Week of 10th September, 2001

Last Week

Monday, 10th September

Sarah had a dental appointment this morning, so off we drove to the fang-cobbler, who took a mould of her teeth, in order to make a shield to prevent Sarah grinding her teeth at night - something she is occasionally guilty of, apparently. After that, it was some driving practice - mostly reversing round corners, one of the more difficult accomplishments - and Sarah did not do well.

After a tantrum on her behalf, we adjourned to the shops to meet Jane, her Dad and sister-in-law, whose birthday it is today. Many happy returns, Ale!

Jane's Mum is in hospital, awaiting surgery, so I took some flowers in to cheer her up.

Later: Mum is in the operating theatre - it's 11 p.m. as I type this, and we're waiting for news of the procedure. No visits before tomorrow afternoon.

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Tuesday, 11th September

Mum is doing well, she's still plumbed up to two IV feeds, what they are I don't know, and didn't enquire, but she's sitting up and as chirpy as ever.

While we (that's Dad and I) were there this afternoon, we saw coverage of the disastrous (le mot juste, I fear) events in New York and Washington, as they happened via the miracle (sic!) of satellite TV relays. Live footage, as it happened, showing the aftermath of the apparent terrorist hijackings and subsequent collapsed buildings. No reliable reports of casualties yet, but loss of life is sure to be heavy. My sympathy is with the people of New York and Washington, and by extension, the whole of the United States.

No reliable reports of who did it, either, or why. I lean towards dissident Arabs - this is of a piece with the bombings of American Embassies in Africa. I stress dissident, Yasser Arafat has condemned the events, but he has the useful virtue of possessing deniability, all same the Irish Sinn Fein for such things as the Omagh bomb. Whoever did it, the Americans will be out for blood, and I suspect may act without due process, which would be a massive mistake in my opinion, since it would forfeit any sympathy they will undoubtedly have gained from today's events.

That said, something has got to be done about these nutters. I say, get the facts (provable), and then, by all means, set up an ultimatum situation - "Hand them over, or else..." and be ready for else. BUT, and it's a big but, be ready to defend your actions with facts. Don't say, "Gee, we're sorry" when you miss. Better yet, don't miss.

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Wednesday, 12th September

New York and Washington continue to post horrific images of total chaos and destruction. President Bush has announced that he considers the events of yesterday to be acts of war, and has offered threats of retribution to those who gave the orders and to any nation harbouring them.

Fine, say I - get proof, then kick butt. But remember, behind these terrorists, there are others, and behind them, yet others - all ready to take up what amounts to a jihad. It ain't gonna end when you clobber this lot, and their assistants and shelter.


Jane's Mum continues to improve - she's only got one tube attached now, and all the signs are that she will be released from hospital tomorrow, God (and doctors!) willing. There's no-one else to bring her home (buses are not practical politics after fairly major surgery), so I'll have to take a couple of hours off. There should be no problem with this - the workload remains very light.

While checking on Mum's situation, Jane told me that Sarah has passed her driving test - that's a real red-letter day for her, one she's already taken advantage of. She's out with the car even as I type this.

Sarah will be off to college next weekend (10 days time) - Jane will ferry her and belongings that weekend, I'll hold the fort here. Katy has a Duke of Edinburgh Award walk, and we can't yet leave Jenny alone. I've had to take leave to cover this - not a problem, I've got lots of days left.


Katy succeeded in breaking the plug of the adaptor cable from her laptop's PCCard network adaptor to the RJ45 network cable. Luckily, Action stock replacements, so I bought one in yesterday. The old device still works, so we'll keep it as a spare.

I'm downloading a website that has lots of information that Katy will need for her Geography project. She needs information about the history of the City of Swansea, where my Mum lives.

S@H continues to crunch, on Fujisan and Tux. Fujisan finished a WU last night, but he had to wait until this evening before I could get a new unit, Tux will complete a unit tonight. Fujisan takes about 83 hours per WU, Tux about 94. Fujisan isn't as quick as he might be, since he's my work machine, the one I'm typing this on.

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Thursday, 13th September

Mum came out of hospital at lunch-time today, still a bit fragile, and under doctor's orders not to exert herself. Trouble is, Dad is incapable of cooking for himself, so Jane or I will have to attend daily to cook meals, etc.


The workload remains light at work, so I made productive use of all that copious spare time, and helped with moving equipment around. The new Master Control Room (MCR) came on line today, and much gear (satellite receivers, signal processing electronics, and whatnot) had to be moved - while maintaining service, of course.

The move went well, new MCR is now up and running, and the old area will be demolished in due course. This is likely to be very soon, since I suspect the powers-that-be have covetous eyes on the space for more office cubes. I remember when the old analogue transmission kit was decommissioned, just under 2 years ago - the redundant gear was stripped out within a couple of weeks, sold off (clapped-out though it was) where possible, junked where not possible to sell.

