Evening Thoughts

I really do like this laptop. It's a nice weight, and it boots quickly -- not quickly enough when I just want to write something, dammit, but more quickly than the desktop PC, even though we leave the desktop in Standby (which this laptop does not have as a power option; something to do with having re-installed the operating system. I don't understand why). I like being able to use it anywhere -- right now, I'm in the living room, in the corner chair, listening to a CD of Yo Yo Ma. Not to say that the laptop works perfectly -- it has an annoying tendency for the cursor to flip somewhere else in what I've written and start inserting letters there. Its something to do with the touch pad, which this has as a pointing device. Whether it’s the pad sensitivity, or the gods of teknologie, I have no idea. I suppose I could call Mike Dell or Bill Gates up and ask them. Or I could just whistle into the wind, which would be as likely to produce a useful result, and get me outdoors, too.

The laptop came with Word Perfect, which I'm using to write this -- a better interface than Blogger's, not to mention, wider. Perhaps it’s the novelty of the interface, but I find that I like it a bit more than Word. It seems to have had more thought put into the options. Not to say that there aren’t way too many options – there are; for one, that was supposed to be two dashes, which WP sucked back into one, and I don’t know how to make it stop doing that – but the interface just has a nicer feel to it. In a weird way, it reminds me of something that I had read about Quicken, back when it was just a feisty little software package, and not the megadeath package it wants to be now - - the people supporting it would go out to see how people actually used it, and then they would optimize the package to work that way. Ah, nostalgia.

I had put that CD on as encouragement for our daughter, who has announced that she wants to quit cello and go back to piano. We think that it bugs her that she really can't play anything more advanced than Mary Had A Little Lamb. She wants musical proficiency on the cello equal to what she had on the piano, and right now, too. I can't give that to her (future generations might be able to handle that via direct RNA drip. Maybe someday soon, but not yet) so I'm hoping the sounds of a well played cello might inspire her. Of course, they might also confirm her in her opinion that she will never be that good, so she might as well knock it off now. Not that she wanted excellence in the piano, either; what she wants is the ability to do something. The same reason well designed software has a 'quick start' feature.

Saw an article on the guy who designed The Sims. I never got into Sim City, but I admire it nonetheless.

I'm reading To Rule The Waves again, finally. At the moment, Spain is in deep trouble because the cost of having that huge military is outpacing the ability to fund it via the swag from the New World; the depredations of the English and others isn’t helping the matter. The English politicians are saying that they need to build a bigger, stronger, more robust military so that they can get out there and grab, too, just as the Spanish have done; the effect of the military on the Spanish economy seems to have evaded them. The largest warship in the world – at the moment - is English, with one hundred guns on three decks – the mighty Sovereign of the Seas. I wonder if the English miss those days, and what if they were to come again? I was reading a novel, several years ago, wherein the young woman who has somewhat unexpectedly become Queen of England is attempting to learn the realities of the nuclear weaponry that the United States has in her country. She is being aided, reluctantly, by her ministers, who don’t think it entirely appropriate that a woman, even the Queen, should be concerned with such matters. It made me wonder: if the King or Queen of England were determined to return the throne to its ancient position of power, how might they go about it? And how would the English feel about it?