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Search rbgilbert.com

This is my blogchalk:
United States, Massachusetts, Boston, Brighton, English, Ron, Male, Photography, Nudity.

Seen on Usenet:

Space Opera. It's not over until the fat lady explosively decompresses...

"Good morning, doctors. I have taken the liberty of removing Windows 95 from my hard drive."
--Arthur C. Clake, on what he imagines HAL 9000's first words to be

Al Gore was out jogging when he saw a boy on the sidewalk with a box of kittens. Curious, he jogged over to talk to the boy.

"What kind of Kittens are those?" asked Al.

"They're Democrats," said the boy.

Al thought that was so cute, so a few days later when he was out jogging again, this time with his good friend and moral compass, Bill Clinton, he told Bill to jog over to see the boy.

"What kind of Kittens are those?" Al asked again.

"They're Republicans," said the boy.

"What? A few days ago they were Democrats."

"Well, now their eyes are open. And in a few days when they learn to walk, they'll be Libertarians."

Here's a site guaranteed to irritate you if you think guns are a liability that should be tightly regulated by our government.

The holidays are coming! Check out these fine character building toys: Death Row Marv and South Park classic animated characters with voice chips.

Yesterday I started fiddling with Vuescan from hamrick.com for scanning my slides. It's got a much more straightforward interface than the software that came with the scanner, it seems to run faster, and it can produce sharper scans! Only $40! I'm totally happy. If you go to their website you'll also find VuePrint, free graphics viewing and printing software. A nice feature of VuePrint is that it will shrink large images to fit your screen. Handy if you want to look at one of my slide scans, but don't have a large monitor.

A few days ago I gave you my opinions of the various ballot questions coming up in Massachusetts. One of those had to do with greyhound racing. Since then I have found out a bit about the woman who initiated that question. It seems some years back she was out walking her little doggie when they were suddenly and ruthlessly run down by a Comm Ave Green Line train. She ended up in a coma. The doggie's condition was not mentioned so it either (A) died, or (B) was smart enough to stay out of the way of the train.

It's not easy to get run down by a Green Line train. They are really big. They make a lot of noise. They have lights on them. The driver has both a bell and a really loud horn. You know exactly where the train is going as the tracks are highly noticeable. The trains also move fairly slowly. A healthy college student should be able to outrun one. And the trains have some excellent brakes. They can appear to defy Newton's laws and stop in an instant, but they do this by transferring all momentum to the train's internal mass; i.e., the passengers.

Nonetheless, at least one Boston University student has a close encounter with a Green Line train every year. One's mind would boggle at such a thing, until one realizes that BU is filled with students whose parents are both (A) wealthy enough to send them to Harvard, and (B) very disappointed that Junior's scores weren't good enough to get him or her into Harvard. BU specializes in skimming off this creamy niche market. Many of those students then try to drown their shame in many kegs of alcohol. Some will fall from high places or drown in rivers. Traffic is too congested in the city to get up enough speed to kill yourself in your car, so some will walk on the Green Line tracks, perhaps wearing headphones.

And indeed, the woman who initiated the greyhound racing question, who was trammeled by a Green Line train, was a BU student -- majoring in French. Now she continues to display the critical thinking (and compensation) skills she learned at BU by trying to ban dog racing in this Commonwealth.

Great godamighty! We seem to have the Netscape problem fixed...at least until it gets some other little hair across its sensitive little ass.

Schwinn
I have taken possession today of a Schwinn Varsity -- no, I should say THE Schwinn Varsity. This yellow Schwinn Varsity has been my friend Tom's since the day it came out of the bike shop, brand new. That would have been way back in the sixties. The nineteen-sixties. Tom insists that the bike had never been in for maintenance that whole time, so I guess we can blame the extra six inches of derailleur cable sticking out to the side on the original Schwinn dealer. Not likely, but that's what we'll have to do.

