_www.FantasyLibrary.com [Visit Who Is Joseph Teller?] Synthesis & Synchronicity 040

Synthesis & Synchronicity #40

Winter has come with a vengeance to the Boston Area, as many of you are probably well aware. We've been hit by a major snowstorm, with somewhere between 18 inches and 24 inches (depending on where you are). Most of the side streets are buried, the main streets are bogged up as well in many places. The Airport was closed most of the night, and is filled (according to the tv) with stranded travellers. Thousands of people are without power (not us, thank the Goddess), and the traffic level on our street (a main access route to the Massachusetts Turnpike) is dead slow, with more foot traffic than cars (but the MBTA bus lines are still running, a good sign). A parking ban remains in effect for the second day, and so our gaming group get together for today was canceled. And It is still snowing...

In general, everything is covered in snow, most public events have been canceled, and many stores are closed.

So, we've been snowbound, and are likely to stay that way today as we did yesterday. Why? No Boots. I'm breaking in a new pair of shoes from L.L.Bean that are woefully inadequate to the snow depths (and neither Cindy or Kiralee have anything in the way of boots either). The reason is simple, we don't normally get snows this early. My last year snow-sneakers wore out after 2 winters and were tossed back in July. I had plans to order some snow sneakers or boots later this month when my cash flow evened out again (yes, we run our finances that close... the basement project of doom does NASTY things to our cash flow).

I'm trying to make the best of things.... but its not easy. Kiralee spent 3/4 of yesterday (a good 8 hours of the day) working on finances for the condo association. At the end she delivered a check to the other owners to be delivered to the architect as the 'final payment' on his work... and was promptly handed a folder of Additional paperwork, bills and documents regarding the association.... and is now in a dispute with them over the details. This threatens to kill another 3-6 hours of her day today (and she's already had to cancel on a morning social obligation because of the weather, and called off our afternoon game as well... and if she manages to get things worked out with them, will get to spend the rest of her fabulous day off doing ironing or something equally unamusing. She is a bit irritable, to say the least.

Jeers : To Comcast, our local cable service, for the new round of upcoming rate changes. We're not the kind of folks that get fancy premium movie channels, and the only reason we get cable at all is because our building has ancient aluminum siding that prevents any broadcast reception. We're facing another hike in our monthly bill and I'm seriously considering reducing our already meager selection of programming to keep costs within what I consider reasonable.

The real annoyance in this is that Comcast is basically stinging their cable tv customers in order to cut the prices on their internet cable service (which we don't use). Basically they have competition as an internet service provider and are fighting to gain market share, and the easiest way is to sell that service as close to cost as possible as an introduction to knock out the other ISPs etc in the market. They have no real competion in the cable tv market, and figure they can thus get the cable tv customers to foot the bill for cheap internet for a few years until they are the lone major provider in the region, and then they'll raise the internet service costs. (Of course by then they figure they will have tv cable customers who are either also internet customers and/or are conditioned to the ever increasing prices on their cable and will simply blindly pay them for the service).

The Sidebar : As you probably have noticed, I'm continuing to expand and re-organize the sidebar of links and information for my journal pages. This is because I have more information I want to give a brief heads-up on to folks withoput doing a complete treatise on them. I'd apreciate it if folks look at it when they get the chance and do some exploring of the things I've pointed out in this manner. Just because I don't write endlessly on a subject doesn't mean it's not important.

A Weird Personal Synchronicity : I spent a couple of hours trying to help Kiralee get her Resume (done in MS Word for the Mac) into a PDF to send to a possible job opening that a friend passed along to her. Inevitably this failed, because we don't have a computer with both MS Word AND Adobe Acrobat on it. Acrobat is, for us, rather expensive, and so only one of our machines (mine) has a copy, and that isn't the latest. Word for the PC at one point integrated and then de-integrated PDF support, Cindy's machine has the latest version of Word for the PC which will not save in PDF format. My machine only can read documents in Wordperfect format (and again an older version of that, which cannot read MS Word files) as a copy of Microsoft Office was beyond my finances when we got the machine but Wordperfect came with it for free and had been my less expensive Word Processor of choice for 6 years or more.

So I went and tried to use Adobe's online PDF creation option. We went thru the process of setting up an account, verifying it thru email, etc. And finally tried to get it to load the file.... 5 times it reset the connection on us and failed to produce anything. The 6th time it complained that we have five attempts in the que, which was the most free attempts to use it we could have and would we be interested in paying them to try again. Right. It didn't work, why should we pay money to have it fail again? Finally we decided to give it up for the night (this was around 11pm). I then went off to the bedroom to read while Kiralee got ready for bed... picking up the copy of Douglas Adam's book (see sidebar) and starting the second section of the book.

This is where things get interesting. The first article in the 2nd section of this posthumous collection of his works was one he wrote for MacUser magazine entitled "Frank The Vandal". What did it deal with? The problems and incompatibilities and frustrations that Douglas had when working with his several Mac computers and different kinds of Word Processing Software, and the fact that the various programs just wouldn't talk to each other or share files etc, and how ridiculous this was. This while going on about his ongoing home construction project and the destabilizing efforts of his electrician to the whole project.

Basically he wanted to not have to wrestle with the technology to achieve the goal of writing an article or book. The analogy he gave was:

"If I want to have some cupboards installed, I don't have to do the following: I don't have to have the house completely dismantled, shipped up to Birmingham where the carpenter is, put together again in a way that a carpenter understands, then have the carpenter work on it, and then have the whole thing dismantled again, shipped back to Islington, and put together again so that it works as a house that I can live in."
(Excerpted from The Salmon of Doubt by Douglas Adams, from an article in MacUser magazine.)

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