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View 544 November 10 - 16, 2008

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Monday, November 10, 2008

I have double scheduled myself today: I had a flat last week, first one in 9 years, and AAA came out and installed the spare; and I realized that these are the original tired on the Explorer. They've been to Fort Apache and Death Valley and on fire roads in the Angeles mountains, as well as everywhere I drove including Las Vegas a couple of times. The car only has 50,000 miles on it because I don't drive a lot any more -- after all I commute by climbing the stairs, I don't have two Las Vegas trips every year, and when I go places like Henry Vanderbilt's commercial space meetings in Phoenix Niven has been doing the driving in his car the last few years -- but all my friends tell me that nine years is way too long to let the smog work on the tires, and it's time for a new set. I also have post office errands.

Of course I had forgotten that I have an appointment with Niven to hike up the hill -- haven't done that since last Spring -- and he's on his way over.

I'll drive Niven down to my local Firestone and let them start replacing the tires, and we'll start our hike from there. It's time to start actually doing the outline on Lucifer's Anvil (working title, not final decision). And tomorrow I'll get the mail chores done.

Meanwhile I need to get dressed and get my head into Big Blockbuster Novel mode.

I managed 7500 words from Friday noon to Saturday afternoon, which is to say the November column is up on Chaos Manor Reviews.  It's about the Microsoft conferences, Windows Azure, Windows 7, and implications. It's pretty clear I can still write (up to you as to how well, but the quantity is there). So it's time to get my tail in gear and get some words cranked out.

=============

Lest you be misled by me, the proposal to take over all 401K accounts is not part of Obama's plan; it came out in Congressional hearings. It is very much in keeping with Democratic policy ideas and the principle that government control is more trustworthy than private individual control, and their oft-stated campaign commentary that had people been allowed to do private investment with part of their social security payments it would have been a terrible disaster. Democrats have never encouraged private savings -- hence their refusal to stop taxing interest earnings on money on which taxes have already been paid -- so it is not unreasonable to believe that the ravenous wolves, who have already denounced the loss of revenue that results from the tax exemptions on earning from 401K and IRA accounts, will seek to end that revenue loss while "guaranteeing" the retirement savings by putting those in the "Trust Fund."

It is not unreasonable to infer that they'll think this a good idea, but it is not part of any official Democrat program that I know of. I haven't heard any of them denounce it since it came up in Congressional hearings presided over by Democrats, but no one I know has officially proposed it. Sorry if I was a bit misleading.

==============

Back from hike and lunch with Niven. It was extremely productive. I have everything I need to write the first draft of the proposal for Lucifer's Anvil. That's a working title; neither of us is entirely satisfied.

I have some physics and astronomy questions, and I'll be asking some of you about them; those considerable (not casual) expertise in solar system physics and astronomy; and current USAF R&D organization command structure are encouraged to volunteer (i.e. send me a message saying so). I already have a number of friends with the necessary expertise, but I am reluctant to dump too much unpaid volunteer work on anyone, and, immodestly, Niven and I are pretty sure we have between us a number of fans with the time and expertise and will to help us out in planning this. Warning: we're getting down to fairly technical details.

Meanwhile my desk is a ghastly mess and the Great Hall is worse, and after I get this proposal done I'll have to devote a great deal of my time to Mamelukes; Heaven alone knows when I'll get it all cleaned up. Roberta proposes that I throw away a barrel full every week. The problem is that much of it is valuable. That's the difficulty: I am no longer as active in the computer non-fiction business as I used to be, but I hate to toss out anything that's still valuable. I guess I'll just have Alex and Eric and Dan and Joe come over and mine what they want, and make up a huge box for the LASFS Gift Exchange. But ye gods, what a mess.

 

My office, and the Great Hall

It is worse, not better, than it appears. This is the accumulation of about a year of total inability to decide what is and what is not worth keeping. Now I need real desk space to spread out fiction references and research materials, and to make outline with pen and ink (I can use Lisabetta the TabletPC for some of that, but she's slow and until I get this outline in and under contract I can't afford a new Tablet -- and worse, there would be no place to PUT it so I could get some work done.)