The Schwinn Varsity was the very first ten-speed bike I ever rode -- and it is literally a ten-speed. When you look down at those five gears on the rear hub you see enough space between them for a row of good Iowa corn. Back in the late seventies (nineteen-seventies) I test rode the Schwinn Varsity in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The tires were flat, but we were able to get to a gas station where we really shot them full. Until that test ride I had thought these ten-speeds were maybe just some overly-complex toy, and that a good ol' three-speed was probably all any human really needed.

I went on to buy a Schwinn Traveler (blue), then a Motobecane Gitane (celeste), then a Schwinn Voyageur (black), then a Nashbar problem, then a Diamond Back Apex (lilac smoke), then the Cannondale touring bike (red), followed by a Bridgestone RB-1 (cream and green), and then the surprise discovery of a used Schwinn cruiser (black, Hungarian) at Ace Wheelworks. Tom doesn't need the Varsity anymore because he has a really lightweight Bridgestone at his beck and call. So we took it into Belmont Wheelworks last week. The helpful employee there actually tried to steer me toward a tune-up rather than a major overhaul. He didn't object to the oxidized spokes, and even suggested the brake cables might be just fine! Well, what do I know. Maybe back in the sixties Scwhinn built their bikes with components to last into the next millennium (although these didn't quite make it). I, pointing out that the headset felt like it had hydraulic damping, insisted on the complete overhaul.

Picked it up today, and while it does feel like an object at rest tending to remain at rest (it is heavier than my cruiser), it rode beautifully and fits me well enough that I felt very comfortable standing to pedal. It has shiny chrome fenders and no braze-ons for bottles or pumps. It's just wonderfully simple and sits in the middle of my living room right now making me want to go for a ride, but the sun has set while I worked on Netscape's "issues." Ya know, Netscape has a beta version of 6.0 available. They're going to leap right over 5. Why not. Go for it Netscape. If it is actually able to display a simple page, I'll let you call it 7.0!

But the Schwinn: the handlebars are fairly narrow. The wheels are 27 inch, so my choice of tires will be limited. There are no toe clips yet, but I'm going to buy some chrome steel ones with leather straps, which would have been what people used with rattrap pedals in the sixties. The shifters are on the stem and are looong, looking like something from a Stingray. And, of course, the gearing is not indexed. I would like to think that my great skills with unindexed shifting are to thank for the easy time I had of it today, but I think instead that it is that Schwinn found and installed on the Varsity a simple and reliable derailleur that was good enough to turn the American bike market from balloon-tired cruisers to ten-speeds (I'm going to ignore those Stingray bikes).

Here is an article explaining the significant advances the Varsity presented.

Fight the thought police
The last week of September was the American Library Association's Banned Books Week, and we overlooked it entirely. In order to atone I have included their list of the 100 "most challenged" books of the nineties (nineteen-nineties) to the lower right. Almost all of them are linked to Amazon, but that doesn't mean you have to go buy them there. You should be able to find most of them in your library, or your favorite brick & mortar book store, or a used book store, or maybe the bookshelf of a friend. Any book that's pissed off enough people to get onto that list is probably worth a read!

What's a "challenge?"

A challenge is an attempt to remove or restrict materials, based upon the objections of a person or group. A banning is the removal of those materials. Challenges do not simply involve a person expressing a point of view; rather, they are an attempt to remove material from the curriculum or library, thereby restricting the access of others. The positive message of Banned Books Week: Free People Read Freely is that due to the commitment of librarians, teachers, parents, students and other concerned citizens, most challenges are unsuccessful and most materials are retained in the school curriculum or library collection.

In addition, there are these books you might consider:

• 100 Banned Books : Censorship Histories of World Literature
• Banned Books (4 Vol. Set)
• Literature Suppressed on Sexual Grounds
• Literature Suppressed on Political Grounds
• Literature Suppressed on Social Grounds
• Literature Suppressed on Religious Grounds

And speaking of "web" here's another gruesome story from Science News (Volume 158, Number 7):

Wasp redesigns web of doomed spider
A wasp larva injects a spider with a web-altering drug, driving the spider to spin a shelter just right for a wasp cocoon.

