missing kittens

Monday the cat had NINE kittens. The kids were here for an all day visit when it happened. We got home about 8 in the morning and I saw Rocky the Cat beside the house, super huge pregnant. She had disappeared for a few days again.

She is a wild cat, living under the houses on the block with 20 or so other wild cats. This was the first time that Roxanne and Bubba were here to see her. She came right in.

After a short while she started acting uncomfortable and howling. I told the kids that she was probably getting ready to have her kittens. A bit later Roxie came into my room worried cause "Rocky peed on the bed". Actually she probably did not say Rocky at this point. She chose the name Rocky for the cat that day, maybe later.

Cat went under the bed, I told the kids to leave her alone there, she was getting ready. Then Roxie ran up crying, "there is a baby hanging out..". Mama was walking with a baby hanging out of her.

The next few hours Rocky the cat was under the day bed in the living room squirting out kittens.

Roxie came up with the idea of rubbing a towel all over the mother to get her scent on it; to use to move the babies when the time came, see. I told her that this was an excellent idea, I had not thought of that.

So. Late in the day we moved the day bed away to discover that NINE kittens had come out of this one small mama cat. We cut up a box to make a nice door into a cozy dark cardboard cave and scooped the kittens up with the nicely smelly cat towel and scooped them into the cardboard cave. Rocky the cat liked it.

Roxanne and Bubba were worried about one kitty who was not moving much. I did not think that all of them would survive but did not want to talk about that. We scooped up the wayward kitty and deposited him upon the pile of kittens nuzzling up to mama.

Took the kids back at 6:30, everyone happy about the productive day.

Tuesday I found one sad little cold kitty corpse put outside the cardboard cage. I took him out into the field for burial, worried about how the kids would take this. 8 kittens tuesday night.

Wednesday after school I picked the kids up for a few hours. We rushed home to see the kittens. Reluctantly I told them that I'd had to bury one the previous day. When we got home there was another silent one inside the cat cave. Roxie picked it up and we buried it in the field. I told her that there were too many for such a small cat and that some of them were surely not going to survive.

One more kitten seemed to disappear the next day and one body was ejected. I was confused about this because there was a missing body. I am sure that 3 kittens were buried in the field but only 5 kittens were feeding. There was a huge pile in the litter box (set up wednesday after we bought more cat food and some litter) that I threw out.

I did not investigate this strange "too large for poop" thing in the litter box but now I wish I had.

On friday there were four kittens feeding. One more sad package had to go to the field. I peeked into the cat cave friday night and saw Rocky lying there nursing. I did not open up the box to count kittens.

Saturday morning, up at 3:30 to go drive the taxi on French Quarter fest day. Home at noon for a nap. After waking up at 3pm Rocky the cat was walking around the house crying. I pet her, wondering what she was talking about. Then I looked in the cardboard cave. No kittens at all.

I searched all over the house looking for where she might have moved them to. Nothing, no mewling kittens anywhere. Mama the Rocky cat just acts puzzled. Then I thought about that strange large thing in the litter box. Was it vomit? Must have been something vomited up, way too big for poop.

With dread I searched for "do house cats eat their babies?". Some people assert that this has happened.

There are no mewling kittens anywhere in the house and four kittens have disappeared from the face of the earth.

Big mystery. I dread this discussion on Sunday when I have the kids for a visit.

Pre3/Nokia c3

my Palm Pre3 is down. The GPS stopped working. On some advice from the forums at webosnation I downloaded the webOS doctor for webOS 2.2.4.

Now, I changed SIM cards from AT&T to T-Mobile; a pay as you go "no data" card. $100 for a thousand minutes. I use about a hundred minutes a month and AT&T was costing me $62 per month. I got a Wi-Fi hotspot from TMob as well.

So, the Pre3 finished initializing and I had to sign in to my Palm profile. Oops. Cannot sign in without a cellular data connection.

Dead phone. Dead until I get a SIM card in it which has some kind of data. I use google voice to have a permanent phone number. The number which I tell people to call is my Google number, not the number on the SIM. This became a problem with the Straight talk Moto flip phone I got at Wal-Mart. The Moto will not accept the Google authorization. Don't know why, I type in the authorization code but Google never hears it.

So I ordered a Nokia C3 next day delivery from Amazon. Wal-Mart does not stock the Nokia E series that Straight talk shows as available.

I went back and forth as to whether to get an E5 for $165 or the c3 at less than $100. C3 uses S40 rather than the S60 symbian system. They say it is a "feature phone" system rather than a "smart phone". No GPS on the C3. I ended up getting the C3. It is a solid phone with a much better full keyboard than the Pre. No touch screen. It has a good texting system. I am using texting for the Taxi biz so I wanted an easy to use text phone. Not email, texting. Text does not use the data channel on a SIM.

Now I have to break down and get a full plan for the Pre2. I have used nothing but a Palm Pre since June 2009. Got this pre2 in June 2010. I have a square trade warranty on it so I can get it replaced.

Problem with this is that I pay $30 a month for the data on this T-Mobile hotspot thingie. It works very well, quite fast with HSPA+. I mostly use the phone in my car, doing taxi biz, or at home. Wi-fi everywhere I use the phone.

I just now fully realize what a data hog that webOS is. And what an energy hog. The C3 uses a small fraction of the power and has a bigger battery.

Palm should not have completely ditched PalmOs, nor the PDA concepts that it used. There are people who went back to a Treo from a Pre because WebOS is not as good at being a PDA. Palm even took out the compatibility layers to allow the PalmOS Classic emulator to work on a Pre. Big mistake, especially with the dismal hardware reliability record of the first Pre units.

I see more Palm Centro's being used on the street than WebOS devices.

Anyway, I am happy with the Nokia C3 as a second phone. Very well made. Solid keyboard. Harder to figure out how to use the thing, but geeks can figure this stuff out.

HP/Palm Touchpad

have had the touchpad for two weeks. Just now I am reading a comparison of the ipad2 and the touchpad on infoworld.com. He says he could not get google docs to work on the Touchpad at all. I mistreated a test document in docs on my Touchpad. Works fine.

oops. I cannot paste the link. Link URL's are not copying correctly. Ah. Got it wiring. The 'http:' was doubled

May Day, Jazz Fest

May Day, last Sunday, I went to New Orleans Jazz Fest for the first time. As I am a Haytian taxi driver here in La Nouvelle I have always worked during this time. It is one of the few times that one can make decent money, albeit while working 14 hours a day.
I went with two 8 year olds and a 5 year old so we did not see a lot, but I went to see Boukman Eksperyans. It was nice to see them after so long, but not nearly as nice as being at Cafe Des Arts in PetionVille.
We saw Dja RaRa as well. They use a snare drum, which was too loud inside a tent. Roxie went up close and watched the dancers.

How the Haitian Story Gets Told

Synthetic motor oils

An excellent article explaining what motor oils are made of, and the history of synthetic and mineral oils.

Palm's refusal to admit errors

I have been using PalmOS and now WebOs for ten years. A handspring visor for 5 years, totally stock, then a T|X when I got back to the USA in 2005. I watched the Treo descend into irrelevancy compared to Blackberry. I watched them buy BeOS (my favorite dead OS) then split off the OS department as PalmSource; it was then sold to Access. Palm then refused to use the pda/phone OS that the BeOs guys developed. PalmOs 6 it was. Ready in 2004 but never used by anyone.

When WebOs and the Pre were unveiled at CES in 2009 I, along with lots of other folks was totally stoked. Palm had tons of mind share in 2009. Remember Roger Macafee famously saying that everyone who bought the first iPhone in 2007 would be buying a Pre? It did seem not unreasonable to me. Then the Pre came out a few days before the iPhone 3GS and all those folks who were to get the Pre got the newest and Kulest iPhone instead.

I got a Pre that first week. It was not ready for prime time. The iPhone wasn't ready at first either, but by 2009 had completely changed people's expectations. A not ready new device would not cut it. Hardware reliability problems, software needing to be rebooted, etc. People buying a telephone do not expect to have to reboot it.

I still use that Pre (actually, my first was replaced under warranty) and love it, but many of those early adopters moved to Android or iPhone. I still see more Palm Centro's (I had one) than Pixi's. Sprint invested a lot in the Pre/Webos rollout as the next hot thing. Now they won't carry the new Pre +, probably due to bitterness.

Android was just coming out at the same time as WebOs. There was one Android phone with a troublesome OS. A year later Android was ruling and Palm was leaping into the arms of HP to avoid slow death.

Jon Rubenstein was brought out of retirement to shepherd the new OS into a device to put palm back into relevance. They designed this Kul device to go with the OS. I like the Pre form factor. The keyboard is a bit small, but all the designers seem to have thought this was a killer design. The market has ruled against it. Everyone wants bigger phones. Bricks. Rubenstein here refuses to admit that anything was wrong with the Pre/WebOs rollout at all.

Hey, go ahead and say that our design did not meet with favor and we are working on it! The "portrait slider" form that the Pre introduced is now being used by Blackberry and a Dell android phone. They have bigger keyboards and bigger screens.

People complained about the introductory advertising campaign. I liked it, but most people didn't. He says here "we changed it". Nothing about trying a different type of campaign to create buzz, but it didn't work out right.

Hey, people do not like it when a leader needs to admit errors and refuses to do so.

Monitory Crimes Division

These people cannot even spell.


ATM CARD PAYMENT
...
Anti-Terrorist and Monitory Crimes Division.
Federal Bureau Of Investigation.
J. Edgar. Hoover Building, Washington D.C

ATTN: BENEFICIARY

This is to Officially inform you that it has come to our notice and we have thoroughly completed an Investigated with the help of our Intelligence Monitoring Network System that you are having an illegal transaction with Impostors claiming to be Prof. Charles C. Soludo of the Central Bank Of Nigeria, Mr. Patrick Aziza, Mr Frank Nweke,Sanusi Bello none officials of Oceanic Bank, none officials of Zenith Bank and some impostors claiming to be the Federal Bureau Of Investigation agents. During our Investigation, it came to our notice that the reason why you have not received your payment is because you have not fulfilled your Financial Obligation given to you in respect of your Contract/Inheritance Payment.

