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Week of 9 April 2001 Latest
Update: Friday, 05 July 2002 09:16 |
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Monday, 9 April 2001 [Last
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Barbara walked into my office yesterday morning and started a dialog, which went something like this:
Well, I'm exaggerating about the last part. They were actually boxes of disk drives and host adapters, although Barbara didn't really toss them down the stairs. But I have no doubt that she will do that if I don't get this place cleaned up. When I mentioned this disturbing development to Pournelle, his response was, "Ohmigod. And they’ll get together on it too." Now there's a worrisome thought. But there is a good side to all of this. I've been wanting to come up with "a name for this place". Barbara named it unintentionally when she called my office a "rat's nest". That makes this place The Rat's Nest™ (hereinafter "the Nest" for short) and me The Rat™. Barbara insists that I be careful to point out that the rodent reference applies strictly to my office and not to the rest of the house, so I'm hereby pointing that out. For a global identifier, she insists that we refer to the place as TechnoMayhem™.
The first official photograph of The Rat's Nest™.
Barbara is off to the gym this morning, and I'm doing my usual Monday morning routine--updating web pages, running web access reports, and so on. My stats are up a bit over the last couple of weeks. The "unique visitors" metric is back up a bit, to around 3,000, although it's still well off from the former 5,000 or so. I do see where most of my reduced page-read count is coming from. I have something like 5,000 failed page reads, most of which originate from search engines that still have the original document locations cached. Since I moved the back issues of my daily journal to the password-protected subscriber-only area, I'm getting a lot of failed attempts from people using those search engines. Presumably that will taper off as those search engines re-index my site and eliminate the inaccessible pages from their indices. Well, I just heard the garage door go up, so that means Barbara's back and I need to get to work. Blowing out gutters today, along with cleaning up the Rat's Nest™. And perhaps even some writing... Click here to read or post responses to this week's journal entries Click here to read or post responses to the Linux Chronicles Forum [Top] |
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Tuesday, 10 April 2001 [Last
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| As regular readers know, I frequently deplore the spreading
influence of bad English. Bad English written in ignorance is annoying
enough, but the spread of intentionally bad English spawned by the
Feminist movement and later by the Political Correctness movement is
worse. The slide began with attempts to neuter masculine and feminine
nouns. Calling a murderess a murderer, an actress an actor, a waitress a
waiter, or (gag) a stewardess a flight attendant is absurd, if only
because it conceals useful information for no good purpose. Such neuter
constructs were the beginning of the slippery slope that's led to such
barbarisms as "his or her" and (shudder) "s/he".
But there's another category of butchered English that really disturbs me, and that's misusing words to grant more status than the object referred to should rightfully be accorded, typified by such things as referring to garbage men as "sanitation engineers". I always want to ask someone who uses such an inflated title which university granted him his engineering degree. To extend that, there seems to be a modern tendency to attribute admirable personal qualities to people who haven't demonstrated those qualities, at least on the basis of what's being described. For example, Barbara was watching golf the other day. One of the commentators described a putt as "courageous". What, he'd bet his life on making that putt? Similarly, sports figures and movie stars are frequently described as "heroes". ("Heroine" seems to have gone out of use; see above). Every time I hear the word hero used that way, it makes me cringe. A fireman who goes into a burning building to rescue a child is a hero. The cop who pursued the goblin through a school recently, exchanging shots with him, was a hero. The power company folks who climb poles during storms to splice broken high-voltage cables and restore electrical service are heroes. Doctors and nurses who rush to aid the victims of an Ebola outbreak are heroes (and heroines). Leonidas and the Spartans at Thermopylae were heroes. Heroes and heroines are people who (a) risk their lives to (b) accomplish something that benefits others sufficiently to make the risk worth taking. Someone who hits a lot of home runs may be a good baseball player, and he may even be an admirable person, but he's not a hero on that basis. Race car drivers may risk being killed during a race, but they fail the hero test on (b) above. They're in it for themselves, for the money, the glory, or whatever. Diluting the meaning of the word hero by using it when it is not justified simply cheapens the word.
