That's MISTER Ed to you.

2010-12-08T12:44:00.001-07:00

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Tablet History 1 - Introduction

2010-05-21T19:05:00.001-06:00

PICTORIAL  HIGHLIGHTS  OF  TABLET  HISTORY

   Part I:  Introduction

As an amateur tabletologist and member of the International Society for the History of Tablets, I've lately been asked quite a few questions about the place of Apple's iPad in the history of tablet devices.

For example:

   1)  What is the place of Apple's iPad in the history of tablet devices?

Other questions revolve - and evolve - around Apple's innovation.  For example:

   2)  Is the iPad revolutionary, evolutionary, or kleptolutionary?

And then there's the panicky cry from every Applehead's nightmares:

   3)  Where do I plug in my one-button mouse?

I'm pleased to offer here extracts from my research paper, "Toward a Unified History of Tablet Devices."

(There have been hints that it will appear in the Bulletin de la Société Internationale pour l'Histoire des Tablettes (BullSIHT)!  Real soon!  Someday.)

The study is needed because tabletology is a highly-charged field of research, as I'm sure one can imagine, and individual tabletologists (and there are great ones) often disagree on the timespan and naming of various eras.

But they (almost) all agree that a "tablet" is something for communications ... that's at least, oh, let's say about 5" x 7" ... and that's portable.

Clearly the 11-foot monolith from Stanley Kubrick's movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey, does not meet this last requirement.  And yet, it was probably fun to monkey around with.

What's ahead in these  Pictorial Highlights of Tablet History:

Part I:  Introduction
   -- I invent a field of study, a phoney Society, and a bogus journal

   (Okay, that's not ahead ... you're reading it now.)

Part II:  The Lithic Era
   -- Paleolithic (ancient) and Neolithic (modern) Tablet Stone Ages

Part III:  The Lignum Era
   -- Writing on wood (or rather, on fiber)

Part IV:  The Expansion Era
   -- 20th- and 21st-century devices that can be expanded

Part V:  The Restrictive Era
   -- Devices that restrict users

Part VI:  The Future
   -- From the 22nd century onward!

Part VII:  Conclusions
   -- The Stone Age and the future

Part VIII:  Comparisons
   -- Comparing the devices in this study

Part IX:  Methodology
   -- How this pictorial history happened

Stay tuned for all IX exciting episodes!

Vasha's blurb

2008-06-13T13:41:00.009-06:00

S/F, 2 1/2 Years, German Shepherd Dog, 70 lbs.

Hey there!

I'm your typical AWESOME German Shepherd Dog! If you know our breed, you know what a fantastic package you're getting! If you don't, let me tell you what a treat you're in for!

I'm beautiful, of course! And smart, adaptable, athletic, intelligent, loving and loyal to my family, dependable, clever, energetic, brave, and, ummm ... smart! Are you up to the challenge?

I have more pictures here on dogster.com! You might notice that I need to learn "Drop it!" And most of the other "tricks" that make life go smoothly for a doggy gal and her family, like "Heel," "Down," "Stay" ... you get the picture.

But never fear! I can learn these things easily! I'm very treat-motivated, and did I mention that I'm smart?

In fact, breeds like German Shepherds that have worked for humans for centuries must feel useful and know that they're doing things for their people. If we don't, we'll think up our own projects. Like digging up the yard. Wouldn't it be better for me to learn fun stuff with you? I think so too!

I've been reported to be good with kids that I know but not able to get along with cats at all. Dogs that are unfriendly to me make me mad, and we can't be together. With other dogs, we'll have to meet and see if we get along.

I'm not a nuisance barker. I am house-trained, of course, and need outdoor activity, but like all dogs I also need to be inside with my family, especially at night.

There are good times ahead for the family that takes home this young, "interactive" (and smart!) dog! Let's meet! Come throw a ball for me!

Saturday Night Massacre at MaxFund

2008-03-05T04:40:00.013-07:00

[Thursday] This post is a duplicate of the one I put on Tucker's blog, which is why I mention doggies.

[Later] I've invited MaxFund volunteers to come here to discuss this situation or actually any other that's too controversial for the official volunteer forum.

Essentially nobody else knows about this blog, except that it's been mentioned all of twice, I think, on Tucker's blog. So it should be relatively safe.

❧❧❧❧❧❧❧❧❧❧

mr_ed: Sorry, doggies, but I gotta butt in here.

❦❦❦❦❦❦❦❦❦❦

Saturday Night Massacre?

