Daynotes 1999 week 15

Daynotes: Week of 12 - 18 April, 1999

Daily notes and commentary -- Week 15

* Link to: last modified 08:50 GMT+2 on 19.04.1999

Hi, welcome to this fifteenth week's daybook page.

himself See the update-link (above) that points where I last added some text, which should simplify your keeping up to speed. Of course, you may still have to scroll back a bit and see if I've updated more than once since you last visited, but that is easily done.

Webpages live -- i.e. content editing may at times be performed retroactively, so that some "established" content may change (updated links, new comments, etc.) or material be moved. Any such "retro-updates" (or if I write something but for some reason upload it to the site a day or two later) will be noted in the current daynote. For any thematic articles added "on the side", see separate pages off the contents page at the previous location at www.leuf.org/articles/disisay.htm .

Mail inclusions are as a rule on a separate weekly mail page -- see Mailnotes link in sidebar. The Mailnotes link beside each weekday, below, points to the corresponding weekday in the mail page for the same week.

Monday 12.04

Translating at speed.

As relaxation inbetween, I was reading up a bit about 14th Century Europe. This is the time of the Black Death, and it is very interesting to speculate what might have happened in European history had that plague never occurred. It was totally devastating to the social structure of the time. Most of what we today consider specific to the "Renaissance" (and by implication "modern" in contrast to "medieval") turns out to be well established already in the 1300s. In one account it is characterized this way:

... people live in cosmopolitan cities, buy designer clothes in the right boutiques, plan the next new year's party, arrange exquisite dinners, read novels, are conversant in world history, and have monthly wages, money in the bank and house mortgages...
All this has roots in the 1300s, especially in the cultural and financial center that was Florence.

And it all collapsed, in large part because of the plague that reached the region in 1348. Not to say there were not other serious problems, such as the massive insolvency of some of the warring regents of the era, notably Edward III of England who by defaulting on loans four years earlier had already caused considerable financial turmoil in Florence. By extension this had serious effects on the rest of Europe, a plight made more desperate for Florence by frozen crops in 1347.

The consequences of the plague were far-reaching, and sometimes unexpected.

Some links on disease tracking, modern and not-so:

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Home Page
Outbreak (not recently updated, but much info)
plaguescape: the second millennium B.C.E.

Tuesday 13.04

More translating, after some adjustments to comments received yesterday evening about the previous document. Sometimes a simple, explicit tech-definition can do wonders for resolving a terminology problem in the text :) (A is an instance of AX, B is an interface within the instance A. If you don't get that, trust me, it gave a definite "Aha!" about which translated terms to use.)

Serious problems with access to this site reported by my regular's Bob and Tom. Very odd. See mailnotes for yesterday and today.

My own Three rules for life:

Listen to others, then yourself, and most importantly to your heart.

Choose your own path in life, with vigour yet reflection, constantly for each step you take.

Be compassionate, yet true to yourself.

I am resuming posting longer and more casual meanderings in the "DisISay" section of LeufOrg, initially with the article "Free". With the hosting change, it is now so incredibly much faster and easier to update pages under that domain. Enjoy the side-plate offering.

Wednesday 14.04

Translation turned out to be finished ("good enough") yesterday, so now I can gradually resume working towards my original goals of two weeks ago. One of the few downsides to working the way I do with translation jobs now and then, is that invariably, the jobs are rush ones. This means that I must drop pretty much everything else for the duration of that job. In actual fact, I don't usually do that completely, but it is true that most less critical things get put aside for that time.

Of course, now the next job already in the pipeline is writing the Outlook2000 book with Tom Syroid. Given the intensity of how we worked out the proposal, and the outline work leading up to that, I fully expect this little episode of writing to dominate my life for the next several months.

One little petty task remaining, is filing the tax returns. I see that I ended up being late with them this year because of the rush-order work here and the fact that one doesn't really want to think about taxes in any case. Extra confusing lately is the shifting due dates for individuals and small business. Used to be Feb 15. This year it is (was) March 31 for small business and May 3 for individuals. I note that I risk 2 x $60 fines this years for being late (my own and my wife's filings). Unless I can give a good excuse. We'll see. First I must finish the bookkeeping that the returns are based on. Maybe just as well I "forgot" this year; I'm not sure the stress of filing the returns on time would have been very helpful to the other tasks in progress.

Thursday 15.04

The simple grind of entering the accounts. At least it's with a program I am comfortable with (my own).

Catching up on some mail , which updated Wednesday's mailnotes as well as today's.

An uneasy day. Last night I dreamed of being in a city center, rather evocative of Belgrad or a similar Stalin-era architecture, which was being bombed to bits and then some. Waking to the news of "heaviest bombing to date" did not start the day very well. The mood around Europe is, I think, aprehensive as this all grinds on day after day, week after week.

Friday 16.04

Many issues on my mind today. May also have another translation Next week. And as if that wasn't enough, a couple of plots started bubbling in the back of my mind where SF stories develop. I'll have to start time-slicing...

There is a risk because of this that daynotes may end up shorter than usual for a while. We'll see. Posting these notes may also be a bit erratic for a while.

Saturday 17.04

Hmm, must watch the TV-schedule like a hawk. Today Babylon 5 airing time is advanced by 20 minutes again. Then again, the printed schedule is occasionally wrong, which can cut both ways: actual airing time shifted when schedule says not, or not changed even though schedule says otherwise. Show-on-demand would be so much easier.

Sunday 18.04

* As happens at times, got around to seeing one of these films that comes and goes at the cinema before one gets out to see them, but later returns on TV. "The Net" with Sandra Bullock. It was better than I expected/feared, with less of the tech-ignorant computer effects than most of its ilk. My wife, who is exceptionally good at spotting faults in films, remained uncharacteristically silent on this aspect throughout, so I must assume that unusual care went into the continuity checking. On the other hand, there was much screen detail that flickered by without any special explanations (to the better in my view, since film explanations of tech details tend to be downright painful) that I know she did not even begin to understand, and which I didn't really bother to track either except to note IP numbers with components >255 -- the Net version of a 555 phone-number I guess you could say.

The trojan horse concept (here exemplified by Gatekeeper) was kept reasonably realistic, for film, and simple enough that perhaps most actually understood the basics of it. Assuming it didn't flash by too fast, of course. -- The possible failing of the film for a general audience, because a lot of material went by extremely fast with little to help the non-savvy understand what was going on. No matter, as a paranoid thriller, it all worked tolerably well even ignoring the detailed tech issues. I may work out a proper review for my SF review section...

That about sums up what happened today. The kids occupied my system with Jedi Knight, and I said to heck with doing anything sensible with the rest of the day.

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