@Icarus Anne Riley We've got Covidiots down here in Baja. A fair number are expats, and trumpanistas, but there are plenty of locals that think "it's not gonna affect me", also. The local authorities have slowly tightened up restrictions and we're now pretty much in full lock down.

Those of us who value our local friends and workers are doing everything we can to support the local populace. Just as an example, my wife, Teri, and I have a lovely young woman who comes about one day a month and cleans house for us. We've been paying her what we normally do, every month, even though we've told her not to come and clean each of the last three months. By local standards, we "overpay" her already, at $40 for 6 hours work. Our neighbors across the street are doing the same for her, even though they're not even here. Others are doing likewise with the various people they employ.

It's the right thing to do, when one considers that the average worker in a local business here in Baja makes a grand total of about 100 pesos a day (which is about 5 bucks, depending on exchange rate).

We have good friends (Mexican nationals) who run a little restaurant. We've tried to use them for takeout as much as we can and are looking for other ways to help them out, also. That one is a bit more complicated, because they're middle class, by local measure, and very proud of their accomplishments. But there's no way they're in any fashion making enough, as restaurants are closed excepting takeout, and also restricted in hours in which they can operate. We'll come up with something, though.

Last week saw the tightest set of restrictions imposed yet, mostly because not enough people are following local guidelines. Basically, anyone living and working in town has to be in their home by 6PM, except for there's an hour for getting dinner and/or groceries before those are required to close by 7PM. Masks are mandatory when out. Fines are also now in effect, ranging from 3500 pesos to 17,500 pesos ($175 to $875). That's in effect until, at minimum, May 31st, but the government has warned it could be extended to the end of June.

At least the local governments and the national governments, for all their other problems, are pretty good at delivering a consistent message. It helps that they are not being led by an Orangutard and a herd of RWNJs, like back in the USA. Oh, yeah, and we don't have to put up with micropenis wonders carrying AR-15s.

How about yourself? I hope you and yours are doing well!

The Amiga approach to meta-data was a bit of a kludge, but more generally portable - each file could optionally have a .info file which contained meta-data. This included pixel-precision location and custom bitmap icon graphics of unlimited size, so you could have floppies with crazy custom graphic interfaces build just out of files and icons. Usually, this capability would merely be used to have thumbnail icons (rendered at the time of saving the file).

In principle, it would be possible to search on meta-data, but I never had so many files as to make it worth bothering with.

I really never had any problems with the responsiveness of the UI on an Amiga. It was generally sluggish to open a folder just because the CPU was slow and the OS loaded a bunch of .info files, but that's just the way it was. There's only so much you're going to squeeze out of a slower CPU.

In contrast, the NeXT workstations I used, with much faster 25MHz 68030 CPUs, definitely had times when they were just outrageously laggy. Like ... I'd click on things and maybe 5-10 seconds later, the computer would respond to them. No way to cancel the things, either!

I really liked the 3d bezel look of the NeXT GUI, but this itch was scratched when I upgraded to an Amiga1200 with AmigaOS 2.0.

When it came right down to it, I never really had a lot of heavy multi-tasking going on except for compiling stuff. When the only two things really going on are a 2400 baud terminal session browsing USENET and a compiler job churning away ... I guess I just never had a problem.

When I finally upgraded to a Pentium 100 Win95 machine, I treated it as mostly a single tasking computer. With 8MB of RAM, it had four times as much RAM as my Amiga 1200, but it was just so much less efficient that attempts to multi-task much wouldn't go so well.