| Monday
August 30, 1999 I was exhausted last night or I would have
noticed that something was very odd. From Tuesday through Sunday, the current mail (which
will now be Mail 63) was visible with Netscape. Then Sunday I did something without
altering Tuesday that caused Mail to crash Netscape. The remedy was to alter a letter that
had been posted Tuesday. There is a letter from Troy Loney pointing this out in the new
current mail (which will become Mail 64 in a week or so). Thanks.
I may experiment this morning with trying to find causes.
NASFIC was wonderful. Most conventions managed by Los Angeles are. Los
Angeles fandom has just the right combination of old hands who know what all the problems
are and have been through it before, and newcomers with energy to go fix things that the
old hands are a bit weary of. Few major "professional" conventions (like AAAS)
are run as well as science fiction conventions, despite the potential for disaster
inherent in putting a couple of thousand individualists in the same place at the same
time. There are some lessons in that, having to do with shared experiences and values, and
some warnings having to do with what happens when, as our larger society in the US is
rapidly experiencing, people try to live together in "diversity" with no shared
values and no shared experiences, and nothing to unite them except acquisitiveness.
That convoluted sentence contains much of the essence of my Guest of Honor
speech. I don't tend to write out my speeches; I talk from outlines, which I try to make
as near to the time I am speaking as I can. That usually works. It doesn't make for
speeches filled with whiz bangs and visual effects, but then I'm not all that good at such
things myself, and I have an odd reluctance to bring in experts and use technology to fill
that gap in my capabilities. If I have nothing interesting to say, I really don't want to
fool people into thinking I did by dazzling them with special effects.
In this case, though, the three hours I had allocated Saturday morning
before my speech for writing the final outline were eaten by technology: for reasons we
still don't understand, when we tried to call home to speak with the housekeeper, the
phones kept being answered by robots offering to take messages. They weren't OUR robots,
nor were they robots we requested. Pacific Bell said the hotel must be doing it. The hotel
said Pacific Bell was out of its mind. It may have been the hotel, though, because we
didn't get that odd message when we tried calling from a pay phone. On the other hand, we
didn't get OUR robot on the line where we keep one.
No one available at either the hotel or Pacific Bell on a Saturday morning
seemed to know what was going on, and apparently our next door neighbor was out in her
garden when we tried calling her. Being a creature prone to panic, I decided we has better
get home and see if everything was all right. After all, our departure for Anaheim was
delayed by burst pipes that had to be fixed, our kitchen was unusable, and -- well, so it
all seems silly. As Roberta knew. But after forty years she also knows that when I get
into panic mode I have DO SOMETHING, and we did more or less have time to get home and
back before my speech. We had less time than we thought because the entire city of Anaheim
is under construction. It seems that the City of Anaheim, Disneyland, and the Anaheim
Convention Center Authority all decided to do major construction at the same time, and
despite having to get permits (so that someone in the city had to be aware that the entire
city street system was about to be torn apart at the same time that two major construction
projects stressed the system worse than anything ever had before) the city was astonished
to discover that everything was happening at once. Naturally I took a wrong turn and ended
up going the wrong way on the freeway so we spiraled back toward home...
Anyway, we drove home, to find that all was well (and we still don't
understand why our phones decided not to work properly; they did just fine when we got to
the house). The upshot was that the outline for my speech was written as Roberta drove
over a freeway very much under construction and through a city that looked like Seoul
after the UN liberated it for the second time. You are probably not astonished to learn
that some of my notes remain illegible.
I am told it was a good speech, and I can only attribute that to a
combination of fifty years of experience at public speaking and a healthy dollop of Divine
Providence.
I have to finish the column before the end of the week since I am due in
Japan next Sunday for a full week. Thus, while I would like to experiment with
alternatives to FrontPage -- the Netscape disaster is disturbing -- things are going to be
rushed this week. Of course there's always something...
We continue looking at the Netscape situation in mail. And Earthlink has dropped my connection
for the 9th time this morning. In looking I find that Outlook has changed a setting for
me. I did not make that setting change. I am very weary of this. DO NOT USE OFFICE 2000
yet. And Earthlink has dropped my connection AGAIN as I am trying to test Mail 63 with
Netscape. Why not?
All right. After fighting Earthlink, getting unwanted telephone calls,
talking on the telephone to publicists of authors I only vaguely remember who want me to
do some project I can't recall from four years ago brought up in a party-- if you are
going to annoy me on the telephone, do it yourself. Don't have your publicist call me.
Preferably don't call me at all.
Now to do the column. It will probably feature how to rip out Office 2000
and go back to Office 98, Outlook 98, and FrontPage 98.
This was created in Frontpage 98 after I "published" the site to
Parsifal (a Windows 98 2E machine), installed FrontPage 98, imported web (which can be
done from a folder). This is the first test. Does everything work back and forth between
the two web sites with the two different programs?
If this works we may start shutting down FP 2000 over there. The reason I
need to do that is that it's pretty hard to cut and paste across the network, and Outlook
2000 is still over there. I want to see if FP 98 can paste properly from Word 2000 or if I
have to kill all of Office 2000 (I suspect I will).
OK: you cannot publish from FP 98 to a folder. Or at least I
can't. I can't manage to publish across the network. I am now writing this
in FP 2000 back on Princess. I WAS able to simply use Commander for Windows
to copy from Parsifal over here to Princess, and open the file to find it
was what I expected it to be. Whether I have thus mucked up FP records I
don't know but I doubt it, and certainly when I save this it will take care
of the situation.
Next experiment: will PF 98 coexist with FP 2000 on the same
machine? Stay tuned...
But first the New Order and Maildex and Index files John
Rice has been kind enough to supply. Install them. FP 2000 is NEAT that
way: you can simply use Windows Explorer and drag files into the FP
folders, and it does the import. That's much more tedious with FP 98.
Bloody Hell. I had forgotten that. But the awful nature of paste into FP
2000... Or is that a function of Word 2000 doing something goofy?
Well we will try something else. FP 98 and 2000 will NOT
coexist. Interestingly, when you try to install 98, it thinks 98 is
already installed. You have to uninstall the existing one to get FP 98 to
install. I will probably do that, but let me ponder some more. Meanwhile
WORD has changed the format for Mail and Answers to MAIL yet again, and I
did nothing. I am now going to try some experiments.
This is the first experiment. I
am going to try to paste text with different formatting. Ye gods,
it worked. So what have I done different?
What I have done different is convert it to
"normal" rather than "body text" before I copy and
paste. But why do those tags come in anyway? I don't want them.
Then there's this:
You always suspected there was something like that, no?
Thanks to Noel Nyman...
TOP
|
CLICK HERE for
a Special Request. 