So therefore, we have contacted the Federal Ministry Of Finance on your behalf and they have brought a solution to your problem by coordinating your payment in the total amount of $800,000.00 USD which will be deposited into an ATM CARD which you will use to withdraw funds anywhere of the world. You now have the lawful right to claim your funds which have been deposited into the ATM CARD.

Since the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been involved in this transaction, you are now to be rest assured that this transaction is legitimate and completely risk-free as it is our duty to Protect and Serve citizens of the United States Of America. All you have to do is immediately contact the ATM CARD CENTER via E-mail for instructions on how to procure your Approval Slip which contains details on how to receive and activate your ATM CARD for immediate use to withdraw funds being paid to you. We have confirmed that the amount required to procure the Approval Slip will cost you a total of $200 USD which will be paid directly to the ATM CARD CENTER agent via Western Union Money Transfer / MoneyGram Money Transfer. Below, you shall find contact details of the Agent whom will process your transaction:

CONTACT INFORMATION

NAME: MR. PAUL SMITH

EMAIL : paul_smith200@gala.net

Immediately contact Mr. Paul Smith of the ATM Card Centre with the following information:

Full Name:
Address:
City:
State:
Zip Code:
Direct Phone Number:
Current Occupation:
Annual Income:


Once you have sent the required information to Mr. Paul Smith he will contact you with instructions on how to make the payment of $200 USD for the Approval Slip after which he will proceed towards delivery of the ATM CARD without any further delay. You have hereby been authorized/guaranteed by the Federal Bureau Of Investigation to commence towards completing this transaction, as there shall be NO delay once payment for the Approval Slip has been made to the authorized agent.

Once you have completed payment of $200 to the agent in charge of this transaction, immediately contact me back so as to ensure your ATM CARD gets to you rapidly.


FBI Director
Robert Mueller.

red guard

I had a young Chinese guy in the cab a few days ago. A Tulane student going to the airport for Christmas break. He said he was Chinese so I asked "Shanghai?". He said yes, it was a beautiful city. I said "Red Guard". He laughed and said that his papa had been a red guard.

D-Link dsl modem on AT&T dsl

Last year I was working on getting my Cousine Carolyn Sue's home network up. AT&T dsl. There were phone line quality issues; I strung some new wire, the company put in a new box on the side of the house. We got reliable service with the Motorola Netopia 2210 modem.

Hooking up the Tivo to the network required stringing ethernet cable and taping it to the floor. This is not an optimal solution but we settled for it.

Wi-fi with DSL: I had installed a wi-fi access point in my house to work with a Netopia modem but for some reason we chose to get a D-Link dsl modem with router and wi-fi built in. The model we bought in 2009 was the 2640B. Attaching it to the phone line resulted in a web browser returning a strange detour page from ATT.net requiring downloading of software to reset the password. This looks a lot like a hijacking attempt but it is the way they do it.

Couldn't get it to work and I didn't want to spend the time on the phone with AT&T tech support. That D-Link sat on the floor for more than a year.

Last week Cousine Sue got an iPad and needed a home wi-fi signal. I resolved to return to the problem of getting the D-Link 2640b to link up with the AT&T signal. It is difficult and little help is available.

I went thru the same procedure as last year, disconnecting the Netopia and hooking up the D-link and getting a redirect page from the AT&T network. This time I invested the time in calling tech support.

I actually got a helpful tech support guy. He spent a considerable amount of time on the phone with me; he was knowledgeable about the different models of Netopia modems (the newest ones are crippled to make NAT and routing very difficult).

The problems with getting the D-Link to sync were thus: the wizard scans and searches for usable signals but reports that all of them are busy. Skipping the wizard reveals multiple VPI and VCI assignments available but in use.

(I think those were the names of the ports, I am writing this at home and do not have perfect recollection; I'd never worked inside a DSL modem before. The D-Link allows access to vastly more settings than the Motorola Netopia.)

Searching help forums didn't give a lot of information. D-Link knowledge base had nothing helpful. I finally found one post (somewhere) that referred to leaving the old modem turned off for a day before hooking up the new modem. Hmm. From this hint I started to glean that the busy ports were still thinking that they had to talk to the netopia.

SOLUTION:
I synced up the Netopia then held down the reset button on the back of the unit. Just as it began to wake up I disconnected it and hooked up the D-LInk. Booted it up, logged into the D-link and set the ports to 8 and 35. Save and reset. After booting up the D-Link it came up with the I light on!

Perhaps someone else will find this useful.

updating a Vista nstallation

I've been working on updating Mary & Victor's computer for days now. They got it three years ago from those Blue Hippo people. It has Vista basic and 512 megabytes of ram. 1000 times the ram as a working computer of 20 years ago and it would barely run.
I put 2 gigs in it and it runs at least; not fast, but running. This AMD X64 system has not been updated since 2007. I've spent the last two days downloading, installing and re-booting. I am just at the point of trying to get a service pak 1 to take. AMD's seem to have a problem with this. Maybe Dells too, according to MS forums.
If I were doing this for money it would be embarrassing.

more on the ssd/dual drive ProBook

I've had a bit of trouble with the system since installing the SSD. It would freeze on boot up from cold. I booted with the Snow Leopard install disk and went to disk utility and found the original, 120 gig HD was corrupt. Fix it. Then I found that the new boot SSD had bad permissions. Fix it. I don't know all the majik shell commands to move files in and out of a boot disk.

Eventually I decided to move the assigned ~/HOME directory back to boot/users/myname and keep photos and itunes libraries on the external. Documents and Downloads and Movies too. I cannot discover how to make the ~/Documents folder redirect to the second disk. So, I made an alias for the Documents folder on the second disk and moved that into boot/users/me. So, I see a Documents and 'Documents alias' folder. Sloppy.

I don't quite know why having $HOME on the second disk makes problems, or if it really was that. For now, I'm keeping $HOME on the boot.

It boots up screamingly fast from the SSD.

I was afraid of opening up this thing, what with my experience trying to solder inside my Amiga 3000 all of 20 years ago. It was no problem; Modern laptops are incredible.

ssd in macbook pro

I've been thinking of cleaning up my Macbook Pro. I got it in 2008 when Emile-Alexandre broke my previous laptop, an iBook. The DVD/CD drive stopped working a long time ago; same with the drive in the Mac Mini. I got an external Samsung DVD writer for $50. Much better idea. How often do I use an optical drive these days? Couple times a year.

I'd heard about replacing the DVD drive with a second hard drive, and I'd thought about using an SSD (Solid State Drive). So I got a 40gig Intel SSD for a hunnerd bux.

I followed instructions here and at ifixit.com. I got an adapter at newmodeus.com. It is a little confusing figuring out which adapter to use. This probook has an ATA bus for the DVD. ATA is now called PATA. Parallel ATA, which is for some reason slower than the new Serial ATA. So, the hard drive is SATA and the tray to replace the DVD has an ATA buss on the outside and SATA on the inside.

It fit perfectly. I moved the old drive into the DVD bay and put the SSD in the boot drive location. Then I assigned ~/home to the old drive in the new location. You do this in advanced options of the login preference. A right click is necessary to find this hidden advanced option. Non obvious.

So after installing OSX snow leopard onto the SSD and re-assigning ~/home and rebooting I have a fast system and a big user area for all files. Applications are installed on the SSD boot drive. I deleted all the old system files from the original 120gig (now the second drive, remember?)

Kul

the counter revolution of the Idiocracy

This Tea Party "movement" is the counter revolution of the Idiocracy.

oil spill

A mother jones article about the BP oil spill in the Gulf. I'm living in New Orleans and this is what everyone talks about. The linked article itself links to an oil industry discussion site called The Oil Drum.

I discovered a new feature on Facebook the other day; they allow importing weblogs into the 'notes' section of yr profile.
so I went to bring these blogger entries in. They did not require a login to Blogger! I could have imported ANY blog into MY notes. Good grief.

ps3 down, new slim sold out

My PS3 stopped playing bluray disks today. That means ps3 games as well as BD movies. I had Slumdog Millionaire in from Netflix and it wouldn't play. I heard seeking, and it started to play, but then froze up. My brand new Modern Warfare 2 played two days ago, today it started, then froze the system, then nothing BluRay was recognized. Bummer. Lots of threads on the playstation forums about some problem with software.

A number of new download games haven't been working on this original 60 gig 4 USB model, considered the top of the line by many people. It has a hardware PS2 built into it. So, even tho I cannot afford it, I went to Amazon to buy a basic new $299 PS3 slim. None available. Walmart? Sold out. Best Buy? Nothing available anywhere. Hm. This new model is selling very well.

More from Zone of Death

A final count of our immediate family in Hayti? No fatalities. Last week Nadia's Maren/godmother called. Her name is Marie-Michelle. She had been reported confirmed dead immediately after the quake. Now it is revealed that she and Nadia, our 9 year old daughter, are in a displaced persons camp by the Dominican border and have been treated by Dominican doctors. Perhaps they are inside the DR, it is unclear. They don't have a cell phone number to call them back. After three weeks of failing hope this was wonderful news.

Lucienne will be flying in to Santo Domingo on the 8th of February and taking a bus overland. She is taking a tent which was donated here in New Orleans and LED flashlights, etc. Mostly money. Our friend Thor Burnham is in Port au Prince now rounding up and taking care of his wife's family who are sleeping on the street around Delmas 30. My mother in law Vanita Louis is camping in PetionVille at Place Saint Pierre, the central square of the city. Jeff, the 14 year old cousin has a Voila cell phone and is taking care of business. Luckily Vanita has her identification so she is able to get money from Western Union or Moneygram, etc.

Brother Marcel found his three children. Where were they? Dunno, but the first reports were that they were missing. Sister Beatrice has her two kids. Our very first call was from Beatrice's ex-husband who came immediately from Santo Domingo to search and reported that the whole neighborhood where they lived had fallen into the ravine and no one was to be found.

The eventuality of everyone being found alive after so many have died is amazing. Merci Bon Dieu.

My sister Pamela Lyall got a lot of interest among her friends and started a prayer circle to envision Nadia alive and well. That seems to have worked out well. Some of her people wanted to send money directly to family of people whom they know, rather than to an aid agency. That is an excellent concept as well.

