stoutfellow

For the first time, I am displeased with my Kindle.

One of the first books I downloaded was George Boole's classic Investigation of the Laws of Thought. Like most mathematical texts at Project Gutenberg, it was in the form of a .pdf. Just now, I decided to read it. I paged past the usual Gutenberg stuff, then the table of contents, and finally arrived at Chapter One.

It is unreadable. The font is simply too small for these aging eyes. Normally this would not be a problem; Kindle has a menu allowing for changing the font as the user pleases. But -

that menu is not available for this work. I suppose it has to do with its being a .pdf; I haven't checked any of the other .pdfs I have, but that's the only explanation I can think of.

It's not a total loss. I can still read it on my home computer - but that is far less convenient.

Grmph.

I'm rereading my old LJ posts via LJArchive, and I'm disturbed to find that, apparently, one of my commenters has become an unperson. There are numerous comments which are obviously replies to other comments, but the original comments are simply missing. The replies are appropriately indented, but the originals just aren't there - not even a "deleted comment" (or "deleted user").

Grmph.

I'm going to rag on Harry Turtledove a bit more.

I have to recap a little detail from the How Few Remain timeline. The point of departure for the series is this: in 1862, the Union army does not get its hands on a copy of Lee's general orders during the first invasion of Pennsylvania. As a result, instead of defeating the invasion at Antietam, the Union is defeated, er, somewhere else. This opens the door for diplomatic intervention by France and the UK, forcing the US to acknowledge Confederate independence. As one result, the Democrats win the next four presidential elections; the Republicans do not regain power until 1880. They then embroil the US in another war with the Confederacy; this time, the UK takes a hand militarily, and the war ends, again, in Union defeat. Afterward, Republican leaders gather to discuss how to recover from this (political) disaster. Lincoln, still a force to be reckoned with despite his unfortunate presidency, suggests outflanking the Democrats by making a strong appeal to the working class. He is rebuffed, and then leads his followers out of the Republican Party and into union with the Socialists, who thereupon become the second-largest party in the US. The US enters into alliance with Germany, and this leads to victory in World War I (1914-17).

So that's the political layout: the Democrats on the right, the remnant of the Republicans slightly to their left, and the Socialists (their radicalism tempered by the influx of Lincoln supporters) occupying the bulk of the left. The Democrats hold the presidency until 1920; the Socialists then win four of the next five elections, losing only in 1932. Turtledove has some fun assigning political figures to one or another party, and most of his assignments are reasonable. Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, and Thomas Dewey are Democrats (along with the Tafts and a young Barry Goldwater); Wendell Willkie winds up still a Republican; and the Socialists include Eugene Debs (of course), Upton Sinclair, "N. Mattoon Thomas" (and I'm sure the "N" stands for "Norman"), Franklin Roosevelt, and Charles La Follette. But they also include Al Smith, and I can't buy that. OTL, Smith rejected the New Deal, going so far as to support the Republican candidate in the presidential elections of 1936 and 1940. Turtledove's timeline has the Socialists introducing a version of Social Security in the '20s, and I can't see Smith staying with the party. He'd be a Republican, or on the left flank of the Democrats.

Two lesser points. On a couple of occasions, one of Turtledove's characters recalls a line or two of poetry, but can't come up with the name of the "crazy Englishman" who wrote those lines. They happen to be lines from T.S. Eliot - who was born in the US, in Missouri (which remained in the US, in Turtledove's timeline). OTL, Eliot emigrated to Britain - but in the HFR timeline, the US and the UK are bitter enemies, and I really don't see Eliot's emigration as likely in that case. (Possible? I suppose - but unlikely.) There are also references to people taking aspirin - with a lower-case "a". But "Aspirin" was a trademark of Bayer, and OTL was stripped from them as part of the post-WWI reparations. In the HFR timeline, Germany won WWI, and "Aspirin" should still be trademarked. (Yes, I know, genericization happens, but it seems unlikely to me in this context and time frame.)

Oh, well. Even Homer nods. (At a convention a few years ago, I attended a panel on the legacy of Poul Anderson. His wife was on the panel, and told us that she backstopped him, checking his alt-histories and histories for errors, and often catching them. I wonder if anyone does that job for Turtledove.)

I have been a customer of a certain local bank almost since I first moved here. By and large, I've been happy with their service. (Well, there was the time a while back when an unannounced policy change on their part caused major screw-ups with my credit cards....) I have a debit card which draws on my checking account there, which I use, mostly, for grocery shopping.

This week, I received a note explaining that, effective May 1, they will charge an excess transaction fee for debit transactions in excess of six per monthly statement cycle. I checked: in the most recently completed cycle, I used the debit card for grocery shopping sixteen times; I also made two ATM withdrawals. (I'm not sure ATM transactions count; I'll have to check.) If I'm to avoid penalties, I guess I'll have to restrict my grocery shopping via debit card to the weekend, and rely on cash the rest of the time. This will probably also entail larger ATM withdrawals, to keep my cash on hand topped up.

