I'm sure the service was very mooving...

So I'm wondering. Why do people join a "select membership" group that has requirements (participation, portfolio submission, whatever) if they don't want to even try to meet the requirements? I mean, if a group says, "Members must have an online portfolio," why would you join and then refuse to put your portfolio online? I don't get it. If you don't like the requirements or can't meet them, why do you join... ?

I was going to get Zoë from preschool today and I was suddenly struck by a wave of really noticing where I was. Mind you, I was just driving down a suburban street, nothing fancy. But the Dandenong mountains were visible to my left, there are eucalyptus trees of all varieties all over the place, it's a pleasant day, and I was just hit with, "Hey! I'm in Australia!"

Sounds kinda weird to many people, I'll bet, but the fact is, I fell in love with Melbourne specifically and Australia in general years ago, and I'm still in love. Lots of times I don't think about it much, of course, but every now and then, just like with a person you love and see every day, I noticed my surroundings and that whoosh of infatuation and love hit me all over again.

I do consider myself fortunate to be able to live in "The World's Most Livable City." As far as I'm concerned, the old nickname, "Marvellous Melbourne," is still absolutely applicable.

Dear Tide:

I'm writing to say what an excellent product you have! I've used it since the beginning of my married life, when my Mom told me it was the best. Now that I am older and going through menopause, I find it even better!

In fact, about a month ago, I spilled some red wine on my new white blouse. My unfeeling and uncaring husband started to berate me about how clumsy I was and generally started becoming a pain in the neck.

One thing led to another and I ended up with a lot of his blood on my white blouse. I tried to get the stain out using a bargain detergent, but it just wouldn't come out. After a quick trip to the supermarket, I stopped and got a bottle of liquid Tide with bleach alternative, and to my surprise and satisfaction, all of the stains came out!

In fact, the stains came out so well, that some detectives who came by yesterday told me that the DNA tests were negative and my attorney said that I would no longer be considered a suspect!

I thank you, once again, for having such a great product. Well, gotta go. I have to write a letter to the Hefty bag people.

Signed,
A relieved menopausal wife

Saw this as a tagline and found it amusing:

"Do not walk behind me, for I may not lead. Do not walk ahead of me, for I may not follow. Do not walk beside me either. Just pretty much leave me the hell alone."

The CIA had an opening for an assassin. After all the background check, interviews, and testing were done, there were three finalists- two men and a woman.

For the final test, the CIA agents took one of the men to a large Metal door and handed him a gun "We must know that you will follow your instructions, no matter what the circumstances. Inside this room, you will find your wife sitting in a chair. Kill Her."

The man said. "You can't be serious. I could never shoot my wife."

The agent said. "Then you're not the right man for this job. Take Your wife and go home."

The second man was given the same instructions. He took the gun and went into the room. All was quiet for about five minutes. Then the man came out with tears in his eyes. "I tried, but I can't kill my wife."

The agent said, "You don't have what it takes. Take your wife and go home."

Finally, it was the woman's turn. She was given the same instructions, to kill her husband. She took the gun and went into the room. Shots were heard, one shot after another. They heard screaming, crashing, banging on the walls. After a few minutes, all was quiet.

The door opened slowly and there stood the woman. She wiped the sweat from her brow. "This gun is loaded with blanks," she said. "I had to beat him to death with the chair."

Might as well be comfortable, eh?

I found out tonight that the Air Force has closed Griffiss Air Force Base (in Rome, New York). I'm really surprised by this, actually. I mean, I know the military has been closing bases right, left, and center for more than a decade, but I really wouldn't have expected Griffiss to be one of the ones that got the axe. Sheesh.

Now, apparently, it's Griffiss Business and Technology Park. Uhm, okay...

I wonder what they've done with the chapel. I got married there once, a long, long time ago (I'd show you the pictures, but they're too embarassing. Let's just say "powder blue" and "polyester" and leave it at that.)

This was posted at the board at Cyber Crew:

If you know someone that might be interested in joining The Crew please spread the word and invite them to join.

I've previously written about the haunted building I lived in when we were stationed in Germany. Well, I didn't write about it here, but it's on several other sites (here's a link to the story at a ghost stories site).

Anyway, I was curious and did a search on Google and I managed to turn up some photographs of the housing area where we lived! It's been turned over to the German government now, as many of the American military facilities in the area have been closed or very seriously downsized.

It was really kind of weird seeing the pictures. I haven't seen any photographs of the place in many years (we left Germany in 1977), but I recognized it immediately, despite some changes.

The main site I found the pictures on is about the military downsizing and the reburbishment of the housing areas (several of them) and military bases. There's a very good picture of the actual building I lived in (link opens in a new window), as well.

In the photograph, the darker tan areas are where the stairwells are, and the one on the right is the stairwell I lived in. On the second floor, just to the left of the stairwell, is the window that was my bedroom. On the far right on the basement level is where the laundry room was; the ghost was in the room to the "rear" of the building, directly across from the laundry room (not visible in the picture, obviously, since it's on the other side). The ghost was tied to that other room, but would often stand in the laundry room doorway and stare at me (and others, but you'll have to read the story if you want the details).

