When it rains it pours - as I sat at the keyboard, sipping coffee, and typing about the new mouse capture, another one stepped onto a glue trap. So, a most successful morning.

Ode to Mouse

I was so deeply and pleasantly asleep this morning. I know this because when the sounds started I didn't actually wake up. I just silkily drifted up to that floating, warm, comfy dream state which is very lovely and relaxing. There's no real time sense in that state so I have no idea how long it was before my brain interpreted the sounds as being the frantic cries of a mouse caught in a trap. At that, I was instantly awake. And that's how I knew how mavelously well I'd been sleeping since I was alert, well rested, and feeling great. Full of energy. Which I haven't been for weeks now.

A quick peek revealed the trapped mouse. Stuck to the glue trap. I'll dispose of it later. Of course now I'm completely wide awake.

So glad I was wrong!

My hat's off to the leaders/organisers of United for Peace and Justice. They did a magnificent job of keeping the march peaceful and controlled. And considering there were probably 500,000 people there, that is an amazing feat!

Bravo!

What a pity, the early forcasts called for serious thunderstorms on Sunday afternoon. Now it will just be hot and humid. I was hoping the downpour and lightning would dampen the idiot/protestors who planned to illegally rally in Central Park and destroy the Great Lawn.

Having spent a great deal of my childhood playing on the Great Lawn and most recently helping to raise money to finish its renovation after years of abuse by massive groups, I take this issue rather personally.

Anyway, today I need to go downtown and brave the chaos of the ciminals/anarchist/professional & recreational protestors. I have great respect for the genuine legitimate organizations which plan orderly, civil demonstrations. I belong to several myself and that's why I'm going downtown today. But my goal is not to disrupt innocent people's lives. I'll be part of a mass voter registration drive.

Tomorrow's goal is more crass. Andrew is meeting me to carry home the TV I plan to buy. Yes, I'm going to break down and buy a TV. After 18 months being TV-less, I'm giving in and bringing one into my house again.

The Arrogance of Protest

It's the start of a week of massively, inexcusibly, arrogant recreational prottests in NYC. The disruption to everyday life for city dwellers is inexcusable but the arrogance of those causing the incidents makes is all the worse and not surprisingly, very devisive.

For the most part these people are not locals. Their protests are really aimed at causing as much chaos and general disruption to the city and its citizen's lives as possible.The point of this escapes me as New York City is most definitely not Bush Country. Want to punish the idiots who voted for this little tin pot hitler? Go to Arizona or Kansas.

Tonight's treat was a cute little circus act of about 1000 bicylces weaving their way through the friday night traffic - the wrong way, ignoring lights, ignoring pedestrian crossings. They are very lucky that NYC drivers are actually quite courteous. Elsewhere they might find drivers a lot more hostile and less willing to give up right-of-way to some arrogant little bastard on a bike. Traffic, as you can imagine, is a mess. I decided it wasn't worth going down to 23rd st to meet friends for dinner. That seems to be an area of focus for the 2-wheeler moron set.

Happy Birthday Asti 

HAPPY BIRTHDAY ASTRID

The Joy of Cell Phones

I just got a new cell phone yesterday, a Nokia 6200IM. With this phone, I've finally fallen in love. It just does things so right. All the countless little annoying things about previous cell phones have been corrected. Even the address book is reasonable to use.

Mousetime again

Sometime during the night another mouse was caught. I thought I'd gotten them all before but I suppose this wil be ongoing. The original total was 5 I believe and then I got another 1 last week but nothing since. Foolishly I was thinking of dumping the glue traps. Just as well I didn't.

Andrew is returned from his holiday at Walt Disney World. I loaned him my digital camera and I'll be downloading the photos from it later this afternoon. Other than the camera, Andrew planned and paid for the entire vacation for him and Kate all by himself. He said they had a great time- he'll fill me in on the details today.

I've decided that my Hispanic neighbors on this street come equipped with volume controls with only 3 settings.
1. Very Loud
2. Soundblasting Loud
3. Excruciating Loud

This is not just their radios and CD players, it includes their children. I routinely see families standing in the street chatting, a small child with them screaming at top volume and being completely ignored. Obviously the "being ignored" bit has something to do with this. However, there's definitely a different definition of acceptable noise levels.

I really -HATE- gMail.
The service itself may be great but their customer service is in the toilet. I had one of the first gMail accounts and it was fine. Butthen one day I tried to log on and couldn't. After monumental efforts I contacted a human at gMail and they confirmed I was using my correct username and password. I assume they sorted something internally because suddenly I was able to log on again. For a week.

Then I could't log on., Still can't. Can't reach anyone at gMail or Google to help.
Can't start a new account either.

Bastards!
I hate companies who arrogantly trash their users.
I HATE gMail.

Andrew and Kate left for Orlando, FL for their holiday at Walt Disney World today. Andrew called from Orlando airport to let me know he arrived safely...and that it was a very turbulent flight. No doubt, with the remnants of Hurricane Charley still around.

Anyway, it's an exciting time for him- his first grownup vacation. Planned and paid for all by himself. I'm hoping they have a fantastic time and get some great photos to bring home with them.