For the nonce I'll retreat to the Monk's Cell for heavy duty fiction work, and I'll probably just sweep all the junk off my desk into a banker's box to clear enough space to let me work on outlines. I've never been a particularly neat person: I recall my first year in college, one of my lab instructors -- probably chemistry although it may have been physiology -- berated me for my sloppy habits. "An orderly desk denotes an orderly mind," said he. And I agreed with him, but it didn't matter. I am just not neat and never have been despite all my military training. Perhaps I have ADHD. If so, I'm grateful because whatever my mental defects and bad habits, they seem to have been successful if stressful. Enough rambling on that: I'll manage. And now I have to get to work on that proposal.

===========

This is in mail in answer to a letter, but I'll put it here because it stands alone:

If I were Bush I would pardon everyone in sight, then resign on January 19 and have myself pardoned by the VP. That way the Democrats could save themselves a lot of trouble: they could say they can't prosecute anyone, so there's no need for all that recrimination; and the nation would be spared the equivalent of proscriptions.

============

Hugh Hewitt is speculating that Team Obama will be Carter II, with national malaise, limits to growth, learn to live with it; and that he will take us deeper into Depression, high unemployment, and inflation: the classic stagflation of the Carter era. Clinton wasn't so devoted to ideology that he did that; but environmentalism knows no bounds. 

He takes this from the rumors that Obama will forbid new oil drilling and try to stop some existing drilling; that rumor has already started speculation in oil; we'll see what that does to the price of oil on the world market and at the pump. I do hope that Obama is not that ideological.

 

 

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Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Armistice Day   

.

It is also Veteran's Day, but it is well to remember The Great War, which ended many things.

==============

I had a highly productive day yesterday. I have done the first draft of the proposal for Lucifer's Anvil (working title; we'll look for others. Actually ANVIL! comes to mind as a possible title). It's Niven's turn now. If Firestone is open I'll take the car in for new tires, and also get to Kinkos so I can ship out stuff that has accumulated here. Then I'll work on Mamelukes.

It was a good day but not such a good night. I had trouble sleeping. I'm going to ignore that and keep working.

Commenting on Obama's remark that he would tax the coal companies out of existence in aid of reducing our CO2 footprint, my friend Sarah said that this was madness akin to committing suicide to avoid the symptoms of a non-fatal disease we don't have. I thought that a clever way to put it.

 

===================

This was a holiday, for me also: or think of it as a recovery day. I did a bit of work, but mostly I read and did some housekeeping. After about 10,000 words over the weekend and Monday I don't feel as if I am lazy; and Monday I sure felt great after finishing all that work and climbing the hill.

 

 

 

 

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Wednesday,  November 12, 2008

A couple of errands, then Mamelukes.

Rush Limbaugh had a pretty good diatribe today: we survived Johnson, we survived Carter. We survived Watergate. This election was closer than many. Of course I have said that since election night.

It's very clear: a better ground game would have won for the Republicans in the election. A better ground game getting out more non-Republican conservative votes for other parties would have made it easier to build a more conservative Republican Party; but the opportunity is here. The country club has discredited itself. The efforts that built the Reagan revolution will work again. The opportunity is there.

"But we did that! And the country clubbers snuck in and stole the party!"

Yes. Of course. Who ever thought that one need not guard Fort Knox after defeating an attack on it. We have always known that eternal vigilance is the price of freedom. It's worse now, because capture of government is so much more important than it once was. There was a time when there was enough freedom that it hardly mattered which brand of crooks ran government. That has not been true for a long time -- not during most of your lifetimes, and for much of mine -- and it will probably never be true again.

The nation needs a strong two party system. At the moment those who really don't believe in freedom are in ascendancy. We face Depression. This is hardly the time to give up; nor is it the time to say, well, we will never take control of the Republican Party and keep it. The country club elites who feel entitled will always be there, ready --

Exactly. They will always be there, ready to compromise any principle to keep power.

But we rebuilt after Watergate. We can rebuild now.