Of course, just before knocking-off time, a shelf-ful of work arrived.Where was all that when we needed it, half a day earlier?


Things seem to be calming down a little over the suicide hijackings in the USA. There are still vociferous demands to "Nuke 'em now, and then nuke 'em again", whoever "'em" may be. In fact there is a section of opinion which would attack any and all Muslim regimes that have ever shown sympathy for the terrorist cause. This goes far beyond what I feel is appropriate response - destroy the headquarters of proven guilty parties by all means. After all this does seem to be war, but indiscriminate throwing of nuclear weapons? No, that is descent to their level. Besides, such nuclear carpet-bombing would create so many martyrs that the entire globe would never see the end of the retaliation. Remember, these are fanatics, you cannot reason with them, and if even one such survives, the entire cycle will recur. Also, excessive reaction will likely turn moderate factions into new fanatics.

In the face of blanket denials of complicity and expressions of repugnance from even hardline Muslim states I don't feel that an overkill response is appropriate. That said, it's not my family and friends being dug out of that rubble. I hope that calm would still prevail if it had been, say, Canary Wharf that had been hit, but I don't know.

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Friday, 14th September

A quiet day. We're still shocked by the aftermath of Tuesday, but distance does lend a certain detachment. Matt Beland's last post (and that was an unintentional pun) citing the words of the UK's Remembrance Ceremonies hit a chord with me. My thoughts are still with those who were injured or bereaved in this sad time. Unashamed crib - I can't help it, it's so apposite -

They shall not grow old
as we who are left grow old,
age shall not wither them
nor the years condemn;
At the going down of the sun
and in the morning,
we shall remember them ...

But, we move forward. As I said above, I don't think (no, amend that - I'm sure) that massive retaliation, especially against those terrorist-friendly states not directly involved, would do far more harm than good. You can't kill every Muslim, just because some few are fanatically determined to do you harm. Anyone caught in flagrante delicto deserves everything that's coming to him or her (remember Leila Khaled), but remember, "Innocent until proven guilty".

For example, there are large numbers of Muslims here in the UK, all, except a very few, perfectly law-abiding people, just as appalled by Tuesday as I am. There are a few who publically rejoice at the carnage, as there are a few in the West Bank - you want to tar all of those with the terrorist brush? And probably piss off them and their relatives into the bargain? This is a very Bad Thing. By all means deal with those provably responsible, but let's not let things mushroom, literally as well as figuratively. It may take longer, it will certainly not have the instant satisfaction of revenge, but it will endear you to the rest of the world, that you are living by your long-expressed principles.

Justice should be swift, unbiased and as accurate as it is possible for error-prone humanity to be. In that respect America has perhaps gone too far away from swift - 15 years on Death Row? No, forgive me, that was uncalled for.


Turning back to normal events, I noticed, when I posted last night's update that Demon had deposited a file called bwusage.txt in the site's root directory. Demon's homepages facility, offering 20MB of space to do what you wish with, subject to UK law, does not come with a full access statistics facility. All they do is tell you if traffic has exceeded certain levels, by depositing this file in your site root. Excess bandwidth usage results in your site being moved to a slower server. The move occurs whenever your bandwidth usage exceeds the threshold, even if people are coming deep into your site. One of my friends, who also has (or had - I've not spoken to him for a while) a Demon page (a fan site devoted to the TV series "Sliders"), suffered heavy bandwidth consumption by someone elsewhere linking to his screengrabs, without acknowledgement. This was resolved by an exchange of e-mail, I think amicably, but Demon make no distinction between intra-site links and deep outside linking.

I was wondering whether I'm typing into a void, this at least lets me see that there's someone reading my ramblings. Thank you, whoever you are.

Tux had a short WU last time, it completed in about half the normal time, probably because of result overflow. You occasionally get one of these, due to Earthly radio interference - this is my first. I set Tux off to get another unit, and sure enough, I was credited for the returned unit - even though it has no significant science in it. Still, even a negative answer is data of a sort. Of course, S@H will never prove that there is no extra terrestrial intelligence - all we'll be able to say is, "We didn't find anything." The only provable result would be a positive - "We've found it!!"

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Saturday, 15th September

I drove down to Swansea today, for a few days with my Mum, before bringing her back to London for Sarah's departure to college next weekend. It was an easy drive, the M4 was not crowded. I was about 3 hours on the road, "Everything forward and trust in the Lord".

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Sunday, 16th September

A quiet day, as usual down here. In the afternoon, I took a walk along the seafront, taking pictures of the sea defences for Katy's project about the coast of Swansea Bay, from Mumbles Head to Blackpill (a distance of probably 2 to 3 miles), and one of the more boring parts of the area - the geology is simple, mostly Carboniferous limestone, shading to Millstone Grit near Blackpill.

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