The Twilight Report

In the dollar store some times ago I got a cheap book titled Great Battles. It is a funny book for me to own being a pacifist. But I find that sort of thing interesting. It starts with the Battle of Marathon and finishes off with the 2003 invasion of Iraq (which they refer to as “Operation Iraqi Freedom”). Each night I read a chapter which covers a different battle, and then I read about the same said battle on Wikipedia. Lately I have been making the rounds through the Napoleonic Wars: Trafalgar, Waterloo etc. Then I read into other subjects like the Napoleon's Continental System, in which he tried to cut the British out of trading in Europe, but this ended up hurting France more than Britain in practice. Also led to invasions into Spain and Russia which resulted into the downfall of the French Empire. I wonder if their are any lessons for us in The Future for that.

Lena has been watching through Star Trek The Next Generation, and we've been watching key episodes together. In The Best of Both Worlds, Picard tours the Enterprise the night before a tough battle with the Borg. He makes his way to Ten Forward and has a conversation with Guinan which is supposed to remind us that, this being the season finale, Anyone Can Die. (Riker is also mulling over a promotion to another ship, and guest Shelby is vying for his job). (Oh noes any cast change could happen)!

Picard: It's something of a tradition, Guinan - Captain touring the ship before a battle.
Guinan: Hmm. Before a hopeless battle, if I remember the tradition correctly.
Picard: Not necessarily. Nelson toured the HMS Victory before Trafalgar.
Guinan: Yes, but Nelson never returned from Trafalgar, did he?
Picard: No, but the battle was won.

Absent a stale spoiler alert, lets just say at the end of part two, all the regulars are back where they started and Shelby is on to other things never to be seen again.

Anyway, reading about Trafalgar, the thing that strikes me about this interaction now is that it seems like Picard is on “our side”. “Our side” being the presumed Anglo-Saxon-American audience which relates more with Nelson than his opponent Pierre-Charles Villeneuve (who by the way, unlike Nelson, lost the battle, but survived). The only problem is that from Picard's perspective Trafalgar wasn't won, but lost. He is after all, nominally French. We even later find out in another story that he had a relative fighting at Trafalgar on the French side.

I was in a tall building the other day riding the elevator from close to the top all the way to the ground floor. A guy who worked in the building was already in the lift and seemed flustered and was very apologetic because only one of the two lifts was operating. I make it a policy never to be in a hurry so I wasn’t bothered. Then this lady got on somewhere (let’s just say level l0 for good measure). This seemed only to make the man even more flustery. She kept telling us that she needed to get off on level 5, in the same manner that someone reminds ones self something by saying it over and over again because it is something they are likely to forget. I was sort of torn as to whether or not to suggest that pressing the “5” button might help. When we got to the ground level, she was all “oh my gosh I missed my floor.” Again the man was apologising for wasting my precious time. I thought it prudent not to mention that I wasn’t even supposed to be in the building in the first place.

This week at work my boss responded to a client that he would pass their provisioning request on to the “Provisioning Team”. He then poked his head over the cubical wall and said “Graham, you are now officially our Provisioning Team.”

I mentioned to Kim on Friday that I was taking Russian. She asked why, in a manner, dare I say it, that might sound a bit like surprise.

I am trying to get my head around the Vista thing. Fortunately my workplace has been smart and all the windows client machines are still XP. Several of the business apps that we use, like Office and Outlook, are of the Vista generation (by which I mean completely baffling from a user interface point of view). Was there something wrong with the XP generation of software? I think personally the best feature of XP was that it was relatively easy to make it look and act like Windows 2000. I’m reading in an open source rag (so, obviously not a balanced point of view) today about how the demise of Microsoft due to Vista was a forgone conclusion because their model for software development is “wrong”. Is that really true though? I mean I remember MS-DOS 4. That turkey was a real stinker. Everyone just kept using version 3.3 until 5 came out. The stakes in the computer industry are a whole lot higher now of course, but history is not really about progress it is about cycles.