I have put up a bit of mail. I'll get more done when I get back form errands, but Mamelukes comes first.

=============

The present Treasury plan of buying preferred stock instead of bad debts is probably the right approach, but it should have been taken long ago; and without reining in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac on making bad loans, it will do no good at all. Whether Obama, whose transition team staff is loaded with people who helped cause the problem, can resist those past masters of lobbying who have long experience in coordinating the efforts of the ravenous wolves, is another story. If he can't, nothing is going to save us from deeper Depression.

Some banks are doing the right thing: restructuring loans to people who are living in houses no longer worth what they owe on it. That, it would seem to me, is a good thing for both the bank and the home owners who were dazzled into getting in on the bubble. They ought to owe the money they borrowed; but restructuring and adjusting the interest so they have a chance to get out from under seems to me a good thing to do.

================

I hate Firefox. I am about to dump it. When it works it works great, but now it won't open at all: it tries to open an acrobat window, then after several minutes tells me that it can't open acrobat, then dies with a message that Firefox just shut itself down, OK? This has happened several times. If I could manage to make it stop trying to load whatever it was that is trying to load acrobat I'd do that but of course I can't.

Firefox is wonderful when it is working, but every now and then you have to just open a bare session, lose all your previous open windows, and start over. And that's just too darned much trouble. And of course Firefox does all this to you when you really need it to get something else done. Internet Explorer is more reliable.

But see next section

=========

OKAY that's fixed: I had to upgrade Acrobat to 9.0.  But I also had to figure that out for myself; Firefox wouldn't tell me. It just crashed.

The good news is that Firefox is working again, and when it's working I do like it. But ye gods, they must use surplus Microsoft help system designers.

==============

I find that Vista must be shut down and restarted every few days. A system reset probably does it, but I turn the whole thing off and start up again. I presume this is one reason Microsoft says people complain about how long it takes Vista to come up from being turned off.

But for some reason, Vista slows to a crawl and runs out of memory if not restarted at intervals. It may be a matter of settings; I don't know. I didn't have this problem until recently, so I suppose it was one of the Microsoft updates. I wonder if they're aware of the problem?

MAC OS X has memory leaks too, and needs periodic restarts. We're back to the early days, when you really should turn your computer off every night, not to save power, but for the mandatory restart. I used to get letters from people bragging about how long they could run without a reset...

===============

reboot times 

Hi Jerry,

I couldn't resist sending you a tale of a long time between reboots after your comment...

At my previous place of employment we had a Sun workstation used for software development. (Software development is *still* a great way to crash Windows, although it happens much less now). One day it stopped working, and complained that the root filesystem was full. Our UNIX guru looked at it and discovered that the system log now occupied the whole root partition. "When did you last reboot it?" he asked. The log would be automatically deleted on reboot. We checked a portion of the log, and found it had last been rebooted two years ago!!!

THIS is how reliable operating systems are supposed to be! I think Windows and MacOS still have a long way to go.

Chris Barker

More or less agreed, but in fairness I have to say I had almost exactly the same experience with Windows 2000 Server.

======================

Kindle problem: Amazon kindly replaced my broken Kindle. I then couldn't buy any books. That is, I would go to Amazon and buy a Kindle book, but it never appeared on my Kindle. I then telephoned Amazon tech support, and they deactivated the old -- and dead -- Kindle, and did something so that my books appeared within moments. Problem solved.

Tonight I downloaded a couple of pdf files I wanted on my Kindle. I did what I used to do, emailed to myself with the file as attachment. With my first Kindle that file would appear on the Kindle within minutes, and Amazon would charge me a dime for the conversion; a very good deal. This time what happens is nothing. I called Amazon tech support, but it turns out they close at 10 PM and I'll have to wait until tomorrow. I sent them an email, but I don't expect much result from that.

My previous two contacts with Kindle support were pleasant so I don't expect any problems with this when I call tomorrow, but we'll see.

===============

Maria at Kindle support took care of the problem instantly once I got through on the telephone.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Thursday,  November 13, 2008

Friday the 13th falls on Thursday this month.

