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The morning traffic was mildly chaotic today, since it had snowed a lot for
these parts and the road surface was ice. Even buses were stuck in places.
Further north, it was even worse, especially when you got to hills. We're
due for some more snow during the day. Snow does brighten up the place a
lot; pity it won't stay long.
For convenience, I tend to keep a lot of "backup" material on a partition
of its own. Never ceases to amaze me how quickly that space fills up. Every
so often, I connect the external harddisk and do the delete-and-shuffle
two-step.
Last major reshuffle moved a lot of W95 installation CABs off to the
external drive. Why keep those? you may ask, since they're on
the CD. Different builds, is why -- the CD has build 1111 (first release),
while the CABs I've purloined from elsewhere are roughly equivalent to what
was OEM-installed. I really should invest in a CD-burner of my own
for this kind of reference backup...
Trouble is, that external disk is pretty full too, containing a lot of stuff,
including two reference backups of the Win95 installation ("as
delivered" and "working"). I'm sorely tempted to remove those, and replace
with a current, much pared down backup version. Then again, I'm sorely tempted
to simply scrub the entire Win95 installation and run NT-only. The
only real reason Win95-OSR2 remains, is that some games require
it and won't work under WinNT. I should check out which ones --
I know of one that we have, but the others might actually work. I'll get
around to that... soon...
Another alternative is to get a larger harddisk. Necessary, and I will,
soon. Question is, how soon? Answer: as soon as some more
cash becomes available -- car repairs have eaten the current reserves for
"non-essentials".
Apropos cash: I saw an item that stated that 2 billion people today
fall into the catagory "absolute poverty" (less than USD 1 per day). That's
fully one third of the population. I'm not quite sure how that is figured,
and sort of begs the question if dollar/day classifications are all that
relevant or useful, because it e.g. gives the impression that the main task
is to increase their income. Sure, distribute 2 billion (or the equivalent)
and you will more than double the income of these unfortunates, but that
doesn't address any fundamental problems here. I am somehow reminded of that
imfamous Reganomics study that concluded: the main cause of poverty
in the US is that poor people lack money. Yes?
It's deeds that count, not cash. There is an interesting local effort
near where we live -- a used-furniture shop, with lots of other odds and
ends as well. The concept is roughly this: people donate things
they don't want. Given that one generally gets little to nothing anyways
for most used things, the choice is not that hard. Profits from the shop's
sales then go to a private school in Tibet, where upwards of 100 kids are
receiving an education. As thanks, donators receive postcards from the school
in Tibet.
Much so-called "development aid" is in fact barely even stopgaps, or worse
ends up just being kickbacks to the donator country's own industry to construct
something that the recipients don't really need. Direct aid to self-help
projects seem to me to hold the best promise in any situation.
I hold the position that a decent education is likely the best possible
investment in the future anywhere, notwithstanding other efforts
(such as building awareness for e.g. basic health care infrastructure) that
make learning possible.
I believe it was Heinlein who asserted somewhere, that it was in
society's best interests to give everyone as good a (basic) education
as possible, simply because it was impossible to predict exactly who
would need it later, at perhaps a critical juncture for that society as a
whole.
Like many other "oldies" (and parents), I deplore a lot of what I see in
current education. There is little awareness of learning for its own sake,
just cramming for the immediate test, and once tested and past, forget. There
is little concern for wider contexts, critical analysis, or the sheer joy
of discovery. I only hope that I can be instrumental in preserving these
qualities in our kids.
There are all kinds of levels to "sophisticated" vs "simple" it seems; see
the following snippet clipped from a
Yahoo
news article...
"... An Israeli military official said last month that Iran had delayed
a second test of its Shehab-3 missile after running into trouble trying to
apply sophisticated Russian technology to a simple frame it purchased from
North Korea. ..."
It was unusual to see "Russian technology" given that slant.
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See the
update-link (above) that points to the start of
where I last added some text, which should simplify your keeping up to speed.
Of course, you'll still have to scroll back a bit and see if I've updated
more than once since you last visited, but that should be a minimal bother.
.