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Saturday,
September 9, 2006 I sit in a most
improbable position, head braced hard against the back of a high-back office
chair (my expensive and comfortable chair having been temporarily exiled),
arm straight out, eyes looking at a level. It's not comfortable, but it does
stop the headaches. If my head is held just right it doesn't hurt to sit
here. At least not a lot, and when it does it's fixable by adjusting my
position.
That tells me that my problems have to be structural, pinched nerves,
unstretched muscles, blocked blood flow, something of the sort, which is
probably adjustable. I can't think that a sinus infection would be relieved
by sitting in a particular position. I still get flashes of a sinus headache
alternating with the hideous migraine-like whammy in the back of my head,
but if I hold my head just right -- which means bracing against the back of
the chair in just the right position -- I can get some work done without
doping myself to the point of being unable to think. And since it is
structural, I expect there's a treatment. Chiropractors, perhaps.
Orthopedists. Physical therapy. Surely there's a way out of this, and I
intend to find it.
For those who don't know: several months ago I developed what felt like
sinus headaches. They combined with an old migraine that I used to get when
I was younger but which I hadn't experienced for years. The two then
alternated in periods of minutes to hours, sometimes in phase so I got both,
and they got progressively worse until it became very difficult to work. I
have since had XRAYS, dental Xrays, CT SCAN, blood tests, and other medical
witchcraft, and no one can find anything so far. I haven't got the formal CT
Scan results yet, but I have discovered that certain physical positions will
make the headaches go away. Not just the migraine which has always been
associated with a muscle pain; but the sinus headaches as well. I find it
hard to believe that posture can affect sinus infection pain, so it begins
to look as if it's all in my head. Not psychological, but some kind of
muscle spasm, pinched nerve, or something of the sort. And as I said above,
if it's structural it's treatable. Anyway, that's where I am, which is why
the columns have been erratic the last couple of weeks.
I have been late on columns. Today, I am preparing the International
edition of the September column now. Half of that will go up Monday, all of
it goes to Tokyo and Istanbul and other places Monday, and the other half
goes up a week from Monday. My apologies for missing a week. I won't miss a
month. Sitting in a ridiculous position to write is a small price to pay for
being on time monthly for 27 years.
The old paper BYTE column was 5,000 words. Sometimes they wanted longer,
as for example when they sold a lot of advertisements and needed editorial
content to hold the ad pages apart, so it might go up to 7,500 words. When
we went over to On-Line I wrote the column monthly, and it generally came
out to about 12,000 words, sometime creeping up to 14 or 15 thousand. The
editors chopped it into segments and doled it out weekly. This went on for a
while until someone made the mistake of chopping it into 4 segments when
there were 5 Mondays in the month. I saw they had fired themselves dry and
rushed in 2500 words to cover. This happened a couple of times. I still did
the columns monthly but sometimes with a weekly supplement. It was
interesting being able to comment on things that had just happened. IN the
paper BYTE days, I would prepare the April column and get it in before 7
January; it would be on the stands in mid-March. That meant having to write
things that would still be interesting when they came out.
I have been doing the Chaos
Manor Reviews columns weekly. For a while that was easy enough, and left
plenty of time for fiction; after all, I am primarily a science fact and
fiction writer who found a great gig as a computer columnist to bring in a
steady income. Now that it doesn't insure a steady income (more on that in a
moment) fiction has to come first; still, it was no problem at all, until
the headaches hit me. Why they happened I don't know. Is this a message?
Memento mori? Bones getting soft? But it sure did remind me; after all, we
lost Charlie Sheffield just as we were about to do another Higher Education
book (my turn to write most of it; he did most of the work on the first
one), and Bob Forward, both to brain cancer, and both without much warning.
That doesn't seem to be the case here, but it sure scared me.
Anyway: I will continue to do the columns, and I will continue to try to
post a new one ever Monday; but the guarantee will have to be about 8,000
words a month. More if I can do them. Plus the mail bag. I contend that
Chaos Manor Mail
(part of this web site) is one of, if not the, best mail columns on the web;
and I contend that the mail bag at
http://www.ChaosManorReviews is as good as any computer-related mail
feature you will find on line or in print.
I also do this page, which is arguably the first blog; certainly I was
doing an on line public daybook long before anyone else I know of. I didn't
-- and don't -- organize in "blog format" with the latest on top, because I
find that hard to make sense of. I don't call this a blog -- I find the name
ugly. This is a daybook, or journal, and while the subject is often
political I don't think of it as a political journal. I have had my
successes in politics, having successfully managed campaigns for Congress
and Mayor of Los Angeles and having been an advisor to a President and a
Speaker as well as to several Members of Congress. I still have a have a few
political contacts, but I don't often use them. Politics has left me a bit
behind: I am frightened of both parties and the continuing trend to make
everything a federal case, leaving nothing to the states and to the people,
and I don't find either party very sound on those matters. I do not believe
in "big government conservatism" and I find the term self-contradictory. I
don't believe in "compassionate conservatism" in any political sense. One
ought to be compassionate, but to the extent that this should be a
government activity it ought to be local; and for the most part it ought not
be governmental at all. The major benefit of charity is to the giver. There
may be necessities -- for a man to love his country, his country ought to be
lovely, and it is not lovely when one lives in a land of beggars -- but in
many cases the welfare bureaucracy is self perpetuating. And I see I am
rambling: my point is that I try to be more philosophical than political.
Political victories can affect principles, and have done so; but if one has
a nation with strong enough principles, then it ought not matter much which
party prevails, except that no party ought to govern for too long. If you
wish to call this page political, it is hard to disagree, yet I do disagree
in that it is not just political: I am concerned about principles which
endure long after elections are forgotten.
I suppose, though, that this page is a result of my having been offered a
position teaching a senior seminar on technology and civilization to a
technical university, only to have that withdrawn because of my work in
"Star Wars." I don't apologize for being one of the founders of a strategy
of Assured Survival -- that was the title of a chapter in Possony and
Pournelle, The Strategy of Technology, 1970 -- nor will I ever; but that did
cost me the professorship, so this page is my compensation, so to speak.
Strategy of Technology in pdf format:
And enough rambling.
All of this is, of course, a pitch to get you to subscribe. I do thank
all those who have subscribed, particularly those who showed great
confidence by sending in new subscriptions or renewals in the past couple of
weeks while things were erratic.
The simplest way to subscribe is through paypal:
That button makes it painless to send in a patron subscription. There
are other methods, all described here.
I do both the computer columns and this page in part because it's usually
enjoyable, but they do have to make enough money to justify their
continuance. And I am doing more fiction, and now that I know how to sit to
write fiction I'll be doing more.
It's sure an odd position to sit in, but it does seem to be working. And
now I have to go work on the column. In part this ramble has come about
because it is taking more than two hours to download the newest VISTA. More
on Vista in the column.
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