It's "probably the most finely directed alteration of behavior ever attributed to an insect parasitoid," notes William G. Eberhard of Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and University of Costa Rica in San Jose. In the July 20 NATURE, he describes the wasps' elaborate attacks.

A female of one species of Hymenoepimecis strikes a Plesiometa argyra spider hanging in its web. She temporarily paralyzes the spider with her sting and lays an egg on its abdomen. The spider soon perks up and spends the next week or two spinning webs as usual. Meanwhile, the egg hatches, and the larva sucks the spider's body fluid. When Eberhard removed the larva, the spider kept spinning normal webs.

Otherwise, just before the larva constructs its cocoon, it induces the spider to spin a twisted tent instead of its regular web. In the wild, the wasp then kills and eats its host and suspends its own cocoon under the shelter. However, when Eberhard removed the maturing wasp before it retires into its cocoon, the spider continued to create tents for several days, slowly regaining some of its former web style.

Offensive!
You want offensive? Check this out! A live web cam in the old Texas School Book Depository in Dallas! It's set up in the position from which Oswald fired and is focused on the roadway in Dealey Plaza below. This has got to be one of the most tasteless things I've ever seen...and I eagerly pass it along to you!

To add a bit more to yesterday's info about skyscrapers, here is the Federation of High-Rise Websites

Here's a cool pic (not mine) that compares the height of the various Boston skyscrapers. It's in PNG format, which should download faster than the Jpeg version which you can download if the PNG version won't work in your browser.

That pic comes from The Boston Skyscraper Page which you New Yorkers might find amusing, but we like what we have here. Check out the proposed new building for South Station. Obviously the picture shown still has the extra 30% of height that all proposed buildings get in Boston. City Hall cuts 30% off the top, the developers get the building they really wanted, and the city politicians looks good. For more pictures of Boston architecture (not just skyscrapers) go see Boston Photos at the Urban Photo Page or the page of Boston live web cams

Also along those lines is the World's Tallest Buildings site which I found quite fascinating. Check out the proposed skyscraper for Chicago. The project's been killed.

And if you really love skyscrapers you'll want to check out the Skyscraper Web Ring which can link you to 36 web sites concerning skyscrapers.

Got my new Minolta Dimage Scan Dual II slide/film scanner today. It'll be a while before I learn how to do the scans really well, but you deserve a pic right now. Click here to see it.

There are only two little things wrong with the Presidential candidate debates.

We Get Complaints
Yeah! Today some ASShole complained that we had failed to offend him yet. If that's so, then I'm being too distracted by this Netscape nonsense. Let's talk politics. Specifically the questions on the Massachusetts ballot. That oughta piss somebody off.

Question 1: a constitutional amendment to provide for earlier redistricting for state legislators.
Well, duh. This one doesn't even have any opposition and the "neutral" Secretary of State points out that if the amendment isn't approved the U.S. Supreme Court will simply declare the current state of affairs to be unconstitutional!
My vote: an easy YES.

Question 2: a constitutional amendment to prevent incarcerated felons from voting.
And what purpose would this serve? Are they afraid the drug dealers of Massachusetts will go overwhelmingly Republican? Let's hope that the prison population stops growing so that the percentage of citizens who are incarcerated felons doesn't become a significant plurality in an election. The prisoners are human, they still have rights which are (it has been pointed out) inalienable, voting keeps them a bit involved in the real world. There is no reason to take away their right to vote.
My vote: a righteous NO.

Question 3: a law to ban dog racing.
The proponents of this question have three arguments, none of which require the banning of dog racing:

1. Thousands of greyhounds are killed each year.
2. Taxes are used to subsidize dog racing (they don't say how).
3. Greyhounds are treated inhumanely.

1. Outlaw the killing of greyhounds, except for reasons of poor health.
2. They could stop subsidizing the dog racing industry (however it is they do that).
3. They could police the dog tracks and enforce laws against cruelty to animals.

