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5 April 2005 - I rarely find books that sound overly religious interesting but it is April and time to remember Rwanda once again. I went into Hastings to see if they had anything by Sara Tavares. She is another singer with Cape Verde roots. Amazon sent me an email stating that people that like Maria de Barros were also buying Sara. I wasn't the only one because yesterday it was ranked 10,887 and today it is ranked 707. The Hastings' information kiosks were busy and I looked at the books. When I walked by the %40 off book rack, Immaculée Ilibagiza's book, "Left To Tell - Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust" was staring at me. There are several movies about the Rwandan Holocaust and all of them make me uncomfortable to watch. Ilibagiza's book was much different than I expected. It is more like the South African stories of reconciliation where people describe the terrible things that were done to them but could still find it in their hearts to forgive. Towards the end of the book, Ilibagiza describes going back home to Mataba. When she left her life was in jepardy, with 100's of Hutu's wanting to be the one to kill the snake. When she returned, she was in a convoy of 5 armored vehicles with no less than 2 dozen armed soldiers to protect them. Returning with the pride of warriors had to feel much better than slinking out did. It is a very good book.

8 February 2006 - I happen to like FreeBSD, a Unix style of operating system. Most of the applications I use are developed on Linux systems, so, I found the survey article about Adobe's Photoshop being the application most desired to be converted to Linux very interesting. I use Photoshop and feel the same way. It is the definition of the industry and to use something else is mind boggling. Gimp is not Photoshop unless you are very successful at ignoring reality. Being able to use a Linux version of CS2 would make my life easier.

25 December 2005 - I made it through the posada party. I was taught how to dance to música de banda y norteño. Not a lot of steps but enough to not feel dumb. Last summer it was said by a pretty lady from El Salvador that I have the moves of a "flat tire". I didn't feel insulted because it was true. I sat and watched a muy hermosa mujer de Sonora de 27 años dance. I was in awe because I didn't think my feet would move like that. The fact that I was 40kg (90 pounds) heavier and 40 years older added to my problems. Dinner was Méxican food from Sonora y Michoacán and a rice and beans dish from Cuba. Tomales de Sonora was the first food that I liked that used the green olives. I liked the carne de rez de Michoacán best but it is interesting to eat food from other places.

For a present, I was given "No soy de nadie" de Pepe Aguilar. My oldest adopted grandson likes recent stuff by Aguilar and I have to agree that I like it better than his albums with only mariachi songs. I was in Best Buy and because of his suggestion I had the CD in my hand to buy when I was called on my cell phone and told they couldn't find any of my choices. I suggested Aguilar, they found it, and I took the CD back to the múscia latina seccíon.

I had printed some photos from the party and stopped back on the 25th to show them to Sandra. I had more carne de rez , un tomal, y frijoles y arroz. It is really good that I don´t have a wife that cooks like that. I would easily weigh 100 kg (220 pounds) or more.

20 December 2005 - The movie Serenity was released. I bought the Firefly DVDs and now I have the movie DVD. I had a hard time finding a widescreen version on sale for the lowest price. Wal Mart had lots of Full Frame but very few widescreen copies were left.

I really liked the movie. The web site also has its act together. You have a frame vesion and you have HTML. The last figures on broadband usage were around 15%. Forcing someone with a dial-up connection (the other 85%) to watch a frame presentation is crazy and demonstrates a lack of regard for them. So, you can imagine how surprised I was that you can visit the serenity site and browse around using HTML.

10 December 2005 - I wasn't satisfied to stay with FreeBSD-5.4 and upgraded to 6.0. There wasn't anything wrong with 5.4 but the current version is 7 and being 2 major versions back is a real problem. The number of MFC's to the older versions drop with each version you are behind "Current".

30 November 2005 - After Galeras erupted in Columbia, I found there is a web cam.

I was also introduced to some of the more advanced capabilities of MSN Messenger by a lady from Ciudad de México. For example, you can see what I an listening to. I am probably on one of the other computers, they all share a keyboard, monitor and mouse, but they all have their own audio systems. I am surrounded by these little speakers as I work.

Windows Media Player can use my subscription to Musicmatch Jukebox to play artists available "On Demand". As I was writing this, La Ley started playing. They have been mistyped. They are considered hard rock but sing some of the most pleasant and layed back music I have heard. Another group that I think are similar is Nek. Listening to an Italian group doesn´t help me learn Spanish but they are really good.

23 November 2005 - I see that Mackley has photos of Banda Aceh. How the ground subsided is clearly visible. The thought of that tsunami still makes me shudder.

13 November 2005 - I finally got all of my working computers running FreeBSD 5.4. It is a technology jump from the version 4.11 that I had on most of my computers. I was slow converting because doing a build world takes just about 1.5 times what it did on 4.11. I have to transfer a large quantity of files when I upgrade a system and 100baseT versus 1000baseT isn't a contest. Transfering 4 GB at 10 MB/sec takes much longer than it does at 100 MB/sec.

27 October 2005 - I finally paid attention to Mackley's photos from Pakistan. Everyone has seen some of the destruction but where ever Mackley ends up, he always seems to go a step further. He goes in with a video camera but he always shots stills at the same time and then, he uploads the stills to his web site using his satelite cell phone.