Amazon Kindle support opens at 6 AM and closes at 10 PM. This morning I got through to Amazon support, told the story to first echelon, was transferred to Kindle support, and found myself talking to Maria, who was the agent who took care of replacing my broken Kindle. It turns out that the new one had a new email address; she fixed that and in seconds I was able to email pdf files to myself and receive them wireless on the Kindle. It all worked fine.

I have a Kindle One. I have no experience with the Kindle Two, but I sure can recommend the one I have; and Amazon has done the service support right, too. Hurrah. Now if there were a Skype mod for it...

Today I will be working on Mamelukes. Wish me luck.

 

 

 

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Friday,  November 14, 2008

Republican Principles or Democrats Light?

We are back to ice: there is now serious but not conclusive evidence, convincing to some, that the only thing preventing a new ice age is CO2; and we are busily removing CO2. Now admittedly the serious studies anticipate this happening over a fairly long time period. On the other hand, all the historical evidence is that ice ages happen fast. England went from deciduous trees to frost plains to ice in well under a hundred years, and to kilometers of ice in another hundred. There is similar evidence from lakes in Belgium. When the ice comes, it comes fast.

Note that climate changes are odd. A few miles south of the ice wall average temperatures were not all that much colder than they are now. The ice didn't extinguish life; but it sure made large parts of Europe and North America uninhabitable. Ice is a fire greater threat than a few degrees of temperature rise between new and the end of the century. Prudence demands that we continue to look at the CO2 rise. Prudence also demands that we not wreck the global economy in order to play carbon restriction games that, according to even the most optimistic models, will have only a tiny effect on the average temperature of the Earth in 2090.

Of course no sane person would opt to wreck the economy for such tiny gains; but then the ecology now Fromates (Friends of Man and the Earth; an organization I invented to use in stories I wrote in the 1970's; you can find those stories in Exile -- And Glory! from Baen books. They're still pretty current.) -- the ecology now advocates get around that through flat out lies. This is compounded by the gullibility of many of the Fromates, who take the word of Al Gore and people who actually know better as if it were Revealed Truth. As to the motives of Gore and such like, I can only speculate; but they have done well by the Fromate movement. So have many of the scientists whose grants and/or fame depend on accepting the Fromate position.

The Democratic Party has become stuck on Fromate. Whether this is due to the influence Gore or something else isn't important. The Democratic Party is Fromate Light, and has thus secured the eternal loyalty of the Sierra Club, country club ecology now do-gooders, and other elements of the Fromate coalition. It's part of the Democratic Party victory strategy, which is to build up a voting block group at a time. Some Democrat leaders clearly believe there is scientific validity to the Fromate position. Others, like Obama, are harder to figure out. Presumably Obama is smart enough to understand the real situation, but the evidence is that he has become a True Believer: why else would he jeopardize his victories in critical coal states by stating that he would tax coal use out of existence? But the Democrat position is politically understandable; the Fromate position is worth votes.

What's weird is people like McCain and Schwarzenegger who seem genuinely smitten by the Fromate positions, and who don't seem to want to pay attention to the scientific evidence. The evidence, if fairly considered, is that there is a rise in CO2 levels; doing something about it is  terribly expensive, and if only the nations that are interested and who can (barely) afford it adopt strenuous CO2 reduction practices, the effect on CO2 is from very small to trivial. China and India are not going to stop their economic growth -- indeed can't do that.  The CO2 rises will continue whether we like it or not, and without regard to what crippling measures we adopt. It may make the governor feel good to lead California toward the Green, but the truth is that the CO2 sensors in Hawaii will take little to no notice, and the effect on global warming of turning California green by shooting all the methane flatulent cows and then turning the state into an uninhabited park would be very small to trivial. I've met the governor, and I cannot believe he is not smart enough to understand this. Perhaps he simply will not listen; it may be that the good will of his wife and her relatives is dependent on his turning off his critical faculties.

