Author: paul

a blast from the past

Cruise Ship Profiles Cruise Lines – Orient Lines – Marco Polo

Adapted from the first to earn hard currency, the ALEXANDR PUSHKIN was employed in the service of the Baltic State Steamship Company to run between Leningrad and Montreal via ports in Western Europe and Britain.

This is the ship on which I crossed the North Atlantic in 1966, not long after she entered service.

It looks like quite a big ship, but even by the standards of the 1960s, she’s quite small. The QE II, buiit in 1969, is 70,000 tons to the Pushkin/Polo’s 19,000. The Queen Mary II, slated to enter service in 2003, will be 150,000 tons.
Continue reading “a blast from the past”

words to live by

In my son’s new school, I saw a poster/sign in a classroom, obviously made by one of the staff, and I thought it could be a pretty complete philosophy for life:


  • Have you been kind today?
  • Are you making good choices?
  • Are you doing your very best work?

Ilike that these are questions, rather than imperatives: there’s the opportunity for reflection, rather than just another message being dinned into your head.

I especially like the second question. The extension of that is, what are you doing right now and is what you should be doing?

Some may find this simplistic or childish, but think of all the events in the news or your daily life where a little self-examination might have made all the difference.

The Wizard of Pink/The Dark Side of the Rainbow

Google Search: “dark side of the moon” “wizard of oz”

Almost all the song transitions match up with scene transitions, and most of the lyrics of Dark Side of the Moon can be seen to resonate with simultaneous things happening in The Wizard of Oz movie as well in one way or another. Although you have similar bursts of synchronistic energy in other synchs, none appear nearly this sustained or consistent; “Dark Side of the Rainbow” seems unique in this way.

from http://users.boone.net/brittanma/darksideoftherainbow.html

I had heard of this rumor a few weeks ago for the first time, and am amazed to see how much there is to it.

Follow a few links yourself, and see what it’s about. If you try it yourself, let me know.

blogchalking

I followed a link on John’s site and lookedinto the blogchalking stuff, deciding to add the tags to my pages and see what the results might be.

The first thing I learned was the value of linking movabletype templates to real files you can edit with a real editor. Simply copying and pasting turned all the quotes to entity refs, and editing them in MT’s template display window was going to be unwieldy at best.

Watch this space for the future of information retrieval

Nav4 Search Engine Patch Kit – Think Tank 23 Context Navigation Solutions

Give your search engine some words, and you’ll get back some documents that match one or more of those words. Give Nav4 a document, and you’ll get back the documents that match one or more of that document’s concepts. Is this search result close? Let Nav4 find others like it; let Nav4 get you closer.

Nav4 SEPK picks up where your search engine leaves off. Like what you’re reading? Want to know more? Nav4 gives you related documents, in context. You’re one click away from a Nav4 results page the additional documents you need. Or, why click? Embed Nav4 related documents right in your Web pages, with Nav4 Web services available in HTML and XML formats.

Look for this service to be impletmented here on this weblog soon: with each article you read, you’ll see links to other articles, here and on other weblogs, that are thematically similar. This is beyond the capabilities of keyword search, since it works like your mind does: it knows what a document is about, not how many times a given word appears.

I’m excited about it: this is the way information retrieval, aka search, should have always worked.

this scam keeps working, I guess


I am the Chairman of the contract Advisory Committee
(CAC) of the Nigerian Federal Ministry of Works and
Housing (FMWH). I am seeking your assistance to enable
me transfer the sum of US$16,500,000.00 (Sixteen
Million, Five Hundred Thousand United States Dollars)
into your private/company account.

The fund came about as a result of a contract awarded
and executed on behalf of my Ministry the Federal
Ministry of Works and Housing.The contract was supposed
to be awarded to two foreign contractors to the tune of
US$60,000,000.00 (Sixty Million United States Dollars).
But in the course of negotiation, the contract was
awarded to a Bulgarian contractor at the cost of
US$43,500,000.00 (Forty-Three Million, Five Hundred
Thousand United States Dollars) to my benefit unknown
to the contractor. This contract has been
satisfactorily executed and inspected as the Bulgarian
firm is presently securing payment from my Ministry,
where I am the Executive Director in-charge of all
foreign contract payment approval.

So let me get this straight: you have US$16.5 million, skimmed from an overfunded contract and you want me to help you spirit out of the country illegally.

Wow, how much trouble can I get into in one swell foop . . . .

what’s wrong with this picture?

It’s a bit frustrating to follow the rules while other flout them. If this guy is bringing in $2,000 a month and not reporting it, what’s my incentive to play fair?

The Seattle Times: Life after layoff: Dales to sell the house

It also meant taking on a double-sized Seattle Post-Intelligencer motor route — technically an independent business — and putting it in Karen’s name in case Rodney ever needed to collect unemployment compensation. [emphasis mine]

Rodney has been collecting $496 a week in unemployment benefits, and extensions could carry that into next year.

The Seattle Times: Layoff family sells home, adjusts to apartment life

And he continues to drive a double-size Seattle Post-Intelligencer route, an independent business held in Karen’s name. The route takes about 5 hours a night and brings in $2,000 a month. Together, the jobs and unemployment checks add up to $5,000 a month.

It sounds a lot to me like he’s taking some trouble to adhere to the letter of the law without paying much attention to the spirit of it.

The last question asked in the weekly benefits certification process is “Did you work for any employer?” and I would say he is working for his wife’s independently held business. I wonder how he answers that question every Sunday?

annoyances

  • apache2: there seems to be no easy way to migrate from apache’s httpd v.1 to version 2. I have tried a couple of times now and failed. The config file isn’t read properly and little things like SSI don’t work, cgi-bin isn’t active, and logging goes wrong. It sounds like the wrong config file is being read, but try as I might, I can’t get the one I want to be used. The apachectl script, for all its virtures, could benefit from either explicitly defining the file to be used or a path/directory in which to find it, like say /usr/local/apache2/conf.
  • Those online docs for the automounter are worse than bad, they’re dangerous. I found the one machine on which I had made those changes all but unusable. The only command I could run without getting an error that the system was unable to fork a process was echo which being shell built-in didn’t need any resources. I rebooted and messages had a whole lot of messages from the NFS process used by amd, so it seems to have just taken over the system. Needless to say, I have de-activated amd at boot time until I figure out if it’s worth documenting and then doing so.