23 October 2005 - I found a web cam that is pointed towards the volcano Osorno in Chile. The Smithsonian also has a link for Orsorno. I got tired of having a dead link on my volcano web page. Crater Lake has extensive revisions going on and the web cam is down for now. I think Crater Lake is beautiful but Orsorno is a beautiful volcano.

22 October 2005 - I found an interesting project tonight. It was called "Soy Andina" or "I am Andean" (woman). It appears to be a work in progress. This makes another video that I am interested in watching. It is about an immigrant living in New York City going back to Peru to host a festival. The principle star is part of the "Ballet Folklorico Peru" group and the trip home is very important to her. I have an interest in Peru's cultural past but some of this can still be seen in their current dances. Some of them probably haven't changed that much since the Spaniards deposed the Inca rulers in the 1500's. Watching the trip home and then seeing how that trip affected her life in NYC, should be very interesting.

11 October 2005 - I went to visit llanera.com and went to read about a simulated accident. On the side frame was a link to lagransabana.com. The links change and you have to be lucky. The Grand Savana was a new link and so, I went visiting. I was instantly shocked by this rock rising out of the clouds. The caption was "Tu conexción natural". This web page is about "Bienvenidos a la Gran Sabana - Venezuela" or welcome to the grand savana region of Venezuela. Following the Arauca region of Venezuela and Columbia remotely like I have done for years, I am aware of views of nature that are truly awesome. I also get surprised emails when they find an anglo that likes their style of music enough to create a web page about it.

If the photos are accurate, the region receives a lot more rain than the desert where I live. Consequently, it is no surprise that the views are considerably different, i.e., lots of greens instead of browns. Sometimes images of these far away places surprise me and this is what the Southern savana region of Venezuela did. It was a similar shock to coming out of the tunnel and seeing the main valley of Yosemite National Park for the first time. You are either speechless or invoke the name of one of the deities. A similar view to something you will see in Yosemite is "Salto Ángel" or Angel Falls. The water falls 979 meters, which works out to be 3212 feet. That is a high water fall.

26 September 2005 - There are people I know that haven't seen the "Interdictor's" web blog. So, here is a link to live feed from New Orleans.

23 September 2005 - Well, someone is still playing games with me. All I can say is that "They are coming to get you". You have left enough tracks to be found. The Police will want you for attempted credit card fraud. If you are interstate, that is a Federal Crime. Since you called pretending to be me, that is attempted identity theft, which is also a Federal Crime. Citi Bank reached me 5 minutes after you hung up. You can think you turned off callid but that is to ordinary people. You should remember the terrible, old song with the lyrics, "they are coming to take me away, away" because they will. You have Citi Bank in one state and Bank of America in another state, so, you have to be Intrastate for either BoA or Citi and both of them sounded angry enough to track you down.

3 September 2005 - I am sitting at my computer building updated ports for FreeBSD on Ruby, listening to Lila Downs on coral and also working on my web site. I have been neglecting both lately. I am getting ready to go to Yellowstone NP for my week after Labor Day annual vacation. The week after is a magic time. The kids are all back in school and within days, major facilities start being closed. In the mean time, life has started being a little bit traumatic. Just before I was ready to make reservation, my car had been making noises and it needed to be checked out, and then, I received a jury summons for Benton County, Washington. I applied to be excused for the week of 12 September and received a notice that I would be excused that week. I had been told by my friends that they didn't know anyone that had ever been excused and so the being excused came as a shock. Lots of things needed to be done before I could leave and I had 2-weeks of work to get done. I got started and everything went right for a change because at this point, the only thing left is to 4-wheel align the Bonneville. That will be done on Tuesday at 5 pm and I won't leave until the following Sunday. I think I did this on Thursday before I left last year.

Shortly after I received the excused notice, I made reservations at the "City Center Motel" in West Yellowstone, Montana. If I can't stay at the Stagecoach Inn, I try to stay across the street because I can eat breakfast at the Stagecoach Inn restaurant. You make your reservation using a web form. Later in the day, I tried to renew my GM Motor Club card and found my VISA card was locked to web activity. It is WTF nasty words time. Someone had tried to charge $1000 for jewelry and $401 for a motel. It would be easy to assign risks because I don't use it very often. The most recent access was the motel reservation. The bogus activity was too soon after I filled in the reservation form. I had only used it 3 times for web activity in the last 2 months and I am going to bring it up with management when I get to West Yellowstone. I have already verbally sledgehammer the other 2 places and I prefer to do it in person. I have been told that when I am totally POed my eyes get dark and distant and that I look like serious things can happen. Since nothing was successfully charged to my account, I have no bad feelings but I am really POed because now I have a new Visa card and have automated payments that are still setup to be charged to the old card. When I started updating everything, it was amazing how fubared things could get with time. For example, my security system still had my old work telephone number as a contact point. They layed me off and I retired in 1997.

I have nothing but praise for the Bank of America people. They have some magic trigger on my account and it worked. When I called them about lack of access, things got noticeably chilly. I had to supply information that no one knows but them and then, things automagicaly happened. I think that people that try to steal should be neutered with a dull, rusty knife and no pain killer. The neutering prevents propagation of a defective line and no pain killer is the retribution for trying.