❦❦❦❦❦❦❦❦❦❦

35 years ago, President Nixon told Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire Archibald Cox.  Richardson had appointed Cox independent special prosecutor for the Watergate break-in.

Richardson had promised Congress that he wouldn't interfere with Cox, so he refused the President's order and resigned in protest.

Nixon then told Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus to fire Cox.  Ruckelshaus had made the same promise to Congress, so he refused and resigned as well.

Nixon finally got satisfaction from the number three man in the Justice Department, Solicitor General Robert Bork.  Bork hadn't made any promises to Congress.  Cox was fired.

The media dubbed the loss of Richardson, Ruckelshaus, and Cox in one weekend the Saturday Night Massacre.

➥

Details are sketchy at this time, as they say in the media, but it sure sounds to me as though MaxFund had its own version of the Saturday Night Massacre, but on a Tuesday night.

MaxFund apparently has an Advisory Committee as well as a Board of Directors. I hadn't heard of the Committee before, but it seems to hold the trump cards.

As told to me, the Committee decided to fire Lori Moss, who's been something like the operational head of MaxFund and also its shelter manager.

- The Advisory Committee told the Board of Directors to fire Lori Moss;

- The Board of Directors refused;

- The Advisory Committee disbanded the Board of Directors

Lori hadn't been fired as of 10:19 Tuesday night, but....

Full disclosure: I like Lori, I consider her a friend, and I strongly disagree with firing her.

⚔

I've volunteered with MaxFund for maybe a year and a half, and this isn't the first or second abrupt dismissal of top people that I've witnessed. Never mind the ones that I've heard about happening before I started there.

But this one takes the cake ... if, indeed, there's any cake to be taken.

Since MaxFund politics have nothing to do with Tucker or Sinjin, I won't make it a cause célèbre of this blog. But I'm really steamed and wouldn't have been able to get to sleep without working off some energy on the issue.

Since I'm Volunteer of the Month and all.

Now what do I do?

-- ⅇⅆ

p.s. - it's snowing

State capitols

2007-11-10T15:14:00.001-07:00

-- all photos from Wikipedia

Democracy and Communism

2007-11-07T13:28:00.001-07:00

White male nerds of a certain age may remember November 7 as the anniversary of the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge (1940) or as Joni Mitchell's birthday (1943).

(Or maybe as the birthday of Aron Nimzowitsch (1886), Albert Camus (1913), or Al Hirt (1922).)

But this is a remarkable date in the history of democracy and communism!¹ On this very day in history:

1875 - Mikhail Kalinin is born

1879 - Leon Trotsky is born

1893 - Colorado acknowledges women's right to vote

1916 - a woman is first elected to U.S. Congress

1917 - Lenin and Trotsky lead Russia's October Revolution

1931 - the Chinese Soviet Republic is declared (it ends in 1934)

1957 - a report on fallout shelters recommends nuclear deterrence

1967 - an African-American mayor is first elected in a major U.S. city

1983 - a bomb explodes in the U.S. Capitol

1989 - an African-American governor is first elected in a U.S. state

1992 - Alexander Dubček dies

2000 - a huge LSD lab is found in a retired U.S. missile silo

2000 - a former U.S. First Lady is first elected to public office

And the struggle continues! In China, North Korea, Cuba ... believe it!

¹communism, socialism, dictatorship of the proletariat, Bolshevism, Marxism, Leninism, Trotskyism, Maoism, Stalinism, Titoism, Castroism, 주체 (Juche or Kimilsungism) ... whatever.

All entries are from Wikipedia.

Freedom and the North

2007-10-19T01:55:00.000-06:00

Freedom of the press, anyway.

An annual survey was released recently on the freedom of the news media in 169 countries. It's really odd, but there seems to be a trend that northern countries have more media freedom.

Northern Europe¹ includes 8 of the 10 most-free news industries and 12 of the top 20!

There's no similar pattern in the Southern Hemisphere. There, countries closer to the South Pole don't have more journalistic freedom than countries closer to the Equator.

Immigrant Song
Jimmy Page/Robert Plant

We come from the land of the ice and snow
From the midnight sun where the hot springs flow....

The 5 Nordic countries are the superstars - all are among the 10 top countries in the list. These 5 plus 3 other, big countries have land north of the Arctic Circle,² and the 8 arctic countries are in underlined bold in the list below.

Sadly, the three giants of the Arctic Circle aren't the other three northern countries in the top 10. Only Canada is even in the top 20. The two countries that stare at each other across the Bering Strait aren't quite as hands-off with their news media.

