My father passed away last night. Prayers for all, please.
Author Archives: wjduquette
True Love
I got this e-mail the other day:
Dear loved one.
I saw your profile on the site and wish to contact you after seeing your profile, you appear gentle, I humble wish you will aspect my request to be my lovely friend.
Let me introduce my self to you as gentle hansom young graduate that is interested in
knowing you and having you as a lovely friend so kindly welcome my request.My dear I am presently waiting for your positive reply that will keep us as friends
forever.Regards.
Gerald.
I have no idea what the individual is after; but what I love best about the letter is that it’s addressed to “undisclosed-recipients;:”. I’m also glad to know that there are still a few young hansoms left in the world.
Nix on Windows Live Writer
Windows Live Writer has now crashed or locked up my netbook at least twice. That is, I think it was Live Writer’s fault. This machine has been rock solid, but it crashed hard today, while invoking Live Writer, and then froze completely ten minutes later while I was using Live Writer. Dunno what to make of it.
Anyway, do any of you Windows users have a desktop blogging program that you like? Or do you just use the web interface? Inquiring minds and all that.
Windows Live Writer Nuisance
OK, I’ve identified one nuisance in Windows Live Writer: if you cut and paste text from a web page, there seems to be no way to get it to paste the text without the formatting coming along. There’s supposed to be a way; the Edit/Paste Special… dialog lets you specify that it shouldn’t include formatting. But it does anyway. And there doesn’t appear to be anything in the WLW help on it. Sigh.
Comrade Don Camillo
Some time back I was introduced to Giovanni Guareschi’s delightful world of Don Camillo, a parish priest in a small village in Italy a little after World War II. Don Camillo loves his villagers dearly, though they cause him many problems, and none more than one Peppone, the mayor and the local Communist Party leader. As a Communist, Peppone has no use for the Church, and as a priest, Don Camillo has no use for the Communist Party, and so the two are frequently at odds. And yet, somehow they can’t quite do without each other either.
Consequently, when I found Comrade Don Camillo at the local Dollar Bookstore (every book a dollar, no matter what it is), I nabbed it, and as expected I enjoyed it thoroughly.
In this book, Peppone, now not only a Communist Party bigwig but also a member of the Italian Senate, is arranging a trip for himself and nine party stalwarts to the Soviet Union, there to see the marvels of the Worker’s Paradise. By indulging in a bit of blackmail—Don Camillo had done a favor for Peppone, and Peppone didn’t want anyone to know—Don Camillo manages to get a place on the trip as one Comrade Tarocci. He spends the rest of the book subverting the party loyalty of the other folks on the trip, mostly by adopting a More-Correctly-Communist-Than-Though attitude and relying on the other’s Italian sense of the ridiculous…and on his own native goodness, which he’s mostly unaware of.
It’s a fun book, and I stayed up late last night finishing it.
More on West Oversea
Patrick O’Hannigan has reviewed Lars Walker’s West Oversea, and where I accentuated the negative, he accentuates the positive. And, come to think of it, he’s mostly right, too.
Boot Booster
My netbook came with 1 gigabyte of memory. I ordered a replacement 2GB memory card with the netbook. It arrived today, and I installed it. The machine booted right up, which was nice, and I asked Windows to tell me how much memory I now had. It said: 0.99GB. Huh?
It took a while, but I finally figured it out. The Asus BIOS has something called a "Boot Booster". It makes the machine boot up more quickly…but apparently some things are skipped. Like scanning the memory to see how much you have. I disabled the Boot Booster, and rebooted: 1.99GB. I then re-enabled the Boot Booster, and all is good.
Windows Live Writer
Since I expect to do a certain amount of blogging from this little netbook of mine, I went looking for desktop blogging software. I use MarsEdit, which I’m quite fond of, on my Mac, but it’s Macintosh only. I went to the WordPress home page, and did a search, and discovered that Microsoft has released its own blogging tool, Windows Live Writer…which came pre-installed on my Netbook. So far, it looks OK.
The Thing That Will Not Die
So this week I ordered one of these little babies: an Asus eee PC netbook. This is a newly released model with a 1.6 MHz processor, 1GB of memory, 160MB hard drive, and a battery that’s rated for ten and a half hours of use.
Let me repeat that: Ten and a half hours of use.
I thought, “Heck, I’ll be lucky to get six hours out of it…but that’s still really, really good. I should be able to use this for an entire plane flight with no problems. I can take it with me places and not worry about running out of power. Sweet!”
It arrived yesterday afternoon, and the manual said to let it charge for at least eight hours before first use. I plugged it in and left it alone until around 6:30 this morning, at which point I booted it up and unplugged it.
It’s now almost 10 PM, and the darn thing is still running. I’ve put it to sleep a number of times during the day; it’s not like I was typing at it the whole time. But I’ve installed a bunch of software, and read a lot of blogs, and just generally spent as much time as I reasonably could playing with it and using it…and it’s still going.
They say that you’ll get the based battery life out of it if you fully charge then fully drain the battery the first few cycles, which is beginning to get me down. I’d like to let it charge over night, but it’s still at 17% charge, and claims that it’s got an hour and twenty-three minutes left.
Plus, everything seems to work OK. It’s zippier than I was expecting it to be. It’s small enough to carry around; and gosh, I’m not worried about running out of power while out and about. On the whole, color me pleased and amazed.
Interview with Lars Walker
Over at Brandywine Books, Phil has done a short interview with Lars on West Oversea.
I’ve been pondering West Oversea and its predecessor over the last week, and I think I’ve figured out why I didn’t find it as compelling as Erling’s Word, Lars’ original novel and the first half of The Year of the Warrior. Erling’s Word is about Erling’s attempts to bring Christianity to his people despite the strong opposition of some of them; and also about Father Aillil’s spiritual battle against both the same opposition and his own past. Erling’s and Aillil’s stories run in tandem.
In the second half of The Year of the Warrior, and in West Oversea, we again have two stories in each tale, Erling’s and Aillil’s. Erling does his thing in the natural world, and Aillil does his in the supernatural world, and although they happen at the same time and mostly in the same place they seem oddly disconnected. Not entirely, of course, but somewhat, at least in comparison with Erling’s Word.
But I blither.
The View from the Foothills 