Next come the people at Cingular Wireless. Their web programmers have exceeded their "Peter Principle" point. That is where you are promoted until you become incompetent. I told the service person what the problem was and that their site would no longer let me login. Since I do cut and pastes, I could not be providing the wrong password. We came to the conclusion that they had reduced the number of alphanumeric characters allowed in the password. The service person figured out what would work and would not let me go until everything worked from my end. They may not be the best deal in town, but I go on what help I get when I am in trouble, and Cingular has gone the extra mile on both occasions. I have been involved with solving computer problems for 40 years and we were always told to check back. Cingular did that when I need roaming in Canada. They normally need 3 days but in 2 hours, the person I had explained my problem to called me back and told me it was setup.

24 August 2005 - I get a large number of sales brochures in the mail and via email. I toss almost all of the mail without looking at it. I am not much more descriminating about email but there are places that I have on my good-list and Barnes and Nobel is one of them. I get an email about a sale but I can not read my B&N membership number. Once I get some help and figure out what it is, I ended up ordering the book, "Seven Daughters of Eve", the DVD movie, "Lucia, Lucia", and the CDs "Nha Mundo" by Maria de Barros, and "Acústico" by Mercedes Sosa. Both of the singers are extremely easy to listen to.

14 August 2005 - I had a friend ask me if I knew how many people had visited my site and I showed how Apache would record the activity and how people were by passing the home page counter. In the middle of the current log was a number of accesses keyed to phrase "Una Palabra" or "A Word". The link will take you to Varela's web page on the story behind the activity. This song was released by Varela on his CD "Nubes" in 1999. I first noticed it when I watched the BNW Films movie "Powder Keg" by Alejandro González Iñarritú. It gained a lot more attention when it was used in the movie "Man On Fire". You may have trouble finding Nubes but you should not have any problem finding the soundtrack to "Man On Fire". Since then, Varela's web page has added a page just on this song. You can visit the web page by clicking this link to "Una Palabra". It has the lyrics in both English and Spanish. I don't know of any sites that you can use to download the song.

11 Agust 2005 - I finished a book called "Shake Hands With The Devil: : The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda". It was written by Roméo Dallaire, who was in charge of the UN Mission to Rwanda. It is one of those stories of a person that cares that was stopped by a system that didn't care. I watched a movie called "Sometimes In April", which continues to bother me. It is about 2 brothers and their involement in the 1993 genocide in Rwanda. Both ended up being victims.

6 August 2005 - I found a new plant chemical. It is called TURFLON Ester and it kills bermuda grass. We have 2 problem grasses where I live. They are crabgrass and bermuda grass. Before I found out about TURFLON, you had to use Roundup, full strength, and use a que tip to touch the blade of a bermuda grass plant. That is a PAIN. Applying TURFLON (triclopyr acid) is also a pain but it is at least a couple of orders of magnitude lower than killing individual plants.

3 July 2005 - I have been listening to the sountrack from Into The West. If you haven't heard about it don't be surprised. It seems to be a maketing failure. It and the book should have been pushed from the first show. Look at what Lucas did before any of the more recent versions of Star Wars were released and you understand what I think over the top marketing is. Some of the artists were surprised by their presence on the album. One of the first songs to really grab my attention was "Grandmother's Last Sunset" by Mary Youngblood. I happen to really like flute music and such a pleasant song to represent a death is emotional. Some of the local stores carry some of her CDs. No one has had all of them.

The mini-series follows a family that merged two cultures. I am hooked by anything that shows that linking well and "Into The West" does. At least it is does for the first three episodes. Since they seem to be following the book fairly closely, I assume the remaining 3 shows will also do as good of a job. The mini-series is 12 hours long and I will have watched it on the order of 24+ hours. I mostly watch the show via DirecTV and symultaneously record it on my DVR. So, I don't care if I miss some of it. Then, I burn a DVD of what I recorded and watch the DVD on my fastest computer. My main TV is dying and I have been to cheap to upgrade it. So, I watch many things on my computer with a hi-res LCD monitor and a 5.1 audio system.

1 July 2005 - I am following TNT's miniseries called "Into The West". Many of the books that I enjoy reading involve positive contacts between early European Americans and the "First Americans". I don't believe in the term "native americans". Mitachrondial DNA (mtDNA) shows that they also came from other lands, which means the term is inaccurate and inappropriate. They may have moved here 10,000+ years ago but they aren't "native". There is a news article on the BBC that describes 40,000 year old footprints. Every society has their own creation stories and I happen to believe that the "First Eve" was in Africa perhaps 100,000 years ago. There are books such as "The Real Eve" by Stephen Oppenheimer that trace the movement out of Africa as a function of time. If they are right, the only "native" anythings are Africans.

1 June 2005 I have a new movie that impressed me. It is called "The Snow Walker". I have always been interested in movies that give a fair shake to indigenous people. Snow Walker does a really excellant job. More in "My Movie List".

6 May 2005 - I got to thinking this morning about impressions. I eat at a buffet and many (more than 3) people that work there are Muslim. I like certain things and the Muslim manager has added them to the list. She is from Bosnia but knows how to take care of customers. For example, I like spinach and you will now find spinach in the vegatable choices several times a week. When you eat at a place every day, they accommodate you. All you have to do is make a comment and it appears.

