Daynotes 1999 week 18

Daynotes: Week of 3 - 9 May, 1999

Daily notes and commentary -- Week 18

* Link to: last modified 21:50 GMT+2 on 09.05.1999

Hi, welcome to this 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 03.05

Another week. Strange, there's this pile of discarded weeks under the desk; I barely remember half of them. <shuffleshuffle> It's gone by so quickly. Hundreds of thousands of Daynote words. Remarkable...

Thank you all, for your positive and interesting feedback over the weeks and months of this experiment, sharing the experience. Keep those emails coming; they mean a lot.

This week will see a shifting of gears as Tom Syroid and I resume writing in earnest, now on a contracted schedule to produce Outlook 2000 in a Nutshell. Exciting -- a challange to realize the vision we have of what this book will look like, and for both of us the start of a new segment of our respective lives.

Interesting weapons concept: a graphite spewing bomb to short out electric distribution. How about airlifting a lot of US/Canadian midwestern mud to mire the tanks? :) There is no end to alternative weapons technology if we really try. Given these million-dollar-a-shot smart missiles, as likely targets get rarer and stocks deplete, perhaps lower-tech enemy impediments should be seriously considered. E.g. how much surplus EU milk and butter can we airlift and dump on Serb armour for a billion USD? -- Imagine morale effects as the mounds of this sour and turn rancid. Or how about a steady stream of fire-fighting bombers dumping Mediterranean water around the clock? -- should dampen spirits considerably, not to mention the corrosive effects of the salty water on the hardware. Sweden could contribute with tins of fermented herring. :) In fact, we could all contribute garbage of all kinds for aerial bombardment.

There was a rather detailed documentary the other day about Milosovic's rise to power. Unfortunately, I could see but a fraction of it. I recently read up on some of this history to refresh some of the Kosovo background. This confirmed two things: the tv documentary was good, the situation down there is a mess, no matter what way you cut it.

I am prompted to give two (translated) sayings here:

The homeless have no neighbours.
-- Moor saying

and

The absent rarely prevail (win).
-- Spanish proverb

Both of which bode ill for the Albanian Kosovars at this time.

Tuesday 04.05

Good morning, friends and visitors. It's a bright and sunny day here. The main news for today (unless Tom and Leah have their own news) is the implementation of a new discussion forum to complement these pages, and in particular the Mail section. Let me know what you think.

I shall give two relevant links here:

The general "wiki" list (bookmark it for future reference), which will keep you informed of further additions and changes to discussion forums of this nature, and also explains what the heck a "wiki" is.
The DaynotesMailForum wiki server -- where I hope you all will make yourselves at home and freely contribute your valuable insight, humour and personality. This is a first implementation and therefore still somewhat experimental.

I will let the details of this remain in the wiki pages themselves. Suffice it to say that the wiki pages are intended to be a much more dynamic and interactive place than the typical static pages found here. For now I may continue to post mailnotes, but ideally most correspondence and follow-ups should now be posted via the wiki, making the parallel Mailnotes unnecessary.

As predicted by the global warming scenarios, weather extremes get more extreme, and in particular the storm systems just get more intense, as demonstrated by the tornados yesterday evening (US time)...

... The massive storm system, described by weather forecasters as a ``super outbreak of tornadoes,'' swept across Oklahoma and Kansas in a deadly blow that spread destruction across hundreds of miles and into dozens of communities, officials said.
``The magnitude of this is just unprecedented, hundreds of millions of dollars in property damage and literally hundreds and hundreds of homes destroyed. A lot of people (are) homeless tonight,'' Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating said...

Classed as Level 5 (highest), with upwards of 400 km/h winds, these monsters are unbelievably destructive. The warning is that similar outbreaks will contiune the next few days.

It should perhaps come as no surprise that the coming hurricane season is predicted to be one of the worst as well.

Good golly micro-gosh: "NT4 Service Pack 5 Beta Out".

Wednesday 05.05

Actually, maybe it's not only the Daynote Mail section that might be replaced by the new wiki, even these notes could be managed there. Still, the medium does after a fashion shape the message. I notice that even in the difference between this day-by-day layout, and the irregular postings of the "articles" that I maintained last year. I write different things in a different way, and a wiki-style daynotes would again be different. This particular layout has its charm and commitment to regular writing, which may compensate for the immediacy of a wiki version. And perhaps some content "needs" to be static.

The wiki at least keeps track of recent changes and date edited :)

A reader pointed out to me that the wiki server, if accessed with only the "bare" cgi/wiki url-stub, will serve the most recently accessed page -- generally the RecentChanges page. Thus his bookmark list had a lot of different wikis, all titled RecentChanges :) I have addressed this by appending "?DaynotesMailForum" to all the links I've given here. You may want to update your bookmarks accordingly.

