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Week of 24 December 2001 Latest Update: Friday, 05 July 2002 09:16 |
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Monday, 24 December 2001 [Last
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| 11:55 -
Welcome to my journal page for the last week of 2001. Barbara has
undertaken her usual end-of-year deep clean. As best I can determine, this
involves attacking one room at a time. She first removes everything
movable from the room. Then she rips up the hardwood floors, removes the
sheetrock from the walls, cleans everything, and reassembles it. Or
something like that. I stay well away from Barbara while she's doing this.
I'm afraid she'd clean me.
I've jumped the gun a bit on Linux. I started playing with it yesterday, although I won't get seriously into Linux until I finish the book. More details over on the new Linux Chronicles page.
For most of the world outside Great Britain, morning ends at noon. That period between noon and evening is called, reasonably enough, "afternoon", as in after noon. Apparently, that's not the case in Great Britain, or at least it wasn't back in the 1920's and 1930's. I've been reading a bunch of classic British mysteries by Agatha Christie, R. Austin Freeman, and others. They frequently refer to times between noon and 12:59 p.m. as being in the morning. From context, it's clear that they indeed are referring to times after noon as being in the morning, e.g. "Lady Windemere discovered the body at 12:30 in the morning, just as her guests arrived for lunch." So, my questions for my Brit readers are: Is it still this way, or do modern Brits refer to times after noon as being afternoon rather than morning? And, when does (did) morning end? Was it at 1:00 p.m.? I haven't found any references to times after 1:00 p.m. as "morning", so I'm assuming that perhaps back in the 1920's and 30's morning was considered to end at 1:00 p.m. Incidentally, I also love the references to the postal service back then. A character opens his morning mail--which apparently arrived at about 6:00 a.m.--reads and replies to one of the mails he received, and has an answer back after lunch. Apparently, at least in London, there were half a dozen or more mail pickups and deliveries a day. In Thirteen for Dinner, Agatha Christie goes into detail about late deliveries. One of the characters notices an overlooked piece of outgoing mail, and takes it to the mailbox for pickup. She notes that as long as she gets it to the mailbox by 9:00 p.m. and puts an extra stamp on it, it will be processed that same day! Things were very different back then. Of course, they didn't have email or fax machines, either. (And, yes, I know there have been fax machines since the mid 19th century, but you know what I mean.)
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Tuesday, 25 December 2001 [Last
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Wednesday, 26 December 2001 [Last
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| 9:20 -
Barbara is attending the funeral of one of her favorite uncles this
morning. I met Harold a few times, once when Barbara and I traveled up to
the Newport News/Hampton area, and several times at family get-togethers.
Harold and I were alike in some ways. At family get-togethers when
everyone else was talking a blue streak, the two of us would be off in a
corner somewhere, just watching everything and not saying much.
While Barbara is gone, I'm taking care of Mom and the dogs. Fortunately, they're all behaving pretty well. Malcolm is supposed to be taking it easy so his incision can heal, but there's only so long a 2-year-old Border Collie can remain quiet. Last night, I took his cone-head off and played hall ball with him for most of the evening. He can chase the tennis ball down the hall and bring it back literally a couple hundred times in a row without becoming bored with the activity. Fortunately, he's not showing much tendency to chew his incision. I did keep his cone head on overnight, and I'll keep it on today while I'm working and not paying attention to him. Barbara should be back sometime after dinner this evening. We have left-overs from yesterday that I can just re-heat for Mom and me. I even have some left-overs for the dogs.
I definitely have a full-blown cold, the first in a long time. I was finally able to get to sleep last night by arranging myself in almost a sitting position. I still couldn't breathe through my nose, but at least that let me be comfortable enough to sleep. The guys let me sleep in until 0730 this morning, which was nice of them.
Big article in the morning paper about pop-up/under ads on the Internet. Sometimes I feel deprived, because I almost never see any of these things. I use Norton Internet Security with the ad-killer enabled, set my browsers to disable JavaScript (and everything else, for that matter), and refuse to have Flash installed on my systems. I occasionally run into a web site that requires ActiveX, JavaScript, Flash, or other obnoxious technologies. When that happens, I usually just go elsewhere, although I sometimes fire off a nastygram to the webmaster. Any site run by people clueless enough to require technologies like that rather than at least offering a plain HTML alternative is probably not long for this world anyway.