Two of the new kids (under 40) are from Afghanstan. They are a brother and sister pair. The sister is 18 and has been going to school for 4 years. She is at the equivalent of a Junior in High School, which is the 11th grade. That rates pretty high on the development scale. I am very curious about places and being able to talk to someone from those places is very interesting. I haven't talked to the brother but the sister stops and talks. We were introduced by a good friend from Mexico. It is practice for her English and I am friendly and safe. It violates my concept of Muslim women and that is where the comment about impressions comes in. I don't care what religion they believe in but how they treat me.

I have to explain to my Mexican friend that Muslims believe in the same God that Catholics do. They just don't believe that Jesus is a God. There was a book that I walked by at Barnes & Noble about "Three Great Religions and One God". The religions were Jewish, Catholics, and Muslims. My Mexican friend forgets that "Jesuchristo el hijo de Dios" separates God and Jesus. I constantly remind her but it only lasts for 3 or 4 weeks.

22 April 2005 - I wrote too soon. Several stores stock Andrea Echeverri. I am curious enough to buy the albums "The Best of Aterceiopelados" and "Andrea Echeverri". I will probably have to order "Luz Rios" and Eco de Jorge Drexler. The chance of a local copy is pretty small. Drexler's "Al Otro Lado De Rio" was almost as haunting as "Una Palabra" by Carlos Varela. I first encountered "Una Palabra" in the BMW Films presentation "Powder Keg".

22 April 2005 - I have never thought too much about vehicle advertising until last night. I was looking for Jorge Drexler's CD called Eco. After Drexler won the Academy Award for best song, his label decided to include his song from "Motorcycle Diaries" and make a release in the USA. When I was leaving the Hasting Bookstore parking lot, there was a van in the hotel parking lot across the street with a door open. The door had a drawing of a pretty face and "En vivo" by the drawing. I did a wide circle around the van and saw "www.lrcmusic.com". When I got home, I set my brower to the site and found out about "Luz Rios". When I heard the intro, the first singer that came to mind was a pleasant combination of Paulina Rubio and Myriam Hernández from Chile. I haven't played anything from Rubio for a long time. Hernández is totally different. I play only copies in my Pontiac Bonneville. You slowly destroy originals if you play them. I wore out several copies of Hernández´s "Y mas" before I found some one new to listen to. I still add it to my Nomad playlist. There are usually around 20 albums in my play list. The Nomad occassionally has to be rebooted and it loses the current playlist. So, I alternate listening to Lucero´s "Mi Destino"and "Y Mas" I checked with 3 of the local stores and couldn't find her new CD either. I was 0 for 3 tonight.

20 April 2005 - I finally got around to adding some of my digital photos from a trip to Mt. Rainier in 2004.

9 April 2005 - I found 2 interesting web sites this morning. The first was Snopes. It is mainly about "Urban Legends". The 2nd site was found on Snopes. It was a urban legend photo of a great white shark attacking a diver on a ladder suspended from a helicopter. The great white was photoshoped into looking like it was jumping out of the water at the diver. The shark photo was from a video by South African underwater photographer Charles Maxwell. A visit to Maxwells site is well worth the time.

7 April 2005 - There are a few groups that are producing Spanish based movies that have a lot of impact. For example, HBO started me down a long road with "The Dancer Upstairs". It was filmed by "Fox Searchlight Productions". That movie simply haunted me. I do not have any idea how many times I have watched it. Everytime I watch it, it makes me want to do something and I know that I could not change anything. It isn't even close to being a documentary about Sendero Luminoso but it makes you want to learn more.

There are two tear me up moments. The first is Rejas' problem with Yolanda. The "I am dead" message is too much. He suddenly realizes there isn't anything he can do either. The second is when his daughter is trying out for the dance school and looks up, sees her father through the closed door, and smiles.

If I thought TDU was bad, you should watch "Paloma de Papel" or "Paper Dove". "Paloma de Papel" is a presentation of "Luna Llena Films". The Spanish is pretty simple. You can almost understand the Communist rhetoric with out translation. You will also not learn any new Spanish swear words. In TDU, Rejas visited his home village. It was not the place he left but you were not provided any real insight into life in the villages.

"Paloma de Papel" is a movie centered around the Sendero Luminos and life in the village and their impact on a young boy named Juan. You get to see some happy times but you also get to see how bad life was in the 1980's. As the introduction web page describes, "Un niño víctima de la violencia en los Andes peruanos". It literally translates as "A young boy, victim of the violence in the people of the Peruvian Andes". Peruanos means people and not the country. Juan's life is out of his control. As a victim in prison, he passes through life as a teenager and isn't released from prison until he is an adult. His hold on the past is making paper doves or "Paloma de papel".

HBO continues with the movie "Maria Full of Grace". It makes a heroine mule look much more human. It also shows some of the consequences of being a mule. The current "People en español" has a shot of Catalina Sandino Moreno at the 2004 Oscar, She was, without a doubt, the most beautiful actress up for an award. This time it was "Catalina full of grace".

