Disaster – Genius Needed 258


I am sorry for the blog hiatus, but I follow a method of historical research a bit akin to method acting! I am absolutely immersed in the world of Burnes. I am in Bhuj at tne moment, and yesterday was at Mandivi looking at the shipyards and harbours where Burnes procured his boats to sail up the Indus – they are still made today. Much larger than I had realised. In Mumbai I identified a “lost”, uncatalogued portrait of Alexander Burnes which I think is the finest of him anywhere. The owners did not know who it was. It is by Brockendon like the one in the royal geographical society but is quite different, with him in military uniform. It is by Brockendon, not a copy.

Today disaster. I have lost ten days worth of notes. I noticed this morning that I had two versions of the identical document of my notes open – an .ODT on open office. One was a much older version. Paradoxically they had the identical file name but both showed as saved – the save icon was blanked on each.

Having checked that the content was all there on the version on which I was working, and that it was saved, I decided the best thing was to close off the extraneous version. Disaster!! An error message came up saying open office would now close. On restart, document recovery brought up only the old version, minus ten days work. I had a moment of hope when I right clicked on the document icon and saw “restore earlier versions of the document” but clicking on that just brought up a ,essage that there are no earlier versions available.

I am heartbroken- these aren’t just notes that can be recovered from memory, but also painstaking transcripts of old manuscripts, some of which I probably can’t access again even if I had the time and money.

I can think of a dozen things I might have done to avoid this situation. Comments on how to avoid such happenings are not welcome in the current trying circumstance. The real question is, can anyone think of anything at all that might help? I am running Open Office on Windows 7.

I really cannot express how much in despair I feel. This trip has cost all my available cash and I have to come back soon as money is out.

[If any mods have hung around while the blog is quiet, I am getting an extremely small typeface, only on this site. Do we have a problem, or is it another computer glitch personal to me?]


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258 thoughts on “Disaster – Genius Needed

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  • Clark

    ‘…the Vice President of the Upper Immigration Tribunal has ruled that “the Secretary of State’s decision… appears to have been entirely unnecessary” and that Sheikh Raed’s appeal against the deportation order “succeeds on all grounds”.’
    .
    Maybe the Daily mail won’t go loopy. It seems they have two choices; spin like top or keep very, very quiet.

  • Mary

    The Community Security Trust ‘misled’ her. They are a charity set up to hype up the threat of anti-semitic attacks in the UK. They received funding and training from the Met and were granted special exemption by the Charity Commission from naming their trustees and staff. How ridiculous. Always the victim.

    .
    Lord Gerald Ronson is their chief funder. You remember him from the Heron property empire, his petrol stations and his time in prison.
    .
    ‘Ronson, the chairman and chief funder of the Community Security Trust, has given £35m to charities over the years according to this year’s Sunday Times Rich List.’
    http://www.thejc.com/business/business-features/41052/meet-ronson-property-star-and-its-not-gerald
    .
    By the early 1980s Heron was one of the largest private companies in the United Kingdom, with assets of over £1.5 billion, but the company was over-extended and by the 1990s had almost collapsed with debts of £2.4 billion owed to 89 banks and 15,000 bondholders. The company survived with help from Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, Craig McCaw, Oracle Corporation’s founder, Larry Ellison, and others who gave loans to Heron.
    .

    In addition to Heron International and Snax 24, Ronson’s more recent additional business ventures include Ronson Capital Partners, an investment firm he established to invest opportunistically in real estate assets in the UK; and Rontec Investments, a consortium comprising Snax 24, Investec and Grovepoint Capital, created to acquire the assets of Total Oil UK.
    .
    Guiness Four
    Ronson became known in the UK as one of the “Guinness Four” for his involvement in the Guinness share-trading fraud of the 1980s, along with Ernest Saunders and occasional business associates Jack Lyons and Anthony Parnes. He was convicted in August 1990 of one charge of conspiracy, two of false accounting, and one of theft, and was fined £5 million and given a one-year jail sentence, of which he served six months. In 2000 the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the 1990 trial had been unfair because there had been an improper collusion between the DTI inspectors and the prosecuting authorities. A further appeal to the Court of Appeal Criminal Division, that sought to have the Human Rights Act 1998 applied retrospectively, and claimed that the trial jury had been “nobbled”, failed in 2001. A final appeal to the House of Lords (now the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom) failed in 2002.
    .
    Doing very well now and with a open line to the Tories who gave him his peerage. Sheikh Raed Salah has been hounded by May. He should be compensated. btw she was at the Herzliya Conference recently speaking on Homeland Security.

