Being the thoughts and writings of one Gustaf Erikson; father, homeowner, technologist.
Action This Day, Michael Smith and Ralph Erskine, editors. Bantam Press 2001. ISBN 0593 049101.
A collection of essays about Bletchley Park during the Second World War.
The most entertaining one is by the late John Chadwick.
This is how he describes his arrival in Heliopolis following the evacuation of Alexandria in 1942:
My arrival created administrative chaos, since I was a lone naval rating attached to an Army Intelligence Unit, itself attached to an RAF station.
He was later promoted "Temporary Sub-Lieutenant (Special Branch) RNVSR" because the material he handled was classed 'Officers Only'.
Later, after the Italian Armistice, he wanted to promote code discipline in the Aegean:
[...] I volunteered to go on the next mission to act as liaison with the Italian Navy in Leros, in the hope of preventing any further breaches of security. My suggestion was rejected, and I was told brutally that my superiors did not mind if I were killed, but they were unwilling to take the risk of my being taken prisoner.
Chadwick later deciphered Linear B along with Michael Ventris.
Here's another strange thing about David Winer's trip to Europe -- he's started a temporary weblog for the trip.
Why can't he update his regular blog, the one read by millions each day? He seems to have a laptop, and connects through internet cafés. So he should be able to update a server somewhere.
I don't get it. I can update this blog from a web interface or from Emacs on a remote box. I'm nobody. Dave Winer is a respected internet personality. Go figure.
David Winer has some strange idea on how SMS works. So the gang at #mobitopia discusses a little, and David writes a post about it.
But how do we let Dave know about it. He's travelling in Europe right now. With a mobile phone.
So now he has an SMS on it from yours truly. Hope he can read it.
Part of my responsibilities is taking care of new computer installs at work. We have recently purchased several top-notch Dell Inspiron 8100s. These have 15" widescreen displays.
To prevent ridiculously small font sizes, Dell ships with the DPI settings set to 120. This means that fonts look bigger, but also that Internet Explorer also scales the images on websites. These appear blurry and jagged.
Not surprisingly, this is a top issue at Dell's support
forums. The
"solution" is a registry hack: change the value of the key
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\UseHR from
1 to 0.
Additionally, when I tried to read an article on MSDN about this, IE froze when trying to load the page.
I will recommend Mozilla for our users in the future.
Well, this should help my PageRank. Thanks, Jim!
Somehow it's difficult for me to write on this blog sometimes. Part of the problem is lack of time. I have a family and a full time job. I usually compose rather nice entries when walking to the subway in the mornings, but they vanish when I arrive at work and a terminal.
Of course, I could become a T9 god and tap out screeds on my taco, but I prefer reading and listening to music when riding to work. If I've forgotten reading matter, I'm usually too pissed off about that to be able to write anything good anyway.
Work provides almost no convenient times for advanced composition. What free time I doi have is spent reading other peoples weblogs, which are much better than anything I could produce. So that too is a barrier.
So why have a blog then? Egoboost of course. And sometimes you write something or think about something that's worth communicating.
Fire in the Lake by Frances Fitzgerald.
An excellent history/reportage about Vietnam during the American War.
After a tip from Rui, I've started to sort my work mail (mail addressed to me personally, and the support box) into quarterly archives.
Long experience has told me never to throw away mail, and the quarter seems to be a good time period in which to ask yourself "when did I get that mail?"
First sunny day in the city, the Sisters of Mercy playing on the Taco, and the irresistible urge for new sunglasses came over me. So now I'm the proud owner of a couple of Ray-Ban Sidestreets. Mirrorshades. I've wanted a pair since I read Neuromancer in 1985.
Of course, if Ray-Ban didn't have an all-Flash site, I could link to them. But they do, so I can't. Less linklove for them then.
They will adorn my handsome mug when I go skiing in Åre this weekend.
Gmail is a meme spread by Google to help improve their search algorithms.
By tracking references to this enticing service, they can see which news sources and weblogs are influential. By launching on April 1, they can also track arguments against the belief that the service actually exists.
Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War by Paul Fussell.
A blend of personal memoir, history, and literary criticism centering around WW2.
"(...) what time seems to have shown out later selves is that perhaps there was less coherent meaning in the events of wartime than we had hoped. Deprived of a satisfying final focus by both the enormousness of the war and the unmanageable copiousness of its verbal and visual residue, all the revisitor of this imagery can do, turning now this way, now that, is to indicate a few components of the scene. And despite the preponderance of vileness, not all are vile."