Mouse status report

So far 4 mice caught. Luckily they are stupid little creatures. I just put a glue trap by the hinge side of the door and they keep marching in there to die. So far the total is 4 mice. I just threw out the most recent kill. Fresh trap is waiting.

The World Is Too Much with Us

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.---Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathéd horn.

-WIlliam Wordsworth

Tales of the mouse

About 6 weeks ago I bought myself what I thought would be a productive treat - a wireless optical mouse. But it was neither productive nor a treat. The mouse had a mind of its own. The pointer would dissappear and go skidding off into a carnor and I'd be clicking away and tapping the mouse and cursing. I tried all the sensible, logical things like making sure there were no machines or sources of interference nearby, bringing the sending unit closer, checking the USB port, etc. No joy. Finally, in deperation and with my mousing hand beginning to ache, I gave up and bought a wired optical mouse.

And what did I find? The wired optical mouse did the same crazy things! This time I knew it couldn't be hardware failure so I started checking out the software. I tried updating and reinstalling the s/w and the drivers and the device manager. No joy! Yes the mouse was clean. It was brand new but I checked anyway.

Today, by accident something I was reading triggered something way, deep in the dusty vaults of my mind and I suspicously tucked away my new and stylish SuSe Linux mouse pad. I got out a sheet of paper towel and started mousing on that.

Problem solved.

::sigh::

The other tale of a mouse concerns the other sort of mouse, the nasty little furry ones. We've had so much rain lately that the mice seem to have migrated to drier spaces. Being on the ground floor and with a lovely convenient space under the front door of the apt and god alone knows what other little cracks and openings in the walls in closets and behind appliances, I started hearing suspiciously familiar noises at night. Then yesterday while I was online, I saw a small, dark body scurry from under the sofa across the floor and under the door. I didn't think I was hallucinating. It explained the familiar sounds. So I went to the store, bought some glue traps and set them out. Twenty minutes later the glue trap along the wall under my desk had trapped its first victim! I tossed that out into a metal can in the garbage room. Problem solved.

Not so fast.....later that afternoon I heard those suspicious sounds again, then walking down the hall to the bathroom I saw another furry little body scurry out under the bathroom door and across the hall to the closet.

Ok, back to the store for a bunch of mousey glue traps. My house is now a mouse-mine field. Death to rodents.

Your giggle for the day

http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/end.php

How the world will end...very clever and amusing.

Catch-up on July

It's been a crazy hectic month and it's not over yet.

On July 16th, we launched Federation II. It went off very successfully with a big online launch party that was great fun for everyone. It was also terribly stressful, enormous work, emotionally ravaging. People said heartbreakingly terrible things to each other as they started to break down toward the end. And now that we've built it, will they come? That's the $64,000 question as they used to say. And it's also my next project for Fed2.

My daughter Asti was in NYC and we met at Cafe Figaro for cappucino and cannolis. Had a lovely time chatting. Great afternoon

Andrew's getting ready for vacatin. Busy working in the lab. Getting paid for his research work.

Miserably hot and humid here.

All aboard the train from Paris, mes petits enfants doux

In Paris, railroad station focuseson history of Shoah deportations
By Philip Carmel

