Cars have changed. Back in the day you could “pop the clutch” to start a car by letting it roll down hill, putting it in first gear with your foot on the (manual) clutch, let the clutch out (“popping the clutch”) and often the car would start. Handy if you had a car with a dead battery at the top of a hill.
Cars are full of electronics now, and that can be good, and it can be very bad…
When you’re on a world tour following COVID lock-downs, nominated for 3 Grammys, scheduled to play at the Grammy’s this year … and your drummer dies….
Steve Wilhite died last week. Yes, he created GIF, but that was just a side project among mountains of mostly single-handed coding projects that were a large part of what kept CompuServe going for years in the face of AOL and the Web.
…many times when asked about a delivery date Steve would answer “it will be done when it is done.”
I laughed when I read that. It was so Steve. It would have been said authoritatively, matter of factly, and any poor project manager involved would have to take that as the final word, because Steve was right … and consistently delivered.
Figure 1: “CompuServe Languages and Tools Group c.a. 2019” by George Jones is licenced under CC SA 4.0
Shelving the self hosting for a while. Just gonna push the static blog up to my 20 year old Hurricane Electric shell account. URL redirection is a marvelous thing. This is not your fathers CNAME record.
I’ve been listening to the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, the stoic Roman emperor. The stoic philosopher Epictetus, who was an older contemporary of Marcus Aurelius said
Never say about anything, I have lost it,
but only I have given it back.
It might lower my blood pressure if I could get my mind around that.
I think the lesson of history is that we don’t learn from the lessons of history.
This is framed quote that’s been hanging on my family’s walls since sometime in the late 19th or early 20th century. It’s way more positive than the other things I was thinking of posting in these dark times…
Figure 1: “Present Duties” by William Penn paraphrasing Jesus is in fact not copyrightable, Charles Scribners’s Sons claims c.a. 1897 notwithstanding.
When goods don’t cross borders, soldiers will.
That is all.
Hiking yesterday in the Shenandoah Valley I discovered that I was on part of “Morgans Road”, which is a road George Washington had built into the hills to allow his army to retreat from the British in case things got really bad. “George Washington Planned To Sleep Here If Things Got Really Bad”. That was enough at the time of the bicentennial (1976) to put up another George Washington marker.
This includes a longish list of Washington sites I’ve run across, including a couple with family connections.
Figure 1: “George Washington Planned To Sleep Here” by George Jones is licenced under CC SA 4.0
Below is some text from Rimsky-Korsakov’s last opera, where the people mockingly pledge loyalty to the Russian King (Tsar)
King Dodon, a lazy and gluttonous ruler, is greatly worried by his warlike neighbors.
It seems the Kremlin’s website is having some issues right now…
Figure 1: “Kremlin Website, Nothing To See Here, Move Along” by George Jones is licenced under CC SA 4.0
