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WEEK 45 2004
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Saturday 6
November
2004
Saturday - Heh. I'd forgotten my haiku of
A Year
Ago, This
Week, regarding the concept of sending MacIntosh files by email -
it clearly has it's own problems. Probably Mac to Mac would be less of
a issue.
Still under the weather.
Reading Hanson's Ripples
of Battle, in between mildly fevered naps. His thesis is
essentially that some battles have effects (the 'ripples' of the book
title), that are out of proportion to a battle's military importance
and these
effects live on and influence cultures decades, and even centuries,
later. He covers three battles, working backwards from Okinawa.
I've read up to Delium, past Okinawa and Shiloh. Interesting
stuff.
For Okinawa I believe his thesis is that the long term result was a
belief in the American military, due to the ferocity of the defenders,
that the Asian soldiers - the Japanese and by extension the Korean and
Vietnamese were less regardful of loss of life and that it affected the
standard strategy in those later conflicts, very possibly in ways that
were mistaken. There was more concentration on killing in these later proxy wars
against communism, rather than the successful
denial of resources and taking
of territory that was the emphasis of the European theater in
WWII.
He points out also that the legend of the Kamikaze success lives on,
despite the fact that Kamikaze suicide bombers were a strategic
failure; since despite the extraordinary naval losses at Okinawa they
did not come near to dislodging or even demoralizing the American Navy.
He suggests that suicide tactics like those used today by terrorists
are, once the defender has come to grips with the idea, not effective
and not supportable.
But careful analysis of Okinawa
offers a quite different and far more chilling lesson. For all the
bravado of the Japanese bombers, they failed utterly to stop the Americans -
indeed, failed to sink a single major capital ship.
(text omitted here)
Five thousand dead sailors is a
horrendous figure, but for the Japanese it had to be seen in the
context of an enemy that had a million-man navy and sixteen fleet
carriers intact after the greatest suicide attack in history. Marine
divisions were shattered on Okinawa; yet more Marines were ready to
invade Japan after the battle than before. As both a weapon of terror
and a conventional means to destroy enemy assets, the Japanese suicide
attackers had no long-term strategic success.
Why is this so? Human nature
explains much, for the pool of those who wish to kill themselves in
service to a lost cause is finite, despite professed fanaticism. There
was really only a limited supply of a few thousand kamikaze pilots
among millions of Japanese, as large scale attacks ceased altogether by
July. Even by the end of the Okinawa campaign, pilots were being
assigned and were no longer exclusively volunteers.
(text omitted here)
Okinawa taught the world that the chief horror of war is not the random
use of suicide bombers, but the response that they incur from Western
powers who self-imposed restraint upon their ingenuity for killing
usually rests only with their own sense of moral reluctance - a brake
that suicidal attack seems to strip away entirely.
Friday 5 November
2004
Friday - yep, some
sort of crud taking me down. My cat sitter was kind enough to bring me
some bread, butter, and tv dinners. Light Headed = Light Posting.
I'm trying to help a friend get some files off her old Performa 6300CD
and onto a newer Mac. The dialup has failed, it has no USB or ethernet
ports, no CD burner, it has an IDE disk so it can't be put into a newer
mac as a slave drive as they use SCSI drives. The options are:
- SCSI DB-25 null modem cable and a terminal program, possibly
Kermit or Claris Works.
- Find a way to 'span' a
file across multiple floppies, and use sneakernet.
- Buy an ethernet card from EBAYand use email or FTP.
I favor the third option, for obvious reasons. I actually own a DB-25
null modem cable, but am not sure that it would work with Apple's
hardware.
Thursday 4
November 2004
Thursday
- feeling a bit under the weather, with a sore throat and drippy nose.
Bah.
Put my fastest machine, a P4 3.2Ghz, into a different, bigger case with
a 120mm fan. It runs a good 15 degrees cooler. Most excellent!
Wednesday
3 November 2004
Wednesday - another beautiful day. Clear
blue skies and cool , 40F, according to the internet. Forty?
Well, maybe, since there was a already little frost the other day. I
need to get out with the camera later, and get some shots of the fall
leaves and such.
I went over to my neighbor's and helped her winterize her swamp cooler
- unplugged it, turned off the water, drained it, put a canvas cover
over the outside and a stopper into the vent on the inside. Also, she
wanted a painting placed over the outlet. Hmmm. A painting - something I
never thought to do at my house. But then, my outlet grill projects out
quite a bit from the wall.
I emailed my ISP the other day, asking about php and such. They said no
problem, and if I wanted I could update to modern blog software like Wordpress or Movable Type. It'd give a bit
more modern appearance to these pages, and less hand editing each week for me.
I've a lot of family and friends who were Kerry fans. That's a great
many people who I respect and love, and who voted - and lost - last
night. It sort of takes some of the fun out of being on the winning
side.
Tuesday 2 November
2004
Tuesday - I voted. It was a beautiful day,
clear blue skies and about 50F, so I walked over to the polling
station. This year it was at the Desert Woodlands Park, about a half
mile from here. No lines - I waited until most people had gone to work.
No muss, no fuss - the people there were polite, friendly, helpful and
competent. A pleasant experience, all around.
I'm going to post an article I saw on the net, before any polls have
closed, so that no matter who is elected, no one need be offended. A
gentleman named Michael Totten, cross posting at Glenn Reynold's Instapundit, has a plea for civility
and common sense in this election:
ELECTION DAY REMINDERS:
Let’s get a couple of things out of
the way before today’s votes are counted.
