Another Monday morning...

[alexpgp]

First day back on the job found me playing catch-up. The big goal of the day was to finish a draft of the company's Technology Control Plan, which I pretty much did, except that I'm not really happy with it. I have to make sure I send it out first thing tomorrow for review. I'll bet dollars to donuts that comments returned by Friday will amount to nothing. In between, we discussed the usual assortment of issues. Just to give the day some spice.

I've been playing around with the idea of incorporating a search capability in my LiveJournal, based on a server I have access to as opposed to burning LJ bandwidth. It would also afford me the opportunity to experiment with different search schemes.

The simplest scheme wouldn't actually be a search capability at all, but a list of selected topics with pointers to individual entries (or, rather, to individual days when particular entries were made). The next simplest scheme would be to grep a text file containing all my posts, but it doesn't seem to be a very efficient scheme. Recent downloads of all my posts are starting to exceed 300 KB, and the volume increases about 100 KB per month.

The main point of this exercise is to see how well the distinction between service from LiveJournal and other machines can be erased, creating simply a single environment through which a visitor moves. This already happens to a certain extent when you embed graphics in a post, since your post has to point to somewhere other than livejournal.com for the graphic.

A corollary to the eventual erasure of lines between servers is an eventual setup where one's LiveJournal really doesn't live in any one place. As a small additional step in that direction, as the gentle reader may have found, I've succeeded in giving my LiveJournal page the same look-and-feel as my own personal web pages.

Cheers...

Comments

I've read it all...

[afeht.livejournal.com]

Aw all right, you write a lot, Mr. Showoff, that's for sure. Jesus J. Christ! Now everybody knows you are an Engineer, a Computer Wiz, a VIP close to the Austronauts, a Linguist, a Top Chess Player, a Mathematician, a Connaisseur of Great Literature and Misuc, and a complete, fully expressed and unambiguous... well, representative of purely American pseudoculture -- the only pseudoculture that doesn't even begin to guess that it has nothing to do with the real one.

(Million thanks to the Allah the Allmighty that I had enough common sense not to go to that travesty of an ATA Conference in the fricken tropical Disneyworld!)

About that music thing: it didn't start going downhill after Beethoven, it bifurcated. On one hand, a "pop" music appeared -- easygoing, pleasant to the ear but brainless enough to make anybody with any intellectual inspiration start throwing up uncontrollably. On the other hand, a "serious" branch developed -- allegedly profound and brainy but more and more esoteric in expression, that is, unpleasant to the ear. This bifurcation process, in a long run, killed all kinds of music: pleasant music became an endless commercialized disposable derivative of the dozen tunes and beats preferred by our lesser brothers and sisters with an extra "X" chromosome, while serious music became so ugly and incomprehensible that even its authors cannot listen to it (they usually prefer beer & soft rock chewing-gum music as recreation).

As to your dear indispensable daughter, she doesn't have a slightest idea what music is, and what is it for. She uses it as some people use wallpaper and furniture: to create a jumpy kind of a general mood that helps poor bored young individual to survive one more shitty day in the Houston's choking paradise. She couldn't even hope to guess that music might have some content; she listens to the sounds as a child listens to the foreign speech: some of the emotions and general "energetic positiveness" or "sadness" do get across -- but that's all. No wonder she likes "techno". If I would use a stereo player as a bathroom tranquilizer, I wouldn't expect anything more complicated, really. Not of a bathroom equipment, no. Your attempts at the cultural education of your children, obviously, fizzled. Get mad at me if you like: it wouldn't change a thing. Next time be more careful choosing a father for your children (THAT was a joke: J-O-K-E).

That'll be all for now.

P.S. You're getting an ISS religion, man.

Look at the damned station from the future: what shall they say, those space pompous exploration historians?

"A pitiful substitute for the real thing, a lost opportunity, a shameful compromise with political fashions of the day, an artificial soothing placebo to satisfy the pangs eating those aging space enthusiasts who were unable to admit their defeat by the overwhelming force of the contemporary mediocrity..." Something like that, eh? Not that I don't have the same pangs.

It is a look from the future, not from the past, that allows us to judge correctly, and to see the real relative sizes of the things.

Sleep well.

AF

Re: I've read it all...

[alexpgp.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. I think I got off fairly lightly for a first pass through my posts.

So when are you going to start posting stuff so I can engage in that world-famous turnabout that's supposed to be "fair play"?

Cheers...