Dysmey Post Archive > Pages for 2002 > Late February 2002 Edition
It's wonderful weather today, but winter is about to have the last word. A lot of cold and snow is heading this way.
The weather is continued from last weekend, which saw me in the crawlspace under the family room. (Well, that's not what we really call it, but I won't hold forth on the history of the room's actual name.) I was there partly to run network cabling; and partly to repair the damage I did in bumping the drain pipe from the sump pump.
This past Saturday I went out and bought a separate APC power strip for the network tools (DSL modem, router and hub), so that I wouldn't have to turn them off when I turn off my computers.
I also bought a Linux+ study book. I plan to take the exam sometime this month or early next.
The weather was also nice enough for my sister the freelance editor to coax our niece to help her clean her house. The floor is now visible. <ooo!> Some rooms are now accessible. <ooh!> And with the new spiral fluorescent bulbs, it is now brighter inside. <aah!>
My sister the freelance editor moderates a newsgroup for fellow self-employed editors and proofreaders. Its archive stores important advice and experience dating back four years. That archive is now in peril.
Over the years the freelance newsgroup has passed from one list service to another, finally falling under the auspices of Yahoo. Yahoo is a byword for negligence in service and maintenance, but the newsgroup held its own.
Until now.
A couple of days ago, my sister got a message from Yahoo. Yahoo plans to restructure groups into free and paid services. The free service is very minimal; the premium service lets her have archive storage of 25 megabytes.
The freelance archive is at least 35 megabytes. There is a chance that the archive may be lost if Yahoo carries out its plan.
My sister and I are working out how to back up the archive, while she searches for a (non-Yahoo) paid service, on the theory that paid services will not mess around with she as a free service would. So far, TalkList is a leading candidate, as it is not very expensive and promises to waive its setup fee for refugees from Yahoo.
One of the artificial nations (read "tribal aggregates") cooked up by Britain is having an election. Its leader is using terror and violence to keep out foreign watchers and to make its people keep him in power.
The leader is now really old, and no doubt he will die soon. Oddly, that is too bad: The present terror is a foretaste of the bloodbath to come when he dies, for his cronies and enemies will battle ferociously to succeed him.
This is just the latest example of the folly of the Europeans, and the British in particular, to think they can well-intentedly impose a Western-like state on non-Western peoples.