Thursday, March 31, 2005
Again... where has all the time gone? Garry Kasparov, perhaps the greatest chess player of modern times has retired. An interesting page for the avid chess player at http://www.chessgames.com/player/garry_kasparov.html gives a brief bio and breaks down his style of play (pertaining to over 2100 games that may be accessed listed in the database). Weather: Record high temperature in Sacramento of 84° (Fahrenheit) on March 10th with a cooling trend started. Rain followed a week later staying off and on for some time with significant amounts including one brief cold snap... where we did received our frost on the dogwood blossoms. The last days in March back to warm sunshiny days. New (used) steering column ($180 USD) and spark plug wires ($48 USD) for Gail's van. We were "taken" in the purchase of the first steering column. The sale went down pretty smarmily, Gail having gone to the wrong shop... the salvage person not letting on. After determining that we had the wrong shop and wrong part for Gail's model van the part was returned and another trip was made to Sacramento for the correct shop and part. This is in addition to the $50 USD ignition keylock and $20 USD ignition switch already purchased, and the replacement of another part, which I can't recall, that was accidentally broken during repair. My father-in-law Larry was finally able to get 'things' right and we were only without a vehicle for a week, able to get oot and aboot Friday the 18th. I'll add car mechanic to the list of things I should have become in my professional life. I checked my Google AdSense dollar tally... $0.75 USD total. That means that at this rate in about 33-34 years I should get my first check of $100.00 USD... Cool!!! Our ward hosted the "1st Annual Inter-Faith Easter Cantata performed by choir members from our "Georgetown Divide" area by Sally DeFord titled "I Stand All Amazed", about our Saviour Jesus Christ. I attended the Sunday performance, sans Gail, and was pleasantly moved by the experience. The performances were splendid. Even after Easter the music is with me in my mind where'er I wander "... wonderful to me." I thought I had Gail's computer downloaded with Windows XP SP2... but it kept aborting. I did manage to get the smaller updates accomplished, but the large SP2 file (32 MBytes or so) just kept choking on our pitiful dial-up connection. I ordered the free SP2 CD that Microsoft has available... said it takes 4 to 6-weeks for delivery (ugh!!)... received it in the mail in 1-week !!! Installed in Gail's computer and running smoothly.Good SP2 page: "Windows XP Service Pack 2 Spotlight" by Tech Republic. Anti-spyware (freeware versions all): "AdAware" and "SpywareBlaster" and "Spybot Search and Destroy" all updated and run with their new definitions and/or new versions of their prog's on my Win 98SE box... AdAware SE being a new version of LavaSoft's anti-spyware prog. That explains why if one tries to update previous versions of AdAware - no updates are available. Gail's 'puter to follow... done and done and done. Firefox 1.0.2 Update for vulnerability found in legacy code... done and done. From an Earthlink tip: Free online college courses courtesy MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)... learn at your own pace. Also available en Español and em Portugues.  From a TuDogs tip: Web Design Group... HTML 4.0 and CSS reference guides. And just what triggers depression?... he asked his imaginary psychiatrist, Dr. Liebschitz. The web page referenced was noted after "Googling" the key words ("mental torture") in the quote by Garry Kasparov (he not being the 'he' in the interrogatory).  I watched recently the PBS documentaries on "Cascadia" (Cascadia referring to the subduction zone(s) from Vancouver B.C. down the coast into Oregon... a zone similar to that off Sumatra, Indonesia) and the Tsunami of last December 26th. Interesting seismic events offshore near Vancouver, Canada as "Scientists search for seafloor eruption." March 9, 2005 (Phys.org) NBC miniseries "10.5" Questions & Answers BIG EARTHQUAKES... from the bigquake mailing list I subscribe to: A magnitude 6.6 earthquake in Kyushu, Japan has occurred at:33.85N 129.98E Depth 10km Sun Mar 20 01:53:42 2005 UTC
A magnitude 6.9 earthquake in Salta, Argentina has occurred at:24.93S 63.36W Depth 558km Mon Mar 21 12:23:52 2005 UTC... followed by a magnitude 6.4 earthquake nearby:24.68S 63.43W Depth 562km Mon Mar 21 12:43:11 2005 UTC... both preceded by a 5.8 Richter event 5 hours earlier.
A magnitude 8.7 earthquake, and a 6.7 magnitude event nearby two hours later in northern Sumatra, Indonesia has occurred at: 2.08N 97.01E Depth 30km Mon Mar 28 16:09:36 2005 UTC
My entries... poetry.com: " Poetry in Motion "... & Haiku daily contests:
" Raindrops "... I wanted to title the poem Rainbow, but I've been there and done that. A Glory, or rainbow glory, was another choice, but just didn't 'feel' right. A quick edit 4-18-2005. " @Peace "... but do His will. Terri Shiavo has passed this day, 3-31-2005. " The Firefox " a Haiku: ... A photo of a resting red fox in a field for inspiration. My original thought was thus: Not Microsoft's IE6 You foo, you foo, you ! ... not my best effort. Görüsædæk !!! |
C'ya.
