Jim -- hang in there. Your dad is in good hands. And I ain't preaching.

Glad to hear that your father is doing better. If it's possible to feel good about a stroke you can say that having one in Orlando is better than having one anyplace else in the world. ORMC and Fla. Hospital both have advanced stroke units that are truly state of the art and national leaders in the area and there is so much new medicine in that venue that most of the scarey stuff that we grew up with is very past tense these days. Even so, the guy will definitely know that he got a wake up call. Take those high blood pressure pills guy! Just cause they can save your life these days doesn't mean that the ordeal won't scare the bejezus out of you and everyone who loves you.

In other news, Jim... you're not the only one with mechanical and computer related miseries. I've been thinking of maybe switching to smoke signals for the last few days. There has to be a better way. I wish that I could figure out a way to blame you.... hmmm.... maybe ... aaah, to hell with it.

There's a great link on that grumpy old du Toit about the green revolution that everybody should read. Really. Go read it.

The impact of high yield farming techniques has a lot of important connections with the dangerous "environmental" loonies who seem to populate the developed west's politics. It's so easy to see that high yield farming practices can save literally hundred of millions of lives... but just because that is true doesn't keep many so called enlightened and liberal westerners who live in the "fat zones" of the developed cultures to oppose or discourage the starving masses of Africa and Asia from praticing the more sophistocated brand of farming that made the West a bunch of fatties. They don't realize that what they're practicing is a sort of ad hoc racism and a brutal, deadly cynicism when they try to bar third world cultures and undeveloped nations from using these modern technologies.

This is important stuff. And like many good ideas... it hasn't gotten the kind of respect it deserves.

Bob

(By the way Orlando... we did a sweep this week and absolutely filled the pokey with VOPs. Man... we sure need a consequence unit!)

Well... it's been a week full of weirdness. It started out with my computer crashing (again). Now there are conflicting IRQ issues that may or may not be associated with my previous bouts of viral infection. Maddening.

Then I was sleeping the other night... middle of the night... sound asleep... and a bug got into my ear. Yup... a bug crawled into my ear. Naturally, I rose up about 3 feet into the air. Ever had a bug scratching in your ear? Oooooh, baby! Well, fortunately I had a designated driver under the covers who could get me to the emergency room. I'm not sure that I could have driven the 5 miles or so that I would have had to go to get to the emergency room.

Anyhow, the doctor sprayed something in there that killed the critter and then took a pair of forceps and pulled out a beatle big enough to scare me all over again. "O, yeah. Happens all the time. To kids mostly," the doc said. Well, there I was sitting in the ER full of car crash victims dying and people running around like an episode of ER... and I've got a damned bug in my ear. But... for a few moments there the critter had my full attention. You betcha.

So... what else is new? Having a good time? All I could think of was that episode of Star Trek where that centipede crawled into that guy's ear so that it could eat the guy's brain. Uuuuugh!

Dan Gilmartin sends this along:


Go to this website for a really good video
of the theft of the 2000 Florida vote.

http://www.ericblumrich.com/gta.html

Information based on BBC/Guardian/Observer
reporter Greg Palast (his home page is
http://www.gregpalast.com/)

...Dan

Smiley faces for everybody!

Want to hear something cheerful?

Most of the stuff that I do is a test of a guy's cheerfulness... as a teacher I struggle with lumps who don't seem to take pleasure in learning the mysteries of boolean algebra or how to factor polynomials. The bail bond business (the money grubbing part of my existence) is mostly filled with folks who have screwed up in some dramatic and destructive way. And the work that I do as a juvenile probation officer with DJJ is often rewarding, but is equally disturbing because too often I have to deal with some unfixable problem. How can you fix a kid's future if he is a Folk Nation gang member who has been classified as SHO/CAP (serious habitual offender/capital offender) after he "accidentally" put a gun in an opposing gang member's mouth and pulled the trigger just because the guy has on a different colored do-rag on his crappy head? Duh!

All of which supports my general premise that we should not attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity.

But then something comes sneaking along and cheers me up... even if the redhead thinks that I'm being nutsoid and my daughter thinks that I'm being certifiably goofey.

I just upgraded my isp service to the "accelerated" service at Hawk Communications. There's a great big $30 difference betwen their high speed 56K service and their "regular" 56K service. Big whoop you say. Well.... yeah. What the system does is maintain a huge cache and does these global includes as the pages are picked up by the browser. Like I said... big whoop. But... but.... the new way is an increase in speed by a factor of 3.5 right off the bat and creeps up to a factor of 9 after you've uploaded pages out of the cache on repetition. So I'm smiling and cheerful. I can be glum about all the negative crap that I have in my day to day world, but when I get on the magic carpet around my website and this blog, the thing has really delivered the goods, without me getting raped by Bell South. I have steadfastly refused to pay for the outrageous ripoff of DSL service from those rapists at the phone company. They have the attitude that they have the only game in town (they think!) so they can screw the consumer. They're not even remotely ashamed of themselves. Crooks.

But lookie here... the American Free Enterprise system strikes again! Ah ha... definitely a better mouse trap. The phone company can fold their DSL over and stick it where the monkey hides the nuts. This is great.

There now. Don't you feel better too?

Bob

I've been looking at the pictures from Spain and I don't mind admitting that I don't know what to say or think. Lilek probably says it best...

In the meanwhile I'm just speechless (as anyone who knows me will say, that's rare). My first reaction is to strike out, but something makes me wait. Can these people be members of the same community of humans as the rest of us? I just don't get it.

Yeah... James Lileks says it best. No anger, just a curious loss of connection. It's like being angry at a terrible sickness that kills without remorse or understanding. Who are these people? It's like our conversation about the Nazi death camps. Anger is not appropriate, just a residue of distaste and loathing. Ick.

Bob

Free at last! Free at last! Good Godalmighty, free at last!

Well, it's been a week of painful progress, yet progress none the less. I got my yearly evaluations back and they were nice enough to say that I'm fine. My boss thought that I needed to improve some areas but that's to be expected. I guess they'll keep me. Good thing cause I need all the extra money I can raise to pay for all the crappy computer stuff I have to deal with.

The website is back up, but I have some kind of hardware conflicts that I can't seem to figure out. The stuff I type seems to take days and days to register. That tells me that there is some kind of conflict and I haven't figured it out. Yet. The trouble with things like that is that the problem is invariably right in front of me but I can't see the forest fire because of all the damned trees in my line of sight. Well, dogged does it.

In the meanwhile, the GF is disappointed with my response times as well. I'm sorry, but when I have this kind of maddening stuff on my mind I lose all sense of emotive interaction. Heartless, emotionless roboticon... that's Devil Bob. The short description is... I'm a jerk. Sorry.

Anyhow, the damned thing is back up. Now all the guys who want to learn about the bail bond business can get into the library area and read all my soft porn stories. I've even got some new traffic in the poetry. Hmmm. Amazing. There are guys out there who want to read fixed form verse. Well, no accounting for taste.

Well, Bob. Quit whining and go back and find all the conflicts and IRQ interrupts that are slowing down the antique K-6 you laughingly call a "big box".

Bob

There are times when I could willingly commit murder. If I could only be sure to get the right creeps.

I've been struggling with a viral infection. Not the kind that causes your nose to run, but the kind that causes your computer to crash... and crash... and crash. And causes you to reboot everything and switch to a new and different and updated firewall, only to have the thing crash again. Along with my website and my email server. Grrr.

What purpose is served? What reason is there, except to cause my already too high blood pressure to spike. I'd feel a lot better if I could just be sure that I could put my hands around the right throat and then squeeze the life out of the bastard's body.

Bob