One, at least, is in the top 30% while the other is in the bottom 15%.

The 3 "Baltic States" are also commonly thought of as part of Northern Europe (for sound cultural reasons). They take spots 3, 12, and 23 on the list, and are in red.

Extending the curious correlation of more north ≈ more free,³ Estonia is north of Latvia and also higher on the list. Likewise, Latvia is north of Lithuania as well as higher on the list.

In addition, the British-Irish Isles (or Irish-British Isles, or British-Channel-Irish-Man Isles, or....) are often included in "Northern Europe." The Republic of Ireland is #8, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is #24.⁴ They're listed in blue.

Finally, the other countries bordering the North and Baltic Seas are sometimes thrown in with Northern Europe (and are here in green): Belgium (#5), the Netherlands (#12), Germany (#20), and Poland (not so good at #56).⁵

So there's an apparent relationship that says countries closest to the North Pole seem to give journalists the most freedom. Is this only a Northern Hemisphere situation? Or does something similar hold in the Southern Hemisphere?

No such luck.

Is it because there aren't any countries inside the Antarctic Circle - "just" the continent of Antarctica? Who knows what lies behind this mystery?

Only one of the nearby countries is in the top 20, with the rest trailing behind. The countries closest to Antarctica are New Zealand (#15), Australia (#28), Chile (#39), and Argentina (#82).

So here are selections from the list that ranks countries by "Freedom of the press": the top 20, the bottom 10, and all the countries mentioned above:

Arctic countries
Baltic States
British-Irish Isles
Baltic/North Sea countries

1 (tie) Iceland 1 (tie) Norway 3 (tie) Estonia 3 (tie) Slovakia 5 (tie) Belgium 5 (tie) Finland 5 (tie) Sweden 8 (tie) Denmark 8 (tie) Ireland 8 (tie) Portugal 11 Switzerland 12 (tie) Latvia 12 (tie) the Netherlands 14 Czech Republic 15 New Zealand 16 Austria 17 Hungary 18 Canada 19 Trinidad and Tobago 20 Germany ... 23 Lithuania 24 United Kingdom ... 28 Australia ... 31 France ... 39 Chile ... 48 United States of America ... 56 (tie) Poland ... 82 Argentina ... 144 Russia ... ... and the bottom 10 ... ... 160 Uzbekistan 161 Laos 162 Vietnam 163 China 164 Burma 165 Cuba 166 Iran 167 Turkmenistan 168 North Korea 169 Eritrea Arctic countries Baltic States British-Irish Isles Baltic/North Sea countries

¹I'm using a broad but standard definition of Northern Europe that includes Belgium, the Channel Island Bailiwicks of Guernsey and Jersey, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, the Isle of Man, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Sweden, and the UK. Oh, all right. And France.

²Iceland just squeaks across the Arctic Circle with the island of Grímsey. The "Northern Countries" boundary can be moved south a couple of degrees, but past 61°N, Scotland's Shetland Islands get included.

Mainland Denmark and most of its islands are safely below the imaginary line, but Greenland and the Faroe Islands give the country standing in the Arctic Circle circle.

³Technically, the relationship between the concepts would probably be better symbolized with "∝" ("is proportional to") rather than "≈" ("is almost equal to"). But then, less technically, "≈" seems less technical than "∝".

⁴Other entities such as Isle of Man and the Channel Island Bailiwicks of Guernsey and Jersey aren't on the list.

⁵Okay, and France (#31) has a tiny slice of the North Sea. But it's a Mediterranean country, too. Insert Gallic shrug here.

Happy Leif Erikson Day!

2007-10-09T05:17:00.000-06:00

It's late, late, late, so just a quick one.

In this era, it may seem like nobody named Barney can possibly accomplish anything. Barney Google was a comic strip, Barney Fife was a deputy who couldn't be trusted with bullets, Barney Rubble had that annoying laugh, and, well, Barney T. Dinosaur.

(Although there was also Captain Barney Miller of the 12th Precinct.)

Nevertheless, Bjarni Herjólfsson is thought to be the first European to catch sight of mainland America, in 986. That would be a shade more than 500 years before Cristoforo Colombo (a.k.a. Cristóbal Colón, Christophorus Columbus, and Christopher Columbus) stumbled upon the island of Guanahani and called it San Salvador.

Okay, so Bjarni was a little off-course at the time of the sighting. But Columbus thought he was in an entirely different hemisphere!