Some of our friends and family who may wish to contribute to a salvation fund for my wife's family in Haiti.
Here is a facebook email which I sent to Tracy in Humboldt.

Western Union is the best way now, cause it is free. They are waiving all transfer fees to Haiti.
I just sent $200 at the corner mini mart with a WU transfer desk. I picked up the dedicated phone
at the little table and talked to a woman who answered. I just told her "$200 to Vanita Louis in Haiti".
I took the order to the clerk and paid him; he entered it into a WU terminal and gave me a receipt.
(this was the first time I had ever done this) On that receipt is a confirmation number.
That number (and her ID) is what allowed Mama (Vanita Louis) to get the money at her local WU agent in PetionVille

So, there is the method to get money to Roxannes Grandmama, who will feed about 8 children.

Merci d'avance

more on Port au Prince

Today there was a 6am earthquake in Hayti. Lucienne received a call immediately from Jeff, her nephew/brother. A police woman in Place St Pierre (the central park in Petionville) was saying that the USA immigration had new rules allowing family members to leave Haiti and go to Etats Unis. I knew this wasn't true but had to get up and search the net for immigration news. Turns out that existing adoption applications are being expedited.

The final toll there in Petionville is two brothers dead, Jean Baptiste and Patrick. Beatrice's two kids are ok. Later brother Marcel called for the first time. The Voila cell network is up. He is sleeping in the street down around Nazon. His three kids have been found. Nadia, Lucienne's eldest daughter (and Roxanne's older sister) is still missing.

The Port au Prince apocalypse

The destruction of Port au Prince has captured the imagination of the USA. For us, it is personal. Lucienne's family all live in poor districts of Port au Prince. When I first heard of an earthquake in Haiti I wasn't too concerned. There was a small earthquake when we lived in Kenscoff; I hardly noticed it. By California standards it was nothing worse than a truck driving by.

This 2010 quake was far stronger than the 1989 Santa Cruz quake (usually mistakenly called a San Francisco quake) which I rode out balancing on my bouncing house. The Haiti quake, in particular, lasted for 35 seconds, a very long time. The measure of ground movement puts it towards the strongest possible quakes. Port au Prince is one of the least prepared large cities imaginable for such destruction.

Lucienne tried to call Haiti for hours on tuesday night, to no avail. No lines available, and the cell phone networks were probably not functioning at all. Wednesday a call came in from Haiti, from Ernest Pinchinat, the ex-husband of Lulu's sister Beatrice. He came in immediately from Santo Domingo and reported that the hillside neighborhood where they lived had all collapsed into the ravine. He could not find anyone. This is a bidonville/favela on the side of a hill behind where the Hotel Kinam is at the top of Petionville. Lucienne calls it Morne Calvaire, but it is the foot of the Morne.

The next day, at 3am one of the young boys in Mama's household (a nephew/cousin or something) called Lucienne and spoke just long enough to say "call me back". Well, you cannot call back. So, word from someone, but mysteries continue. Great grief here. No word about Nadia, Roxanne's older sister, who lives with her Maren/Godmother in Tabarre (close by Aristides old palace and the new US embassy).

On Saturday a friend of Marcel, Luciennes brother, called and said that Nadia's Maren was confirmed dead and Nanou is missing. Mama and Sister Beatrice are alive but with injured feet or legs. Injured how badly? Unknown. Two brothers are dead, some of the other children are alive. The number living there fluctuates and who is family or not also varies.

I started getting active on Twitter and find it actually useful for something like this. Some folks with satellite internet and some source of electricity were able to get word out online, where telephones were not useful. People whom I know were tweeting from Jacmel and Port au Prince.

Today NPR has the first reports of Leogane. I knew it would be bad there, the center of the quake was in the mountains just above Leogane. They said that 90% of the houses are destroyed and there had been no help at all in six days.

ethanol and gasoline

I read a while back in Business Week that many mixes of gasohol have been tested with as much as 18% ethanol. There are proposals in Congress to increase the mixture of standard gasohol to 20% ethanol. This is apparently bad for cars which are not flex fuel certified. The parts in the fuel supply system can be eaten up by the ethanol.

After reading this I looked into which fuel suppliers make fuel without ethanol. Sunoco and Amoco and Conoco seem to be the ones. I have found two stations close to me in New Orleans with this fuel; one Sunoco at a former BP station in Metairie and Amoco at a no-name station on North Carrollton up by Canal.

There is a branded Conoco station by the airport but they charge 30 cents more than everyone else.

Now I try to fill up with the Amoco or Sunoco at least every other tank. I get better mileage with it in my Grand Marquis taxi.

Is the streetcar Desire? Or Desirée?

I was told by a taxi customer the other day that the street (an actual street) named Desire was originally Desirée. A woman's name. The name of the daughter of the gentleman who lived there. In New Orleans, of course.
The Americans couldn't figure out such a name and changed it to Desire.

Ah, ok. Wikipedia has a link to the story that it is mis-spelled. It's up there.

Calvin was a despot

Calvinism is a condemned heresy. Thanks Metropolitan Jonah.

the Kalifornya crash

Brother Lucier in SCruz. Welcome. I haven't seen someone use a blogger comment as a guestbook before. Nice to hear from you. My guestbook on lyalls net hasn't had an entry in a long time. The evolving web. I have been wondering if/when the PublicEmployeeRetirementSystem will stop paying us, or cancel our health insurance. I shoulda stayed in Hayti.

12 hours a day, seven days a week

That is the taxi biz. Today I worked 11 hours and grossed $109. Out of that I pay dues to the company and buy gasoline and put aside money to re-pay the childrens inheritance of the capital required to get in this fascinating business. If I ignore the capital costs (forget about a maintenance account) then I earned about five bux an hour.

Mac Mini hard drives

Yahoo search found me this article about putting a new hard drive into an Intel Mac Mini. My early Minintel has a small drive and is getting noisy. Not as noisy as that external Lacie, but still noisy. I was thinking of putting a silent solid state drive in but they are a bit expensive.

another taxi post

I just used google 'blog search' for hybrid taxis. New York famously had a rule for taxi's to get a certain fuel economy. This resulted in a bunch of hybrids being put into taxi service. I am unclear, but hybrids may have been specifically required. The link in the title above is to a small article talking about the safety of the Escape hybrid contrasted with the Crown Vic. The big Vic is indeed a very safe car and New York has a special stretched version using the Town Car wheelbase. New York cabs have barriers between the driver and knife wielding crack heads in the back seat. There is no room for this stuff in a short Escape.

A stretched Escape? Good idea but would Ford do it? Not just for taxi's and not enough power for police use, which is the largest purchaser of fleet cars. A hybrid Crown Vic? They'd never do that, they are trying to cancel the car altogether even tho it is the largest selling passenger car in Florida. They want the police to get used to a front drive package.

taxi

I've been driving a taxi again for a month. In Jefferson and Orleans parish's. I get a pretty junky car being the new guy. I am stuck with a big diesel pickup out front, making payments and full insurance. A 1999 F250 powerstroke. Been trying to sell it for a year, never lowering the price fast enough. So, now I am thinking of trading it in for something to use as a taxi. First I was thinking of a Grand Marquis/Crown Vic, the most widely used taxi. Strong and reliable. Enterprise car sales has one year old rentals for $14K or so. There is the Caravan/Town & Country as well, which hauls more people but gets worse fuel economy. The big Ford/Mercury gets amazingly good mileage for such a large car. They've been perfecting it for 30 years.

I just started thinking of getting a Ford Escape Hybrid instead of a large car/van. Enterprise has one available. There are a couple newspaper articles about using an Escape hybrid as a taxi in San Francisco and New York. One San Fran driver is quoted as being happy with the fuel cost savings and saying he had 120,000 miles on it with no trouble. Ok, how about at 300,000 miles? The Crown Vic Police Interceptor does that with no problem. I cannot find anything written by an actual driver of an Escape hybrid.

Charles Darwin day

Darwin day. I had not heard that there was a celebration of his birthday. Now there is a Darwinday.org, and a crdarwin on Twitter. The Darwin awards have been a long standing cute joke, but a celebration of science and reason on Darwins birthday is a serious thing. Nice.

Republican Secretary of Commerce

So this bi-partisan administration is not getting off to a good start. Republicans from Maine to Philadelphia have rallied to rescue the economy, but Obama's choice for Secretary of Commerce, Senator Gregg of New Hampshire, did not vote for the program to rescue commerce. Wha?? Why is he taking the job? Why is he being appointed?

Apparently 36 of the Republicans voted on an amendment to change the entire stimulus package into tax cuts. McCain, who twice voted against the Bush tax cuts which doubled the national debt wants to cut a half billion a year in taxes. Oh, eliminate capital gains taxes, make the upper income Bush cuts permanent, etc.

I heard on a Salon economy story "bi-partisanship doesn't work when one side is insane".

off the topic, I got a gmail account last week to try it out. Now Blogger recognizes me every time. While using my netscape.net address it demanded that I log in every time. I think that Google is becoming evil.

Win 7 on Virtual Box on a mac

I just found the Apple Insider story linked above. I did this very installation last week; Win7 beta installed in Virtual Box. Virtual Box is from Sun, a virtual machine to run (whatever) intel operating systems on a Mac. I own Parallels, the first Mac virtual machine for running windoze on yr Mac. I bought Parallels 2, then upgraded to 3. They are trying to sell me the upgrade to 4 for another $50 but I think I'll pass.

VM Ware has a competing product, Fusion, which gets better reviews than Parallels, altho Parallels supposedly will run from a Boot Camp installation. I cannot get Boot Camp to finish an install.

Virtual Box is free and runs quite well, but does not support my ProBook graphics nearly as well as Parallels. VirtualBox cannot detect the native resolution on this GeForce 8600m.

So, Win 7 is actually pretty nice. I like it. Much cleaner and faster than XP.

futre nine

I canceled my land line and got a voip thingie from Future Nine. After buying the box for $45 the service is virtually free. I got a local number from them today, 504.799.0801. They didn't charge me for the number! Must be something wrong there.