PARIS, July 18 (JTA) — Almost two months had gone by since the Normandy landings, and the Allies were closing in on Paris — but Nazi authorities in the French capital had other priorities.
On July 31, 1944, the final transport of French Jews left the transit camp of Drancy in the northern suburbs of Paris carrying 325 children. It was bound for Auschwitz.
That event, the 78th transport to leave France for the death camps, is being commemorated through July 19 at Paris’s Gare du Nord train station.
The station is hosting a photo exhibition entitled “The Last Transport, Jewish Children Deportees,” which marks the final event commemorating the 60th anniversaries of the deportations of some 73,000 Jews from France between 1942 and 1944.
The exhibit, which shows hundreds of portraits of Jewish children, already has appeared in 18 railway stations across France and at the head office of the SNCF, the national railway company.
The pictures are part of a vast collection of photographs and Holocaust archival material brought together by the French Holocaust survivors’ organization, Sons and Daughters of French Jewish Deportees.
Set up in 1979 by Serge Klarsfeld and his German-born wife Beate — who have spent decades seeking and prosecuting Nazi war criminals and the French collaborators who assisted them — the group has organized more than 80 commemorations over the past two years to mark the departure of every transport to the camps.
Those events, mostly held at Drancy but also at far-flung provincial railway stations and internment camps across France, generally have been modest affairs attended by a handful of local officials and activists of Klarsfeld’s group.
The group’s obstinate commitment to mark the exact date of each transport has been important in personalizing the horror of the deportations, but Klarsfeld recognizes that the station exhibits have been most effective in bringing the subject to a wider public.
For Klarsfeld, who approached the railway company to host the exhibitions in 2001, the choice of train stations was both a logical and a highly symbolic decision.
“There are thousands of people passing through these stations every day, and most of those people would never see these exhibitions in museums,” Klarsfeld said.
More importantly, he pointed out, was the centrality of trains in the deaths of millions of Jews during the Shoah.
“More than anything, it is the train that evokes the route of the martyr,” he said.
Klarsfeld, who successfully pursued and brought to trial Nazi war criminals like Klaus Barbie and French officials such as Maurice Papon and Rene Bousquet, rejects claims that the railway company should be held responsible for providing the trains for the deportations.
“We don’t hold them guilty. They had no choice as a public-owned company forced to carry out work by the Vichy government,” Klarsfeld said. “Justice should be carried out for those who led the anti-Jewish round-ups.”
“We have never claimed anything against the SNCF. That would be like trying French gendarmes or German soldiers,” he said.
For some, though, trains still evoke a painful memory, even 60 years later.
“I can’t stand trains, smoke, stations, even some kinds of light,” Simon Drucker said.
Drucker was rounded-up at the Vel d’Hiver bicycle stadium in July 1942 — where thousands of Jews from the Paris region were held before being deported to Auschwitz — and he was one of a number of Holocaust survivors explaining the significance of the photos to interested passengers at Gare du Nord.
Drucker said he remembered the clinical efficiency of the transports.
“The trains left at exactly the right time,” he said. “There was never a derailment and they always arrived at Auschwitz at the right time.”
Charles Barron, another French Holocaust survivor who was liberated from Dachau in1945, said he was particularly struck by the contrast between his own deportation and the bustling nature of Gare du Nord at the start of France’s summer holiday period this year.
“I remember the noise of the steam trains, the whistles and the shunting of wagons,” he said. “Today, it’s all so different. You see huge buildings with millions of people passing through.”
Nevertheless, it remains “symbolically important” to hold the exhibitions at the stations, he said.
“Stations are a place for release on the way to and from work. People sometimes have an hour to spare while they wait around for a train,” Barron said. “I think it’s better doing it here than in museums, where people can feel trapped and they become indifferent. Here they’re more sensitive to it.”
As at other stations, the exhibit dominates the front entrance to Gare du Nord.
Given the station’s function as a principal destination for trans-European routes and the departure point for London-bound trains, the railway company decided to host an additional exhibit in English in the waiting area for Eurostar trains crossing the English Channel.
David Rebibo, an Orthodox rabbi from Phoenix, Ariz., said he was taken aback when he arrived by train from Copenhagen to see a banner proclaiming the exhibition.
“It was the first thing I saw when I got here, and I was surprised,” he said. “I know there’s such strong anti-Semitism in France, so I never expected to see such a thing here.”
Rebibo said he was very moved by the pictures, and by the fact they had been placed in such a public place.
“It’s so important to educate people about this and so easy for people to forget what happened,” he said.
Rebibo said he had contacted Klarsfeld to ask whether he could bring the exhibition to his community in Arizona.
Arielle Ferhadian from Paris was seeing off her children as they boarded a train to London, and stopped to look at the photos.
“You see this and you realize that railway stations can be associated with contradictions,” she said. “It’s about travel and leisure, but there also has been murder and distress at these places.”
For others, it was not only the pictures of the victims that left a telling mark.
Axel Krause, a history teacher from Hamburg, stopped for a time in front of a picture of German soldiers.
“I know the pictures because I teach kids about this, but for me it’s also a very living memory because my grandfather and father were soldiers,” he said.
After it closes in Paris, the exhibition will appear probably for the last time in public in Jerusalem next Jan. 27, marking the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
But as Klarsfeld has noted, this form of remembrance is unlikely to be repeated.
In a booklet prepared in 2002 to introduce the 60th anniversary commemorations, Klarsfeld wrote that this period was exceptional “because there are still among us hundreds who survived Auschwitz, there are thousands of children who survived while their parents were deported, and tens of thousands who passed through the Shoah without being deported and who did not lose their parents.”
“In 10 years time, that will no longer be the case,” he wrote.

With all the serious things I could comment on- the agony of the world railing against injustice - the thing on my mind is why do deli counter clerks lie about slicing Boar's Head Ham thin when requested? It's like a point of honor for them to try to get away with slicing cold cuts as thickly as possible so they can get it over with and get rid of you and go on with whatever earthshaking occupation they prefer - like chatting up some cashier.

This is the truth about the human race. We don't really give a damn about genocide in the Sudan, government corruption, or space exploration. We really just want to leap over the deli counter and strangle that lazy, lying bastard clerk.

Thus ends the lesson.

How can someone casually ask me, "Explain DNS to me?". I just couldn't believe this; this is a whole field of study and frankly I would never casually ask someone to just hand me info. Haven't people heard of Google? Duh! You go to google first and make an effort to learn for yourself. Then you go ask questions to clarify details or to get specifics about how it applies to a particular situation. But just "Explain this?", get real.

By default, I'm the Sys Admin for IBgames. I'm also the head of their Tech/Test Team, their marketing/PR person, and I wrote amusing pieces for their newsletter and build planets. Starting next week I'll be writing a regular, weekly column about IBgames/Fed2 tech news and advice for players.

Damn. The things we do for love.

Spacecraft Cassini Enters Saturn's Orbit! Mission control at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory erupted in cheers shortly before 9 p.m. PDT when a radio signal indicated Cassini had been captured by Saturn.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/main/index.html