It took Columbus two more trips, and six years, to reach the mainland (Venezuela). And it took Leifr Eiríksson (a.k.a. Leif Erikson and Leif the Lucky) eight or ten years to get around to following up on Herjólfsson story and discover Newfies and Labs.

And it took another 964 years, more or less, to establish Leif Erikson Day. Which is today, October 9. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a widely recognized Talk Like a Viking Day. But you can get a Viking name for yourself. As mr_ed I'm Eirík the Berserker, and as Mister Ed, Grím the Drunk.

A few other tweaks to my name give Egill the Violent, Björn Deathbringer and Ásbjórn Doomslayer. And other, quite silly, stuff.

Happy Birthday to Camille Saint-Saëns, Alred Dreyfus, Charles Walgreen, Aimee Semple McPherson, E. Howard Hunt, Fyvush Finkel, John Lennon, Trent Lott, John Entwistle, and Jackson Browne, among many many others.

Including, for the royalty watchers, Prince Edward, Duke of Kent (a.k.a. Field Marshal His Royal Highness Prince Edward George Nicholas Patrick, Duke of Kent, Earl of Saint Andrews, Baron Downpatrick, Royal Knight of the Most Noble Order of the Garter, Knight Grand Cross of the Most Distinguished Order of Saint Michael and Saint George, Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order, Aide-de-Camp to Her Majesty).

Note that on this date, the Chicago White Sox finished handing the Cincinnati Reds the 1919 World Series by deliberately losing games. I'll write about more recent sports scandals soon.

Hacking template "No. 897"

2007-10-07T17:56:00.000-06:00

"By default, Blogger offers over 30 gorgeous, professionally-designed templates."

Gorgeousness is kinda in the eye of the beholder, though. For example, template "No. 897" creeps me out in some ways. At first I thought it was just the colors, but the star and the secret messages are the biggest problems, I think. Fortunately, they can be eliminated.

"If you're the sort of person who really likes working directly with the code, though, that's fine, too."

"Really like" is too strong. But I'll do it in self-defense. Or to help someone out. Like Carolyn, human mom to Claire, Maddox, Scotty, and Shelby. She wants to get rid of the star at the top of No. 897, too.

So let's do that, plus get rid of the creepy secret messages, plus fix the capitalization at the top. That's pretty low, when a "professionally-designed template" messes with your capitalization!

These are all simple changes, but they require messing with the HTML code for your page. As always, backing up at least what you're starting with is strongly recommended. Remember, you're hacking the work of a gorgeous professional!

Just to be sure that we're on the same page, literally, you get there from the home/dashboard page by clicking on Layout | Edit HTML.

A Star is ... Removed

To do the star project yourself, you need to be able to download a graphics file to your computer; do one bit of very simple, quick editing with a graphics editor that can handle GIF files and preserve transparency; and upload the result to an online internet storage place of your own.

Then you do a quick copy-and-paste text edit to the blog html.

There are ways around the first three requirements if you don't have an editor or your own storage space ... click the link in the sidebar to email me ===>

To get rid of the star, you want to change line 168 (by my count). Let's have a look at the html. Unfortunately, when you copy computer stuff to a blog and use the html tag "<code>," the indentation gets lost. But anyway, here's the context we're looking for:


/* Header

----------------------------------------------- */

#header-wrapper { 

  background: #fff;

  padding-bottom: 4px;

 }



#header .titlewrapper {

  background:#269 url("http://www.blogblog.com/no897/topleft.gif") no-repeat left bottom;

  padding:0 0 0 160px;

  margin:0 0 10px;

  color:#fff;

  width:100%;

  width/* */:/**/auto;

  width:auto;

  }

The line we want is this one:


  background:#269 url("http://www.blogblog.com/no897/topleft.gif") no-repeat left bottom;

And the offending graphic that we want to replace is http://www.blogblog.com/no897/topleft.gif Download this file to your computer, and fire up your graphics editor.

Set a paintbrush to that orange color. The easiest way is to use an eyedropper tool (color picker, whatever) and pick somewhere in the orange. Or you can set the paintbrush to:

red 255, green 153, blue 0 -or-
red 100%, green 60%, blue 0% -or-
hex xff9900

Now just paint out the star.

Next, upload that modified file to your internet storage space that's online all the time (because people will be looking at it 24 hours a day!).

Plug the internet address of that file in place of the Blogger's "...topleft.gif" in your blog's html, and you're done!

The line should end up looking something like this:


  background:#269 url("http://www.myfilespace.com/myfilename.gif") no-repeat left bottom;

No More Secrets

There's secret writing in the green box below the orange box that has the star. It's not exactly The Da Vinci Code - it just says "897." I guess it's in case you forget the name of the template you're using. Or in case your readers want to know.