I am trying to figure out configuring the SPA2002 box. Caller ID information is going out, I called my cell phone to check. They must do that at sip.future-nine.com. There is a web interface to the SPA2002 but no way that I can discover to edit the sip.conf file. Is there one in there? Dunno.

possessive apostrophe

This possessive apostrophe thing has confused me all my life. It's its' thing.

Onyx multi-touch phone

The link is to a blog website for the Onyx cell phone. It was a proof of concept for the new touch screen interface like that used by the iPhone. This is interesting as the Palm Pre will be using this screen, from the same manufacturer that Apple uses.
Palm is apparently being threatened by Apple over intellectual property. Apple was just granted a very broad patent for touch screen cell phones.

Synaptics has a growing business supplying touch sensors for cell phones. It uses a particular type of touch sensor known as "projected capacitive." Before the iPhone came along, Synaptics was struggling to convince manufacturers that the technology was better than the cheaper "resistive" screens. From an SFgate story about this issue. Interesting battle coming up. I lust after the Palm Pre and bought in to Palm stock again. Too late, but it is making a little.

win on mac with VirtualBox

I've been using Parallels Desktop on my Intel Macs for a while to run Windoze XP. I hardly ever run win, but I check sites with InternetExploder on it. I installed Chrome as well. Since Parallels came out VMWare released a desktop product for the Mac and it has gotten good reviews.

The noise about Win 7 made me want to look at it. Downloads of the beta are free! My Parallels version 3 doesn't install the Win7 properly. An upgrade to version 4 would be $50. So, I looked at VMWare Fusion, which offers a cross grade rebate; prove you own Parallels and they pay you $30. A digital download purchase of VMWare Fusion is $80, same as a new Parallels. A boxed edition from Amazon is $57. Strange days when a boxed version is cheaper than a download.

Then I discovered VirtualBox from Sun. It is free, open source and has gotten some good mentions. Installed Virtual Box and Win7 is one of the choices for automatic installation. How is Sun going to get me to buy a Sparc server by giving away a virtual machine program?

More: The free VirtualBox does not run the graphics card in the MacB Pro. ProBook it should be. Anyway, VB does 'generic vga' but it is a lot more than 'generic vga' used to be; 1280xwhatever, 32 bit graphics. But, it does not do a widescreen Macbook resolution. Runs this Win7 pretty darn good tho, for free.

new presidential limousine

The new Limo looks like a cadillac. Looks like a modified Escalade truck actually. It is all custom built on a heavy duty truck platform tho. The link in the title is the only story I can find that actually says what platform it is based upon. They say GMC Topkick, which is a medium duty truck that has had airport limousine models built on it before.

inauguration

Today is the inauguration. Pretty exciting. 40 years ago MLK Jr was assassinated for stirring up trouble, 20 years ago Jesse Jackson ran a good campaign. I organized Labor for Jackson in Santa Cruz in 1988. Still have a couple T-shirts for that campaign. The Local 23 bus drivers put together a front line. We were all checked by the Secret Service and got clearance and we stood in front of the Santa Cruz Civic Center. Didn't get to hear the speech but we felt important waiting to jump in front of a bullet.

Who else was in that line? Ron White, Wally Parham, who else?

updating

Updating the web pages for the first time in months. Here:
updating this page for the first time in a while. There are pictures that belong in the family doings page, I use twitter a bit and just [14 Jan, 2009] joined Facebook. School is tough with Roxanne in first grade. She is still having trouble with reading and writing. There is a bit of dyslexia kind of stuff; b or d? and I get no help with doing homework. The second Ferret, Zoe II, disappeared. I give up. We got a nice kitty; a mimi. Mimi is kreyol for kitty. Roxy has named her Olivia but I just call her Mimi.

I need a job and it is a lot harder to get a truck driving job than I thought it would be. I just applied to Schneider for a full time over the road job in desperation. I drove a taxi for two weeks but never made more than enough to pay the rent on the cab.

laptop insurance

Safeware offers insurance for laptops which has much better coverage than, Apple Care, for instance. My Treo 755 and Centro can be insured much cheaper than what Sprint charges as well.

Day Watch

Day Watch; the counterpart to the Night Watch. I just watched it on Netflix streaming. Saw Night Watch at the Minor theater in Arcata a few years ago. These are really good films. A particularly interesting item in this film is the sub-titles. They animate and add to the story. Tres Kul.

Oh. Марія Порошина

toasted tos

Cousine Sylvia, when in Swahililand during the Peace Corps service, was fond of the local practice of saying tos when they referred to bread. Untoasted bread. So she would say toasted tos. I do that now, with affection.

I had a similar irritation with language in Haiti. Many of them, but one in particular to comment on. A Haitian, for instance, when asked where is this [thing,person,place], will reply lot bo. (another place). Oh. That is real helpful. What other place? Where? lot bo. Ay ay ay. Mezanmi.

One time I was in Saint Marc and went next door to talk to the Madam about the little shack in her front yard. I asked the young man ki kote li? "where is she?". li pa la "she isn't here". Ok, I see that. Where is she? li sorti "she left". Ok, where is she? Finally I did get an answer. I can only roll my eyes.

Chicago Bridge and Iron

Chicago Bridge and Iron, of which I sold 100 shares at $20 (a loss) some months ago, does not build bridges and is a Netherlands company. The Hague. How about that?

Last friday they traded at 8, today above 12. Good thing I sold at 20 after buying at 25. Too bad I didn't buy again below 10. Probably a short squeeze tho.

Louisiana elections

Dollar Bill Jefferson has been defeated. By Ang Cao, whom no one had heard of a few months ago. The only person to bother to file for the republican party spot in the election, he picked up most of the disaffected democrats around here.

I didn't vote. It was on Saturday, Dec 6. Frankly, I forgot. Low turnout. The November general election was the democratic primary runoff. Runoffs in primaries? yup. California has no such thing. I thought the southern penchant for actually requiring a majority to be elected was for general elections, but this time it applied to primaries while saturday's general election was won by Cao with slightly less than 50% Malik got 3% for the green party, some nut case got 1% for the white peoples party and Jefferson came in with 47% for the old demo machine. Black dog democrats.

I wasn't gonna vote for the republican, how could I? I would have voted for Malik as the Rasta green anti-Bill Jefferson guy. Or maybe voted corrupt party line. Voting for a universally acknowledged thief would be a good southern comfort.

But this Cao looks fun. The first Vietnamese in the congress. Good idea. That scumbag Steve Scalise was on stage rooting on the victory. Scalise had Dick Cheney come to Metarie to campaign for him. Incredible.

The traditional democratic party machine has fallen apart here. There were 5 young african-american guys running against Jefferson and one cute young texan woman. Moreno was her name; she came in behind Jefferson but ahead of all the experience political challengers. Some elders were required to anoint a designated assassin of Jefferson. The elders have evaporated. The result? A seat falls to the party of the resurrected confederacy.

my first taxi job

I've been driving a taxi for a week now. For A Service Cab of Metarie. I've submitted applications for a number of driving jobs but nothing has come thru. A Service Cab actually gave me an intent to hire letter. So I got my Jefferson Parish taxi drivers permit and got a cab. It is one of those operations where you pay rent to the company and keep their cab full time. Drive whenever you want, as many hours as you want.

It does appear that 12 hours a day is required to make any money beyond paying for the cab and fuel. I have an old CrownVicPoliceInterceptor. Pretty old cause the certified speedometer is way off. The GPS tells me actual speed.

With Lucienne working at a hotel in the French Quarter and doing private house cleaning many days that she is not working (at the cash only, no Social Security Card required job at a major hotel) it is hard to put in enough hours. I haven't made anything in a week. But, I do have a third vehicle outside the house!

If I got rid of two pickup trucks (at whatever loss is necessary) and bought a van to do taxi conversion It might be a little better.

Big Mac work shirts

So I went to Penny's yesterday. J.C Penny's is required for google earth or the GPS to find it. At the Causeway mall; some other name, but it is off of Causeway. I was looking for the work clothes catalog. The women working there had never heard of a work clothes catalog and I sure did not see one. Looked in the main catalog; not there.

I wore Big Mac cotton work shirts, with two breast pockets and button flaps, for years as a hippy. Sometimes I wore Big Mac overalls with no other clothes but huaraches. The cotton chambray shirts have a nice slot in the left pocket flap to keep your toothbrush in. For when you don't know where you will be sleeping that night. They call it a pencil slot.

The women working the catalog department had never heard of Big Mac except as a product of McDonalds.

I found it on the JCP website. Just search for big mac. It'll be in the list, but big mac work shirt will not reveal it. Strange.

Ah. Link won't work. Illegal characters. Here it is:
http://www5.jcpenney.com/jcp/X6.aspx?ItemID=14745df&ItemTyp=G&GrpTyp=SIZ&ShowMenu=T&ShopBy=0&SearchString=big+mac&RefPage=SearchDepartment.aspx&s4PageSize=15&CmCatId=searchresults&Search1Prod=True&S4Filter=N|0|Ntt|big+mac|Ntk|search_all|Nao|0|Nty|1|sid|11DDDA311080|Ntx|mode%2bmatchallpartial|Ntpr|1|Ntpc|1

Taxi Driver

So I finally gave up on finding a truck driving job here. Surprisingly almost everyone requires previous experience already. Driving school graduates only get to go to the big over the road companies. And Schneider doesn't accept a graduation more than 3 months old. I was going to work with my brother Kevin driving his new old truck; Team work. Delays, etc, all the jobs he is finally getting are Kentucky centered, blah blah.

So I am going to do the Taxi gig in Metairie; Jefferson Parish, just up river. Spent a few weeks getting fingerprinted yet again, and drug tested again and paying about a hunnerd bux to various departments and agencies but I now have a Jefferson Parish taxi permit. Spent two days training with two different drivers at A Service Cab. Louis bought his own Suburban, Jiggs drives a company Crown Vic.

The plethora of Suburbans in the Taxi biz here has really surprized me. They seem like they would use a lot more fuel than a Crown Victoria. I still want to call the big Ford a Galaxie or LTD. They should bring back the Galaxie 500 name.

Louis says it doesn't use much more fuel than the Vic and many loads require a bigger car. Lots of the biz here is hauling Tow boat crews to and from the River. The Mississippi is one huge industrial canal.

