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Daynotes: Week of 2 - 8 Oct, MM
Daily notes and commentary -- Week 40
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* Updated: 10 Oct MM at 01:25 GMT+2.
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In the Land of LeufNet, where the Wikis serve.
Rain in morning eventually gave way to just cool and cloudy. But even the
rain is friendlier here than in Malmö, I said to Isabel, laughing, as
I came in with dripping umbrella from a quick trip to the nearby store...
It is however a bit of a contrast with the sunny and 21C record weather of
the weekend. (It was perfect for the party on Saturday, so people could also
be on the patio. Good to see those familiar faces again and have the house
"warmed in" with their smiles and "welcome back!". We had luckily decided
on oven-grilled chicken and lots of home-made potato salad as a fallback
main course for what was supposed to be a "Dutch" dinner. Very yummy indeed.)
On Sunday evening, quite by happenstance, we turned on the TV and caught
that classic The Wind and the Willows, in the
1997 movie version by the
Monty Python members (Jones, Cleese, Palin, Idle). The kids loved it.
Anyway, it was washday this morning, and the afternoon was spent helping
a newly acquired neighbor friend to move from her apartment, just up the
street, to one next door to it -- we carried bookcases, sofas, and the like,
out one door and in the other. She's been packing for weeks, using some of
the many boxes we had, but today was the day when things had to be shifted.
It's some kind of triangle arrangement, where two other neighbors also move
about while their respective apartments get renovated. The end result was
a certain amount of stress for her, partly because of a few days' delay in
getting the key, partly because of the shift in weather. But with enough
helping hands, such moves go very quickly.
Editing work got put on hold, but the delay is not critical. I've been thinking
about some of the changes on and off while doing other things, so I've not
really been "away" from it. Mondays are in any case odd days for me, in part
these days because it's usually very late in the evening before email and
updates start to flow from the timezones far to the West of me.
Barely brushed past the news the past few days. If it's not sinking Greek
ferries, it's random shootings (yes, even in placid, "gun-free" Sweden) and
other psychotic outbursts in locations both near and remote.
If a sufficient number of people who wanted to stop war really
did gather together, they would first of all begin by making war upon those
who disagreed with them. And it is still more certain that they would make
war on people who also want to stop wars but in another way. --
Gurdjieff
I'm not quite that pessimistic about the human condition, but looking at
the news can easily give one that kind of impression. I try instead to focus
on more positive expressions of humanity. Then there are always the more
pragmatic positive issues like client companies paying their invoices on
time -- some actually do that y'know: almost as defiant an expression of
the unexpected as negative enthropy or an intelligent response.
Speaking of defying enthropy, I suppose our apartment is now "in order",
and the process of unpacking has more-or-less stopped. It feels that way,
even though there are some piles of stuff to sort through still, and some
re-arrangement is bound to occur. Cheese slicers have moved about three times
so far between different kitchen drawers, so clearly many objects remain
in, shall we say "excited orbits" that have yet to decay to their "natural"
state. And there must be some bit of black hole that got packed by mistake,
for a few items remain unaccounted for, such as bicycle locks and hairbrushes.
Dinner today evoked the coming winter, for the choice fell to me and I opted
for one of my cold-season (and ad hoc) soups -- veggie broth, carrots and
potato, small spiced salami-like thingies cut up rather fine (left-over from
party), quartered meatballs (from the freezer), peas and diced apple for
extra zest, a dash of vineger, and just add some spices (and Cayenne) for
attitude. Served with cheese sandwiches (fresh white Greek bread) and elderflower
drink. Remarkably, even though the kids found it a bit "hot", they ate with
gusto.
Despite many other distractions, I did manage some further careful review
of the technical review feedback, and some amendments and rewrites to a chapter.
Some other proof-reading work might come in a day or two. And I have the
photos for the web issue of the Doctor Bank newsletter, so that's some web
work for later. Then too, there have been questions about the school "workplace
experience" plan, a two week program that Edward starts in just over a week
-- but where? Hmm... short notice and a distinct lack of options, suitable
or otherwise.