But on purely pragmatic grounds the Republicans have no business going Fromate. The Democrats already have the Fromate vote sewed up, and always will: the Fromate position demands Big Government and Government Action, and those who think Government is the solution and not the problem will always choose the Democrats. The Republicans can make all the concessions it likes, but the Sierra Club and the Fromates will always go Democrat.

The Republican Party has fallen victim to Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy. The Iron Law states that in every organization there will be two factions. One will be dedicated to the goals of the organization> Examples are dedicated class room teachers in teacher unions, the Old Guard members of the Sierra Club from the days when you could not join the Sierra Club unless you had been backpacking in the High Sierra, etc.; we all know such people. The other faction will be dedicated to the organization itself without any regard to the organization's actual reason for existence. Examples are teacher's union officials, many administrators, the current management of the Sierra Club, etc..; we all know those people, too. Pournelle's Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization.

The horrible part is that in the case of the Republicans, control of the party has gone to incompetents. They have thrown away the principles of limited government and the notion that in general government is not the solution, government is the problem -- and they have gained almost nothing for doing that. Many of those bureaucrats won't even be able to keep their jobs, hurrah.

Face it: the Republicans have more than once tried to be Democrats Light: to go along with the Liberal position that the solution to most problems is to build a bureaucracy and throw money until the problem is covered over, with the proviso that Republicans will do it better and more efficiently. Even were that true, it's a stupid position: the aggregate of bureaucracies that make up the Democratic Party are almost without exception already controlled as the Iron Law would suggest, and those people are pretty thoroughly embedded into the Democratic Party; again we all know groups that would be much better off if they were less politically fastened to the Democrats, but whose leadership won't let that happen. The Republicans will never win those people over.

But do note that playing loyal opposition, Democrat Light, has been effective for many Country Club Republicans: they were allowed to keep their positions and influence. That was the situation when Newt Gingrich organized the Republican takeover of Congress. Unfortunately, without Newt's iron control -- you may ascribe his motive to dedication to principle or to simple desire to keep power -- without Newt's iron control the Republican congress went mad and truly acted as if it were Democrats: it spent money in ways that even the Democrats wouldn't have (then; not now), including the old Wilson/Roosevelt interventionism that generally led to war. There was a time when it was a truism that the Republicans are the party of Depression, the Democrats are the party of War; after Newt the country club Republicans managed to become both.

The only way the Republicans can survive will be to become a party of principle: smaller government, devolution of power to the states, transparency and local control; the old principle Adams stated, "we believe that each man is the best judge of his own interest". Trust the Associations (as Tocqueville described) rather than government, and states more than federal. Give up "right to life" and adopt the constitutional position that abortion ought to be left to the states -- as should education and many other matters. We have plenty of failed experiments in federal control to show that it's not always a good idea and sometimes federalizing things is disastrous.

The Republicans ought also to go back to Washington's principles regarding foreign policy. Not isolationism; but non-intervention unless US interests are clearly at stake. From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli--. Rebuild the Navy, keep the Legions strong; and mind our own business. That was once stated as "Speak softly and carry a big stick." Not bad advice.

I haven't the time to enumerate and defend the principles that Republicans ought to adopt; I am not even certain I am the right person to do that. But I am very certain that this is necessary. The country club Republicans used to say that they could take control and implement the Democrat agenda better than the Democrats. They have now given the nation real proof that they can't.

===========================

From security expert Rick Hellewell:

Great Spam News

Dr. Pournelle:

A big spam host in CA was taken offline on Tuesday. One good source for the story is here http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/
article/2008/11/12/AR2008111200658.html  , since Brian Krebs (the WP columnist) was one of guys responsible. The 'co-location' (a big web site hosting firm) looks to be responsible for up to 80% of the world's spam, along with hosting other offensive sites (child pornography, etc).

As of Tuesday, their connection to the Internet was cut off.

As a result, the volume of spam being pumped out by all of those infected computers has gone down by 60% or more. At my office, we usually get about 800,000 messages a day; we block 92%+ as spam. Over the last 24 hours, that incoming volume has been reduced to about 250,000. Others are reporting the same reduction. (More details on Brian Kreb's blog here:
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/
2008/11/the_badness_that_was_mccolo.html 

It will be interesting to see how long this reduction lasts.