I do not recall another town with so many Suburbans in the Taxi biz. Toronto had mostly Taurii in the trade instead of Crown Victorias. Perhaps the front wheel drive of the Taurus is better in the snow. But why doesn't Chicago use Table/Saurus then? Ah. Perhaps Taurus/Sable are built in Ontario and Crown Vic/Marquis are not?

Mumbai/Bombay television

Streaming online, you have your Deccan terrorists taking over the Wall Street of South Asia. NDTV seems to be a Mumbai/Bombay television station with live streaming.

office of President Elect?

Change dot Gov? The President in waiting is an office? Has this been so before? There is an official website for the President in Waiting.

Now, I am very happy that Barack Hussein Obama won the election. I was a little worried when McCain started running the ad with all the Berliners chanting Obama, Obama. It did seem a little cultish. And one of Obama's campaign appearances had him behind a faux president to be seal. Now there is a President Elect seal. This is a little over the top.

armistice day

Yesterday was what the USA calls Veterans Day. We used to call it Armistice Day, for the day the Armistice was signed in Europe in 1918. Apparently at Verdun the French shot 600 soldiers for desertion. Must have been a tough battle.

election 2008

Wrote this on election nite:

Last night I saw my first presidential campaign advertisement in
Louisiana. An anti-Obama one; attacking the reverend Wright, saying he
is dangerous. The night before the election, first ad. Strange.

There are a lot more positions subject to election here. Some parish
down river has a 'constable' for each of seven districts up for
election. There used to be elected district assessors here; they were
eliminated after the post-Katrina re-organization.

there are lots of judges being elected; the State Supreme court has
someone endorsed by the Family Research Council (according to his ads)
I'll vote against him; Guidry.

US Senator is the only race that may be a contest here. The only one I

know enough to vote on. Landrieu the conservative Dem. Kennedy the
imaginary Conservative Republican; last year he was a liberal Democrat.
I'll have to vote in that race.

Oh, my Congressional seat is held by William Jefferson, famous for
keeping his savings in cash in the freezer. He came in first in the
'first' primary without campaigning. There were five black guys and one

young white woman running against him. Today is the runoff between Wm
Jefferson and Roberta Moreno. She is cute, a former television weather
reader or something. Then later we will have the actual general election
between the socialist and fascist and vegetarian parties.

We have a hot District Attorney race between two Italian guys. Last time
a black guy was elected who immediately fired most of the white lawyers
in the office; the ensuing civil rights suit is costing the city many
millions of dollars. He dismissed
tons of cases, or declined to
prosecute, and was at his girlfriends house over the river in Algiers
when a friend of hers came over to ask the D.A. what to do after the
shooting he had just committed. Eddie Jordan was his name. He was a
stylish dresser; he resigned last year and we've had fill in temps since
then. A murder a day.

No black DA candidates came close in the primary this time. So now it is
Cannizzaro or Capitelli. Vote for the Italian guy!

first grade

Today's homework; first grade, Oct 30.

Next week, we will be electing a new President for our country. What do you think makes a good President? What kind of person should the President be? What kinds of things should he or she believe? What should he or she do in the White House? Think about these questions and write at least five sentences telling what you think a good President would be like.

Roxanne doesn't know what a president of the country is. She cannot form any notion of what would make a good president. Write five sentences? Was first grade this hard when I was six? I sure don't recall that.

Calpers a sign of collapse?

California Public Employees Retirement System, CalPERS is selling stock to meet obligations. Like any hedge fund driving down the market by selling at the lowest price seen in years. This news comes today on Marketwatch and is a really, really bad sign. CalPERS is one of the most important institutional investors in the USA. They pay my retirement benefits.

The Stock Market

The
Stock Market

Due to today's rapidly changing stock
market, the following terms have had to be revised.

This should help investors more clearly understand today's economic condition:

CEO -- Chief Embezzlement Officer.

CFO -- Corporate Fraud Officer.

BULL MARKET -- A random market movement
causing an investor to mistake himself for a financial genius.

BEAR MARKET -- A 6 to 18 month period
when the kids get no allowance the wife gets no jewelry, and the husband gets
no sex.

VALUE INVESTING -- The art of buying low
and selling lower.

P/E RATIO -- The percentage of investors
wetting their pants as the market keeps crashing.

BROKER -- What my broker has made me.

STANDARD & POOR -- Your life in a
nutshell.

STOCK ANALYST -- Idiot who just
downgraded your stock.

STOCK SPLIT -- When your ex-wife and her
lawyer split your assets equally between themselves.

FINANCIAL PLANNER -- A guy whose phone
has been disconnected.

MARKET CORRECTION -- The day after you
buy stocks.

CASH FLOW -- The movement your money
makes as it disappears down the toilet.

YAHOO -- What you yell after selling it
to some poor sucker for $240 per share.

WINDOWS 2000 -- What you jump out of
when you're the sucker who bought Yahoo @ $240 per share.

INSTITUTIONAL INVESTOR -- Last year
investor who's now locked up in a nuthouse.

PROFIT -- An archaic word no longer in
use

Voting on the Debt Debacle!

C-Span live streaming is really, really bogged down. Lots of people watching the vote on the new, more expensive, Debt Dummy buyout bill. The Bailout. I think it is necessary, thought so two weeks ago. We can start lining the suits up against the wall in February. Right now we have to nationalize the banking system. Started to, actually. Sell it back after it is straightened out. This is a Mexican divorce with Amurkans love for Wall Street and gettin the guvamen offa my back.

That Sarah Palin interview

Couric. Katie Couric? Is that her name? I haven't watched network news in years, but since using a TV antennae here in La Nouvelle Orleans I have happened to tune in. So she spoke with Governor Palin. Missed it. I saw part of the earlier interview by some guy. He did seem rude and supercilious to me. I have been a political junkie for years and couldn't tell you what the Bush Doctrine is.

But I guess this last interview is unnerving some self described conservatives who are now calling for her to resign from the Republican ticket. There are people who vocally supported Gov Palin who now call for her to quit? How can people like this take themselves seriously? If they didn't know anything about the creationist governor how could they have said anything in public in support?

New Orleans swimming pool

Saturday we found a swimming pool finally. The New Orleans Recreation District has a dysfunctional web site with pdf links instead of web pages. I cannot find directions to any swimming pools there. I did read a newspaper article about pools opening this summer but no one I knew could tell me where one was. On friday Roxie and I had a teacher parent conference at Lusher School. She is having reading problems. Was first grade so demanding when I was six? So I asked Miz Fitz if she knew of a swimming pool. There is one by Audubon Zoo. (Audubon was born in Jeremie, Hayti). By the Audubon Tea House actually. So we drove by late friday after checking out trailer storage in Belle Chase. Yup, it is there. Saturday we went to the pool: Emile et Roxy and myself. It is free! And they let kids use those buoyant noodles. The Arcata pool does not allow them, only Coast Guard approved vests. Had a good time. There was swimming class practicing. The director of the pool was working his youngest, a not yet three year old who was swimming by himself! Kul.

Go Wm Tecumsah Sherman

on 24 Sept Cramer took a caller from Louisiana chanting "go Tigers". I guess that is the team name. Yup, Fightin Tigers is the official team name, from the War of Southern Slavery.

So, Cramer said to the caller "LSU, started by William Tecumsah Sherman". I guess his Lenin portrait did him some good, he knows Sherman.

Capitalism leads to Communism

Wall Street Journals Marketwatch:
As free-market-loving Americans, we all know overregulating an economy amounts to socialism. We're now discovering what happens when you underregulate -- communism.

Brave New World

The New Deal returns. Last nite the Kaesars of finance hinted that they may do a 'bad bank' solution for all of the Enron style 'creative finance' mortgage backed bonds which seem to be bringing the worlds capital system to its knees. Traders swooned in ecstasy.

I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.

September weather

Since the second hurricane left the weather has been nice. Cooled down, in the 70's and the humidity is lower. July and August are the hot, wet months?

OS X live planet

Live planet as a desktop background.

trying out blogspot

So I just switched this thing over to blogspot. I have been hosting on my own server at www.lyalls.net. Hosted by webmasters.com. But customizing the layout is much more difficult that way.

Now, I wanted 'http://devoid.blogspot.com/' but it is taken. And had one post years ago, never used since. Titled Audible Silence, a nice name, but I want that name back!

non-Hindi Hurricanes

Gurricanes? We evacuated to Meridian, Miss for six days to celebrate Hurricane Gustav. Returned last Friday, 05 Sept. Meridian was friendly to all the refugees and the trailer court we stayed at, Bonita Lakes RV Park put on crews to wire a bunch of extra plug-ins for all us extras to use. They parked in driveways, in between existing spaces, by bath houses.

So, I'd like to thank them for their hospitality.

Now we have Hurricane Ike hundreds of miles away from New Orleans, heading to Galveston and the water is rising here. It looks like half of the Gulf of Mexico is being affected by this huge storm. The satellite pictures show it is almost as big as Texas itself.

Galveston was destroyed in 190(?) by a hurricane. They raised up the entire city afterwards. Then it was the major port. Now Houston has taken that role away with the dredging of the sloughs. Will they raise it up again? New Orleans needs to be raised. Or have all the houses raised.

हुर्रिकानेस ऑफ़ २००८

Why am I writing in hindi?

amusing racist rants on usenet

Usenet, the newgroups came along long before the WWW thing; the web browsers that you are using now. Usenet was for civilized discussions by interested people.

It has become polluted with strange spam and lots of racist rants. For some reason many people in the USA are possessed with passionate fear and loathing of dark skinned people. Like, folks descended from Africans within the past few millenia.

