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THE VIEW FROM CHAOS MANOR

View 153 May 14 - 20, 2001

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This is a day book. It's not all that well edited. I try to keep this up daily, but sometimes I can't. I'll keep trying. See also the monthly COMPUTING AT CHAOS MANOR column, 4,000 - 7,000 words, depending.  (Older columns here.) For more on what this place is about, please go to the VIEW PAGE.

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This week:

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Monday  May 14, 2001

Home from the beach. Niven has PacBell DSL working. If they can get it working for him they darned well can do it for me. Wednesday is the day. They say.

 

 

 

 

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Tuesday, May 15, 2001

Heart specialist needs information. See Mail

Good news for a change:

 

Jerry,

There is no backdoor in FP98. This is 'old news', the story broke a month ago, and was debunked pretty quickly.

http://lists.essential.org/pipermail/am-info/Week-of-Mon-20000410/002701.html 

regards John

rice@vx5.com webmaster, network admin, janitor

 

And once again the net is not working, and I am waiting for connections to my server. Forever. I hate this. I hate the Internet. 

Sure. It gives us these things we never had before. Then it gets us used to them. Then it takes them away again. Bah. But then it clears up.

With luck tomorrow I get DSL but I will not bet on it.

 

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Wednesday, May 15, 2001

It is a good thing I did not bet. Of course PacBell determined suddenly that I am too far from the switch. Why they did not do that before we went through all this including my rearranging my schedule to be here today for the execrable PacBell is another story. I see their ads for their "reliable" networking on TV and I laugh and laugh. PacBell has outsourced customer relations to Elbonia, and I would no more rely on their networking services or servers or anything else than I would on e-machines. When a company does one thing not badly but terribly, why would you rely on them for anything else?

I have managed to get on line in the "closed" areas of the Science Fiction Writers of America discussion groups. I had forgotten just how awful news groups can be, and just how the structure encourages meaningless chatter, "me too" messages, responses to things dead a week ago, flames and revivals of flames, and hiding the substantive material amongst endless redundancies -- and repetitions of things that need not have been said at all. I suppose I should not be astonished that I was encouraged to be intemperate myself.. Of course there are some diamonds among the shards, and apparently SFWA runs some member information services that are pretty nifty (only I already have more information than a man can stand...)  Anyway that and waiting for Godot -- sorry for PacBell -- took up the day. Roland called them finally and lo! they had cancelled. And it can't be done.

So I am where I was about 3 months ago. Sprint won't work here. Satellites do not seem to be the answer. I really hate the idea of paying for a conditioned T1 line. Black magic?

As to news groups, it is not at all astonishing that people who hang around in them go insane. If you hang out among enough crazy people you get that way. And there are those who simply cannot stand to let anything go unanswered, and those who hang about waiting waiting waiting for something to answer tend to be a little nuts.  Worse, it's a tendency I have to fight myself, and when I have nothing else to do, I find I succumb. Fortunately there is Everquest to tempt me away when I have too much time...

 

 

 

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Thursday, May 18, 2001

Went to Optometrist in the morning, E3 before noon to afternoon, home, dinner with Peter Glaskowsky, Alex, Eric, and high bandwidth expert Dan Spisak. We may yet have a way to get bandwidth to Chaos Manor. May.

 

 

 

 

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Friday, May 18, 2001

There was little at E3 for me. Noisy. Lots of console games. Some of it is nifty but the overall effect isn't one I like.

I spent a good half hour or more with the Everquest people. I am sad to report they are making the place even more interesting. The new graphics are nifty, and there are new cities and a new playable race. Sigh.

More time with the newsgroups yammer. There is something fundamentally wrong about their structure. People bring up, casually, matters that look vital; when you ask you are told "that's old news" as if that answers the question, and then we go on to important matters like whether former officer Gooblwotck brushes his teeth or if that's the reason for his bad breath?

I see California, having bought Amory Lovins's "Negawatts" notion of conserving your way to prosperity, is now unhappy that Bush hasn't solved the problem with the stroke of a pen. The "solution" California seeks is to make everyone else pay for the State's imbecilities. Internally the "solution" is to make everyone in the state pay for the damage caused by the artificially low rates in some power districts. In fact we all have: the budget surplus is gone, there will be no tax refunds, and the state now natters about conspiracies and seizing power plants. The governor points to the new power plants being built -- all of them natural gas and small, all of them peaking and load shaving plants: there are no new baseline plants.

There aren't any because we bought the negawatt snake oil. We bought that because we have been sold the bill of goods that there is virtue in "not wasting energy."

Bushwah.  There is no virtue in conservation. There may or may not be economic reasons for conserving, but there is no virtue in turning off the lights if it is inconvenient to have them off. For that matter wear and tear on switches and light bulbs can result in more energy being used (to build their replacements when they wear out faster) than was saved. And still there is no virtue in leaving them on or turning them off.

It is the effects of energy generation that can be harmful if not done carefully. Again I point out that the stack gasses from western coal go into scrubbers cleaner than the stack gasses of eastern coal come OUT of the scrubbers. The implication is obvious, but the government has set things up to favor eastern coal. It would be better simply to set a stack gas output limit and let the companies decide if they want to do that by burning western and not scrubbing, eastern and scrubbing, or some combination: but as it is the eastern coal users get more pollution than the west users and by a lot.

Politics gets into everything.

At least we are now seriously considering nuclear power, which is environmentally friendly, and reliable.

With enough baseline electrical plants in place we have resources to allocate. We can also confine petroleum uses to automobiles, and tell the Arabs to drink their oil at $25 a barrel.

This morning a Harvard economist said we don't need more oil. There is plenty, this is not like the oil crisis of the 70's. Then there was a shortage. Now there is plenty at $25 a barrel.  Uh -- what else to they teach in economics at Harvard? Cartels can maintain high prices so long as there is high demand that only they can satisfy. Reduce the demand for oil, and increase the supply not controlled by the cartel, and guess what will happen?  I would have thought even a Harvard economist could figure that out, but if you have been brought up on a steady diet of Samualson I guess there is no hope.

Anyway there is work today. I'll post a bunch of mail tomorrow or next day: I don't think I will get to much of it today.

 

 

 

 

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This week:

Monday
Tuesday
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Saturday,

Worked on other stuff

 

 

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This week:

Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday

read book now

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Sunday,

 

I will have Monday's page up this afternoon. Meanwhile read the Paris Report.

 

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