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Journal SolemnDragon's Journal: Battle of Allia 15

Journal by SolemnDragon

On the upside, my technical writing is getting a brush-up.

We'll talk about why later. But i've set the backbone of the work out and given it some effort, and the result is getting pretty interesting as i continue to research my chosen topics.

On the downside, i am soending my spare time at home sitting around, drawing maps of famous streams.

So here's the thought. Useless useful tasks. Or useful uselss ones, depending on how you look at it. Homework. Practice. Stupid stuff you start with so you can do harder stuff later on.

What's the most useful dumb thing you've had to do lately? What's the most useless smart thing you had to do lately?

So here i am, on the banks of the Allia, with my Celtic soldiers on one side, and the Romans on the other, and the Tiber in the background looking watery and bored with itself.

Do you have a favourite roman battle? A favourite ancient battle in general? C'mon, history buffs, you know who you are. Bore me with stories.

This discussion was created by SolemnDragon (593956) for no Foes, but now has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Battle of Allia More

Battle of Allia

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  • Some Guy has to do 400 repetition each day of this really lame [pun intended] leg exercise. Hopefully after this he will be able to run again.
  • I don't do 'classical' battles... I'd be happy to explain practically any battle in WW2. My fav being the battle of stalingrad...
    • I would love to read what you have to say about Stalingrad. After my friend and I watched Enemy at the Gates were decided that we would look up the true history of Stalingrad and see how "true" the movie was. Since we saw it in theatres, you can only guess as to how successful our researches were...

      As for battles in Antiquity? None jump out right now, but the evolution of Roman tactics is fascinating. Early on they were readily adaptable to any circumstance. Then, later on, they became entrenched in

      • The movie showed stalin's russia (like running away gets you shot by your own officers), the nazi's use of psi-ops, and how desperate the snipers kept the city. What they didn't show was how it ended and the motivation and ignorance of Hitler which lead to the downfall of the Nazi's.

        If works slows down or something, I'll write about it...
  • My job. No, really. 70% of my job is creating work orders to fill demand -- stock or made-to-order, it doesn't matter; the process is the same; it's just the "warehouse stocking level" is zero.

    Not only could I be replaced by a computer, but I probably should be. THere is no reason a human performs this action. Now, the purchasing, planning, and scheduling are other matters, but they only account for some 25% of my job.
  • I have successfully seperated out nearly all of the wingding fonts from the rest. 2,309 wingding fonts have been tossed into a folder to deal with later, leaving me with 41,111 non-wingding font. Even with the programs I wrote to speed up the process it was incredibly tedious. I am a fontcrackfiend.
  • Useless usefulness? Other than burning some random facts into my head related to work, not really. Items such as:

    - There are 43,560 square feet in 1 acre
    - A typical parking space in most municipalities is 9'x18' with a typical drive aisle of 24'
    - 1 parking space is typically required for every 200 square feet of retail space or 100 square feet of restaurant space
    - Landscape requirements are 30 square feet of green space for every proposed parking space along with 1 tree required for every 150 square fee

  • The Battle of Thermopylae and the 300 is always a good tale. Though it is interesting in the sense of myth-making as to what Sparta and the Greece in general where/was. It was the original Alamo and Battle of Mogadishu. The fiction and the truth and how they rub against each other is an interesting bit of human psychology. A mediation on how we would like to see ourselves brave.

    I personally prefer the Anabasis and Ten Thousand with my boy Xenophon. It is a more true view of the Hellenes (instead of acc
    • Have you seen that there is a theatrical movie coming out about the "300" based on Frank Miller's graphic novel of the same name? Looks curiously interesting.
      • That's cool. Checking IMDB the only name I recognized was the director who did the very well directed but unnecessary remake of Dawn of the Dead... hey Dominic West is in it! I guess we're going for the "They aren't Americans so they must be played by English actors" thing. Frank Miller has a better track record for adaptations right now than Alan Moore... so I'm optimistically enthused.

        There's also a 60's version which I haven't seen. I guess it's good classic sword and sandal fare.
  • Stonewall Jackson, who died yesterday 143 years ago.

    He was a military genius.

    He is most famous for his series of hit and run battles in a campaign known as "Jackson in the Valley". He fought 3 armies on 3 different fronts and forced them all to withdraw or retreat. These 3 armies were much larger than his own. Guerilla warfare much?

    To sum it all up: General Lee quote: "Jackson lost his left arm, but I have lost my right".
  • So we have, like 80+ servers - 2/3 MS Windows, 1/3 Novell NetWare, and 1/10 Suse Linux. This week (every six weeks) I wake up at 04:30, have to be at work before 06:00, and log in to every server, check that the anti-virus .dat updated overnight, there aren't any weird new errors in the log files since yesterday, and generally make sure the server is doing what that server is supposed to do. Sometimes things just crash over night. I'm growing to dislike a particular IVR server.

    We do this so that when the c

  • The most useless smart thing I'm doing right now is rebuilding my checkbook register in Quicken. When my hard drive crashed, I lost four years' worth of financial info. If I want to use Quicken to help me file my taxes next year, I need all my 2006 finances in one place. I just hope what I wrote in my checkbook manually is reliable.

    I most smart useless thing I'm doing is de-cluttering on a massive scale to prep my house for sale. Right now, though, the place looks like a Roman army decimated it. Let's just

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