View 80 December 20

THE VIEW FROM CHAOS MANOR

View 80 December 20 - 26, 1999

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This is a day book. It's not all that well edited. I try to keep this up daily, but sometimes I can't. I'll keep trying. See also the monthly COMPUTING AT CHAOS MANOR column, 4,000 - 7,000 words, depending. (Older columns here.) For more on what this place is about, please go to the VIEW PAGE.

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If you want to PAY FOR THIS there are problems, but I keep the latest HERE. I'm trying. MY THANKS to all of you who sent money. Some of you went to a lot of trouble to send money from overseas. Thank you! There are also some new payment methods. I am preparing a special (electronic) mailing to all those who paid: there will be a couple of these. I am also toying with the notion of a subscriber section of the page. LET ME KNOW your thoughts.
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Monday December 20, 1999

There is an adventure story about RealAudio with a happy ending in last week's view. I have got RealAudio working; it was settings; and if you have a netserver or contemplate getting one, be sure to read the story.

I am recovering from the flu that laid everyone low. Of course it means I have not bought my wife's Christmas present, and that is a vital necessity...

We continue the LOSAT debate with a letter on shortstop, and open a new alt.mail discussion of roles of branch of service.

The roles debate continues, with a diatribe by the author...

News from a few minutes ago on the hostage situation at the Bonaventure Hotel where a California Trial Lawyer Association meeting is being held. The terrorists are in control and have at least 400 hostages from the conference. They are threatening to release one an hour unless their demands are met.

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Tuesday, December 21, 1999

I am somewhat recovered, but I am still in pajamas at noon. This is not the most severe flu bug I have had, but it is deceptive in how much energy it leaves you.

I will tonight install Windows 2000 gold release in both Professional (Workstation) and Server on two new machines. We'll see how that goes. I have been using Professional for months and like it, so I will be changing over to 2000 Professional on a new machine (Pentium 550 Intel board) and let Princess, the dual Pentium 200 that has been the mainstay of operations here, have a decent retirement. That change operation will probably be the basis for the next column.

However, it is year's end, and it is time for the Chaos Manor annual awards column; I always did that the first week in January. In the print columns this didn't appear until the April issue, but that column will now be out in mid-January. Don't miss it...

Last week we thought we had a happy ending to the Real Audio problem. Not so. APparently I got on at a good time; today, with the same settings, everything is "net congestion" and the interruptions are intolerable. The upshot is apparently that this is pretty good when it works, but that isn't often.

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Wednesday, December 22, 1999

Managed to walk around the block today. Only took half an hour for a 15 minute walk. Between the Santa Ana winds and recovering from this flu I have zero energy.

Managed to finish The Treasons of the Clerks, an article on the most important trend of the XXth Century, which should be posted at www.intellectualcapital.com tomorrow. Also, over at www.teledotcom.com I have an article about the future of communications that may be interesting.

In a discussion group I inhabit -- one of only two, the other being over on BIX; to get on BIX you have to join (and subscribe to for money) Delphi then ask to be put into BIX; it can be done, but you need determination. The other group I am in is not mine at all, but I am pleased to be thought among the peers of those who are there. Anyway, over there the topic came up about wars and democracies, and it caused me to find this to quote:

If you establish a democracy you must in due season reap the fruits of a democracy. You will in due season have great impatience of the public burdens combined in due season with great increase in the public expenditure. You will in due season reap the fruits of such united influence. You will in due season have wars entered into from passion and not from reason; and you will in due season submit to peace ignominiously sought and ignominiously obtained, which will diminish your authority and perhaps endanger your independence. You will, in due season, with a democracy find that your property is less valuable and your freedom is less complete.

Disraeli, speaking on electoral reform.

Quoted in C. Northcote Parkinson The Evolution of Political Thought

As usual there is a lot of good mail. I also found a bunch of mail I had lost, and have fixed a hole in my rules to catch the rest like that. Apologies. Incidentally, in Outlook 2000 the ORGANIZE button lets you make rules in a more flexible way than does the RULES WIZARD. The wizard is useful, but sometime you want to try the Organize route in which you can type in stuff free form.

RealAudio today is once again working so long as you are willing to put up with frequent interruptions and delays sufficient to make it fairly uninteresting. And Earthlink tells me after half an hour on hold waiting, that no, I am not in the DSL area after all, sorry to send me email saying I was, those go to lists and the locations are not checked before the solicitation is sent out. They now owe me for an hour of my time at my billing, and somehow I intend to collect. I am rather furious over this: they sent me SPAM. I would have subscribed had I been allowed to, but HOW DARE THEY put me on hold for half an hour before telling me they sent that to a mass of people and had not checked in advance whether they could do what they offered to do? How dare they? Earthlink has been relatively satisfactory up to now, but this was unconscionable.

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Thursday, December 23, 1999

For the second time the little rebel.com box just sort of stopped working: the modem was no longer connected to the net, and attempting to get into contact with it by doing 192.168.1.1 produced no result. The fix was simple, pull the plug and let it reset itself; drastic, and I wouldn't have done if it were not when it is, but I am not feeling up to anything fancy; and a powered off reset certainly fixed things.

It's working again; as soon as it came up from being hit on the head it redialled the modem. But it was sort of out of it for a while, and I have no idea why. Next time I may try to see what the status is before I pull the plug. With luck it won't happen again...

mike@xnet.com I am getting your mail, but all I send to you seems to be returned.

I continue to recover, but it is slow going.

(Click to expand.) My thanks to Walter Scholne for sending this. You can find the original at http://www.userfriendly.org

My recovery proceeds. I was able to take about a mile walk, on flat streets not on my wonderful hill. Took longer than I thought. When I walk in the city I tend to read as I walk. The dog watches out for problems, and the sidewalks are level, and this is the safest area in California, so why not? Today I read the latest issue of Andy Seybold's Outlook, which was once a fairly general newsletter but now specializes in Mobile Computing and Communications. If you have professional responsibilities in Mobile Computing and wireless communications, and you don't read Seybold's newsletter, you are letting you competition have a hefty advantage. Andy's coverage is good, his opinions are sound, and the newsletter tells you about things you may or may not find in the general high tech financial press -- and what some of the financial and merger events mean for the future. If you don't know about this, look at www.outlook.com and find out.

I took the Seybold report because my OmniSky Palm V wireless arrived today, and I am eager to get going with it. My son Richard has the Palm Net Palm VII system as do a number of other journalists. Cheryl Currid is very happy with her Palm VII despite the lack of a flat fee for use; the OmniSky model is a flat monthy rate of under $50. Anyway I have that, and I will be implementing it shortly.

I haven't found a Microsoft operating system wireless device I like very much, but it's early days. We will see. Wireless digital is going to be big. Really big. But you already know that...

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Friday, December 24, 1999

Christmas Eve. I seem to be recovered enough to take a walk, which is Christmas present indeed. I've been a soldier in one form or another for most of my life, sometimes in uniform and mostly not; and as I get older I find the later verses of a Christmas song not often sung any more to be as good a Christmas message as I know.

Merry Christmas, and may God bless you all.

O ye, beneath life's crushing load,

whose forms are bending low,

Who toil along the climbing way

with painful steps and slow,

Look now! For glad and golden hours

come swiftly on the wing:

O rest beside the weary road,

and hear the angels sing!

Yet with the woes of sin and strife,

the world has suffered long

Beneath the heavenly strain have rolled