You have the right to vote. You do
not have the right to see the man of your choice in the White House.
If George W. Bush wins the election,
the world will still spin on
its axis. Canada will not grant you asylum. If John Kerry wins the
election, America will still be America. Australia will not grant you
asylum.
People who vote for the other guy
aren’t stupid, brainwashed, or
evil. They are your friends and family. Someone you love will almost
certainly cancel your vote. (My wife cancels out mine.)
If, by some chance, everyone you
know votes for the loser it won’t
mean the election was stolen. It will only show that you live in a
bubble.
If this thing is close (the victor
could easily win by 0.1 percent)
try not to read too much into it. We’ll still be closely divided.
If the election doesn’t go your way,
don’t pop off as though America
were Guatemala under the generals. You’ll get lots of attention, but it
won’t be the kind you want. People will laugh, not near you but at you.
Humor
Cooking for
Engineers. Apparently there is still hope for me...
How about Tricks
of the Trade?
- tricks on how to use clowns tricks in selling software, on getting a
dog to look at a camera, how to sell a piano. [both via Stumbling Tongue].
Listening to Radio Paradise last night. A totally bizarre mix of songs.
Usually the dj has some sort of connection between the songs, at least
in genre, or theme, but no. An instrumental Rain 'Oer Me, then a Ten Thousand Maniacs song followed a
minute or two later by a weird version of Five Hundred Miles that manages to
include tanks. Um.
Monday
1 November 2004
Monday - keeping busy.
Got an email from a friend asking if I was sitting around in my pink
bunny slippers. Hah! I want everyone to know that I have stylish fleece
lined slippers with a nice
plaid flannel shirt pattern on the outside.
I understand the 'niners lost again. I think they are 1 and 6 now.
But someone watching the game said that there were a couple of pretty
bad calls against them, and that they might have had a chance
otherwise. So...that's good, I guess. I saw the last half of the
Charger's crushing the Raiders. Great, just great.
Modified the links at the top of the page so that there are both "A Year Ago" and "Two Years Ago" links. Boy,
it has been a while, hasn't it?
Election day tomorrow. Hopefully there'll be a clear cut winner this
time.
From Corsair The Rational Pirate
(who apparently has an irrational
fixation on belly buttons):
Some
Things We All Learn in Life
GREAT TRUTHS
GREAT TRUTHS THAT
LITTLE CHILDREN HAVE LEARNED
1) No matter
how hard you try, you can't baptize cats.
2) When your
Mom is mad at your Dad, don't let her brush your hair.
3) If your
sister hits you, don't hit her back. They always catch the second
person.
4) Never ask
your 3-year old brother to hold a tomato.
5) You can't
trust dogs to watch your food.
6) Don't
sneeze when someone is cutting your hair.
7) Never hold
a Dust-Buster and a cat at the same time.
8) You can't
hide a piece of broccoli in a glass of milk.
9) Don't wear
polka-dot underwear under white shorts.
10) The best
place to be when you're sad is Grandpa's lap.
GREAT TRUTHS THAT
ADULTS HAVE LEARNED
1) Raising
teenagers is like nailing Jell-O to a tree.
2) Wrinkles
don't hurt.
3) Families
are like fudge...mostly sweet, with a few nuts.
4) Today's
mighty oak is just yesterday's nut that held its ground.
5) Laughing is
good exercise. It's like jogging on the inside.
6) Middle age
is when you choose your cereal for the fiber, not the toy.
GREAT TRUTHS
ABOUT GROWING OLD
1) Growing old
is mandatory; growing up is optional.
2) Forget the
health food. I need all the preservatives I can get.
3) When you
fall down, you wonder what else you can do while you're down there.
4) You're
getting old when you get the same sensation from a rocking chair that
you once got from a roller coaster.
5) It's
frustrating when you know all the answers but nobody bothers to ask you
the questions.
6) Time may be
a great healer, ! but it's a lousy beautician.
7) Wisdom
comes with age, but sometimes age comes alone.
THE FOUR STAGES
OF LIFE
1) You believe
in Santa Claus.
2) You don't
believe in Santa Claus.
3) You are
Santa Claus.
4) You look
like Santa Claus.
SUCCESS
At age 4
success is . . . not peeing in your pants.
At age 12
success is . . . having friends.
At age 16
success is . . . having a drivers license.
At age 20
success is . . . going all the way.
At age 35
success is . . . having money.
At age 50
success is . . . having money.
At age 60
success is . . . going all the way.
At age 70
success is . . . having a drivers license.
At age 75
success is . . . having friends.
Sunday 31 October
2004
Sunday - not a lot to say. Went
shopping, bought another hard drive as the disk on this machine is
just about full. Met someone at the computer store, they had called
earlier asking
about printers. I'd advised them that the Brother or Samsung personal
laser printers were probably the best bang for the buck, and they'd
picked up a Samsung 17xx model. Visited with them in the late afternoon
- one of them is teaching in Northern California next weekend, so, as I
will probably be up there, we will try to get together for dinner or
something.
With other friends for the evening - I wore my thermals and was
prepared to freeze outside, handing out candy, but wasn't called upon
to do so. R
had an even better halloween display than last years, or
the year
before that!
Their daughter was watching rental movies. First came "13 going on 30" - I asked for a dull
spoon to gouge my eyes out with. Then came "The Prince and Me",
at which point the testosterone in my veins started turning into acid.
This was followed by...um...can't recall the title, some Lindsay Lohan
or Hillary Duff type movie, at which point it was time for me to
leave...