Regards, Rick Hellewell

=======================

Well, as an illustration of memory loss: last night the kitchen sink wouldn't drain. Water backed up into the sink.

We'd had this situation before. I was sure I had cleared it. My wife pointed out we didn't have a snake: and in fact we hadn't had one in some years, and I didn't where ours was. Yet I was pretty sure we'd had one, and I supposed I had used it to clear that drain. Access is pretty simple, since there's an access plug on an outside wall about knee height just under the kitchen sink.

So: I went down to the local Ace Hardware and bought a $15 snake. Came home prepared to use it. Got out back and then recalled I hadn't used a snake last time: I'd stuffed the hose into the access port and turned it on, pushed it further in, let it run a while, and Lo! the drain was cleared. It takes two hoses to get to the port from the nearest outlet, and Lo! there was a hose without a metal end lying back in the area where I'd need it. So I connected it to the regular hose in place, stuffed it down the drain to its length, turned on the water, and Voila!  Indeed it took less time to clear the drain than it did to go down and buy the unused snake (which is not returnable even if not used, for fairly obvious reasons). Now that I have done it again with the hose I recall using the hose last time; but I had absolutely no memory of doing that, and indeed had a false memory -- which I knew at the time was false! -- of using a snake.

I need to think about that a bit. Memory is an odd thing.

When I was in high school I had eidetic memory: I could recall anything I had every read, page by page if need be. It began to fade as I left high school, but until last year I still had a lot better memory than most people. Now there are these gaps, particularly for names of people and things (I recall the concept, I could build the gadget, but I can't think of it's name; or I recall the person, I can picture him or her, but again the name is gone). Of course Niven has had that kind of memory since I have known him: it took him years to remember which of my kids was which, and we'd often discuss conferences and meetings we'd been to in which he knew what had been said but not who said it. Now I'm learning how to live with Niven's data retrieval system. He seems to have done well with it, so I assume I can also.

And my sink drains properly again.

=========================

 

 

 

 

 

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Saturday,  November 15, 2008

My son Alex is working in San Francisco. Dana, our daughter in law, with two cats and Rocco the Exuberant a shepherd-lab (guess), showed up at 5 AM, once again fleeing fire in Sylmar. Their house is in no danger, but there's no getting in and out of their neighborhood until the fire is under control, and that doesn't seem likely today or tomorrow. Alex gets back to LA this afternoon. All is well, and the Chaos Manor Fire Rescue B&B remains open for business. We expect that to continue until the Santa Ana Devil Winds die out. Now if we just don't have an earthquake...

Sable actually likes to have Rocco for company, but every now and then she remembers that she's the Prima Donna here, especially when she ignores her food and he decides she doesn't want it any more. No one gets hurt. He's quicker than she is, even if she's bigger. We're also cutting back on how much food she gets; when she weighed in at the vet for her shots last week, she was a lot more overweight than I has suspected. Peter Glaskowsky once described her as a cylinder, and while she's a very furry dog I suppose it's true. So Sable gets to go on an involuntary diet (not an extreme one, just a reduction in her daily food allowance) while entertaining a dog and two cats, and she has mixed emotions about all that.

But all's well, and my sink still drains, and I got some work done last night.

===

When I tried to send this up, I found that our Internet connection isn't working. Powercycling the modem and router did nothing. It's probably traffic.

It wasn't traffic. I have had it with Windows networking, I'm going to try something else, a bit more drastic. Anyway I have that problem fixed.

 

 

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Sunday,  November 16, 2008

Work in Progress

Fires all over Southern California, but the evacuation of the Sylmar area has been lifted, and Alex and Dana have gone back home. Sable now misses Rocco. Sable doesn't know a lot about the dog business, being a Prima Donna empty nest dog, and she learned a lot from Rocco in just a few hours. Maybe I can take her to a dog park now.