The whole site actually has a lot of pictures of places I recognize. It's an interesting thing to see these after so many years. It's kind of bittersweet, as I have very mixed emotions and memories of those years (well, anyone who's at all familiar with my family will know that I have mixed emotions and memories of pretty much my entire childhood), and some extremely disturbing and also positive things happened while I lived in what was then West Germany...

More than 60 influential scientists, including 20 Nobel laureates, have issued a statement asserting the Bush Administration has systematically distorted scientific fact in the service of policy goals on the environment, health, biomedical research and nuclear weapons.
[...]
The documents accuse the Administration of repeatedly censoring and suppressing its own scientists' reports, stacking advisory committees with unqualified political appointees, disbanding government panels that provide unwanted advice, and refusing to seek independent scientific expertise in some cases.

This George W. Bush press conference, conducted at a New Mexico restaurant, really made my jaw drop. I would honestly have thought it was a joke, but apparently, it's real...

I've been sorely neglecting my blog lately. I just don't have that much to say, and can't think of a clever or witty way to say things I can say.

Mostly, I'm just busy. School has started, so Zoë goes to pre-school twice a week (Tuesdays and Thursdays) and I go with her to early intervention playgroup on Wednesday mornings. We're all still adjusting to this schedule, and I'm a little flustered trying to get everything together.

Once I have a decent and workable routine set out, it should be a lot less hectic. At least, I hope it will be...

After the Superbowl....

President Bush called the Patriots and complemented them on a great game.

Al Gore called the Panthers and said he thought they were robbed.

Bill Clinton called Janet Jackson.

Basically, it looks at first glance like someone has sent you an e-card, but it gets a LOT nastier after that... There's lots more to read about this (and this is yet another good reason not to use Internet Explorer...).

President Bush and Democratic front-runner John Kerry are engaged in a high-tech political showdown that combines the targeting power of direct mail with the glossy appearance of a television commercial.
 
The format is a Web video message e-mailed to millions of the Democratic and Republican rank-and-file.
 
“It’s animated direct mail,” said Michael Cornfield, research director of the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet at George Washington University. “It’s meant to mobilize supporters, raise money and create buzz.”

In other words, it's an unsolicited, bulk-emailed message with a link inside. Yeah. That's just what the average voter needs to make up their mind. SPAM.

Well, things are getting caught up in a good way. Zoë's doing well in her various therapies (speech therapy, some social skills work, etc.), and Miranda is turning into a real little two-year-old right on schedule, Andrew is going to be getting a very substantial pay raise in the very near future (no date yet, as it involves a government contract, and that can be tricky to negotiate), and I'm learning to manage my medical complaints (pain, exhaustion, etc.; and yes, it's a real medical condition, and no, it's not treatable at this time, although research in the field is ongoing, and no, I'm not going to say what it is just yet because I still need some more tests to "rule out" some other possibilities).

I'm feeling pretty okay about things right now. This is good. I'm going to bask in it so that the next time I feel overwhelmed and pissed off, I can try to recall this very pleasant moment on a sunny, breezy day, the scent of freshly mown grass drifting in the window, the feeling of momentary peace (since our household is rarely peaceful for any length of time, heh), and remind myself that these little moments happen frequently and will happen again...

Scientists are finding that, after all, love really is down to a chemical addiction between people

More new photographs in the Picture Gallery. Look in the right-hand column for the new stuff.

Joanne Webb is a mother of three, a Baptist, a booster of the town of Burleson, Texas, and a former schoolteacher. She also faces trial for being a smut merchant.

John Howard has been extremely stubborn regarding the issue of asylum seekers in Australia. In order to "save face" after the international debacle that was "The Tampa Affair", the Howard government made arrangements with some other island nations to take the asylum seekers and house them -- at Australia's expense -- while Australia processed the asylum claims. This way, John Howard could maintain his hardline attitude about asylum seekers and the government couldn't be accused of violating various international treaties and basically just being heartless and stubborn (although you can still accuse them of that if you want; many people do).

Anyway, it seems that now:

The Australian Government has paid $4.3 million to keep open a camp on Manus Island that has held a single asylum seeker for the past six months.
 
The cost to the Australian taxpayer of keeping open the detention centre on the Papua New Guinea island, is running at $716,666 a month, according to figures supplied to the The Age by the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs.
[...]
This puts the monthly bill to the Australian taxpayer for his upkeep at $216,666.
 
In contrast, it costs an average of $4800 a month to keep an asylum seeker in detention in Australia.

Kurt Wenner does the most amazing street art, and I just loved his Absolut ad...

My picture gallery is back online with a new facelift (and a complete and utter reinstallation of the script). Also put some new pictures in. Look in the right-hand colum for anything called "New" (imaginative, huh?).