  • Fedup

    Mary,
    Community trust often invites the murdering bastards serving in the army of the occupiers in the occupied Palestine to come over here and teach the “master race” techniques in self defence.
    ,
    On the other hand if a Muslim gives some money for a charity serving the beleaguered Palestinians, the chap is considered a terrorist aiding and abetting other terrorists.
    ,
    So far as the poor octogenarian Grass goes, piss on that system that tries to drawn the voice of an old man, lamenting to have remained silent witnessing injustice, and aggression throughout those years of his silence.
    ,
    The Fake history, fake tragedies, fake triumphs, and fake narratives, the conflations of which are reflected in the circular recantation of wrongs inflicted by some people ought to be avenged by wrongs getting inflicted upon other people.
    ,
    The fact that those monsters fighting the “good war” are all but filthy, dirty, war criminals to a man (inclusive of keyboard warriors), is addressed by eulogising the imaginary heaps of bones, that apparently explains away the mountains of dead corpse piling up high, all in the way of the natural consequence of wrongs getting avenged by more wrongs.
    ,
    Hysteria abound on goes the never ending charade of attempts in making respectable: theft, murder, plunder, corruption on industrial scale, that is mandated to be accepted by all and sundry as the “rights to land” that is to be found in the land register that the rest of the world knows as the Bible.
    ,
    This state of madness promoted as the only version of the truth, has no tolerance for any kind of confrontation and examination, for lies, and deception cannot tolerate any kind of investigations, and probing.
    ,
    Piss on any value system that denounces an octogenarian who has finally mustered enough courage to shout out; enough of lies. Stuff your system of theocratic excess that deems heretic anyone “denying” the singular version of fairytale passed as the true reflection of the vents past.

  • Mary

    Ooer Mrs….May.
    .
    7 April 2012 Last updated at 22:38
    .Home Office website blocked; ‘Anonymous’ hackers blamed
    The hacking group Anonymous is alleged to have blocked access to the Home Office website, apparently in response to government plans for e-mail surveillance.
    .
    The website has been blocked; earlier a message was posted blaming a “high volume of traffic”.

    A message on Twitter claiming to be from Anonymous said it was responsible.

    The tweet said: “For your draconian surveillance proposals!”

    Earlier in the week the Home Office said it planned to “legislate as soon as parliamentary time allows” to bring in email surveillance measures.
    .
    /…

  • Clark

    Computer Security Warning
    .
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17623422
    .
    This is the first time Macs have suffered from malware on a large scale, and it suggests that malware distributors are diversifying from Windows. Now might be a good time to install the Firefox extension NoScript – this warning is for GNU/Linux users too:
    .
    http://dangertux.wordpress.com/2011/11/27/my-final-plea-for-you-to-use-noscript-why-you-get-owned-because-sysadmins-are-stupid/
    .
    It is a hassle to learn how to use NoScript, but in security terms it is well worth it; some 85% of all threats gain entrance via JavaScript. Even on Windows, I regard NoScript as better protection than anti-virus software.
    .
    NoScript blocks JavaScript code that comes from websites. Most websites use JavaScript, but work perfectly well without it. For instance, according to my NoScript, this page has eight scripts, all of which are disabled at my end, and it makes no difference to the page that I can see. NoScript allows you to selectively enable JavaScript, and the hassle is in learning which bits you need to enable. Pages where you submit comments often require JavaScript in order to function properly (though this site doesn’t, I’m glad to say).
    .
    Using NoScript has other advantages, too. It reveals things about the sites you visit; more commercial pages have more sources of JavaScript, and you see the same advertising companies showing up on diverse sites. NoScript helps to keep your browser under your control instead of someone else’s. For instance, Paul Staines’ site, order-order.com, doesn’t let you copy text from the site, but NoScript disables the JavaScript that prevents copying.

