Here are a couple of recent blogs from pre-blogger times.Transfer to Blogger.

Sunday, January 5, 2003:

~11:00 AM.
Seneca (Part 2). Georg Schoeck's little book Seneca fuer Manager gives some more insights: Although his philosophy was quite stoic, he has had a problem with living it! The discrepancy of theoretical demands and reality was particularly apparent in his relationship to emperors, and his dealings with money. Seneca was a close advisor to Nero, in fact he had educated the Emperor from early childhood on (age 12). In general, he seems to have known how to turn things to his own advantage.

~2:30 AM.
Spent most of the day re-establishing the DP-website. Not much time for philosophy. Read a few passages by Seneca, the upholder of moral standards in ancient Rome, titled: Was ist wesentlich? [What is important?] He says: It is more important to control your vices than to conquer the world, to face your fate with dignity, to have a strong mind, to abandon bad intentions. To be proactive, to remember that we are only human. Therefore one knows that happiness will not last, but can also realize that he can avoid unhappiness, if he chooses not to be unhappy!

Seneca was "inclined to the stoic system, with Epicurean modifications". A Stoic is a person without a tear, who smiles and lets the world have its way. Seneca was also consul under the tyrannic emperor Nero.

The above mentioned passage was referenced as "nat. III, praef. 10-16". I assume that means 'naturales quaestiones', questions of natural sciences. So I looked it up. Interestingly, in there Seneca already gave some insights into the nature of thunder and lightning, water, clouds, earth quakes, and comets. It went onto my 'to read' list.

Satuday, January 4, 2003:

~ 1:00 PM.
What do I want from this BLOG? Certainly not a record of how my day was, and whether I went to the gym, when I went to bed, and in what position/condition I woke up the next morning. No, it should rather be a journal of thoughts and impressions, ideas and conclusions. >Ground rule #1: Keep profanity out!

~ 4:00 AM.
So here I am! Among the BLOGgers. Of course it sounded rather silly to me at first; what would I have to document in a BLOG? On second thought ... maybe I could put out some ideas, day-to-day, just when they come up? BLOGger's motto: >Things only matter when you take them public. We'll see...

Technical stuff --- first exercise: a link to an html file generated from Excel: facts.htm. This can be used to publish tables with a garden variety of info. At first, I tried to link it directly to the XLS, but that did not work (confirmed by some WWW newsgroup posting). So now the html-version.

It took me a long time to find an appropriate server to post these pages. For now, esmartstart.com (dynamicplanet.250x.com) does the job. And it's free.

Also spent some time evaluating Blogger and Blogspot.com. Decided that a self-designed HTML page would be more flexible, although these blog sites seem to be simple to use and are reasonable in appearance. Who knows, maybe I'll come back to that later.