4 April 2005 - I have known about a Live365 radio station called "Walisuma De Los Andes" for some time. They are a VIP station, which means you have to have a VIP membership. Then, you can hear them at fm-32k. Thirty two k-bits per second is a long way from CD quality but I have been satisfied with listening to Xeoax (cortv.com) at 21 kbs for a long time. They just didn't catch my attention at the right time. By this I mean that there are times that I like to listen to "música andina" and there are times that I don't. I am trying to become fluent in Spanish and Andean music really doesn't help me meet that goal.

The 29th of March was an "I like" day. When I checked the stats, they have 12 TLH or 12 listening hours. I have helped raise that to 27 TLH. For a style of music that is so relaxing, that must be frustrating. I simply like the sound of the quenas or sikus (zampoñas). If you don't know what these instruments are, you can find them on WDLA's web site or on VinArgentin.com. You can also buy real music from the Andes at either site. The VinArgentin is by far the most professional looking.

21 March 2005 - I have spent about 2+ hours of the last 4 listening to "Dança Ma Mi" (Dance With Me)" by Maria de Barros. It is very pleasant music to listen to.

6 March 2005 - I went to Narada World to register buying Lila Downs' CDs. I could not but found a free Internet radio. They claim "The best in new instrumental, jazz and world music." and you can listen for free while you browse. SUCH A DEAL! I was sitting here thinking that you shouldn't listen to more than you can afford. That is a sort of joke because I think you will suddenly find there are a number of groups that you want to buy their CDs. The question is when are you going to stop buying and how many will you have purchased at that point.

I follow Stan Gotlieb's adventures in Oaxaca, México on Real Oaxaca. If it wasn't for Stan and MusicMatch's "On Demand" service repeatedly telling me about Lila Downs, I would have never listened to her music. You have a number of cultures that are threatened by modern society. Downs' Mixtec group is just one of many. She also sings Zapotec songs. The Internet provides a means for protecting their cultural stories and it also provides a means of allowing other people to experience them. I have thought for a long time that if a group wanted to bring up a web server and add something like Apache, I would help teach them to administer their site. It just can't be a Microsoft Windows system. I also don't do Linux because I switched to FreeBSD a long time ago. FreeBSD is designed to be maintained from a single source and none of the Linux's are.

I have a tendancy to like African rhythm. The first LP records that I can remember wearing out were Marty Robbins' "Gunfighter Ballads" and Guy Warren's "Themes for African Drums". With the exception of Linda Rondstadt (Blue Bayou is rock), I haven't listened to country music for several years. I have always thought the Texican in "Poor Pitiful Me" was my ex brother in-law, George. So, I chose "World" genre and found there was a lot of new music that I liked. One of them was the voice of "Maria de Barros". De Barros is from the island of Cape Verde, which is located about 350 miles out in the Atlantic Ocean off of Senegal. Senegal was one of the African countries that I seemed to be able to talk to on the Ham radio 20 meter band. We wouldn't call them, they would hear us talking about something of interest and would ask to join in. Some days it would be a guy driving to work in Johannesburg.

De Barros music is supposed to be a fusion of African, Argentinean, Portuguese, and Cuban. The only questionable language is Portuguese. I find it bothers me because I only understand the 50% that sounds like Spanish. You have to just listen and not try to fully understand it. I have looked around and no one stocks "Nha Mundo" locally. She has a new one being released on 15 March. I think I will buy one and see if I like the full tracks instead of the little sound bites that you get on some web sites.

27 February 2005 - Soraya, my favorite Spanish singer, has a new CD being released on 1 March. I always find this really frustrating because the local stores don't stock her. Everyone will have the "new" Jennifer Lopez album but I think Soraya is a much better singer. On her "for you" or "de mi para ti" page, is a number of links. The one I found to be really interesting is called "Casi...Un Angel" it is a fan site by Jesus Argenis -Venezuela. What makes his site different, is that he links to a number of sources. It is like an reference page with all of the videos and "pr" sessions that Soraya has done. The most interesting item on "un poco" was that "where she was born" or nació was New Jersey to Columbian parents. She is always refered to as a Columbian singer, which made me assume that she was born in Columbia.

1 February 2005 - It was interesting to read on the blog "Iraq the Model" about a soldier shouting from one of the army convoys to "vote for Alawii". The captain in charge stopped the convoy and told the soldier that he had no right to do that. He was a member of the Iraqi army and not Alawii's Army. The people on the sidewalk cheered.

Cry Me A Riverbend II had a link to a blog referred to as "Rantings of a Sandmonkey". You have to look for the entry where he writes about Raed being on his S***list. Eventually, you end up on "Iraqi Bloggers Central" where they were giving Raed and Riverbend a bad time. Someone, who claimed to know both, claimed that Riverbend was the eldest daughter of a Ba'athist Iraqi Ambasador appointed to a Western country by Sadam. This sounds reasonable because if you read her writings she writes like she grew up in the USA. FWIW, I don't know any 20+ year old American that writes as clearly as she does. CMARII has created a sidebar list called "Insurgents" and he has both on his Insurgents list.