The fires make for malaise. My eyes smart, and the constant stream of news about disasters in the region don't make for concentration on fiction. I think Niven and I are finished with the proposal for Anvil (working title; we've offered several choices to the editors). It's pretty good. Of course a proposal isn't final. We don't really know how the book ends. We'll know when we get to it. But we do have a pretty good timeline of events, and that's all that's needed to get started.

As usual we will definitely have a Dramatis Personnae.

Mamelukes is my next major work, but I also need to do the proposal for The Mask on the Wall, my autobiographical account of surviving brain cancer after watching it kill Charlie Sheffield and Bob Forward within months. It turns out to be harder to write a proposal than I thought: there's either not much to say, or there's so much it would become boring and much of that repetitious. I'll also need to do some medical research since I know very little about modern neurology and pharmacology.

Meanwhile, I have the Mac Book Pro, but before I set that up I have to rationalize the network here. I was persuaded at CDC and WinHEC to try Microsoft Home Server and I have a self-contained unit I haven't opened yet that should be simple to install. In doing that I will have to uninstall what I have; that shouldn't be too hard, but I will have to be sure I can open all my systems that expect to be logged in through the net. I may have to set each one with an Administrator account and password independent of anything, and then -- but I anticipate problems I may not have. I have to read the flipping manual, and I have not done that yet. I make no doubt I'll be able to draw upon some of you for advice.

Briefly the situation is that we  have an aging Windows 2000 Server system with Active Directory. The machine it's on is the backup to the original installation: the original server died horribly. The transition was easy. I should then have set up another backup server, but I have not done that, and I hope to get past all this without doing it. Meanwhile I have an HP Windows Home Server box. It came with 500 GB, but it has slots for more, and I have two 1 TB drives (One from Western Digital and one from Seagate, and I have no real reason to prefer one to the other) that I can add to the HP box.

 I need a name for the machine; Homie doesn't seem like a great idea. Homemaker perhaps less so. I also need to read the manual; I have not seen a book on setting up Home Server, much less in standing down from Active Directory. The network will have to accommodate: Vista 32 and 64 bit; several XP machines; at least two VMware virtual machines on Macs (probably one Vista and one XP); HP 4500 Laser Printer (ancient, ancient) including the PCL instance of it that I have named JEDI; it will have to print from DOS under Vista among other things; and at least three OS-X Mac systems.

All of which sounds exciting. As soon as I get that set up, I'll activate the MacBook Pro and install Windows under VMware. It looks like an exciting week. Only I have to do my fiction work while that's going on.

The alternative is to take Phil Tharp's advice and use a Del system I have to set up a server/router with Clark Connect's software, which is a supported Linux. That has the advantage of access to their HELP, to Phil who has been using it for years, and being of interest to the readers. If I have much trouble with Home Server that is exactly what I will do. Home Server looks to be designed for easy setup, but perhaps not for someone who has a dying Active Directory system. Whatever I do will have to be done quickly since I can't leave Roberta cut off from the Internet.

I'll think about this one before I start. And of course I'll fish out the manual and read it.

===================

The fires have made a mess of schedules here, but with luck we'll get back to some semblance of a routine tomorrow.

==============

Every time I think I am going to switch over to a Mac, it does things to me. At the moment it has lost all my mail. I open the mail program and there is this blank inbox. Nothing. Nada. Moreover, I can't send any mail either. I try to start a new letter and all is well except the send button is greyed out. Meanwhile, while Inbox shows zero mail, and draft shows the 1 I attempted to send before I gave up, something called RSS shows the number 222, but there is nothing I can do that will let me see any of that. Mail sent to my mac account gets to my iPhone, but it never gets to the iMac. Attempting to synchronize iPhone and iMac does nothing. Shutting down the machine and restarting it does nothing. I am sure it's something simple and easy but Macs seem to work at making me feel stupid.

I can't operate my email from an iPhone and I won't try. So I can't give up Windows. I know I can reach the Internet from the Mac; but I can't send myself Internet addresses, and I don't really want to have to type in long long URL's to look at stuff on the Mac. So I do more and more on Vista, which doesn't lose me all my mail.

Darn

==================

All right, it is fixed. Story tomorrow.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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