Quotulatiousness

September 12, 2009

Is it non-partisan when both parties are at fault?

Filed under: Bureaucracy, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 20:55

Belatedly, from a post at Gates of Vienna on September 11, 2009:

After eight years that hole in ground in Lower Manhattan is still there. That’s more than twice as long as it took America to mobilize, rearm, go to war, and defeat Nazi Germany and Japan in World War Two.

In the eight years following John F. Kennedy’s call to put a man on the moon, the United States went from having no manned space program, though designing and testing the Mercury and Apollo spacecrafts, to a successful landing on the moon.

The original Word Trade Center took six years to complete, from the ground-breaking to the ribbon-cutting.

In the past eight years we have seen plenty of candlelight vigils with teddy bears and flowers and tearful remembrances by the relatives of the slain.

But there’s still a hole in the ground where the Twin Towers used to be.

The bureaucratic wheels grind slow . . . but not necessarily very fine.

QotD: The Muse of Booze

Filed under: Humour, Quotations, Wine — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 18:06

It’s reasonably well known that the arts of brewing and fermenting arose in nice time for the dawn of human civilization (there are ancient poems and mosaics and that sort of thing, dedicated to the celebration of the fact), but it’s at least as notorious that an open flask of alcohol is a mouth that can lead to hell as well as heaven. This being the case — and one day we shall work out the etymology that leads us to use the simple Italian word for a bottle, fiasco, in the way that we do — then it is as well to have a true Virgil to be our guide through the regions infernal as well as paradisiac.

The late Sir Kingsley Amis (who wrote these slender but thoughtful volumes before receiving his knighthood and who was also the expert to consult on things like the derivation of fiasco) was what the Irish call “your man” when it came to the subject of drink.

Christopher Hitchens, “The Muse of Booze”, Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis, 2008

The most welcome improvements in iPhone 3.1

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:25

Brian Chen looks at the improvements that are likely to be most popular with iPhone users:

A major addition to iPhone 3.1 are Genius recommendations. Similar to the iTunes function of the same name, iPhone’s Genius feature helps you search for apps you may wish to download based on those you already own. Also, iPhone 3.1 enables you to easily sort apps on your computer screen using iTunes 9. As helpful as these new features sound, iPhone 3.1 comes with major drawbacks: the loss of free, unauthorized tethering and the inability to access the unauthorized app store Cydia. One more caveat: After upgrading to iPhone 3.1, you can’t downgrade to 3.0.

That’s a tough predicament, and many likely face a dilemma. Should you download now or give hackers some time to re-exploit the system? Here, we dive into the pros and cons of the software update to help you make a decision you won’t regret.

As I haven’t jailbroken my phone, the loss of access for Cydia customers isn’t particularly important to me (but I’m sure it’ll be addressed ASAP by the folks there). It’s about time that Apple provided a better way to manage the location of apps in the user interface other than finger-twitching on the iPhone itself.

Grumble, mutter, frickin’ hard drives, grumble mutter

Filed under: Technology — Tags: — Nicholas @ 01:06

So . . . I finally get the desktop back from the shop. Another dead hard drive. Oddly enough, another Seagate. You’d think by dead drive #4, I’d start to notice a pattern, wouldn’t you?

Yep. After the old Seagate 120Gb drive died, which was neither unexpected nor particularly traumatic — because I had backups that worked — I just disconnected it and carried on . . . no point in powering a dead drive. It had had a long and useful life as the primary drive in my previous desktop, so it had paid its dues.

The two 320Gb Seagate Free Agent drives having MTBF measured in tens of hours was depressing, but oh well. It’s not like either one of them lasted long enough to actually be, you know, useful or anything.

The fricking Seagate 500Gb primary backup drive crapping out after just over a year was more than a bit disappointing. It was the drive I’d been using for backups and for local storage of infrequently needed things (photos, old documents, scans, etc.). Not everything on the drive had made its way to other media, of course. Some documents lost, some scans I’ll have to re-do, and so on.

So, today’s to-do list includes picking up a 2-bay drive enclosure with an Ethernet port, and a matching pair of big hard drives to put in it. RAID-1, here I come.

Update: I’m now waiting for the pair of 1Tb hard drives to be formatted for RAID-1. Advice from Chris Taylor, Andre B., and Dark Water Muse was much appreciated, thanks guys. I ended up buying a D-Link DNS-323 for the enclosure, and a pair of Hitachi SATA drives. I’d have preferred the Western Digital Green equivalents, but they were out of stock, and I wanted to get this up and running today.

The untold story from the Plains of Abraham

Filed under: Cancon, History, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:03

Desmond Morton points out that one of the most interesting parts of the battle — after both Wolfe and Montcalm had become casualties — is almost unknown today:

What happened next? Suddenly French soldiers knew: they would die. The chill of terror that dissolved British regulars in earlier battles now struck Montcalm’s men. A British cannon shell smashed their general’s side. As soldiers lugged Montcalm back to Quebec, they were jostled by terrified whitecoats fleeing for their lives.

Bayonets glinting, the British followed at their heels. On the left, Fraser’s Highlanders dropped their muskets, drew their heavy claymores, and raced forward with blood-curdling screams to cut off a French escape to Beauport.

This is as much of the battle as most historians report. What more do you need?

Montcalm died before dawn on the 14th. Hit again, probably by a Canadien militiaman, Wolfe died as the French ranks dissolved. Fighting on the Plains continued until dusk, sustained by Canadien militia and their native allies. When Quebec sovereignists killed plans to re-enact the battle they helped keep that heroic story secret. Perhaps they had no idea that it happened. When French regulars fled, the militia fought on.

Five times they stopped Fraser’s terrifying Highlanders from slaughtering the terrified regulars. Thanks to their despised militia and aboriginal allies, Montcalm’s French regulars could safely stop at Beauport, catch their breath, and begin a long, dreary march back to Montreal to prepare for another year of war. Did the separatists not want anyone to know?

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