Wednesday, March 09, 2005
Shirley Chisholm: November 30, 1924 - January 1, 2005.
Valentine's day: sent my wife a collection of my poems in an ecard that took me quite a while to format... but her ecard never arrived??? Soooooo, I copied the confirmation that I sent to myself as a Cc:, which I did receive, and played with some HTML coding and made an HTML document for web viewing as well as a hard copy for presentation. The hard copy was arduous, as I had to 'print the screen' multiple times as I scrolled through my document using a freeware utility for Windows called PrintDeskTop... v1.05, a must have utility, to get the artwork, .gif's, to render on the printer as it appears on the screen. Just printing the document using typical printer commands allowed only the 'print' to print discarding the artwork (of angels and hearts in this case). Then I literally cut and pasted the document together with scissors and glue to make one six-foot long roll of artwork and poetry. Weather: On and off rain from still more warm weather systems until this second week of March which is wonderfully in the 70°'s (Fahrenheit) with plenty of sunshine... starting off allergy season in earnest. Finally got my 10-speed bicycle tuned up after all these years. It may be the only transportation Gail and I have if she doesn't prioritize some urgent repairs to her van... soon. Down now for ignition problems. Seems the ignition key will start the van, but will not shut it off when finished (with the key turned to the off position). We have to disconnect the battery and then further turn the ignition on to stall the van to stop... which must be doing wonders for other systems... not to mention the squelchy-grindy noises it makes when one does that with the van already running. My vincas, or periwinkles (or myrtle), and plum trees are blossoming enmasse. Daffodils in yellow bloom... well, one of ours did anyway... everywhere else they're blooming like mad. Manzanita with red and pink buds and blossoms... falling to the ground as I hack the tree limbs down for fire wood. Bees and hummingbirds have re-emerged from their absence. It looks to be a glorious Spring. Ice hockey season cancelled?... go figger. Escalating costs (including salaries) causing financial burdens were bound to bite some major sport hard. I feel for the hockey fans. I was very angry over baseball's past boondoggles when they occurred. I personally like the idea that one enlightened sports person, not I, came up with... tying salaries to performance as in days past... not allowing guaranteed multimillionaires to rest upon their laurels... if that's what they sit on. But, the present day athlete is but a commodity in a big business market and will continue to garner whatever the market will bear, inevitably, until that market crashes. March madness begins !!! (college basketball) Updated Gail's XP machine with SP2 and a few other patches before Microsoft gets heavy-handed and updates her computer on their schedule. It takes forever on her dialup connection which tops out at 1 Kbps but typically runs at between 600-800 bps when downloading. I often dream of broadband... Firefox 1.0.1 released (4.7 MBs download)... an update that (complete article)...fixes a few security holes and some other bugs." I've been very happy with Mozilla's Firefox browser. I rarely use Opera anymore and I'm weaning myself off IE6 more and more. It's interesting to read of Microsoft's frenetic activity in their IE7 project. The only complaint I have with Firefox, and it may be my 'puter not being set properly and not their browser (though IE6 is unaffected?), is the way the Java Applet for "Poetry in Motion" works with the mouse... a very haphazard delayed motion. Free Java Scripts... for web developers... cool!!! Physics and technology news... to peruse. The sciences, in general, have always fascinated me. I also watched PBS's reruns of their "Nova" programs on "The Elegant Universe" about string theory and the pursuit of the "GUT", or "grand unified theory" of force(s). It's as simple as black and green, or greene !!! (John Schwartz and Michael Green and Briane Greene)... almost. Of course there's Beyond String Theory"... to further warp one's mind about. Instead of leading the world, there is no Kyoto accord agreement for the U.S.A. Guess that confirms that our country doesn't walk the walk when we talk the talk of environmentalism. And all that money wasted on studying cow emissions too. It always comes down to dollars and scents (sic). A wonderful interview with the prophet, Gordon B. Hinckley, in 1997 I came across in my email while perusing a Google News Alert. I missed the recent interview with Larry King on CNN, but of what I have heard of the recent interview, it pretty much follows the same vein as the interview of 1997. The Sumatra earthquake, last December 26th, has been upgraded substantially in magnitude to 9.3 Richter in force. Mount St. Helens in Washington State, U.S.A., is showing renewed activity. BIG EARTHQUAKES... from the bigquake mailing list I subscribe to:
Location with respect to nearby cities:
Location with respect to nearby cities:
30.75N 56.80E Depth 42km Tue Feb 22 02:25:26 2005 UTC Location with respect to nearby cities:
2.93N 95.56E Depth 30km Sat Feb 26 12:56:52 2005 UTC Location with respect to nearby cities:
6.57S 129.84E Depth 193km Wed Mar 2 10:42:10 2005 UTC Location with respect to nearby cities:
My entries... poetry.com: " Poetry in Motion "...
"Kyoto Discord " a Haiku: ... the photo was of an elk, or ilk, in a meadow... giving me pause to consider my words, above, about the U.S.A and the Kyoto accord. We were made caretakers of this wonderful earth, and we will be held accountable to a Higher Authority. |
C'ya.
... digg.com