Thursday 06.05

Engage... :)

Both Tom and I seem to have more or less simultaneously resumed serious writing again. This creative session will prove even more interesting than last time because of the added focus that Tom's full-time attention will bring. We are also exploring the way a wiki can be used in the collaborative exchange. At a minimum, it brings a different kind of persistence to our exchanges when material is interactively added to our collaborative wiki pages. The extra bonus is that it can be searched, linked and relinked as it changes.

Already, some of you have begun adding pages to the DaynotesMailForum wiki. Great! It's a remarkable feeling seeing the pages change in this way. I was explaining the interactive aspect to my wife Isabel yesterday, and as we spoke someone added a page demonstrating this very thing.

To increase my own interactively, I took the decision yesterday to upgrade my line to ISDN. Next week at this time, I should be fully digital at 64 kbit/s. We'll see then how big a difference this makes in day-to-day connectivity. The main expectation is that with dial-up latency reduced to about a second, I will have at least the illusion of being constantly connected. I also expect my telephone bill to no longer keep rising.

The "constantly connected" illusion will help a lot, because I find myself more and more wanting to make quick connects to the Net; for email, web update, wiki, news, file transfer. The half-minute delay for modem connect becomes rather painful then. As our book work ramps up, I fully expect this "instant access" to become more important.

Friday 07.05

I drank some banana juice today, first time. Interesting... Kids loved it. Isabel and Therese were out biking all day.

Many thoughts, but little useful material being formulated. Towards evening, I did get some more writing done with some semblance of clarity, but most of the day, though not exactly a waste, was not quite the productive time I had imagined being alone at home for those hours.

This collaborative co-authoring work is fascinating, in part because our writing styles match so well. It is a new experience for me, because I have until this year almost always worked alone when it came to creative writing. To go then to co-authoring a book is perhaps as big a step for me, as quitting his normal job was for Tom. At least this was the thought that came to me this evening.

I had thought of writing more, but it will have to wait.

Saturday 08.05

Big doodoo in the news today... Three bombs intentionally targeting the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, evidently through incorrect identification of the building. We will have to see what concrete expressions the expressed Chinese "outrage" may take. Relations have been frosty enough recently. For Serbia, the pressure mounts -- officially there were 600 (!) so-called sorties overnight. No end in sight.

On the home front, I unexpectedly have a day for myself. Both kids are with respective friends for the day, and Isabel has a busy afternoon booked with friends of hers. Instant home vacuum :)

I guess I'll spend some time today on undisturbed writing (book, web) and reading.

Double oops. The Chinese Embassy building had been correctly identified as the target building, but incorrectly identified as to its purpose. In fact, NATO is very embarrassed to admit that they in effect did not know where that embassy was. About the only bulding that would be worse to hit is the Russian Embassy.

Sunday 09.05

* Serbian protest meeting downtown today, as I happened by on bicycle with Therese, stopping for a hamburger lunch. Most was not held in any language useful to me, and in any case rather distorted at the excessive volume used on the square, but it was clear that they were very flag-waiving angry, and "NA-TO mur-der-er" and "Clin-ton mur-der-er" were recurring refrains.

At one point there was however an interpreter on another microphone, and I gathered that there was a short historic background given for the sake of Swedes passing by. This centered mainly on the Serbian exclusive claim to all of Kosovo, based on the pre-WWII situation in the region.

Like I have mentioned before, anyone attempting to even begin to understand this mess, must take a deep breath and read up on at least this century's history of the region; ideally starting with a very condensed encyclopedia version. The bottom line of this is that pretty much that everyone has some valid claim to each and every region based on some status quo at some point in time, but these claims are all mutually conflicting and exclusive.

Note that even under Tito, it proved impossible to hold this region together as a unit, which explains why Yugoslavia was styled a "federation" rather than a "people's democratic republic" of some sort, and even the individual component republics in this contained more-or-less autonomous regions of discontent. Kosovo is a case in point, brought back into line from relative independent status at gunpoint by Milosevic about a decade ago.

Discussions about all this are perceptibly becoming rather inflamed in many quarters.

Hell of a way to end the 20th Century...

Anyway, on the web front, I am starting Next week by letting the DaynotesMailForum wiki assume the role that the Mailnotes page has played up to now. I will therefore post any interesting mail there, along with general comment, and let you all join in the fun, interactively. And I fully expect that much material will be posted there directly, instead of going via email. It is then also fully up to each contributer to decide whether to make public his or her own email address.

Note, however, that I am always pleased to receive your email, so by all means, continue mailing me for a more personal response or discussion.

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