Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2005-11-19:

"Men want to liberate themselves but they do not want to be free. They are always looking to belong to something." - Jean Daniel, in his 1995 essay "Voyage to the End of the Nation".

(submitted to the mailing list by Terry Labach)

Mail containing the string "geocities.com" will not be delivered to my primary email address. Even if it's in the body and does not appear in the headers. Even if I'm emailing the message to myself from a login session on the same machine (at my ISP) it's supposed to be delivered to.

Let's see whether the steaming pile of clue on a silver platter that I just sent them helps them fix the damned problem on Monday.

Meanwhile, research for replacing my ISP continues. Panix would almost be one-stop-shopping except that their policy regarding PPP connections not being left connected when one is away would make me unable to connect back to my house for files or tools without DSL.

Oh, and if anyone has been trying to contact me from a GeoCities address, I probably haven't seen it. (I wonder whether comments to this entry will show up via email. Probably not. I'd better leave this entry in an open browser window and refresh it every few hours to check for comments.) [It turns out a LiveJournal comment email containing that string will get through -- either because having it in the quoted text instead of fresh text doesn't trip the filter rule, or because whatever transfer agent is doing the filtering has livejournal.com whitelisted. How much more unpaid time is it reasonable to put in doing my ISP's sysadmins' job for them?]

I really want to be able to tell a computer, "Suspend this running process, pick it up, send it over the network to that other computer over there, and resume it as though it had been running over there all along." Uh, and if the process in question is an X client, I want to be able to optionally tell it, "and attach to such-and-such X server while you're at it." I mean, I can tell my computers this now but they just stare at me like I'm an idiot. I want to be able to tell them to do that and have them actually do it. I'm willing to accept "both computers have to be running similar operating systems on the same CPU architecture" as a reasonable limitation.

Is this one of those "high performance computing" features that you get with a modern rack containing a cluster of virtualized multi-core blades, or is it a pipe dream? If it exists, can I kludge the technology onto my ... well, not a cluster but maybe a "clump" ... of mostly obsolete boxes tacked together with 10baseT?

I'm not sure the 800MHz box counts as obsolete -- I don't think it does anyhow -- but I know the various 100MHz, 120MHz, and 200MHz Pentium systems are, ah, "well behind the curve". I'll say the 350 is in the grey area. But hey, I'm getting closer and closer to replacing/retiring the 486/66 machines ... maybe even before Pennsic depending on what else falls in my lap.

Not feeling well. Instead of insight, a few drive-by snippets just to de-clutter my brain a tiny bit:

Listening to CSPAN radio ... is it just chance that I happen to catch it at those moments, or is "fissical" becoming a common pronounciation for the word "fiscal"? (It doesn't sound quite like "physical", but close enough to catch my ear and make me wonder for a moment whether they grabbed the wrong word.)

Listening a part of to Rove's Instruction To The Bloggers a few days ago (pretty sure that wasn't what it was officially called, but it was clearly a delineation of the next week's right-wing radio and blog talking points), I kept marvelling at his ability to utter some of those sentences without a trace of irony in his voice. Oblivious to the ironic nature, or just a really good actor? But it did raise the cynical thought that maybe the reason the Democrats haven't done as well is that Republicans are better at spouting bullshit with a straight face. (Note that in addition to the crap and doublethink, he also said some perfectly reasonable things I just happen to disagree with in the ways that reasonable people can disagree, but those aren't the point of this paragraph.)

Random typo in a comment somewhere: "extorsion" where the writer meant "extortion". It got me wondering what "extorsion" would mean. The silly answer I came up with was, "the feeling of relief when the chiropractor un-kinks a twisted part of your body." Turns out that there's a less interesting real medical definition using the other meaning of "ex-" ("rotation in an outward direction"). But I guess either one could be related to failure to pay extortion money...

John McCain keeps saying Really Important Things that make a lot of sense, then following those with statements that make him really hard to respect anyhow. I kinda wish he'd either turn into a proper political hero or just go over to the dark side so I don't have to keep experiencing the roller coaster effect when listening to him. But I guess this is one way to be a moderate ...

After hearing a bunch of speeches and snippets of testimony and such on the radio ... I am rather disappointed in our leaders' and representatives' public speaking skills as a whole.. On both sides of the aisle. I hear people I agree with and people I disagree with sounding like robots, sounding unprepared, sounding unconvinced by their own rhetoric, sounding like the not-ready-for-the-school-talent-show players. Okay, how they think and vote is more important, but I'd had this idea that (our current president aside) politicians were supposed to be statesmen and statesmen were supposed to be eloquent. And it does matter when we're counting on some of them to convince others to vote the right way on things, right? Or are my standards too high? (No, I don't expect them all to sound like the very best episodes of The West Wing, and I don't expect an extemporatneous response to a question to be as polished as if a scriptwriter had worked on it for a week, but I shouldn't be able to hear the fact that you're staring down at your notes with your mind elsewhere, when I'm listening on the radio!

Hmm. That takes me into territory covering rhetoric and actors and rehearsal and stuff that I think I want to put off writing until I've organized those thoughts a little more.