Question 4: Income tax rate reduction to 5%
No discussion necessary.
My vote: YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES!

Question 5: health care regulation
This would place all health care institutions in the Commonwealth under the control of a state "Health Care Council" until the state provided "comprehensive health care coverage for all Massachusetts residents." Clearly a quick, fascist takeover of the health care industry until a socialist solution could be imposed. Fortunately, the proposed law cannot prohibit health care providers or insurance companies from leaving the state, going bankrupt or simply shutting their doors -- so that's probably what they'll do.
My vote: (like you had any doubt) NO.

Question 6: an income tax credit for tolls and motor vehicle excise taxes
This would reduce taxes for some and increase them for no one. So...
My vote: another easy YES.

Question 7: income tax deduction for charitable contributions
For the very same reason as Question 6.
My vote: YES

Question 8: drug-dependency treatment and drug-crime fines and forfeitures
This would do a couple of things. Currently land and buildings can be "forfeited" (that is, taken by the state) if their use is merely incidental to a drug crime. The proposal would make it harder for the state to seize such property. Then the proposal would take the proceeds from such seizures and put them into a fund for drug rehabilitation, rather than giving them to prosecutors and police. The money in this fund for drug rehabilitation would have to be used to increase (not replace) drug treatment programs. It also gives judges the power to dismiss drug charges against people who complete drug treatment programs.

So this proposal increases (slightly) the rights of property owners, decreases the powers of prosecutors and police, increases funding for drug rehab programs (which we need really badly!), and it may reduce the number of those in prison on drug charges. The arguments against this question are just hot air hysterics.
My vote: a liberal pleasing YES.

That's it, just eight. Glad I don't live in California...at least on this one little point.

Let's do the time warp again
I let my issues of "PC Magazine" sit around until my bookshelf is full, then I recycle a few of the oldest. Those are usually about 3 years old. I continue to be surprised that I am surprised at how fast things change. Here are some bits from the October 7, 1997 "PC Magazine."

Gateways's top-o-the-line PC for home use features:
300 MHz Pentium II
64 MB RAM
19 inch monitor
8 GB hard drive
DVD-ROM
Windows 95
plus all the usual stuff for only $3799

There were two articles talking about the newly-arrived "cable modem." But U.S. Robotics was offering a $50 rebate to get people to upgrade to a 56K modem from 28.8K or 33.6K.

John Dvorak (a genius!) predicted that Apple would come out with a Win 95 machine and that Microsoft would port Windows 98 to the Mac! The iMac had not yet appeared.

The PCTech column was all about installing OS/2. The column starts out "Since OS/2 Warp 4.0 includes so many new disk space-consuming features and device drivers, IBM decided to ship the product only on CD-ROM." I think this implies "instead of on diskettes." Yes, children, operating systems used to fit on diskettes! In fact, I seem to remember one where the whole operating system could fit on one 360K diskette. I date myself, but no one else will, so why not.

Frank Wills, the security guard who one night in 1972 interrupted a break-in at the Watergate, died penniless last week.

Here's a story from 1997.

If they're not available, read my copies here.

Girl Suspended Over Tweety Chain
Violates School Weapons Policy, Officials Say
Sept. 28, 2000

AUSTELL, Ga. (AP) -- A sixth-grader has been suspended for 10 days because the 10-inch chain on her Tweety bird wallet violates the school district's zero-tolerance weapons policy.

Ashley Smith, an 11-year-old student at Garrett Middle School in suburban Atlanta, received the maximum punishment Tuesday. The chain connects her wallet to her key rings.

"It's only a little chain, and I don't think it can really hurt anyone," said Ashley, who maintains her own Tweety Web site.

No possible appeal
Because her suspension is "short-term," Ashley cannot appeal, assistant superintendent Tony Arasi said. School officials said Ashley and her parents, Raymond and Carmen Smith, knew chains were banned.

Smith said the suspension "lacks common sense."

"A little piece of chain is not a deadly weapon," he said.

