Love and Cosmology, Work Failures, Book Reviews

[tcpip]

Last Sunday Rev. Dr. David Sammons, Visiting Professor of Unitarian Universalist Heritage & Ministry, Star King Ministry, gave his a presentation on "That Confusing Word Called 'Love'". He made an extension to what is commonly called "the Unitarian-Universalist trinity" of freedom, reason and tolerance - by extending it to 'honesty' and 'compassion' which he considered to the key features of the notion of love. After the service, I led the discussion for the Unitarian Philosophy Forum which had an excellent turnout for a discussion on Dark Matter and Dark Energy, and particularly its relationship to the scientific method. We made good use of the BBC programme Most of our Universe is Missing. I have since started writing a paper on the issue and discussion, but find myself sidetracked by holographic principle.

Life at VPAC hasn't been fun for our users of late with three hardware failures on one of our storage nodes in a two-week period. Having 14 drives fail due to a faulty LSI card in the space of six minutes can be sort of scary, especially when we have to restore over twenty million files and almost 8 terabytes of data. It has meant an extended outage on our supercomputers, however users have been most understanding. On a work related topic from some years ago, the proposal that Martin McGuire of ConnectIE and I put together to convert East Timor's ccTLD into a revenue-raising international telephone directory has been taken up; but for a commercial interest and not for East Timor.

When Ticonderoga Online restarted at the very end of last year a number of my book reviews were included; The Last Witchfinder (historical fiction, entertaining, well-written, informative), Hidden Empire and A Forest of Stars (plain-vanilla space opera, somewhat unimaginative) and Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (typical Phillip K. Dick - which is good). Still have a small mountain of other books I've promised to review.

Comments

[zey.livejournal.com]

Typical East Timor, unfortunately. Land of wasted opportunities. A bit like Australia that way, but, they have far fewer opportunities to waste.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

I honestly don't think the .tel TLD will really take off as a commercial entity. It would have worked for East Timor, back in 2003, because there was a lot of sympathy for the place then. Now I suspect a great deal of that is gone. "It's your country, you look after it".

[zey.livejournal.com]

Yep. I really think their decision to go with Portuguese was perhaps close to the worst foot-shot they could have done to themselves. Talk about isolating their country through language just at a time when they most need international skills, advice and assistance.

If they were ever expecting Portugal to respond to their language loyalty, I imagine their hopes are well and truly dashed by now.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

A lot of younger Timorese were not happy with the decision.

Xanana made a defense of it, arguing that Portuguese was gave Timor-Leste an identity unique from the recent of Indonesia.

Portugal has been very generous, both financially and diplomatically.. Mind, they're not a particularly wealthy country either.

My not-so-tongue-in-cheek option was that they should join the Federation of Malaysia and adopt Bahasa as their second official language.

I still think that's the best choice.

But .. it's their country. They'll decide what path it'll take.