Long-time readers may recall that when Malcolm was a young pup he decided to build his own PC. That was before I'd blocked off the Nest, and I frequently spotted Malcolm carrying off a CD writer, some IDE cables, or whatever. While cleaning the Nest yesterday, Barbara and I decided that Malcolm was old enough to be trustworthy, so we removed the sheet of plywood that I'd been using to block the door. Then we took a break. I was sitting on the sofa reading when I heard Malcolm rooting around. I watched as he emerged a minute or so later, carrying a small box in his mouth. Yep, you guessed it. A gigabyte of Crucial DDR-SDRAM. Then, a few minutes ago, as I was writing this page I heard the rustle of plastic. I looked over to my shelves and noticed Malcolm extracting a bagged hard disk from the stack on the bottom shelf. This time, he'd chosen a 60 GB Seagate SCSI drive. I must say that he's making well-reasoned component choices, particularly for a dog. Click here to read or post responses to this week's journal entries Click here to read or post responses to the Linux Chronicles Forum [Top] |
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Wednesday, 11 April 2001 [Last
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I'm a member of a loose confederation of daily journal
keepers whose home page is at www.daynotes.com,
maintained by Tom Syroid. In
addition to the portal page, Tom maintains a "backchannel"
mailing list, which all of us read and to which many of us frequently
contribute. In the past, the tone of that list has been civilized and the
volume relatively low. In the last week or so, that changed dramatically.
It all started with one of Chris Ward-Johnson's (AKA Dr. Keyboard) daily
journal entries. I took exception to the part about the UK being
covered in trash by the year 2050, and sent the following response to the
backchannel mailing list:
That was the message that started the ball rolling, and I'm very unhappy about the results. Ten days later, there have been scores of messages posted, the discussion has gone far afield, the list has devolved into ad hominem attacks, and Tom Syroid has temporarily taken down the mailing list. The proverbial camel straw was a post yesterday in which the poster said that he hoped to see Chris's obituary. That poster, I hasten to add, was not one of those who has a web site on the Daynotes.com page, but was someone who'd been invited recently to join the backchannel mailing list. That comment was obviously grossly excessive, but what really disturbed me was that the person who sent that message was on "my side". That is, he was one of those who argues for rationality and science against the insubstantive emotional arguments that Chris was putting forward. There was lots of blame to go around here, starting with my original snide "Oh, come on. Didn't they teach you range checking when you were a little fellow?" remark. But the upshot is that the guy who posted the over-the-top remark resigned from the list as a part of that message. Chris resigned from the list because he can't take the abuse. Chris's wife, Wendy, was in tears yesterday. After recently having been the target of a series of telephoned death threats, the last thing Wendy needed was someone saying that he looked forward to seeing Chris's obituary. I didn't know what to do, but I knew I needed to do something, so I sent the following message to Tom Syroid this morning:
So I'm not very happy today. And to top it all off, I haven't started on our taxes yet. That means there won't be much here until next Monday. Click here to read or post responses to this week's journal entries Click here to read or post responses to the Linux Chronicles Forum [Top] |
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Thursday, 12 April 2001 [Last
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Daynotes Backchannel Mailing List
Taxes today. And tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow... Click here to read or post responses to this week's journal entries Click here to read or post responses to the Linux Chronicles Forum [Top] |
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Friday, 13 April 2001 [Last
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| Tom Syroid decided to take the Daynotes.com portal page
down last night. All of the links from the original Daynotes.com portal
page (as of yesterday) are available here,
where they will remain. (If yours is one of the links on this page and
you'd prefer not to appear there, let me know and I'll remove the link).