24 January 2005 - A friend where I eat told me about a web site that deals with the little town of Santa Ana del Valle from Oaxaca, Mexico. I finally entered the URL properly and got to visit "www.santaanadelvalle.com". I had looked at all of the search engines and couldn't find it as "santaanadelvalle" or "santaanadevalle".

2 January 2005 - The Tri-City Herald had a frontpage article this morning on the person credited with developing the CDROM. I passed the URL around to my friends and got one back to an article on the Seattle Times. It was called "Scientist's invention was let go for a song ". It is available from the Internet and has a lot more depth to it than the local article.

21 November 2004 - I was looking at my firewall log and saw one site trying to access my .232:80 web site. I couldn't remember why I had denied 129.250.134/24, so I comented out the deny line in the firewall script, which allowed it again.

3 November 2004 - Another hardware failure. The 2nd HD on topaz wouldn't start after I installed new hardware. I toggled the power and it started. I grabbed a new Maxtor 120 GB and tried to ghost the old drive to it. Ghost 9.0 wouldn't accept the key on the CD envelope and I had to send an email to Symantec. I think they set the record on a speed of reply. When I got home from eating dinner at the Buffet, I had a key that would work. This time, when I ghosted the partition with XP Pro in it, the computer would boot the XP.

21 October 2004 - The DVD burner caused me to buy more hardware. This time it was a Creative 5.1 Speaker system. My sound card is 5.1 capable but I have never had a 5.1 speaker setup. Now I do. I normally run my monitors in 1280x1024 or 1152x864. The monitor is only capable of 60Hz at 1280 but is capable of 75Hz at 1152 Either resolution is much greater than the resolution of DVD movies. For a comparison with future capabilities, a true HDTV runs at 1900+. You can read all of the text on a DVD movie at 1152x864 and, in full screen mode, it is much clearer than my main TV.

15 October 2004 - I finally purchased a DVD burner. In a seemingly unrelated step, I have been adding Country Music Artists of interest. I have added people with enduring interest such as Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, and others. Then, I started adding artists that I have always enjoyed listening to. These included Crystal Gayle, Belinda Carlisle, Shania Twain, and The Sweethearts of the Rodeo. The Sweethearts' "Midnight Girl In A Sunset Town" is a song that I have identified with. I always thought that I was a midnight boy that grew up in a sunset town. When you help run a farm, you don't stay up until 3 am and then spend the daylight hours working on the farm. One of the other songs that I have always enjoyed was Gayle's "We Must Believe In Magic". There are a few people with crystal clear voices that I enjoy listening to. Gayle is one and the other is Mercedes Sosa.

I have a Creative Nomad Zen Xtra with a 40 GB hard drive. I have all of my Spanish albums on it and they occupy less than 12 GB of the disk. I must be turning nostalgic because I have been adding only the Country albums that I still find interesting.

23 September 2004 - New web page with photos of my 2004 vacation trip to Yellowstone National Park.

22 September 2004 - I received an email pretending to be from the Shadowcrew. It started out "Subject: How one can become a terrorist? ". I bump into a low earth orbit and proceeded to do what they wanted, which is track down SC's ISP and send them a complaint about spam. I told a friend about it and she wanted to know who all I reported it to and I told her. Later, I got to thinking about what other people thought and so, I did a web search on it. What I found is that some it to be a prank but a few consider to be much more than prank. Joe Wein calls it a "Joe Job". If you click the link, you can read about what he thinks it is. You can also read about what it is like to be on the receiving end of a "joe job".

29 August 2004 - I finally got a photo of the mountains that I can see on a clear day. I added them to my local photos web page.

24 August 2004 - A friend asked me if I had bought the CD by Chingon. Their debut album is called "Mexican Spagetti Western". Chingon is a group put together by Robert Rodriquez. It is made up of people from "Del Castillo". "Paz, amor, y música latina" seems to be "Del Castillo's" signature line. "Peace, love and Latin Music" is something I identify with.

I have liked the music on the movie soundtracks that Rodriquez was responsible for. I got to Severina and promptly revisted Patricia Vonne's web site. The Quick Time player works with Mozilla but not Microsoft's Internet Explorer. I don't know what is broken on my clean machine. I have a tendancy to blame the web programmer; however, I can watch her "Traemae Paz" video and I don't care. I really like Vonne's voice. I just can't walk into a local store and buy the CD. I can see that I am going to order the autogaphed version from Bandelero Records. See the bottom of the contact frame on her web pages.

22 August 2004 - If you want to read about big brother running amuck, you need to read the Buffalo Field Campaign's suit. Because they consider the death of a single buffalo a tragedy, they are considered eco-terrorists by some Montana DOL agents. I really don't agree with BFC's opinions; however, I agree with Montana DOL's position even less. I have this vision from the suit of some DOL agents and other Gallatin County law enforcement agents basically blind side tackling peaceful people. I can remember Dick Butkus running into a quaterback on TV and seeing the QB fly through the air. The QB didn't have a clue that he was about to be hit by a tackle that weighs a lot more than he did. Butkus used to intimidate QB's by boasting that he dreamed of creaming one and watching their head an helmet roll down the field. I think DOL has people with a similar view.

Peaceful protest is one of the foundations of this country and not being able to do that, I think, is a serious erosion of our personal freedoms. I personally think that a US Marshall or FBI agent should go in undercover and when he is harrassed, arrest the creep doing the harrassing.

