Data Protection

 Among the email accounts we use is one provided by our internet service provider (ISP). Most of the traffic comes from the neighborhood listserv, but we do use it for dinner invitations, book club news, and so on. The user interface is a bit clumsy.  Still, we're accustomed to it, we use it regularly.

But not from the European Union. On Saturday I tried to log in, and received an error page saying that the page http://webmail.[name-withheld].com/gdpr does not exist. I infer that somebody at the ISP decided that persons logging on with network addresses in European ranges should get a message stating the ISP's policy of adherence to the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR); and that somebody else neglected to set that page up, or set it up with the wrong URL. So at the moment I can't conveniently get into that email account. Yes, I could connect to the office network over its virtual private network and so connect to webmail with a US network address, but that doesn't count as convenient.

  I think GDPR makes sense. I just wish that our ISP didn't stop halfway in its recognition of it.

Twenty-Six Years Ago

 Yesterday's Google Doodle celebrated Johannes Vermeer. On clicking, I found that this was because November 12, 1995 was the day the Vermeer Exhibition opened at the National Gallery of Art, "featuring 21 of his existing 35 works". I remember that exhibition, both for its paintings and its circumstances.

The exhibition overlapped with two government shutdowns: November 14 through November 19, 1995, and December 19, 1995 through January 6, 1996. During the shutdowns, not all, but a good deal of the federal government was closed, including the National Gallery. During the second shutdown, when it began to appear that the exhibition would disperse on February 11, 1996 without many having seen it, a private foundation paid the expenses to open it. The National Gallery usually closes at 5 pm, but the Vermeer exhibition was open until 7 pm Friday through Sunday. I suppose that it must have been the only part of the National Gallery one could see while the shutdown continued.

I know that we visited it late in the day. I recall being drenched while waiting to get tickets, then chilled. It was worth the trouble.

Wonders and Cuff-Links

 Glenn Creason, for many years a reference librarian at the Los Angeles Public Library, has retired, and posted a farewell on the library's blog. I had never heard of him, or thought about that library, but clearly I was missing out:

 There is nothing quite like the variety in the ridiculous to the sublime public who visit libraries. I will miss the unpredictable curiosity of my patrons. Once I could rattle off "the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus" as one of "the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World" or patiently explain that I found no evidence that Columbus was wearing cuff-links when he discovered America. I could go on for several hundred more pages but it is only the law of averages when you get a hundred thousand questions there will be some bizarre fun in there.

Many thanks to the person who posted the link to Hacker News.

Meta, Evitata

The announcement that Facebook is now Meta has been met mostly with ridicule. It will also have little effect.  How many people speak of Alphabet rather than Google? I know two persons who have recently gone to work there, and both speak of "Google" rather than of "Alphabet".

"Meta" is in Greek a preposition or an adverb; of course it is the sense of "beyond", made familiar by "metaphysics" or "metalanguage", that tempted Facebook. However, in Hebrew, some have written happily, it means "dead". And in Latin it can be a noun, meaning boundary or turning point, so that one finds in Horace

sunt quos curriculo pulverem Olympicum
collegisse iuvat metaque fervidis
evitata rotis palmaque nobilis.

Translated by John Conington as

There are who joy them in the Olympic strife
And love the dust they gather in the course;
The goal by hot wheels shunn'd, the famous prize...

I am all in favor of shunning Meta.