ACLU: 'Zero-tolerance gone awry'
At the beginning of the school year, students were shown samples of items they could not bring to school. Ashley said she saw a chain about 2 feet long and much thicker than the chain on her wallet.

"They shouldn't have jumped to immediately suspend her," said Gerry Weber, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Georgia chapter. He called the suspension "zero-tolerance gone awry."

The ACLU successfully represented Atlanta student Rose Marie Spearman in 1994 after she was charged with criminal weapons possession for bringing African tribal knives to school for extra credit.

Scam Targets Slaves' Descendants

LITTLE ROCK ( APBnews.com) -- Civil rights leaders are calling "despicable" a scam that lures elderly black residents -- some of whom may be descendants of slaves -- into relinquishing personal information with the false promise of reparations.

The flyers, which have been sent to several thousand African-American seniors in Arkansas and North Carolina so far, promise that the government will send money to people "of the black ethnic race" born before 1928 under the nonexistent "Slave Reparations Act." In return, the recipients must provide personal information, including Social Security numbers.

"Slavery and the issue of reparations is a sensitive and serious one," said Earnest Brown, Arkansas state president of the NAACP, who called identification theft a "high-tech form of taking someone's life savings."

There is currently no federal reparations program for descendants of slaves, but there is a growing movement seeking compensation for those whose families suffered under slavery. Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., has introduced a bill that would create a federal commission to study reparations issue.

A 'Cruel scam'
A letter aimed at Arkansas residents targets people born between 1917 and 1926 -- the so-called "notch babies" who, because of the way the program was set up, may be receiving lower Social Security payments than people born in other years. It promises recipients $5,000 apiece because of a glitch in Social Security collections.

Arkansas Attorney General Mark Pryor called the hoaxes a clear attempt at identity theft and a "cruel scam" that preys on the most vulnerable people.

"We believe the purpose [of the scam] is to steal identification so that they can apply for bank accounts and credit cards," said Michael Teague, spokesman for the attorney general.

The flyers were placed in retirement communities, senior centers and on the windshields of parked cars during church services.

A spokeswoman for North Carolina Attorney General Mike Easley said there have been complaints about similar letters being distributed in the eastern section of the state.

Warning from attorney general
The letters list two post office boxes in Washington, D.C., one of which belongs to a legitimate organization called Senior Citizens League. The advocacy group, which lobbies to improve seniors' benefits, including Social Security, says it has no knowledge of the letters.

Teague said there have been a handful of cases where the recipients sent in personal information, but there are no known cases yet where someone's identity was stolen.

"We are trying to help those who sent in information protect their credit," Teague said.

The attorney general's office advises anyone receiving the letters to ignore them.

Similar hoax in Missouri
NAACP officials said the idea of luring someone whose parents may have been slaves to provide information on the basis of a false promise of reparations was extremely troubling.

Hilary Shelton, director of the NAACP's Washington office, said the slavery scam bears a striking resemblance to a Missouri hoax involving real proposals to compensate descendants of lynching victims.

"If they find people tried to take advantage of someone who's gone through generations of suffering, land grabs, lynching, that is despicable," she said.

I have spent much of this fine day installing Netscape Navigator and trying to find out why this page causes Netscape to crash. I think it works okay now, but if you are using Netscape you should avoid going to the archives until I clean those up too.

Netscape's installation was buggy, overriding my current settings even though I told it not to. I had to reinstall IE 5.5 to restore my system.

Once I got my system back to normal and began testing this page in Netscape I saw unpredictable flakey behavior the likes of which I have never seen outside of Microsoft Word. Columns would unpredictably become wider when I reduced the size of Netscape's windows. Tables would overlap! Images would appear outside their tables at random points around the screen!

This page looks best in IE or Opera. It's appearance in Netscape is, uh, only "acceptable," but at least it shouldn't crash.

I've edited the archived pages now, so you should be able to view them successfully with Netscape, IE or Opera. Give 'em a try.

Hey, we've got steam heat again! Just in time.