Bleah.

Well, dayum. The motor of my clothes dryer just burned out. I have a full load (fortunately, no more than that) of wet clothing, and no clean clothes. Given the current temperature, I couldn't sun-dry them, even if I had a clothesline (and even if clotheslines weren't barred by the local C&Rs). I've hung them up on every available support - tops of doors, doorknobs, and chair backs, but it'll be hours before they're all dry.

Looks like a visit to Sears Hardware is in order. The dryer is almost twenty years old, and its heating capacities have been unsatisfactory for a while in any case, but I wasn't expecting this particular expense so soon.

This semester, I have long days on Tuesday and Thursday - two classes, one in the early afternoon and the other in the evening. I've gotten in the habit of bringing dinner to work - either a frozen meal, or a serving of something I've cooked at home. (So far, it's running about 50-50.) Around 3:00, I pop it into the microwave in the faculty lounge and, while it's cooking, I go downstairs to get something cold to drink with the meal. The vending machines offer various drinks, in 20-oz bottles. My usual choice is Brisk, which is almost but not entirely unlike tea. Unfortunately, for the last week and a half whoever services the machines hasn't restocked on Brisk; but I continue to hope.

I put the money - a single and two quarters - into the machine and pressed the button for Brisk. "THAT SELECTION IS CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE." Okay; I pressed the other button for Brisk, and got the same answer. My second choice on that machine is a fruit-flavored drink, peach-melon or something like that. "THAT SELECTION..." Nothing else in that machine appealed to me, so I pressed the change return button; quarters clinked into the return slot, one, two, three, four.... Four quarters change. I scowled; but I still had two quarters in my pocket, so I moved over to the other vending machine and dropped all six in. That one offers Pepsi's Wild Cherry, which isn't bad. Press. "THAT SELECTION..." I gave up, and hit the button for Diet Pepsi. The bottle thunked into the slot, but seemed jammed. Not too unusual; sometimes they get hung up on the flap, and a little gentle pressure frees them. This time, it required a bit more of a shove than usual, and the flap still didn't close. I looked more closely: there was a second bottle of Diet Pepsi. More pressure, and the second bottle came free.

So, okay; I spent $2 instead of $1.50, but I got two drinks instead of one. Even so, it was two bottles of my fourth choice....

Today, apparently, I did something fatal to my new-model library database. I can open my other databases, but attempting to open that one led to a "Microsoft Access has stopped working" message. I wound up just deleting it.

Fortunately, I've been making notes as I go, so reconstructing it won't be too much hassle. I suspect I know what the fatal error was; it was a nifty feature I wanted to add, but I can live without it.

Still kinda bummed, though.

Most of the messages my answering machine gathers daily are nil - no words, or perhaps a "Hello?" But there was one today that just takes the cake for insufferability.

The message began: "Thank you for calling our site. Press 1 if..."

That's right. This entity (apparently connected to Wal-Mart) called my phone and immediately dumped me into a voice-mail menu.

If voice-mail menus that ensnare people who call certain corporations are the spawn of Satan, voice-mail menus that call you can only be described as Cthulhuesque.

Keep away, I tell you! Keep away!

So, it turns out that to get my remote access working, I need to reset the power settings on my office computer so that it doesn't sleep or hibernate. Obvious, but the instructions didn't mention that. Since I wasn't notified that my access had been approved until after I'd gone home on Friday, I haven't been able to do that.... Tomorrow, then.

Yesterday, I had to do quite a bit of shopping after work, so I left my shoulderbag (and its books) at home, instead carrying a pocket-book - by which I mean a book small enough to fit in my trouser pocket. I chose to begin rereading R. M. Meluch's The Myriad, the first book in the Tour of the Merrimack series. I've already reviewed the book once before, but on this reading a couple of items have snagged my attention.

First, a grumble. As the Merrimack approaches the T'Arra system, the captain is upset: "John Farragut could not get an answer to a question as simple as how three planets separated by ten, twenty, and forty-three light years were communicating." Brownie points for anyone who can pick out why that sentence bugs me.

Second, a puzzlement. Later, after the disappearance of Alpha Flight¹, Augustus is pessimistic: "Their oxygen is running out right now. Dakota Shepard is an air sucker. He's already out. The women might last two more hours. After that, they're the sky pilot's flight." I've only encountered the phrase "sky pilot" in one other place, the song of that title sung by the Animals. There, it refers to a military chaplain. My first impression of Augustus's comment was that he's referring to God; on reconsidering, I can see that he might mean "chaplain", but it's not clear. In any case, it's military slang; any of the ex-military on my FL (or in my family...) care to comment?


1. No, not that Alpha Flight. This is part of the Merrimack's complement of fighters.