William Essex
Shall I tell you a story?
  • Dear Diary
  • About Us
  • Back Stories
  • Read My Shorts?

Laying the Foundation

11/8/2018

0 Comments

 
If this site every goes dark - Friday comes and there's no new post; years pass and it's still this sentence at the top - you might want to - well, you might want to breathe a sigh of relief, but if you came here on purpose (thanks), you might want to try william essex dot online.

There's nothing there at the moment (except that I pressed "publish" on the template so you get to look at that, plus ads temporarily), so I'm not linking the address (and I'd hate you to watch how slowly I get my act together over there), but I had a glitch on my other (new) laptop the other day, and that got me daydreaming about paper back-ups, hard drives, thumb drives, redundant systems, cloud-based computing, server farms, solar flares knocking out electronics generally, sea levels rising, zombie apocalypses, black holes ... and then I had a thought.

If I actually sign up for a second website, maybe I'll be able to watch YouTube clips without those earnest young entrepreneurs telling me how easily they set up their websites. I've found that if I keep doing online banking, the bank stops sending me those pictures of the young woman in exercise gear, at the gym, who's chosen just that moment to check her balance on her smartphone. So I transact like crazy. Perhaps the same principle applies here. Perhaps if I just set up a website and tinker with it occasionally, the young bloke in the specs who's just set up his website and now leans forward, one elbow on the desk, and starts being very frank with me about how easy it all is - will go away.

I signed up for the minimum package over there, hence the ads, but I'll upgrade as and when I get my act together. The thing with the new laptop was, it decided as of Thursday evening last, to block my access to this page. Not the dashboard, but the "edit site" page. My chromebook (Chromebook?) did the same. The man behind the counter at the computer store just down from the cinema did what he always does when I come through the door - carefully, slowly, he explained a few possible solutions that I could try at home, and then he sent me away without charge. Usually, that works.

But this time, when I got home, his possible fixes didn't work, so I think I might have an excuse actually to get in there and pay him something. It's about time. He'll probably fix the thing, but if it turns out that my new laptop's awkward little moment is the first sign of an impending global meltdown in all my current IT dispositions - yeah, I can work with the template I've chosen. And anyway, there are precedents. I dimly remember, from years ago reading under the sheets with a torch, that the conclusion of Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy (spoiler) somehow involves the discovery that there's a second Foundation hidden behind the first.

I've been told not to mention any movies for a while, so let's put it this way. If you're breeding dinosaurs from blood preserved in mosquitoes preserved in prehistoric amber, you will know the importance of maintaining a second island. If your first Death Star was shot up by pesky rebels, you will know how much it matters to build a second Death Star - secretly - with absolutely the minimum possible number of fatal vulnerabilities.

There is now a Second Website. This one's built on Weebly. I like Weebly. I have no plans to leave Weebly. If there was a "Like" button I would press it. Weebly! Weebly! Don't misunderstand me. But - yeah. Just in case. Dot online kind of covers all the bases, I think.
0 Comments

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.

    Picture
    In a desk diary scavenged from a house of the dead, a man records his own experiences of the end times: what he has to do to survive; how he came to be marooned where he is; how he reacts to the discovery that he is not alone.

    Picture
    Over coffee, a young journalist gets The Message.

    RSS Feed

    What happens here

    This site is no longer updated weekly because I've taken to writing at Medium dot com instead. I may come back, but for now, I'm enjoying the simplicity at Medium.

    No data is kept on this site overnight. Medium posts might sometimes turn up here, and posts from here might sometimes turn up on Medium.
        Mind you, if you get a sense of deja vu when reading my work, that may be because you've lived this life before.

    Picture
    There's a page for this [edit: there isn't], but maybe you'd like to see the cover here?

    Where are we now? We're hurtling round the sun, held to the ground by a weak force that we don’t begin to understand, arguing about trade deals between the land masses on a planet mostly covered by water.
       The dolphins must think us ridiculous. No wonder they only come to the shallow water to play with us, not to signal their most complex philosophies. More.


