging there. Did odd things to the acoustics but it was a fascinating
concert.
Good night.
Subscribers should have got a message
relevant to Nero Wolfe fans. If you did NOT GET THE
COLLEGE TRY AND THE LAST SPAM OF THE DAY
message, and you are a subscriber, let me know as soon as possible.
Preferably from the system to which you wish mail sent, but from anywhere
will do. Tell me the name you subscribed under (as exact as possible; if
you normally use Dr. Thad of Long Beach please say it that way if you can
remember it since otherwise I have to try to figure out how Outlook filed
it, and that is a mighty mystery; it can be under D for Dr., Th for Thad,
or B for Beach and I have not divined the rules it uses).
Give me the name you subscribed under, the approximate date (within a
quarter will do) and the email address you want things to go to. Sorry for
all this natter about subscriptions but at least I sent you a couple of
pictures last night and I have some more...
Hot as blazes here in the Valley today. Niven and I will go hiking this
evening.
===
CALVIN your mailbox is full and all mail is being returned. Apparently
netcom does that a lot.
===
I have a report that
Word 2000 used with Windows 2000 working on a
document on a network drive doesn't make .wbk files, and a writer lost all
his work because of this. I have just done a test and it certainly
worked for me. I am waiting to see if autosave also works, but if you set
Word 2000 Tools Options Save to always make backup copy it seems to work
fine for me over a network drive. This sounds like operator error. I have
always wished Word would give me the choice of saving in a couple of
places without changing the default save file name and location (let me
save as without changing where 'save' will save) but I can think of
reasons against that too.
Autosave I am not sure of. But it certainly saves across
networks when told to.
===
I have been asked about the Yorktown incident discussions. You can find
them here.
I have been answering a lot of OLD mail tonight. I have also updated
the subscriber list as well as I can. It's late. There is a lot of mail in
mail, most of it with far briefer answers than I like, but that's the way
it is.
Niven and I went hiking and got a lot of work done, plotting a new
novel and what may be a short story, may be a novella, and may be a full
novel; we're just going to let it grow and see. Afterwards we went to
dinner. Decided to go to my favorite French place in Studio City, Pinot
Bistro. OF course I knew it was Bastille Day but I had forgotten they have
a BIG party there on Bastille Day. Was able to get us in, and it was a
wonderful dinner and a lot of contact high from the party atmosphere. A
great day all around.
==
I have put up an FPRI
paper on crusades, old and modern. Very much worth reading for those
interested in foreign policy and the lessons of history.
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