Columns

Dear Editorbeing,

This column is submitted by Doc Logger(163/110) who was shocked and dismayed and amused and surprised that in addition to his many other deficiencies, Ward Dossche owns ABBA records. If ever his legions of detractors needed proof of his strange intent towards Fidonet, his musical tastes must surely be proof positive. As the good and decent people that we are, I suggest that someone offer to hem his bell-bottoms so that rampant democracy doesn't get out of hand and cross the Atlantic to North America.

Roll da flic, Zorch....

Dear Reverend Visage,

It has been another slow week in Fidoland. If it weren't for the fact that my annual zucchini crop was about to undergo its logarithmic expansion, I'd have almost no serious issues to confront. Mercifully, Darryl Gregorash has kept the ZIC echo alive with his endless requoting of a John F. Kennedy piece of fluff. The fact that Kennedy neither wrote it, nor believed in it, doesn't seem to faze Darryl in the least. The essence of the debate is whether the elflords, by virtue of enough fartcatching to have been appointed to sit at Satti's feet, have the Divine right to override majority opinion and vote according to what they presume to be the best interests of Fidopeasants. Unfortunately, Satti remains cowering in his bunker and hasn't emerged for months. Our prayers and our edible underwear should go out to him in his many hours of narcosis.

As I mentioned last week, I've been beavering over a program to simulate a number of events which occurred in the early life of the universe. The program is being written in Italian, which is to say that it is some of the worst spaghetti code ever written if you discount the efforts of the patients of the Head Injury Re-Learning Centre who invented COBOL. Actually, the core of the program is written in PROLOG which is touted as an "artificial intelligence" language. (What this really means is that you have to be an acid crazed dwarf to understand PROLOG's syntax.) The reason that I chose to torture myself by using PROLOG is that I needed something with the bizarre ability to rewrite the executable program on the fly to foreshorten some of the 100 million iterative steps. The results which slowly emerge from the program are quite amusing. For example, had the Big Bang generated just a tiny fraction less mass, the world would have been spared the abomination of yogurt. (The world also would have been spared of life, but that is a minor price to pay for a yogurt free universe.)

This would be an ideal place to segue into the gestalt of programming, and from there into a discussion of what makes a medium like Fidonet. Judging from the first sentence in this paragraph, all six readers of the Snooz will already know that there are some hairpin turns involved in the thought processes necessary to connect these concepts. To start with, I've been intrigued by the way people write computer programs which is analogous to the way people write novels or paint pictures. Some people start with a clear vision of what the finished product should be and map the outlines of the intervening steps. Others, see a goal and launch into the process without clear definition of how to get there. The former type of programmers are generally more reliable, but the latter are often the beneficiaries of serendipitous discoveries along the way. In the interval between the two styles are those who get lost in the process. It is getting lost in the process that brings this around to the issue of Fidonet.

The same issues that continually arise with respect to the Snooz have recently emerged in the FN_SYSOP echo. Legions of sysops express opinions about "what should not be." In the case of the Snooz, the objections trend towards whichever sacred moose isn't being given preferential reportage. What most of the critics seem to ignore is that they are the reporters who could submit whatever it is that would satisfy their notions of "what should be." Unfortunately, the energy required to make those submissions is redirected towards advocating what should be excluded. The FN_SYSOP echo is a sort of microcosm of the Fidonet world and we have been blessed by the musings of Maurice Kinal who believes that a moderator should impose some sort of vision on the echo. The desire has been expressed in phrases such as "higher ideals" etc. Sadly, raising the ideals seems to involve removing anything deemed to contrary to that goal. In my opinion (entirely devoid of any speck of humility), the key to raising the tenor of any echo is by positive contribution as opposed to negative sanctions.

I must go Visage, Ron Mitchell has caused many sleepless nights by informing me that my entire stuffed armadillo collection may be infected with leprosy. If he's right, I'll have to start losing more bets.

Regards,
Doc Logger
Furlang Island,
South Pacific