16 August 2004 - More Christofferson stuff. I liked Buffalo Medicine so much that I added the BFC to my email signature. Then, a couple of nights ago, I purchased "Clinical Trial" at our local Hastings book store. I needed 2 nights to read this book. I liked it better than Buffalo Medicine. It was still dealing with places that I have spent a lot of time in or around but in the back of my mind I recognized it as fiction, where as, BM didn't feel that much like fiction. I feel the same way about a lot of Tom Clancy stories. Many of his stories are so close to physical hardware, that they could be a simply declassified version of something that really could happen. I don't believe in excessive vengance but a measured retribution is ok.

11 August 2004 - I read a book called Buffalo Medicine by April Christofferson. It was on her web site that I found out about the Buffalo Field Campaign. They are fighting to keep the bison from being arbitrarily killed when they leave Yellowsone National Park. I visit Yellowsone Park almost every year. My order of business when I get there is to watch Old Faithful erupt, see the Lower Falls in good light, and and get a great shot of a bison. I figure that one of these years I will get a priceless shot of a bison. Bison don't take directions, so getting a priceless shot is a matter of lucky timing.

Brucellosis is a hot spot trigger for many people and BM is a story about that interaction between both sides with a little bit of genetic modification of a disease thrown in to make it really deadly. There are many people in Montana that are afraid that an infected Yellowstone Park bison will pass on their disease to the cattle that graze on the periphery of Yellowstone Park. They have chosen to ignore Elk (also known as alce in Europe and uapití or wapiti in the USA), which also carry the disease. I grew up on a dairy farm and saw Utah transition from an infected state to a brucellosis free state. We had a number of cows slaughtered because they were infected.

I understand the value of a vacine. If you don't want to get polio, you don't vacinate all of your neighbors, you personally get a shot from your doctor. I think that vacinating the cattle is the price of doing business and grazing where they can be exposed. I understand from Montana DOL that the cattle are voluntarily vacinated. The brucellosis vacines are not 100% and so it doesn't do any good to fix one end of an exposure vector when you have other methods of being exposed to a disease. Vacinating the bison and the cattle, for example, doesn't do that much good unless you also vacinate the elk. That is where the air dispersed vacine in Buffalo Medicine caught my attention. If there was every a what if wish, that is one that I would wish to be true.

It was really personally interesting to find an article in the Billings Gazette about a herd in Boulder and Worland, Wyoming where elk were assumed to have passed the brucellosis to the cattle. The article was dated 11 August 2004. The title was "Follow-up tests show no brucellosis in Campbell herd". Clicking the link will take you to the Gazette article. Links on newspapers have a tendancy to change and you can always do a search from the Gazette's main web page. Boulder, Wyoming is SE of Pindale and Worland is SE of Cody. Neither are close to any bison but the cattle herds are overrun by elk in the Winter. One of the pages also points out that the infection rate of elk with brucellosis is 5x greater in elk in a feeding station, than elk running free and at large. If you want more information, do a web search on "boulder brucellosis". My link will take you to Google and setup the search. If you don't like Google, you are on your own <smile>.

3 July 2004 - My Nomad Zen2 died. Well, it didn't really didn't die but it did quit providing an output on the left channel. I was going to buy a 30 GB Nomad but was convinced by one of the security people at the door at our Best Buy to bring in my Nomad because he thought the warranty replacement contracts were for 2 years. I had mine 13.5 months. Sure enough, he was right and I was upgraded to a comparable value ($299), which was the 40 GB Nomad Xtra. I thought that was the best $39.99 that I had ever spent. The early iPods and Nomads were notorious for having the batteries die after 1 year. I probably shouldn't say notorious because that was what turned out to be the typical lifetime of the batteries. I was still getting around 14 hours for a battery charge and it was used for hours every day.

The much longer battery life was one of the primary reasons why I purchased a Nomad. The Nomad would play music for around 14 hours and the iPod would only last 8 hours or so. The other was that the Nomad supported wma. The iPod only supported aac as an alternate compression scheme. There were not any Microsoft Windows products that converted cda audio into aac audio when I bought my Nomad. That means 95% of the people that purchase iPods are left to using mp3 or to purchasing aac tracks from iTunes. Neither were solutions that I thought were good deals.

19 June 2004 - I have turned off some of the computers for Summer. That drops the heat load in two rooms in my house. That has also had the effect of my losing position in the rankings at Setiathome. I am solidly into 4014th place, which mean there are only 4013 people that have turned in more work units than I have. That is the highest ranking I have ever had.

12 June 2004 - I just finished watching the "Last Samurai" for the 2nd time. I did not want to watch this movie for some reason but my neighbor pointed out how I liked "Dances With Wolves" and said this is a similar piece for Tom Cruise. Was I glad that I listened. I have watched movies such as Ran and enjoyed them. I had been learning a little Japanese and could understand bits and pieces. So many of the action scenes depended on the actors and there was a comment made that Cruise studied for 8 months before they started filming. It was very similar to watching Banderas get better with the sword in the "Mask of Zorro". I was totally impressed.