So here is a Usenet post which started off as a hate screed towards Les Negre and ends slamming the Scotch Irish. that's me

My kids, btw, are Scots-Haytian

************************
>>> >>> Blue state urban nigger...
>>> >>>
>>> >>> We need to face the reality that these creatures aren't quite human.
>>> >>> They have been inbreeding for decades and are now a sub-human
>>> >>> indigenous population genetically different from normal humans.
>>> >>>
>> >>
>> >>perfect description of the hillbilly sub-human sub-culture,
>> >>
>> >>don't try to project it onto others
> >
> > RE: Hillbilles; the lowest economic class of White students score
> > higher on the SAT tests then the Blacks in the highest economic
> > level. Check that Bell curve!
> >
> > ted
first off that's bullshit, but it is bullshit intended for simple and feeble
minded hillbillies, so you did good

but, damn gomer, you're a world class dumb ass aren't you ?

let's see now,

it wasn't you ignorant, retarded, deranged, gutless yellow hillbilly
cocksuckers, but blacks who got us :

$4.40 gas

a professional ass kicking at the hands of goat herding, dung burning, rag
headed freedom fighting girls, at a cost
of $521 million a day for 7 years

how many drowned children in New Orleans, or don't they count because
they're black

1 million murdered, innocent civilians in iraq

a failed economy

25 million illegal immigrants

outrageous food prices

low paying wal mart jobs

good jobs exported to china and india to help wal mart make more $$$

a destroyed and demoralized, non fighting ability military

the russians bitch slapping nato and that bush cocksucker, and there is
nothing they can do about it

tax cuts for the rich and super rich

the destruction of the American auto industry among countless other
industries

the trans America , mexico to canada highway, to let mexicans take american
trucking jobs and keep the
companies costs down

old people dying from lack of nutrition and health care

57 million people without health care

a high percentage of homeless veterans

wounded and disabled veterans on subsistence payments if they get anything
at all

3rd world medical care for wounded soldiers

etc.,etc.,etc.,

yeah, you hillbillies are some bright boys allright,

keep up the good work brownie

you retarded asshole

NOLA cycle

Nolacycle has a bike mapping project. Kul.

7.3 powerstroke diesel cam position sensor replacment diagram

This site has pictures! Pictures of the steps to replace the cam sensor in the 7.3 liter powerstroke diesel. In Fords and Internationals? Like?

interesting political .sig

On the Democratic side, you have a bytch who is a lawyer, married to a lawyer, trying to defeat a lawyer who is married to a bytch who is a
lawyer.

On the other side, you have a true war hero married to an extremely wealthy woman with large breasts who owns a beer distributorship.

Is there a contest here?

Biofuels not cost effective

This OECD report criticizes subsidy of biofuels. Considering the earlier link about the USA subsidizing the export of biodiesel instead of using it domestically, this is good news. Maybe some congressman could look into it? I think my congressmember is Wm Jefferson, soon going to trial.

What does Microsoft want from Yahoo?

The link is to a great article about a patent that Yahoo owns, called the 361 patent. Yahoo bought Overture paid search and got a patent covering the whole nasty business of paying for search result placement.

Louisiana's science revolution?

Djes, Louisiana has passed a law allowing school boards to provide supplemental materials for science classes. "including, but not limited to, evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning."

The inspiration seems to be some intelligent design wackos. May I suggest that Biblical mathematics be taught in math classes? Like, pi is equal to 3, not the egyptian/greek 22/7 or that decimal horror, 3.14159....

Or possibly evidence that the sun orbits the earth? There is ample testimony to this fact in the ancient testaments. Let's get supplementing!

Exporting american bio-diesel?

I'd seen mention of this before, but now it really gets my attention. American bio-diesel producers are exporting. To Europe. With USA tax subsidies. Why aren't they selling it here? Blending it here? Diesel is almost $5 a gallon in Louisiana and we are exporting subsidized bio diesel to Europe? This is pretty outragous and a trade violation. And we don't allow Brazilian ethanol to be imported to compete with our corn/maize ethanol. Brazilian sugar cane ethanol is the worlds cheapest. Comparative advantage. We don't believe in capitalism unless it means subjecting other countries to our dominance.

Here is another post on re-exporting south american biodiesel with a USA subsidy added. Incredible.

how many freewheelin' roads?

Today's Fresh Air was the story of the cover art for Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. The wonderful woman on the cover with Dylan, that is. Suze Rotolo. I'd never heard who she was before. It has been 45 years and I'd never heard her name. We used to talk about her and no one knew if her identity was public knowledge. Was she an actual friend? Or just a cover shoot model?

So, she has written a book. A Freewheelin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties. Good. I guess it is time to read such a memoir. That cover sure looked romantic to me in the 60's. Lesse, I was a sophomore in Provo High School when I bought that album. We put things on layaway back then. Pay for part of it, come back later when you could afford to pay the rest. A record album was a layaway item. It had been out a while when I bought it. I think I listened to Highway 61 Revisited in the booth of the record store in Provo.

Bob Dylan was a comfort to a misfit in a place like Provo, Utah.

Pascha, Pak, Paska

Otherwise known in English as Oester/Easter. Today is celebrated 'he is risen. Indeed he is risen'. We went to the Greek Orthodox Cathedral in New Orleans this morning. Last night was the Pascha Liturgy, but it was raining hard and the kids and I are sick. So we didn't go. The midnight Liturgy is very Kul.

The link above is not to Pascha, but to a Buddhist blog about Christianity in Tibet. Thomas the Apostle was sent to India by the risen Christ, and the Nestorian church was all throughout central asia and china. The Malankara church of India, founded by Thomas brother of Christ, was not Nestorian, but what is today called Oriental Orthodox, along with the Copts of Egypt and Ethiopia.

Grand Turismo 5

Came out last night at 11pm central time. On the Playstation network. For PS3. Like that.

So, I bought it. Took a long time to download, there were tons of people downloading. I played until 2:30 in the morning and there was someone playing online at that time with a Suzuki Cappuccino, tuned. Tuned means that it has been modified to make more power. Changing tires is about the only chassis work that might be needed, it handles wonderfully in the game.

Now, to get to modify a car in GT5 you have to have completed three separate levels of races, meeting a minimum standard in 8 or so races in each level. Within two hours someone had completed all these levels to be able to modify a Suzuki Cappuccino! Yikes. To race against boring Honda Integra's in the small car class.

It took me hours to get third place (minimum passing grade) in the B level toughy. That one starts from 16th place and one is required to pass everyone in one lap. Well, everyone but two, to qualify. The aim is to pass everyone. Cheating is required. Cheating in the sense of taking unorthodox racing lines, bouncing off walls and hip checking cars into turns.

This is the 'Prologue' to the full Grand Turismo 5, which is more than a year away yet. It costs $40 and well worth it. I'll be shopping for a wheel now. Racing with a play controller is rather tricky.

Last Testament

Michael Diebert wrote a good book about the excitement in Haiti this century. Some wacko in the pay of the terrorists wrote a newly dubious book, which Deibert debunks here. There has been amusing repartee back and forth.

some kinda recycling in New Orleans

This morning around 6:30, while picking up the Times-Picayune and letting Jacques Chien out to pee I saw a renegade garbage truck. Not one of the blue ones from Richards Disposal which comes twice a week and picks up huge trash cans. This was a white one. I waited for it to drive down Lowerline and found that PhoenixRecylingNOLA was painted on the side.

Ok, found the site. It is a full home and business pickup service for glass, plastic, metals and paper. But. It costs $15 a month for once a week pickup. I would fill maybe one milk crate sized recycling thingie a week when in California. Course, I couldn't fill a 30 gallon trash can for a weekly pickup either, while here we get a 55 gallon can which is picked up twice weekly. That service is mandatory, a city contract.

Why is every household given trash pickup service sufficient for a small restaurant, but no recycling service? There are not even any drop off recycling centers and Louisiana has no bottle/can deposit system. There is lots of trash compared to Kalifornya.

Songwriter's Notebook: If I Can't Dance...

Songwriter's Notebook: If I Can't Dance...

daylite sucking time

I hate daylight savings time. this time of year is about the only thing i like about arizona; they do not honor daylite savings time there. It saves no daylite. It makes the school bus start pickups in the dark. It makes the sun set go way past dinner time.

In Swahili land noon is numbered as the sixth hour. Because it is the sixth hour of the day. The day meaning actual daytime, starting at daylight. And Galileo used the Egyptian year with a full 365 days inside 13 months, same as Ptolemy and 4000 years of astronomers before him.

No daylite is saved. It is sucked out of the morning and vomited up at vespers.

Louisiana Educational Assessment Program

Louisiana has something called a LEAP test for fourth and eighth graders. Students are required to pass it to graduate and attain the next grade. I am currently unclear if this is part of No Child Left Behind or if it was implemented separately. Louisiana Educational Assessment Program

On friday I went in to Roxanne's school Bauduit Elementary to deliver her backpack (supplied by the school) and pay $32 for field trips next week. Every day there is a field trip because the whole school will be given over to conducting tests for the LEAP. I have been paying attention to elementary school lately and the LEAP is what everyone at Bauduit has been talking about since we got there. All the schools are talking about it and articles in the newspaper abound.

As I left schoool there was a pep rally for the fourth graders in the hallway. The big gurls were dressed in cheerleader outfits (sixth grade cheerleaders?) and the classes had prepared chants to root on their LEAP testing teams. Interesting. It might have seemed bizarre, but producing a social imperative to do well on an academic test may be pedagogically sound. I like that, pedagogically sound.

Rather than social pressure to wear flashy clothes (they use uniforms at Bauduit) or acting tough they substitute an entire manufactured enthusiasm for passing a test.

Lusher School

Settling in to New Orleans has involved searching for a school for Roxanne. She started kindergarten in Trinidad this past Sept 2007. She was out of school for two months, joining Agnes Bauduit Elementary in early February. Just this past week we got a form from Bauduit asking whether she would be attending next year. That was a problem. It is a long way, but we have bus service. I've submitted an application to International School of Louisiana for the french program next year and we did apply to Audubon Charter trying to get into french language kindergarten this year. They wouldn't let her in; they may allow her into french language kindergarten next year. That would make her a six year old starting kindergarten. For the second time.

Well, this all has been weighing on my mind; what to do? What to do? So I stopped by my actual local school on friday to drop off an application. That school is Lusher School. It is a charter school about four blocks away. Turns out we are in fact within the attendance district, which functions as a normal school; if you live there, you get into the school.

Lusher is one of the few schools in New Orleans which gets good ratings and good test results. People resort to blackmail and bribes to get their kids in there. But it does not have a french program. We wanted to get into Audubon french program or the International School program so that Roxanne could claim her birthright Haitian citizenship and run for Prezidan d'Repiblik.