The Register reports yet another flaw in VIA chipsets. This one causes slow PCI transfers that can cripple hard drive performance. As regular readers know, I have never been a fan of VIA chipsets. In fact, I don't think VIA could design a first-rate chipset to save its life. VIA chipsets are better than they were a couple of years ago, but they're still not remotely in the same class as Intel chipsets.
Thanks to everyone who responded, either on the messageboard or via private mail, to my question about the hour from noon until 1300 being in the morning for some Brits. There's no consensus on the answers, which ranged from "I've never heard of such a thing," to "Yes, it used to be that way, but that's a lot less common nowadays," to "Yes, we still do it that way." As best I can determine, many Brits (then and now) refer to times before they sit down to lunch as "morning", and apparently many Brits consider 1300 to 1400 to be the lunch hour. (Most Americans consider noon to 1300 to be the lunch hour).
I should get to work, but I feel poorly enough that I think I'll just read and relax today. It's hard to write when one is interrupted frequently by sneezing. Click here to read or post responses to this week's journal entries [Top] |
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Thursday, 27 December 2001 [Last
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| 9:31 -
Barbara got home about 9:30 last night, having had to sit unmoving on the
Interstate for 1.5 hours while emergency workers cleared the remains of a
mayonnaise tanker that had crashed and burned. We were all happy to see
her arrive.
After I wrote my journal entry yesterday morning, I started to feel worse and worse. I took a couple of short naps during the day, but that didn't seem to help. By last night, I was feeling really terrible. I slept out in the den so as not to bother Barbara. Well, actually I stayed out in the den, but I didn't sleep much at all. Lots of tea and chicken-noodle soup today.
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Friday, 28 December 2001 [Last
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| 8:45 -
I'm doing much better this morning, although I'm still not up to speed. I
won't try to work on the book today. I'm just not sharp enough to do that.
Instead, I'll work on the lecture I'm scheduled to give for our astronomy
club in a couple weeks, Bagging the Winter Messier Objects.
I need to cover 23 objects in an hour, which with the introduction and conclusion means I have about 2 minutes per object. In that time, I have to give a bit of background about the object, provide an overview of its location to allow people to orient themselves, and then provide detailed instructions about how to get it in the eyepiece. I'll have to talk fast. Fortunately, nearly all of these objects are pretty easy to find. There will be so much detail that I can't reasonably expect anyone to take it all in during the lecture, so I'll post the text and images here in both HTML form and as a downloadable Word document.
Surely I can't be the only one who's noticed that the Opera splash screen reads "Oopera". I wonder if I should point that out to them.
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Saturday, 29 December 2001 [Last
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| 9:05 -
It sounds like this weekend will be a good time to stay indoors, even if
Barbara and I didn't have colds. Today is to be chilly, breezy, and damp.
Tonight is to be cold and windy, with temperatures dropping to about 20F
(-7C) and brisk winds. Tomorrow doesn't sound good either. We'll probably
just stay indoors other than to walk the dogs. Perhaps curl up in front of
the fireplace.
I'm feeling much better than I have been, although still not well enough to do productive writing. Fortunately, we have plenty of soup and other good cold-weather food laid in, and I have a stack of unread mysteries. Barbara and Bonnie Richardson are talking about spending New Year's Eve up at Bullington observing if the weather is good. I'm not sure I'll feel up to that. Click here to read or post responses to this week's journal entries [Top] |
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| 9:35 -
Another chilly day today, so Barbara and I will be spending the day
indoors. In addition to the room-by-room deep clean that's in progress,
she's also going to do her regular Sunday cleaning of the whole house
today.
I'm going to try to get caught up on my email backlog today. I've been pretty much ignoring email for the last several days while I've been ill. I have a hundred or so "real" messages in my inbox, not counting spam and listserve traffic, so if you've emailed me in the last few days and not gotten a response, that's why. My apologies. But before I do that, I'd better get the laundry done.
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