Well, I wrote that last night. As others have said, the Internet regards censorship as damage and routes around it. I'll leave my local copy of the Daynotes portal page up permanently and bookmarkable, but Bob Walder has already picked up the ball and run with it. He has the new Daynotes portal page up on his site, and has also revived the Daynotes backchannel mailing list on his own server. Bob just posted a message to the backchannel saying that he's registered daynotes.org and will have www.daynotes.org up and running once he gets the DNS and Apache issues sorted. Thanks, Bob. Click here to read or post responses to this week's journal entries Click here to read or post responses to the Linux Chronicles Forum [Top] |
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Saturday, 14 April 2001 [Last
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| Interesting email from O'Reilly yesterday. They've finally
gotten Safari into production. For
those who aren't familiar with the concept, Safari is O'Reilly's first
major foray into e-books. Rather than package the books as protected
PDF's, however, O'Reilly puts them up on the web. You can subscribe to the
web site at different dollar levels which give you access to different
numbers of books. One level, for example, gives you access to your choice
of any five of the books available. A higher subscription price gives you
access to any ten books, and so on. You can swap books in and out of your
"desktop" during the course of the subscription. I'd give you
more details, but the site seems to be down at the moment. Which is rather
ironic.
This whole idea scares a lot of authors to death. Basically, if someone subscribes to a book and leaves it on his desktop for a year, the author of that book makes about the same royalty that he would if someone bought one copy. Many authors fear, of course, that someone will subscribe to their book for a month, suck it dry, and then drop it, leaving the author with 1/12th the royalty that he'd otherwise earn. My own feeling is that that usually won't happen. Safari is probably a good thing for authors. I suspect what'll happen is that a lot of people will subscribe to a book, decide they want it, and buy the book rather than trying to sit there reading it on screen. There will be exceptions to that, of course. Someone might just need a quick look at a particular book to get a specific answer, and so will add that book to their desktop for just one month. Would that person have bought the book for just that quick look? Possibly, but it's more likely that they'd borrow the book from a friend or the library. I think what'll happen is that more books will be exposed to more potential buyers and some of those potential buyers who would not otherwise have bought the book will end up doing so. None of my books are among those available on Safari, at least right now, but I wouldn't object to O'Reilly making them available. O'Reilly sent the email I referred to all of its authors. It includes a username/password that grants full access to all titles. I took a quick look at them last night. There are lots of interesting books already available, and more to come. If you're interested, visit the Safari site. Time to get to work on taxes...
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| TurboTax scared me to death yesterday. After I finished
entering stuff, the little indicator at the top right was telling me I
owed the federal government something like $9,000 in additional taxes
above and beyond the estimated taxes I'd paid last year! Then I realized
that I had a whole stack of business expenses that I hadn't entered yet,
and that TurboTax hadn't asked for. Everything on Schedule C, in fact. I
went off in search of Schedule C in Help, and it didn't find it! It
brought up an alphabetized list that included Schedule A, then Schedule B,
then Schedule D. Urk.
I found myself wondering if the federal government had passed a new law that self-employed people couldn't take deductions. Wouldn't put it past them. But that seemed a bit extreme even for the federal government, so I started wondering if somehow I'd ended up with the TurboTax AntiBusiness Edition. Finally, after a bit of cruising around in TurboTax, I found the Schedule C stuff, but it was unchecked and grayed out. So I clicked on the first check box in that list of Schedule C stuff. It brought up the automated interview thingee for Schedule C, and I was off to the races. It looks like I'll still end up owing the feds, but nothing like $9,000. I think the federal government needs to revamp the income tax system entirely. The whole thing is unconstitutional anyway. If you check the details on the amendment that supposedly enabled the income tax, you'll find that it was never legally ratified. But there it sits, just like a real amendment, and no one ever mentions that in reality it was never adopted. I propose that the federal government get rid of all the forms and deadlines, and replace them with a simple appeal: "Send in whatever you think we're worth, and send it in any time you feel like doing so." Kind of like public television. The current system is exactly analogous to gangsters who demand protection money from shopkeepers. "Pay us or we'll break your face and burn down your store." No difference. At all. Oh, well. This has been a terrible week. I hope that next week things will be back on an even keel. Click here to read or post responses to this week's journal entries Click here to read or post responses to the Linux Chronicles Forum [Top] |
