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 page is about, please go to the VIEW PAGE.
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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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I was going to work on the
novel today, but I got busy cleaning up. Eric and Dan hauled away two
carloads of surplus stuff, four big bags went into the trash, two boxes got
mailed off, Alex too a couple of boxes last night, and The Great Hall is
almost cleared. I can see the floor, sit on the furniture, and see wood on
the table.
My office is still a horrid mess, so that's tomorrow I
guess.
Every day throw something away...
The Mac continues to baffle me. Writing to a DVD-RW for
example: when you "copy" to it, it shows you have made a copy. You can open
that copy. But in fact nothing has been copied. There's only an image
treated as a copy. If you thought you had backed up something to that DVD-RW,
God help you, because you haven't. Before it actually does the backup you
have to tell it to BURN. This is entirely unlike Windows where if it says it
has successfully made a copy, it has made a COPY, not merely a virtual copy
on the same hard drive as the original was on.
If you go to shut the Mac down it will ask you if you want
to Burn you R/W drive, which is confusing as hell. But you have to do that,
or you will have an utterly blank disk. (Or one unchanged from when you
inserted it, anyway.)
This isn't intuitive, although some Mac people think it is.
Me, when I drag an icon into a folder, I expect it to be COPIED there, not
just virtually copied there. I see it is going to take a while to learn the
Mac philosophy...
I have to work on the novel today but I am also cleaning up the office,
having got the Great Hall in shape. I work better when I can see my desk.
A Merry Christmas to All.
I got an article on teaching your
dog to sing Christmas Carols. Sable already sings. She also talks. Not in
English, precisely, but she tries to imitate us. Huskies tend to do that.
Sable actually barks, which our previous Huskies did only in extreme
situations; Sable barks fairly often for a Husky, as much as a couple of
times a day.
I expect her to learn God Rest Ye Merry,
Gentlemen, one of these days.
=============================
Today the Thursby AdmitMac evaluation license period expired, and Ariadne
vanished entirely from my network. None of my machines can see her, and she
can't see anything at all: the "Network" button in the finder finds one and
only one server, Ariadne herself.
Clearly the simple thing to
do is pay the man the holiday special price of $99. Macs need third party
software to solve networking problems of this kind apparently. I want to
muck about to see if the revisions to 10.3 have fixed any of the networking
problems so I will probably try that first.
Mostly I need to
transfer pictures and documents if Ariadne is to become the standard laptop
here. It worked just fine under the third party software. We will see if it
can be made to work with Mac OS.
The Feast of the Nativity of our Lord,
commonly called Christmas
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year
O Trinity of love and power,
Our brethren shield in danger's hour;
From rock and tempest, fire and foe,
Protect them whereso'er they go;
Thus evermore shall rise to thee
Glad praise from air and land and sea. Amen
================================
Go to the below website and click on Barney and
Spot's Winterwonderland!
David Couvillon
Lieutenant Colonel of Marines;
Former Governor of Wasit Province, Iraq;
Righter of Wrongs; Wrong most of the time;
Lover extrordinaire; Chef de Hot Dog Excellance;
Collector of Hot Sauce; Avoider of Yard Work
It sure is quiet here. I even got Chaos
Manor cleaned up so that you can sit in the Great Hall, but everyone has
gone now.
Dr. Jennifer Pournelle brought back some neat
pictures from Baghdad, taken from outside the Green Zone, as well as a
couple taken from inside. Outside there is a bustling city, with malls and
souks, offices opening, people installing big sheets of plate glass --
merchants don't do that if they expect more riots -- traffic cops although
Jenny says she never saw them give anyone a ticket. Refrigerators in crates
on the sidewalks offered for sale. Shops, fancy and otherwise. It looks like
Los Angeles, with some scenes from the Arabian Nights, just as Los Angeles
itself looks like a modern southern latitude city with some scenes from Old
Mexico.
I'll try to get some of the pictures up, but the important message is
that some good things are happening, and no one is reporting them. The
reporters huddle inside the Green Zone and come out when there is a bombing,
so that's what we see. And there are bombings, but these are few in the
context of a big city.