A California man on Thursday sued a slew of international companies, including a Greeley distributor, alleging the penis-enlargement products they market and distribute do not work.

Our mail server is back up, by the way. Just thought I'd mention it. Oh, and using my spamcop address will pretty much always work, as that's totally independent of our server.

Melbourne has been declared the near-perfect town after being rated the best city in the world to call home. See? See? I keep telling eveyrone how wonderful Melbourne is!

Well, we crashed again. One of the libraries was corrupted and to make a long story short, it had to be fixed in person, by installing the OS from CD. That couldn't be done until midday today, so we were again offline for a while. Things are now (knock wood) back on track. This has all been extremely off pissing and frustrating, to say the very least.

I'll be putting my gallery back online very soon, now that stuff has been sorted out again. Whew.

Okay, first of all, it seems that the full internet service has FINALLY been resolved. We are now on a much faster connection, both incoming and outgoing. Whew.

No word on what the service provider actually intends to do about it, as far as the billing.

And now, it appears, upon detailed inspection, that the goal of the hacking attempt was our mail server. Spammers (or scammers) deliberately hacked into our machine (and did it very poorly, I should add) and managed to crash it because they were trying to send a HUGE amount of mail. We're still repairing the damage to the mail server.

This, by the way, is known as "server rape" and if you could see the damage done, you'd see why.

Now try to tell me that spam is "harmless" and that all you have to do is "hit delete". Spammers are absolutely the scum of the internet, in my opinion. Evil, scheming bastards, that's about the size of it.

Well, well. Now it seems that the "intelligence" on those "Weapons of Mass Destruction" was in error. Oh, my. What a shock. What a surprise. (Where is that "roll eyes" icon when you need it?).

Gee, there are almost certainly no WMDs. I'm trying really hard to resist the temptation to say, "Didn't millions of people, many of them in positions of authority and knowledge, SAY THAT?!" The United States (and others) just spent billions of dollars and will have to spend billions more cleaning up the mess, tens of thousands of innocent bystanders were killed, thousands of servicemen and women were killed or injured, thousands of truly priceless objects of art have been destroyed or lost, one of the world's oldest libraries has been burnt to the ground, and all the politicians seem to be capable of is, "Ooops! My bad!"

Now, I'll just post a few links. And don't bother flaming me if you're inclined to do so. Not only is our mail server not working at the moment (due to the breach on our server), I don't give a damn what people say about this. Even Colin Powell has admitted that in hindsight, it was a bad idea. You don't get much more convincing than that. All those who seriously thought there were huge stockpiles of Weapons of Mass Destruction were misled, and a nearly infinite amount of bad will and destruction and death has been wrought as a result of, "Ooops! My bad!"

This is about as strongly as I ever speak out publically on the subject of politics. Normally, I don't care much about politics and I tend to think that one kind of corruption is just as bad as another, only in a different flavor. This, however, I felt I needed to vent. This isn't about politics. It's about warmongering.

Colin Powell admits doubt over intelligence on Iraq weapons

Colin Powell doubts earlier WMD claim

Powell in damage control mode

Howard joins wave of doubt over WMD

According to the Gallery site:

We have discovered a well-hidden but potentially serious security flaw in these versions of Gallery which can allow a hacker to remotely exploit your webserver. All Gallery users are strongly urged to upgrade to 1.4.1-pl1 immediately, which fixes this serious problem and will secure your system.

Visit the Gallery site and read for yourself and get the fix.

And, well, we recently had our server compromised. I don't know if it was this flaw that caused it or allowed them to get in, but we're not taking any chances and are upgrading both installations of Gallery even as we speak. I highly advise anyone else running Gallery to do the same.

Turning a Mac G5 into a PC was only a hoax, but the amount of hate mail the hoaxer got is pretty astounding.

Microsoft wants to shut him down. New York's attorney general wants to see him in court. But Scott Richter keeps thinking big.

We're finally back! Sheesh!!!

Early last week, we were inexpertly and stupidly hacked. By "stupidly" I mean they didn't even use the right rootkit for our server. Not too bright, if you know what I mean.

Anyway, as we were fixing that (which would have taken a couple hours, plus some time to download a new kernal patch for the flavor of Unix we run), the net connection goes down. Turns out that our service provider, who have thus far screwed up at least three things in a major way, were supposed to do a simple upgrade and managed to give their service provider the wrong IP block, thus disabling our entire Class C for, what, over a week?

To say that I was angry is an understatement. I haven't heard yet what they're going to do about it, but I expect a refund on the upgrade/installation fee (since they utterly screwed that up), plus a pro rata discount on the service for the month (for the downtime), PLUS a little arse kissing wouldn't hurt (although I'd settle for an apology and the other two things).

We're considering our options as far as service providers at the moment. I can't say that we absolutely will change (depends on how they handle this situation, as above), but we're not happy about this, to say the very least.

Anyway, we're back now. At the moment I'm typing this the server is very slow. Not sure why. Hopefully they'll manage to get that fixed, too. And if we're lucky, it won't take a week....