    Riddle. It takes two to make me, but when I'm made, I'm only a memory. What am I? Scroll down to find out.

    Is that a catastrophe I see before me? Could be. There was a clear sky earlier, but now clouds are encroaching from the North. We could be in for a storm. More.


    There's a picture, it's just loading...
    You found me!
    Welcome. Thank you for coming. But am I the right
    William Essex? Click here
    to meet some more.



    Read My Shorts?

    Here is yet another page of old blog posts and other writings. Sorry, but I need my metaphorical sock drawer for metaphorical socks. The link to the page is right at the end of the paragraph here.

    A very green picture. I can't remember where I took this.


    Roads without end

    Here is a passage from a review of the book The Road to Somewhere by David Goodhart. I haven't read the book (yet), but the collected reviews would make a worthwhile set of political arguments in their own right. More.

    Picture
    Also available in English. Look further down.

    State of the Union

    Several commentators today saying that they've lost confidence in the US. Making their point by talking up the glories of the past. After two weeks of this administration, they're not going back.
         Were they wrong, and they've seen the light? Or has the US changed? I guess the latter is the intended meaning. But we should at least acknowledge the possibility... More.

    Categories
    (Started 4th November 2017; forgotten shortly after that.)

    All
    Abuse
    Consent
    Media


    Kitchen parenting

    I have teenage children. When they're home, sooner or later one of them will come to me and say: "Dad! We're going to make a mess in the kitchen!
       "Great!" I will reply, picking up on the tone of voice. "What are you going to do?"
        "We thought we'd slice up some peppers and onion and bits of chicken and leave them glued to the bottom of the frying pan. Burn something in one of the saucepans and leave it floating in the sink."
        "Anything else?" More.

    Picture
    Variously available online, in a range of formats.

    No pinpricks

    Okay, so a certain President recently made a speech to his people, in which he told them that their country's military "don't do pinpricks". His intention was to get across that when those soldiers do a "limited" or even "targeted" strike, it hurts. But those of us in the cynical wing of the listening public took it the other way. More.


    Picture
    Ceased to exist. Sorry.

    Making mistakes

    We all make mistakes in our relationships. Some are mistakes that can be corrected with an apology. Sometimes - "if only I'd said that, and not that." Sometimes, they're mistakes that are incomprehensible even to ourselves, and sometimes, we do things that show us up as not quite the likeable hero of our own story that we want to think we are. More.

    Man down?

    There's a report by the Samaritans about men and suicide. It's titled Men, Suicide and Society, and it finds that men are more likely to take their own lives than women (in the UK and ROI). More.


    Not available for women

    Offending the status quo

    Looking at both the US election and the revived Brexit debate in the UK, the question is not: who wins? but: how did we get here? More.

    Thinks: populism

    Bright, sunny morning. Breeze. Weather forecast said fog, but it's a blue sky overlaid with vapour trails. Windy season, drifts of Autumn-coloured leaves. Thinking, on this morning's walk, about populism. More.

    Picture
    Early morning, Church Street, Falmouth

    9th May 2014

    On the day that I wrote this, the early news told us of a parade in Moscow to celebrate Russia’s defeat of Nazi Germany in the Second World War. Crimea remained annexed, and the Russia/Ukraine crisis was not resolved. At around half eight, the BBC’s reporter in Moscow was cut off in mid-sentence summarising the military display; the Today programme on Radio 4 cut to the sports news. More.

    Riddle. What are you? You're a conversation!

    Archives

    May 2022
    November 2021
    October 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    November 2012
    October 2012
    September 2012
    August 2012
    July 2012
    June 2012
    May 2012
    April 2012
    March 2012
    February 2012
    January 2012
    December 2011
    November 2011
    October 2011
    September 2011
    August 2011
    July 2011

    Picture
    Out of print. Sorry.
No animals were harmed in the making of this website. Other websites are available online (and off). All the content here is copyright William Essex, this year, last year, the year before that and, you
guessed it, the year before that, although I don't have the time right now to hunt out that little symbol. This website uses organic ingredients and respects your privacy. Come back some time.