What to do?

Kosovo Polje

This week sees more absurdity in the management of the american empire. An independent Albanian Kosovo. See Balkan Analysis or this Counterpunch article or, for less nuanced views, some Serb Blog or view the many YouTube Kosovo videos and you'll see what a disaster this will be. Here is a Diana Johnstone article on Counterpunch on the subject as well.

This battle is between the Orthodox and Western Churches. All the Eastern tradition countries are opposed to this wacky US/British idea. The Roman and Protestant countries are still trying to dismantle Constantinople. Actually it was after the Saxons took over the Bishopric of Rome that they started to forbid Liturgy in the people's language.

I had never heard of Camp Bondsteel before this week. Is it an Iraqi style monster base for the future of the empire in Eastern Evropa and the middle east? I dunno, but they sure wanted to destroy Jugoslavia and hand it to the Nazi's. Like the Croatian nazi's and the Albanian Nazi's. Slovenes cannot be tarred with that I suppose, they just wanted to re-join Austria-Hungary.

That crazy John Bolton who tried to dismantle the U.N. is opposed to Kosovo even. He may have gotten an excessively bad rap in that UN deal; trying to shake up a bureaucracy steps on lots of toes.

I got turned off Counterpunch after they jumped on the Aristide bandwagon in 2003-04. For someone who was there, and thinking, the picture was a little different. Glad to see they are on Yugoslavia's side here tho.

Firefox 3

I just downloaded Firefox 3, the beta. It is pretty nice on first appearance. I've heard Dvorak complain about it but on thie, my first hour of use I rather like it.

Agnes Bauduit playground

Yesterday, Saturday the 16th there was a playground building scenario at the Bauduit school. Our Recovery School District school. There were signs requesting 200 or so adults to help build the playground. I showed up around 9:30 and there was a good crowd assembling playground equipment and building planter/bench thingies. The strange thing was that seemingly all the brown folks were staff of the school and the civilians were all blan. This seems out of order because I haven't seen any blan students here, so I assume that the parents are mostly noir as well.

There were a ton of young blan with Americorps and a volunteer organization (name forgotten) and old folks who looked like church volunteers. There were some brown ladies who cooked a fine red beans and rice lunch, but no noir parents working on the digging or assembling or hammering that I could see. Disappointing.

Roxie is starting to like the school after one week. Kindergarted lasts from 8am till 3:15pm, quite a contrast to the 8:30 to 12:30 hours of the Trinidad Union School kindergarten.

Finding kindergarden in New Orleans

The public school system here in New Orleans is a confused mess. All the schools around us, the Carrollton district, are charter schools and application is required way in advance. We are here now, re-locating from Kalifornya, and need to get Roxanne into a kindergarten.

We've been to the Audubon school which has a Montessori system and a French system. We want to get Roxanne into the French school so she can become fluent in real French, not just Kreyol. Then she can claim her Haitian citizenship some time in the future and become Prezidan d'Repiblik. They give a real run-around there tho, and are unable to give advice on how to find 'just a school'.

Friday the 8th of February we submitted a full application to Audubon after finally getting all the required proofs of residence. Then they tell me that two full years of schooling in French is required before 1st grade. They didn't say that before.

So after tooling around the various school district web sites (no one will answer a telephone here) I discovered something called the 'Welcome School' on Poydras. There are two separate school districts within the same boundary; Recovery School district is run directly by the State, and NOLA Schools seems to have nothing but Charter schools which one must apply to a year in advance.

I went over to the Welcome School (no one at the local schools ever mentioned this place) and after explaining that I want to transfer into kindergarden, they actually found me a school and gave me a yellow sheet of paper. This yellow sheet is important; it actually gets you into school. Went over to the Agnes Bauduit elementary school with the majik yellow sheet and presto! Roxie is going to school on monday. It is a long way away, but they will have bus service for her in about a week.

The transportation system for these schools scattered all over the city must be crazy.

the generals of New Orleans

General Pershing, General Taylor, General Collins (who is he?), General DeGaulle. Do other cities have so many streets named for military persons? General Haig, marshall Foch. We have battles too: Austerlitz and some other Napoleonic battles. Oh, Napoleon is a major street as well, but he was a Field Marshall, or First Counsel or Emperor or something.

Krewe de Rex

Today is Mardi Gras, tuesday of fat. Actually, tuesday of grease/gras. The real meaning (as I figured out a few years ago in hayti) is that this is the last day before lent, therefore the last day before fasting requires the sacrifice of no fat in the diet.

So we saw our first Mardi Gras in La Nouvelle Orleans. The Rex krewe marched at 10am from Claiborne and Napoleon down to the St Charles infirmary route. Did this krewe originate as the Ku Klux Klan? their costumes sure look like night riders from 'The Klansman', or 'Birth of a Nation'. Their bio says that they started parading 130 years ago, which would put them squarely in the Klan resistance to democracy period.

Good party anyway, on St Charles. A family affair, no showing of mammaries.

The writers guild had a popular parade before Krewe de Rex came on. One sign warned that without the writers guild we would have Sly Stallone writing all the films.

that PS3 wifi antennae

So we are sitting here at Jude Travel Park on Chef Menteur; N'awlins East. The wi-fi signal from the park doesn't get thru the aluminum sides of the Silver Streak very well. The iBook gets by ok, mostly because I can sit by a window. The PS3 is inside the TV cabinet thingie and therefore behind the aluminum screen.

I've been yahoo'ing and googling for info on adding an external wi-fi antennae to the PS3 but nothing. Anyone out there know how to add to the antennae strength?

Palm Centro, Kul but problems

We are here in New Orleans waiting on word of a rental application we submitted last week. As part of settling in to a new home I got a family cell phone plan with local numbers. In Trinidad we used pay as you go phones from the local GSM/ATT affiliate, Edge Wireless.

I originally wanted to get an ATT plan for national coverage, but the Palm Centro carried only by Sprint was luring me. I had looked at one in Lake Havasu while we were stuck there with a broken truck, but the shop said that they sent their Centros back for some problem. She said that they were hotsync'ing in a loop. That didn't make any sense to me so I put it out of my mind. Hotsyncs only happen when you push the button on the connector cable, no?

So we got two phones in the mail from letstalk.com. I read about Letstalk on some spam post on a bulletin board. That was one spam that worked. Got the Centro and a Sanyo Katana 8500 for Madame. She wanted a belle music phone. That Katana kinda sucks, it is really difficult to find and play the music on yr SD card. Everything is pushed thru the sprint data network. "Vision plans" they call it. Works pretty fast here in N'awlins tho.

So the Centro is pretty nice. Never had a Treo but I've been using a Palm TX for two years and enjoy fiddling with the system, altho it is easy to make it unstable. The stock Centro seemed very stable. It does have three different email programs, which seems very strange. The 'Sprint mobile email' program I set up to get my netscape/aim mail, but it never sync'ed again and I couldn't find any menus or buttons to make it work again. The palm stock email program, variously called Versa Mail or Multi Mail, is there. Then there is Messaging as well as IM. I also installed Agendus Mail which I am used to using on my TX. I installed Agendus 12 from Iambic, an upgrade from the Agendus 11 which I had paid for.

Google maps works very well; I was able to find Rayne Methodist Church and Whole Foods with it. Yesterday I was searching for the Louisiana Office of Motor Vehicles and attempted to use Google maps to search. It kept stalling, then eventually reporting that all sockets in the network were used up. Huh? Never seen that before.

It reset, I tried again and the same situation happened; no sockets and then reset. I thought that MobileWrite or clips might be causing problems. A Treo has no graffiti handwriting recognition, or an area to write in, so a graffiti replacement program of some sort is required. I was using graffiti 1 to replace graffiti 2 on the TX.

About an hour after Google maps started crashing the Centro started trying to run hotsync repeatedly. With no cable plugged in. I pushed home, or phone, but hotsync would immediately run. Eventually it reset/crashed. Hotsync started again within a few minutes. A terminal disease, looks like.

I figured it must be hardware, as hotsync is triggered by connecting two signals within the connector thingie on the bottom. There is a program icon to do this as well, when you are using bluetooth or the network to sync.

After more thought and reading something, I decided to hard reset the unit and start all over again. The 'no sockets' error made me think that the "Sprint Mobile Email" program was trying to get mail but never receiving. The icon for that program is there but I cannot find it within the file system with Filez or 3gx or Resco Explorer. I put the new version of RescoEx in, will have to pay for that program again.

So, hard reset, then re-install minus clips and MultiWrite. I have the graffiti anywhere prog from Splash data in now. It is more expensive but looks quite well done; better features and configuation.

Have to use it a few days to see what happens. The tentative word is that software conflicts can indeed cause a Centro to go into a hotsync infinite loop and crash the phone.

trip to Louisianne

Our trip to Louisiana was a bit more eventful than I had hoped. The Dodge sprang a trouble light on the way out of Humboldt. I checked it with my computer tuner thingie and it reported a misfire on cylinder 8. I zero'd it out and kept going. I'd been irritated by trouble lights for about a year due to a power steering pump sensor. Apparently it tells the computer when the power steering is working to force a slight increase in the idle speed. If idling, that is. So I was not too worried by this report of a misfire.

Two days later it was actually misfiring at idle in the gas station just across the Arizona border from Needles. Premium gasoline in Needles costs $4.06. We arrived at Auntie Bernice's in Lake Havasu on Sunday night after Thanksgiving. The next day I took it into a recommended Chrysler shop for a checkup. Error codes had spiraled to vastyness. A failed oxygen sensor and injector errors along with the misfire. Bummer. Then it turned out that cylinder 8 was showing 75 pounds of compression. Ah. Heart drops.

I bought this truck new, my first new four wheeled vehicle. I babied it, changing the oil many times the first few thousand miles, then running synthetic. So, I authorized a valve job on the right head. Two thousand dollars later the shop starts it up and it bangs and seizes. Pulling the head back off reveals a disintegrated number 8 piston. Incredible.

I just put four new tires and shocks on it and that is about the value of the truck at this point. Now I have to put in a new long block engine. The shop is very sympathetic and helpful but it is going to cost me $6,000 to get a running truck back. That might be the value of it when it is done, might be a bit more than it's value.

