| Wednesday, January
24, 2001
I have to go out to mail letters, but first I had to do an audio.byte.com
recording. (That's really http://www.byte.com/audio
but if you put in the above without www and stuff it will work). Before
that I found my mail wasn't coming in. That triggered a panic. In the
panic I managed to whop something I don't understand. Eventually it cured
itself, and the moral of that story is that if it used to work, nothing
has changed in your establishment, and it involves connecting to the
outside, and something outside has changed -- it was raining last night in
Los Angeles -- then LEAVE IT BLOOMING ALONE FOR PETE'S SAKE!
In the course of fooling around I did learn a bit about phone lines and
their routes in Chaos Manor, and that my DSL line isn't conditioned yet --
the DSL modem continued to blink and won't lock on -- and I am still on
56K modem. I happen to be using a Creative Modem Blaster, but when there
is a problem I haul out the US Robotics which I KNOW works. Of course it
didn't this time. The phone lines would give me a tone and negotiation
signals if I dialed manually, but apparently those weren't strong enough
for the modem to hook into. After a couple of hours in which nothing had
changed (except of course I had rebooted the Netwinder and done a number
of other frantic things) it all started working again while I was on the
air.
I have now got to do some serious work getting a phone company official
who understands what "t-1" means; so for no one I have spoken
with at Pacific Bell admits there is any such thing. Real competence. And
you get to spend hours on hold waiting. Thanks Judge Green, thanks a whole
bunch. AT&;T had its problems and couldn't market eternal youth, but at
least they had some human beings on the telephones, people you could talk
to, and it was all only an "O" away...
I see Fry's now has iWill motherboards for Athlon chips. I have had
success with iWill in the past. A combination Athlon and iWill mother
board runs under the cost for a gigahertz Pentium III now. I'll have to
have a look, if I can get out there today. Roberta is off testing the beta
of her new WINDOWS version of her READING SOFTWARE! which we should be
able to ship in a couple of months, but of course her cell phone was left
on charge in her car so that wouldn't start so she has mine, and the rain
clouds are coming again, and I have to go mail the bills. And I am not
going to take a bicycle to Fry's...
I have a
great deal of mail about doing business on the Internet, and
ordering books and the like. I may even pull much of it together into a
special reports page since the advice collectively is quite good. See yesterday
and today's mail.
We also have a reference to an emulation system that may
solve my DOS program problem. And may not.
And this, with the subject "Wow! You are weird":
Hello!
I'm a big fan of your SF-novels and the
complex worlds you create with others. Guess if I was surprised when I
tried to make sense of your homepage. Is it supposed to make sense ? I
can´t tell. Anyway, I just had to tell you to keep up the good work. I´m
looking forward to the next Janissaries novel.
Sincerely Yours,
Peter Svedman Tyresö, Sweden
"How can you tell the difference between
a swede and a Swede ?!" "Easy, Swede has a capital S !"
Is it REALLY THAT BAD? Good heavens. Perhaps
I need a contest for a redesign of my home page.
And I have corrected the paragraph
about population and energy: 9 million is nearly the population of
Norway and Sweden combined, two first world countries added to California
after 1992 when the power projections were being made and Amory Lovins was
telling us how we could conserve our way to prosperity and do without new
energy supplies. Sure, if you used the population projections of 1992. But
in fact we have brought in FAR more people than were projected.
Which may or may not be a good thing -- cultures
can be overwhelmed by sheer numbers -- but if you don't provide energy for
newcomers then either everyone else has to use a lot less, or the price
will go up, or both, and there ain't no way out of that. As anyone could
have seen, which makes me wonder, could they be THAT incompetent?
Regarding
White House vandalism:
From: Steve Setzer <setzer@backfence.net>
Subject: White House vandalism
It's far worse than originally reported, according to Drudge:
http://www.drudgereport.com/wh93a.htm
If any of that is true, it's way beyond pranks. I
am not a regular Drudge reader, but it is my understanding that he has a
better record for accuracy than most; not 100%, but quite good. And
this is serious.
Has anyone looked at:
http://cicentre.com/SpyDrive.htm
and see
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37276-2001Jan23.html
both called to my attention by Sue of the pshrink establishment.
Fascinating...
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