A major distraction was parent-teacher meeting this evening, which mainly
dealt with information about the impending application date for high school.
Our son is in 9th grade, so that means where he is to be next year, and thus
decisions to make before the Christmas.holidays. Sweden has (yet again)
restructured secondary education, with many new "programs", "directions"
and "profiles", and it is no small task to make sense of a) the theory underlying
the many choices, and b) what it means in practice. Add to the mix that high
schools, both public and private, are to some extent competing for the students
(for budgetary reasons), and you get what's going to occupy some of my time
tomorrow: a new, large "exhibition" at the trade center in town where thousands
of students (and a few teachers and parents) will mingle, jostle, and try
to figure out what each school has to offer. Strange...
Nobody trips over mountains. It is the small pebble that causes
you to stumble. Pass all the pebbles in your path and you will find you have
crossed the mountain.
Weather? Neither here nor there. Cool and cloudy. Dinner?
Take-out pizza.
Spam, spam, spam... A "religious" sendout made a resounding
THUNK in the e-mailbox, since it embedded both a Word doc and a
Wordperfect version. Needless to say, I'm not opening any such inclusions.
The "high school recruitment fair", I guess we can call it, was sort of
interesting, mainly in the sense of showing the variety of more obscure or
unusual selections that are possible, specialties of one or another school,
as opposed to the standardized national or regional programs.
I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through
my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts
of wisdom and knowledge. -- Igor Stravinsky
Hmm, it seems I forgot to upload yesterday's short posting to the website.
The trouble originates with the author, do not adjust your reality.
Just too many icons on my desktop... And unfortunately, I seem to be down
with a bug of some kind. Nothing dramatic, but I'm not as well as I expect
to be. There's a lot of that going about just now, and I read that the local
hospitals are having a difficult time coping with the increase in people
phoning in wondering what the symptoms indicate.
Anyway, the plumber was here this morning fixing some pipes and faucets.
Phone rang a lot. I attempted to revise a few chapter sections with overall
decent results. All in all, an OK day, but as usual the hours ran out before
I was done.
Learn all you can from the mistakes of others. You won't have
time to make them all yourself. -- Alfred Sheinwold
Now who the heck is/was he? (Just goes to show, I'm not terribly
conversant about Bridge. 1912-1997)
CDT: content dial tone is a term I've been seeing lately in the
discussions of e-biz and e-publishing. This refers to the concept/assumption
that people are willing to pay a meaningful subscription rate (monthly) for
services based on providing access to other services and resources. Clearly
it works in some situations -- telco's have been doing this for years (hence
the "dialtone" analogy of the term), and ISPs do so today for the majority
of Internet users. What remains to be seen is if the concept translates to
for example software and publishing. Microsoft's plans for dotNet and application
rentals is an expression of this, as are various projects by publishers to
provide online-book "subscription plans".
Some months ago I saw far too many instances of the term
disintermediation -- well, that's history. Now I keep tripping over
reintermediation. Forgive me if I suspect that by Christmas we'll
find a rebuttal position of redisintermediation and
antireintermediation charging into the fray. The peer-to-peer advocates
keep chiseling away at the established middlemen in the flow of goods, services
and information, while the businesses in this mediation and portal arena
keep trying to reinvent themselves to keep a slice of our money.
Speaking of money, I saw today I had gone through the bottom of my main
transaction account (rent, loan and interest all ganged up last week), so
I had to do an interim fill from another. For the first time, I also had
to use one of the new deposit machines. Ugh! The bank branch was open, but
they have done away with deposit slips and just point you to a machine now.
Touch-screen, very slow response to input, and it snatched in the
banknotes in a very disturbing way -- sss-snarf!... wait... +500...
OK; sss-snarf!... wait... +500... OK; sss-snarf!... wait...
+500... OK. I wasn't convinced until I had pulled a balance slip with my
card from another machine.
I see that the people's will has apparently prevailed in former Yugoslavia.
I almost thought it would, but there were (and are still) many things that
can go wrong in situation like that.