But there are enormous gasoline lines, and people who sit in the line for
20 hours -- that's not a misprint, twenty hours -- to get their car filled,
or who buy gasoline from a vendor in a donkey cart, in a country that
floats on oil don't understand what is happening, so the word in the street
is that the United States is stealing the oil. Of course we're not; it's not
being pumped, or the pipelines are bombed before it gets to the
refinery, or the refinery isn't working because it was a thing of shreds and
patches and makeshift repairs done by people working under economic
sanctions -- and who were all sent away because the American experts are
here, thank you, and we don't need help.
But Jenny, who was an Army medic and then later a captain of military
intelligence, says many of the military experts are reservists. "They don't
understand how their own organizations work, and they're trying to organize
Arabs and Kurds and build new organizations in a country that invented
bureaucracy." As an example: the chap whose job it is to tell the military
what archeological sites are valuable and ought not be bombed or blown up
with artillery just because someone takes a potshot from one of them has not
a clue as to how the military chain of command works. He gave the list to
some sergeant. He's not quite sure who that was, the man said he'd take
care of it. Only no one else in the Army has the information. Nor does the
Air Force, nor do the targeting officers in charge of smart bombs and cruise
missiles, nor ---
"It's as if in a University setting he'd given informati0n about a hazard
in the Psychology Department building to a random graduate student in the
Chemistry Department and expected everyone on campus to know about it." When
she put it to him that way and told him he really needed to talk to the G5,
he said "Gee maybe you ought to have this job." Which is all true but the
Agency for International Development isn't paying her to do that. Not in the
contract. Someone is paying that chap to do it. He'd very much like to, but
no one told him how, possibly because none of his superiors know how until
you get up the ladder to people who can't understand that there is anyone
who doesn't know who the G5 is and what he does...
There's a lot of that. Particularly there are a lot of power plants and
sewage treatment plants and city infrastructure maintained with
baling wire and chewing gum (duct tape was very hard to come by) during the
economic sanctions, and the people who kept it going were fired for being Baathists. Now it doesn't work, and looking at it no one can figure out how
it ever worked, since it's nothing like what they see in their maintenance
manuals (assuming the manuals still exist: much of this stuff is long past
manufacture, old and obsolete by any standards, but it was all they had).
And up at the top level you get "Why the hell can't you get that working?
I've seen the &^)(*& building! It wasn't bombed!" Actually if it
had been bombed it would be easier to get replacement equipment than to get
spare parts for a GE generator made in 1956...
But the Iraqi people are pretty well educated, and if given a chance they
can get things done.
"So," I asked, "how do you tell the managers who were Baath Party
members because you had to be a party member to reach a supervisory level
from the party activists who were thugs?"
"The local people know."
Which is about what you'd expect.
One last point: Jenny says that outside a few cities, Sunni vs. Shiite
isn't important: what's important is clans. And the clans around Tikrit were
Saddam's clans and nobody else likes them and they don't like anybody else.
But if you know something about the clan structure you can figure out a lot
of things -- and if you don't know what a clan structure is, or even that
there is such a thing, you can't possibly govern.
Random pictures from Baghdad, 22 December, 2003
Left to right: Outside a hotel window in Annam, Jordan; the name might
startle you.
Going into Baghdad. What the Green Zone looks like from outside. Proceed
across the Tigris: there's a modern city out there. There are markets, with
traditional goods, and modern appliances like air conditioners and
refrigerators for sale. And modern buildings across the river.
But there are donkey carts. Not many. This one is selling gasoline to people
who are willing to pay a lot not to be in 20-hour lines.
Outside the national museum. Going inside:
You may be reminded of the Assyrian room of the British National Museum
(sometimes known as the largest collection of stolen property in the world).
Most of this was looted and has been returned, either forcibly or bought by
friends of the museum. Looters burned much of the library. The large piece
was sawed into chunks for easier -- what? Transport? Sale? The looting was
organized, but some of it got out of hand.
This was the University Faculty of Arts Library which once held a good
collection of old manuscripts and early Arabic art collections.
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