Alamo In the Ardennes. John C. McManus

A reasonable WWII history book about the bitter fighting of the Bulge.  The Germans secretly built up a vastly superior force, three full fledged armies, and hurled it against the Ardennes sector which was held by a single American division.  The outnumbered Americans put up a stubborn resistance which slowed the enemy down until Patton's Third Army could come into action.  It's a good story, although the author's prose gets sort of pedestrian. 
    The cover illustration is striking.  A photo from the national archives shows three US soldiers walking thru a snow covered forest.  The weather is miserable and the expressions on the soldier's faces do not show happiness.  And yet, they are well equipped.  All three of them have good warm parkas and good boots with puttees to keep the snow out of boot tops.  They are heavily armed, each carries a personal weapon, they have two bazookas and are lugging 250 round steel boxes of machine gun ammunition.  Grenades dangle from their web gear. 
   It's a long way from the industrial heartland of America to the Ardennes, but we managed to get these soldiers and a generous supply of weapons and gear, into action, at the right place and the right time.

Susan Rice rides again.

I never expected to see Susan Rice on the Sunday talk shows again.  Not after her Benghazi lying tour a couple of years ago.  But there she was, on Meet the Press this morning,  looking and sounding like an administration pundit.  She went on and on about how ground troops were not necessary against ISIS.  For some reason that I don't understand, she, and the rest of the administration still calls the enemy ISIL rather than the ISIS used by all the media.
   I wonder how many people out there believe anything she says?  

So how bad is this Ebola stuff anyway?

Hard to tell.  It's not my field, all I know is what I see on the TV news or read in Tom Clancy's 1996 thriller "Executive Action".   The TV newsies are all motivated to make it as bad as possible in order to sell advertising (if it bleeds it leads).  The TV guys are all poorly educated, with no real world experience in anything, so their judgement is suspect.  So far the only really hard facts we have are 4000 Ebola deaths in West Africa and only one in the US so far.  That's pretty good isolation in my view. 
   There is a lot of talk by TV newsies about shutting down air travel to West Africa.  Dunno if that will do much, if any, good.  There ain't much traffic with West Africa in the first place, the Dallas Ebola case had to go to Belgium in order to get a flight to the US.  We have a lot of our citizens in West Africa, missionaries, medical workers, soldiers, and some of them will come down with Ebola.  They are Americans, and we must bring them home and cure them.   We don't abandon Americans to die in African jungles.
   We have to do something about Africa.  The deaths are doubling every few weeks.  First it was a thousand, then two thousand, now it's four thousand.  That's exponential growth and a little more of it will kill everybody in Africa.  And infect the rest of the world.  Trouble is, there ain't that much anyone can do.  Other than isolating the victims so they don't infect more people, you just keep 'em fed and watered ("hydrated") and watch 'em die.  Ebola's kill rate is 60% or worse. 
   Technological advances may save the day.  They have a vaccine undergoing trials right now.  There is talk of drugs.  If anything pans out, it will be a game changer.  Given a vaccine that works, we could vaccinate all of Africa in a year.  

Great Costume Drama, Prisoner of Zenda

It's an oldie, released in 1952.  But it's pretty good.  Stewart Granger has the lead role, James Mason is the dastardly Count Rupert of Hentzau.  Debra Kerr is the Princess Flavia. The costumes are wonderful, both for the men and the women.  Granger and Kerr look fabulous entering the royal ballroom.  It's in Technicolor.  The dialogue is witty and good.  There is plenty of daring do, including a sword fight in a castle, a cavalry charge, a gun fight in a deserted urban summerhouse.
   Netflix has it, but it's a long wait.  I have it on a VHS tape I got from Amazon a long time ago. 

Making Win 8.1 less hostile

Go to Control Panel, Select Personalization.  I prefer a solid color background.  The icons show up better and the eye is less distracted with solid as opposed to a wall paper (some photo on your disc, blown up to fill the entire screen.  There are two basic schemes, dark background with white text (aka white on black)(, or light background with dark text (black on white).  Win 8.1 allows you to choose the color of the window frame but every thing else (text, selected menu item, etc) is automatically set by Windows.  For amusement you can watch Windows switch from white to black text and back again as you alter the background color.  And the Microsofties like soft pastel colors with little contrast.  Win XP gave much greater control to us users.

Once you have the background and frame colors to your liking, click on "Display".  Take the top item, "Change Size of all Items".   I made it 125% (the only choice besides 100%).  This yields a text size close to my old manual typewriter.  The 100% setting makes all the text  really small, I can still read it, but the 125% setting is easier to read.  I sacrifice some screen space but for me it's a good tradeoff.  I'm on a 14 inch laptop, bigger displays might work better at 100%.  There are a couple of other settings in "Display" that I haven't tried yet, but going with  a solid dark blue background, light blue windowframes and 125% gives a screen that I like.

Count your lucky stars

The Dallas Texas ebola case died this morning.  That's too bad, a tragedy to his family and friends, and  I offer my full sympathy.
So far, nobody else had been infected.  That is a blessing and we should be thankful.

Robots and employment, NHPR this morning

A long talk on the radio this morning with science fiction overtones.  Kinda future oriented, clearly all the talking heads were thinking about Robbie-the-Robot walking talking robots competing for jobs on production lines. 
   None of them seemed to understand that the situation is with us now.  Back when I started in engineering, companies all had drafting rooms, with dozens of draftsmen cranking out drawings.  They all had bevies of secretaries who typed stuff up. 
   As an engineer, I would do pencil sketches on squared paper, and when the design was reasonably firm, I would go down to drafting, negotiate with the drafting supervisor, and a draftsman would be assigned to me.  The schematic for a two layer 3 inch by 7 inch electronic board filled a D size drawing and took a week to do.  The printed circuit artwork for the same board took a couple of weeks. 
   Stuff I had to write, proposals, specs, test procedures, user manuals, application notes, assembly and tuneup procedures I would write out long hand on yellow pads.  Then the a secretary would type up a rough draft, I would correct the rough draft, she would type the final draft.  This took days. 
   When I retired from engineering both the drafting department and the secretarial pool were gone.  The engineers all had CAD programs running on their desktops from which beautiful machine lettered drawings, artwork, and parts lists would flow out the plotter.  We all had Word-for-Windows running on our desktops and in one pass, decent documentation flowed off the laser printer.  No need for typists. 
   Dunno what all the draftsmen and all the typists did when the desktops took over.  For that matter travel agents are pretty much gone, every body makes their reservations on Orbitz or Travelocity.  Most companies now have  automatic answering machines picking up the phone.  Sometimes the automatic is good enough to connect you to sales, and sometimes it isn't.  Robocallers pitch political candidates. Websites have replaced salesmen. 
   Don't worry about the future, worry about the present.