Edward has bought himself both Theme Park World (we've had the original Theme
Park for years) and Rollercoaster Tycoon. Methinks I either need to clear
another Gb of space on my system, or do a harddisk rotation from 6+2 to 8+6
Gb (need to buy a 2.5" 8Gb first -- or actually find the money...).
Some local news datapoints...
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70-year old man forgets hunting dog was tied to car hook, drags dog 2 km,
is fined.
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More Swedes than ever cannot afford prescription medicine at pharmacy: tougher
enforced collection rules proposed.
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The number of lab animals used in "clinical trials" has increased dramatically
in last 10 years, contrary to legislation and stated intentions.
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Parliamentary representative proposes Daylight Savings Time be kept
all year round so that people don't have to adjust twice a year and risk
confusion. The interview was also confusing, and not once was it asked why
not simply drop DST altogether!
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Proposal raised to introduce a "driver's licence" to be allowed to trade
shares over the Internet. Sweden already has a comparable certification for
people who have gone through approved training programs for various
computer-related jobs.
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Even more "docu-soaps" will fill TV channels this season. "Interact and
vote out a new participant each week!" shriek the headlines for one
-- but how does that work, the episodes were all filmed during the summer
... ? Quasi-explanation given for the phenomenum: people are too stressed
out to have a normal life, so are therefore willing to stare at boring 24/7
video clips in order to experience stay-at-home life at one remove. Dunno
about that...
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Poll shows that 80% of Internet users believe paper newspapers will remain
despite the Internet versions of the same issues. Only 3% say they read only
the net versions.
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Girls avoid speaking in regional dialect, Swedish study reveals, while most
boys feel dialects are very important for their sense of identity.
And lastly, the phones are out of order upstream of the exchange for some
reason, so connectivity and updates will have to wait. They went down sometime
between 2 and 4 PM. I've phoned telco support twice from a neighbor up the
street, but they seem somewhat mystified.
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(22:30) Hmm, total downtime on connectivity and phones today:
at least six hours outage. Unusual to say the least. I spent some of the
time just rewriting parts of a chapter, and seeing the ISDN-modem's indicators
periodically going from live, to standby to dead as the telco repair people
evidently were testing, reprogramming, and undoubtedly rebooting the exchange
modules. The phones were consistently useless throughout -- either dead,
comatose, or issuing a regular blocking signal in lieu of a dialtone.
No matter, connectivity is back: crisp and fast. Time to post this.
Swedish users (that is to say, those not connected via the university networks)
are still blocked from "Internet2" sites -- that's now about a year that
I know of. I last wrote about this on June
2, after doing some serious investigation, because numerous US edu sites
with wiki content that I wished to research for the wiki book were never
available. I've been checking on and off since then via the two different
ISPs I use, who have different routings across the Atlantic. Still the same
story, access is denied somewhere in the US backbone.
Sadly, the "charsplat" anonymizer I've successfully used to circumvent
this access block was taken down recently due to "abuse", and sites like
anonymizer.com are simply too slow and banner-ridden to be very
useful to me.
So, I figured the time has come to set up my own personal proxy anonymizer
to effect a permanent solution to this vexing problem. For those interested
in roll-your-own proxy solutions,
proxys4all.cgi.net is a site worth
bookmarking. I'll keep you posted on the results of my experiments.
Here's a curious data point that can be indicative of other access problems
in future...
Content-delivery firm
epicRealm
in July began offering a prioritization service that allows companies to
serve Web pages to loyal customers faster than to other visitors.
The company phases it all from another angle, of course, and the idea isn't
bad in some contexts -- that epicRealm's technology that prioritizes "important"
connections when traffic loads would otherwise give unacceptable delays (see
their
whitepaper).
E-biz wants this to ensure that customers aren't lost. Only I see this being
used in other ways too, sort of like "nagware" works today for unregistered
shareware, by introducing irritating delays to prompt you to sign
up for "priority service".
Ah dear, time's up yet again. No longer today, it's tomorrow...
As you grow older, you'll find the only things you regret are
the things you didn't do. -- Zachary Scott
(Lost a day... Rained away...)
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