  • Komodo

    Thanks, Clark, good catch. And it gets rid of unsolicited bloody YouTube scripts too…

  • Clark

    Before someone picks me up on this (probably Crab), the Mac malware above actually exploits Java, which is not the same thing as JavaScript. The advice to install NoScript is still valid, though, as NoScript blocks both, and also various other things such as M$ Silverlight and Adobe Flash.

  • Mary

    Here we go again. The stench increases as the secret state clamps down.
    .
    Hague orders ‘body in a bag’ spy evidence to be heard in secret so MI6 agent’s work in U.S cannot be reported
    By Robert Verkaik
    7 April 2012

    .
    William Hague has ruled that key evidence in the ‘body-in-the-bag’ inquest into the death of an MI6 officer be heard in secret.
    The Foreign Secretary signed an order prohibiting disclosure about details of the agent’s work with the British and US secret services.
    The case has reignited the debate over secret justice and Government attempts to hold some inquests behind closed doors.
    .
    Gareth Williams, 31, who worked for the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, was found dead in a sports bag in the bath of his flat 18 months ago amid claims he had been murdered by another country’s spies.
    But Mr Hague, who has departmental responsibility for MI6, has signed a public interest immunity certificate authorising the withholding of details about his secret work, including joint operations with the American secret services.
    .
    A source close to the case said that the coroner, Dr Fiona Wilcox, has backed Mr Hague’s decision and the Government’s bid to keep the evidence secret. ‘The coroner was favourable to the arguments raised by the Government lawyers,’ the source said.
    .
    /..
    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2126680/Hague-orders-body-bag-spy-evidence-heard-secret-MI6-agents-work-U-S-reported.html

  • Mary

    Treasury at the Trough
    .
    WHY should a business send a big cheque to Tory party HQ when it can cosy up to ministers for the price of a nice meal instead? Official registers of government schmoozing show how active the corporate lobby is; and nowhere is the game played more effectively than at the Treasury.
    .
    In the 15 months up to last June (that’s how dog-eared the information is before it’s published), chancellor George Osborne and his ministers were taken out +++133 times+++, by the Eye’s reckoning 100 times by corporate interests or their representative bodies or consultants, and just 33 times by others, predominantly free-market think tanks and favoured press outlets.
    /..
    .
    http://www.private-eye.co.uk/sections.php?section_link=in_the_back&amp;

  • Carlyle Moulton

    Craig.

    This comment may seem silly since all Windows users know how the recycle bin works, don’t they?

    In the Windows operating systems when a request is made to delete a file, the file is not deleted, simply transferred to special directory called the Recycle Bin. Files in the recycle bin may remain for considerable time, not until new file space cannot be allocated without deleting some files from the recycle bin will some files in the bin be chosen for deletion.

    The Recycle Bin is represented by an icon on the desktop. double clicking on this icon opens a file list in alphabetical order. Each entry contains the date and time of the files “deletion” and the date and time of last modification.

    Right clicking on a file name brings up a menu containing options including that to restore the file.

  • Mary

    This is the Lewis Chester, Tory donor, that Komodo referred to earlier.
    .
    ‘Wednesday was the day when the cookie finally crumbled for Lewis Chester.
    ,
    A former contemporary of David Cameron’s at Oxford University and once considered one of Britain’s richest financiers, Mr Chester’s hedge fund was on Monday evening found guilty of market abuse in the US and ordered to pay a $76.8m (£48.9m) penalty.
    .
    The judgment – which Mr Chester plans to appeal against – looks likely to bring to a close a near four-year battle by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to pin Pentagon Capital Management down for abusive mutual fund trading. The case, which heard from 18 witnesses and was labelled “complicated and controversial” in an opinion handed down by Judge Robert Sweet, followed allegations concerning trading between 1999 and 2003.
    .
    The judge found that Pentagon had engaged in so-called “late trading”, a term used to describe the practice of placing orders for mutual fund shares after the close of trading. Late trading is illegal in the US because it allows the subject to profit from market events that occur after trading closes.’
    [..]
    ‘For Mr Chester, a former Conservative Party donor who handed the Tories £100,000 in 2006 and 2007, the judgment is damning.’

    .
    .
    /…
    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financial-crime/9085471/Hedge-fund-boss-whose-explosive-emails-finally-caught-up-with-him.html

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