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<\/a><\/p>\nAlien Artifact, the new system built with an Intel Sandy Bridge in the beautiful Thermaltake case runs just fine except that we\u2019re having trouble setting up the cache system which uses silicon memory and is supposed to work just fine: it doesn\u2019t, and that\u2019s probably because I\u2019ve been so distracted I haven\u2019t been able to go through the manuals and on-line stuff to see how the RAID system that works this magic is properly set up, and whether there are memory tests I ought to perform. A side effect of this is that if I let the energy manager put the machine to sleep, it wakes up, looks for the cache, can\u2019t find it, and reboots. So long as I set sleep to \u2018never\u2019 the system works just fine.<\/p>\n
It is running on the Sandy Bridge on-board sound and video, and it does that just fine. I\u2019ve been testing it with really complex video stuff like Total War Rome Barbarian Invasion, which can involve a lot of individual figures in combat, and the display is just fine on the 21\u201d analog bottle monitor at the test stand. I\u2019ve been meaning to replace that monitor with a larger flat screen and one of these days I\u2019ll get around to it; but in any event, I can say that for all business applications and for anything but the really latest fast shooters, Sandy Bridge is just fine for video. The sound is all right, too. At some point I may put in a sound card that lets me do some selective amplifications of different frequencies: as it happens my hearing losses are rather specific and narrow, and if I turn up to a high enough volume to be able to understand, some speech frequencies are over loud to the point of making some announcers nearly intolerable. Not their fault. I have a very strange hearing loss pattern and any kind of hearing aid to adapt to that would cost a lot more than I want to pay. Once we\u2019ve fixed the cache adjustment problem with Alien Artifact I\u2019ll do a column catching up with 2011 Orchids and Onions, and details on Alien Artifact. I got the Thermaltake case and power supply after the end of 2011, so I can\u2019t give it an award in that column, but I sure like the way Thermaltake has designed the case for ease of maintenance, replacement of disk drive, and all the rest. It is costly, but that\u2019s a cost I\u2019ll be willing to pay in future: I\u2019m tired of having to fight case design when I maintain computers. Of course for most computers that you\u2019re never going to update or make changes to that doesn\u2019t matter, but most of our machines end up as lab rats at some point. Anyway I\u2019ll cover all that in the column as soon as we have a happy ending.<\/p>\n
If you are looking for some good short snippets to read, try http:\/\/a-place-to-stand.blogspot.com\/2010\/02\/economic-political-wisdom-jerry.html<\/a> which is, of all things, a compilation of \u2018the wisdom of Jerry Pournelle\u2019. Needless to say I didn\u2019t do it, but I rather like what has been done. It\u2019s a number of snippets of things I have said, mostly in the old View and Mail columns before we moved to Bluehost, and some of them are pretty good. This was good editing. There\u2019s also other good stuff on that site.<\/p>\n And with that I\u2019m off. Thanks.<\/p>\n For those concerned about Roberta, there is no reason to be. She managed to bash her hand in a way that made us think it was broken, but it was not; still it ended up half the size of a football, and hurts like anything, and there were these dark line on her fingers and up her arm, and they had to cut her rings off, and it was a mess. The various visits after the first were precautionary so that someone better qualified than me could have a look, and the last visit to our regular doctor was something I insisted on just be be sure. The remedy from here on is cheap \u2013 it is called patience. That isn\u2019t an easy virtue to develop. I won\u2019t say all is well because it\u2019s painful and taking forever but it is daily looking marginally better and comparing it now to the photo of what it was at first is reassuring. Still ugly, and we were worried about infection, but there hasn\u2019t been any. Danger of infection is why the surgeons didn\u2019t want to do anything. So we wait. With patience\u2026<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I see that The Legend of Black Ship Island<\/a> remains fairly high up on the Amazon sales list for science fiction, and there are a couple of good reviews. It will be interesting to see what will happen to this novella. We could certainly have sold it to one of the SF magazines, but it wouldn\u2019t have come out for several months that way, and magazines really hate that length \u2013 too long for a since issue, not long enough to be in a three part serial, just awkward length \u2013 and it\u2019s not the kind of story that ought to be broken into chunks anyway. I suspect it has already sold as many copies to earn more than we\u2019d have got for serial rights \u2013 sf magazines haven\u2019t changed their rates in years \u2013 and I doubt that any magazine would have wanted to print the Foreword and Acknowledgements. It was tricky to work out a story that could fit between two published stories, be significant enough to bother with, and still never be mentioned in Beowulf’s Children. All the comments I have got from readers have been good; a couple of people have spotted a minor error that ought to have been caught in the final edit (not a typo, an actual minor inconsistency in the story) that caused us to do another pass through the book. We didn\u2019t do any significant change \u2013 about five words I think \u2013 and we didn\u2019t find many more typos (probably about a dozen) so there\u2019s no point in waiting for the republication. It really is a trivial error, and few seem to have noticed. I sure didn\u2019t, and I did the final pass on the story. And the new alien is interesting\u2026<\/p>\n \u201cSelf\u201d publishing \u2013 in our case the novella was \u2018published\u2019 by our agent by posting it on Amazon and now I think at Nook \u2013 will become increasingly important as eBook readers continue to sell. It\u2019s a publishing revolution.<\/p>\n It Is Later Than You Know\u2026<\/p>\n When I was in school we all had to read Dickens\u2019 Tale of Two Cities, and in 9th grade we also were shown in class the 1935 film of Tale of Two Cities in which, after some arrogant acts by aristocrats, Defarge goes to a church plaque inscribed \u201cIt is later than you know\u201d and scrawls BLOOD on the stone. After the revolution we are shown the beheadings of the aristocrats: whose who arrogantly took their lifetime privileges and laughed at those who had to pay for their revels.<\/p>\n New subject. It took a couple of years for it to leak out, but we now know the attitude of at least some of the civil servants whom we pay with increased taxes. We have from the Huffington Post the story of tine Las Vegas GSA Team Building conference paid for by federal taxes<\/a>. We also have videos of federal employees in their cubicles doing videos of \u2013 well, see for yourself<\/a>.<\/p>\n And those who \u201clost their jobs" over this turn out mostly to have been transferred, possibly demoted, but pension rights are pretty well unaffected. So it goes. And we need to raise taxes because the government doesn\u2019t take in enough money. You can\u2019t balance the budget on the backs of the poor. Or something.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n View 719 Friday, April 06, 2012 Good Friday Yesterday we took Roberta out to her regular doctor, who confirmed that everyone else \u2013 two trips to the emergency room and three to urgent care \u2013 had done the right thing, and the only thing we can do now is be \u2026 Continue reading <\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"