Les Holy Angels

I just found out via email that Tony Cortesi's orphanage in Port au Prince has a website. A Blogspot at least. So I am linking here, and at Haiti.Lyalls.

wife 1.0

Remember the days when people were so excited about email and the internet that they sent jokes to lists of friends on a regular basis? That was cute, and quickly got tiresome. Here is a good one tho:

Dear Tech Support:

Last year I upgraded from Girlfriend 7.0 to Wife 1.0. I soon noticed that the new program began unexpected child processing that took up a lot of space and valuable resources.

In addition, Wife 1.0 installed itself into all other programs and now monitors all other system activity. Applications such as Poker Night 10.3 , Football 5.0 , Hunting and Fishing 7.5 , and Racing 3.6.

I can’t seem to keep Wife 1.0 in the background while attempting to run my favorite applications. I’m thinking about going back to Girlfriend 7.0 , but the uninstall doesn’t work on Wife 1.0 . Please help!

Thanks,
Troubled User…..

___________________ __________________
REPLY:
Dear Troubled User:

This is a very common problem that men complain about.

Many people upgrade from Girlfriend 7.0 to Wife 1.0, thinking that it is just a Utilities and Entertainment program. Wife 1.0 is an OPERATING SYSTEM and is designed by its Creator to run EVERYTHING !!! It is also impossible to delete Wife 1.0 and to return to Girlfrie nd 7.0 . It is impossible to uninstall, or purge the program files from the system once installed.

You cannot go back to Girlfriend 7.0 because Wife 1.0 is designed to not allow this. Look in your Wife 1.0 manual under Warnings-Alimony/Child Support . I recommend that you keep Wife 1.0 and work on improving the situation. I suggest installing the background application “Yes Dear”
to alleviate software augmentation.

The best course of action is to enter the command C:\APOLOGIZE! because ultimately you will have to give the APOLOGIZE command before the system will return to normal anyway.

Wife 1.0 is a great program, but it tends to be very high maintenance. Wife 1.0 comes with several support programs, such as Clean and Sweep 3.0 , Cook It 1.5 ! and Do Bills 4.2 .

However, be very careful how you use these programs. Improper use will cause the system to launch the program Nag Nag 9.5. Once this happens, the only way to improve the performance of Wife 1.0 is to purchase additional software. I recommend Flowers 2.1 and Diamonds 5.0 !

WARNING!!! DO NOT, under any circumstances, install Secretary With Short Skirt 3.3 . This application is not supported by Wife 1.0 and will cause irreversible damage to the operating system!

Best of luck,

Tech Support

Leopard and Toast

I installed OS X 10.5, Leopard. On the Minintel. There is a lot of talk about superfluous graphical toys, and I do not like how the new dock graphics make it hard to tell which program is running, but it is fast and smooth.

I got it installed with a re-partition (to get rid of an old FAT partition which I never used) and format, then installed the software I use, Tivo desktop, Parallels, then Roxio Toast 8. Toast would not start. Tried all kinds of stuff, deleting plist prefs files, disk utility to check permissions (some were messed up). Nothing worked. Finally, while probing settings I noticed (again) that Parallels does all kinds of fancy stuff inside the networking. They fiddle down inside the OS something scary.

So, I started all over again, installing Toast before I let Parallels look at the computer. It worked. Toast installed, the update installed fine and put Tivo to Go in there.

There is a program from Eternal Stormsto change the awful transparency of the menu bar. This is an essential.

blogger spam

I've been searching for banjos. I want to get rid of my Wildwood Troubador banjo and get something more old-timey. I've looked at the Enoch Tradesman, which is a nice simple rig with a thin 12 inch rim and no 'tone ring'.

So, I looked at the Enoch Banjos site and saw that he has fancier models named Model 100, Model 200, etc. I yahoo'ed for "enoch m-100 banjo" and got a bunch of nonsense blogspot listings. Link is up there. They all seem to have been purged.

layout enabled

So, what is a layout enabled blog? I was searching my Amazon affiliate account, trying to add a link to the seeger bookPete Seeger book. Some automatic widget thing was talked about with directions to automatically add it you a blog page. Well, this blog page, pretty much ignored for the past month since I got it working, won't accept it.

It says that "layouts must be enabled" and I cannot find mention of such an option.

stuck in Port au Prince

The family's flight was canceled due to the hurricane which passed to the south of Haiti. The whole of Sundays flights were canceled I guess. No one was at the airport at all. Madame spent the night at the hotel right by the airport; Visa Lodge.

This morning the AA staff at the airport sent everyone up to the American Airlines bureau at Delmas 32, quite a ways from the airport. Everyone who was denied a flight yesterday had to go there. Must have been a lot of people. Took her a number of hours to get to the counter; the kids went to sleep under the feet of the crowd.

She got a ticket to Miami, but not to Toronto. Hm.

The date of this flight? Aug 30. Ten days from now. Eleven days after the scheduled flight. They apparently do not care to send any extra planes to Port au Prince to pick up the days worth of passengers who were stranded.

They also do not feel any obligation to pay anything for this 10 day (no, 11 days) delay. AA is treating everyone like Haitians. No respect or concern at all.

Apparently there was a riot at the AA office when people started learning that they would be waiting many days, weeks for some people, for a flight to replace one days cancellation.

She said that the crowd smashed the windows of the office and the police had to be called. Must have been exciting with ti Emile-Alex having 18 months now, and two days after Roxie's fifth birthday party.

They are now at the hotel in PetionVille where Roxanne was born. Well, the hotel where we lived when Roxie was born. I'll have to call the Maitre to arrange the payment.

I guess kindergarten for Roxie will have to wait.

compressed air power

The Air powered car. Compressed air. Tata Motors is licensing it for India; I am interested in Tata cause they are going to build a micro car which will sell for 100,000 rupees. They call it 1 lakh rupees. Divide by 40 and you get approx $2500 U$D.

So, they've announced they will build an Air Car as well. Click it.

Toronto, trash and scooters

Being in Toronto the past two weeks has been interesting. It has been a long time since I've spent much time in a big city. Other than Port au Prince, of course. Well, the trash situation in Toronto resembles Port au Prince more than San Francisco.

A big problem is that Ontario does not have a deposit on container law. Soda cans, zillions of 250ml water bottles, anything like that which is picked up by recyclers in California, are thrown on the ground. There is no financial incentive for anyone to pick them up. I've been told that Alberta has a deposit and redemption system, but Ontario does not. Hey, that is pretty backwards.

I see a few scooters here, not like San Fran or Santa Cruz. The riding season is cut short by snow, of course, but this is a large city with hardly any freeways; all surface streets. We need more scoots here. I did see a new Vespa GTV with the headlight on the fender. Beautiful. Expensive.

I've been searching the new scooter scene this past week. I had a Vespa GS 160 (maybe it was a 150) in the late 70's, then another in the late 80's, but they were both worn out and unreliable. I've been looking because lately a surge in new automatic plastic bodied can be seen in Calif. Most of them are from China, with unrecognized names.

Now, India has been making Vespa's under license for generations, and Bajaj is a popular bike in Calif, with a 150cc four stroke motor and the traditional manual transmisison with twist shift on the left handlebar. Another Indian Vespa has been sold in the USA as the Stella by Genuine Scooters. Well, the Indian manufacturer of that bike, LML of India, stopped producing any vehicles at all while searching for a partner. Bajaj makes only automatic scooters now; the market for traditional scoots disappeared in India.

But. Kinetic has been making some interesting automatic scooters. They bought the rights to the Italjet line of machines and have started producing one of them for the Indian market. Phase 2 motors is trying to bring these Indian scoots which are modern, tough, and built far better than most of the Chinese no name scoots one sees.

Toronto Transit

I have had opportunity to take the Toronto TTC a number of times here. Mostly I sit in a 12th floor condo and read, but I've been out.

It is a real good system. At first I was put off by the $2.75 fare, but when going from out here at York University to downtown, that $2.75 goes a long way. One gets on the local route 106 to go to Downsview station. Or the 196 Rocket (express) to the same place, just a little faster.

At the transit station it is not necessary to use a transfer. Debarking from the bus one finds that one is inside the station; behind the barrier I suppose. You are above ground; enter the building and descend to the train platform and get on board. No hassles about getting a transfer, no one has to check anything.

It works the same in the other direction. Get on the subway downtown with a token or exact change and go to the end of the line. Downsview, in this case. Walk upstairs and go out to the bus platform and get on your bus. No hassles. I've never seen this before and like it very much.

Local papers talk about how the TTC has gone downhill, and Thorald (my host) remarks on how not too long ago the fare was $1 rather than $2.75, but it is far better integrated than the San Fran Bay area or Los Angeles, and far more pleasant than New York, NY.

There are hardly any freeways here. Freeways are what we call them out west. Expressway or Turnpike are terms used in the East. In San Jose an Expressway is a surface street with limited access, while a Freeway is completely isolated from the normal surface grid.

Toronto TTC must run a great many busses. They certainly have a large variety of types. New busses are Electric/Diesel hybrids while older ones are marked as Bio Bus; denoting Biodiesel fuel. They are still running 30 year old GMC forward look coaches; the single speed automatic V-drive with two stroke engines. Perhaps they are adapted with new engines, but the units we drove in the 70's. I liked them. They were hot rods to drive, handled like a sports truck.

The Central city has street cars as well, with overhead power. Looks like some Coviet block arrangement, Budapest perhaps. Some streets have a separated area in the middle of the road which autos are not allowed to share. This is being expanded recently, to the annoyance of some drivers, apparently.

those blogger settings

Today I finally got blogger to post to a directory at lyalls.net. It really just took reading the directions more closely. That, and figuring out when it was going to do SFTP or FTP. Our hosting service, webmasters, does not support SFTP, which is simply FTP over a secure sockets layer. Tech jargon.

Clearly reading the instructions consisted of determining what the ftp path for the documents was supposed to be.

Now, if I could figure out how to tweak the look of this blogging page, or insert it into the Devoid Zone page. But this is published as an html file, not a php file. Hm, perhaps I can treat it as a php file anyway and insert it. Something for later.