I don't think most do. So there's even more secret code in the html - instructions on how to get rid of the 897 - that's even more secret because YOU can see it and readers can't! (And neither can Blogger's computer!)

About seven "paragraphs" past the section we worked on above is the following:


#header .description span {

  /* To remove the word next to the description, delete the following background property */

  background:url("http://www.blogblog.com/no897/temp_no.gif") no-repeat left center;

  /* Keep everything below */

  display:block;

  padding:0 0 0 160px;

  text-transform:uppercase;

  letter-spacing:.1em;

  min-height:12px;

  }

The secret instructions are there in a comment. Comments are things for people to read but computers to ignore.

/* Comments are inside a matched set of asterisks, inside a matched set of slashes, like this. */

So the comment says you can get rid of that secret 897 by deleting the line


  background:url("http://www.blogblog.com/no897/temp_no.gif") no-repeat left center;

But why delete it when you may want to put it back in? To mystify readers, for example. Why not just "comment it out" by putting the line inside comment markers, like this:


  /* background:url("http://www.blogblog.com/no897/temp_no.gif") no-repeat left center; */

Done! "897" is gone!

Now let's get rid of the wacky writing in the dark blue strip across the top. Go back to the first section of code we worked on for the block of orange color. In the very next "paragraph" is this:


#header h1 {

  background:url("http://www.blogblog.com/no897/bg_header.gif") no-repeat left top;

  margin:0;

  padding:70px 0 30px;

  line-height: 97px;

  font: $titleFont;

  text-transform:lowercase;

  }

The strange hieroglyphics in the background go away if you comment out the line that specifies the background graphic like this:


  /* background:url("http://www.blogblog.com/no897/bg_header.gif") no-repeat left top; */

No more artsy half-numbers and gobbledygook.

Raise the Capital(s)!

How weird, to make all your capital letters lower-case without even asking! Just weird. Well, while we're in this "paragraph," let's just comment out another line:


  /* text-transform:lowercase; */

Shazaam!

I hope that these notes helped or amused you. Or, if your blog blew up, I hope you saved a backup. "There's many a slip 'twixt the cup and the lip," but "All's swell that ends swell."

And it's more important to have fun than to be earnest. Well ... it's more fun to have fun than to be earnest...!

Oops.

2007-10-05T02:18:00.000-06:00

mr_ed: Tucker kicked me off "his blog," which was actually my blog until my big handsome husky hijacked it. ;-) I'm afraid I must have embarrassed him in front of some female Siberian Huskies.

I didn't mean to - I was just playing with him and teasing him. But he's not feeling quite up to snuff. His post-pneumonia breathing problems are flaring up a little, so he's a bit cranky even though all of the foster dogs that annoyed him have been adopted out.

So how about some October 5 observations? This won't be an extremely long rant because it's just too late after typing up Tucker's latest blog and whatnot.

First off, October 5 doesn't exist in Italy, Poland, Portugal and Spain! No, wait. It does exist, but didn't in 1582. Neither did October 6 through 14. These countries were early adopters of Pope Gregory's new calendar. The effects of new technology - ten days disappeared, poof!

In the area of flight technology ... on this date Robert Goddard was born (1882), Wilbur Wright flew 24 miles (1905), aerial combat first resulted in a kill (1914), the largest dirigible up to that time crashed with more deaths than the later Hindenburg disaster (1930), Canadian pilots shot down the first German jet (1944), the first Canadian astronaut went into space (1984), and an Indonesian plane crashed on take off killing 137 (1991).

In communications technology ... Louis Lumière was born (1864), the first World Series baseball game was broadcast (by radio - 1921), Truman gave the first White House address to be televised (1947), Monty Python's Flying Circus was first broadcast (1969), and PBS became a network (1970).

Hmmm. The Fermi breeder reactor suffered a partial core meltdown (1966), and secret Israeli nuclear wepaons were revealed (1986).

Linux (kernel only, remember) version 0.02 was released, just a couple of weeks after v. 0.01.

Birthdays, well, not so many as sometimes. Denis Diderot, Chester A. Arthur, Ray Kroc, Allen Ludden, Bil Keane, Bill Dana, Václav Havel, Bernie Mac, and Michael of the Andretti clan.

And many, many other people have been born on this date, of course. And there have been other major events. And then again, many events didn't happen on October 5 - but really, there's no time to list them all.