1 June 2004 - I have wanted to buy the movie "The Quick and the Dead" for years. I will buy any movie made about a story by Louis L'Amour sight unseen. I had it on VHS tape but that is full-screen and leaves a lot to be desired. The Q&D DVD was widescreen and they only wanted $5.99 for it. Such a deal <grin>. This leaves only the movie "Code Name: Dancer" and I have all of the old ones that I really wanted on DVD.

27 Apr 2004 - I just finished watching the 5th season of Babylon 5 on DVD. That was one of my must watch series and then they got political. I hate shows that are political. I never watched season 5 because it was always broacast while I was at work. I think buying the CD-ROM set was a good deal.

When I was young, I always drove fast cars. We were hot rodders from the 50's. The most dangerous fast car I ever owned was a SS-409 chevy straight out of the Beach Boys song. The fastest car I ever owned was an SS-396 Camaro. It was supposed to top out at 120 mph but it would accelerate past 120 as fast as my v6 Fiero went past 20 mph. A friend sent me the URL to a site called KiddOfSpeed and I had to visit. The "speed" caught my attention but when I got there, I found out it was about a motocycle trip into Chernobyl in Russia. It is a ghostly trip for some one like me because my adult occupation involved supporting nuclear power reactors. I have held trinitite. Elena talks about the sarcophagus having to be replaced soon and I live in a high technology nuclear area. There was a newspaper article some time ago about local scientists being involved in the design.

18 Apr 2004 - I always find it interesting to tell an individual involved in the entertainment industry that something on their web page is screwed up. The only person that I ever sent an email to that fixed their web page was Soraya. Links were pointing to her webmaster's Mac HD and not to web pages available to a person browsing her web site. It also doesn't count as being fixed if you delete the broken section. As an example, try playing Patricia Vonne's videos. Traeme Paz will not play on any of my computers.

To my way of thinking, an entertainer's web page should be as well thought out as it can be. It shouldn't be too flashy but never dull. It is a tool to convey their thinking to their fans. Consequently, broken sections should be fixed immediately.

What scares me when I send them an email is that their fix will go really wrong like I watched happen after I told "El Cholo" that the version of Apache he was using was susceptible to being hacked. What I know is a 2 minute job turned out to having his site being down for 3 weeks or so. He has cool graphics and IIS on W2K doesn't have a clue on how to do his special effects. The reason I was concerned is that the Llano is in a deadly conflict (revolution) and people were targeting vulnerable Llano web sites. I have lost the links but the last time I checked, Llano.com still had remnants from their being hacked.

30 March 2004 - It seems like I have been watching Firefly-DVD for weeks. There are also a number of Firefly movie site. There are 4 DVDs and 4 or 5 shows per DVD. I have 5 shows left and then I just know I will go back and watch some of them one more time.

Riverbend seems to go over the edge at times and there is a CryMeARiverbend site to tear her blogging apart. I don't take sides but I am interested what other people think. Raed has broken out on his on at Raed In The Middle. At times you wonder how old any of them are. Riverbend sounds like a teenager much of the time but has to be much older. This was true until the abuse at Abu Ghraib and suddenly, there was truth to what she had been complaining about.

25 March 2004 - I was checking up on Geoff Mackley and found he and the camera crew had spent a few days in hell. When the wind is strong enough that it blows your generator over, that is a bad day. They basically couldn't move and the wind was blowing toxic fumes from the Vanuatu crater to them. Rescue by a daring helicopter pilot was a greatful release from hell. I just hope they saved the film.

14 March 2004 - I don't understand why some movies get to me and others don't. It is 2 am and I just finished watching "The Dancer Upstairs" again in Spanish. The movie make me feel really sad but I am drawn to watch it. I found that when I retired that there are people that you want to help understand the world but then you see a movie like this and you know there are some that you can't touch. The movie is different than the book. It is sort of like the movie is the story the author really wanted to tell and did when he got the chance to do the script.

7 March 2004 - I was introduced to a new level of Música del Andina" today. It was like I had been listening to weekend artists for years and suddenly I heard professional artists. I happen to like folklore music. This is especially true if it is from Mexico to Argentina. I received an email from the owner of Vin Argentina who was sponsoring several groups. One of the artists was Pablo Salceda and when he plays the flute or more likely a quena, it almost gives you goosebumps. He also plays in a group called Markama. They have a sound in their flash presentation that sounds like a flute around water. You may even think you are under water. At any rate, I can almost imagine a flute player sitting on a rock and calling an Orca. It is a interesting sound. The only things missing are 30 second sound bites to spur you into buying a CD.

This log entry will scroll off but I will be adding more to my "Music from the Andes" web site. If you just happen to notice, the copyright on Vin Argentina is by Pablo Salceda.

I think one of the cool features of the Internet is that people can sell their products, songs or etc. around the world. In the local Best Buy or any of the other local stores selling Latin American music, Andean Music is virtually non-existant. With the search engines such as Google or Yahoo, you are now presented many choices.

4 March 2004 - I got to sleep in today. We sent the customer home knowing how to use both the new equiment and the old. It was cool to know that that what you did may affect the world in a few years. You personally won't have an effect but the people you helped will. You just made it easier for them to do their job.

1 March 2004 - Geoff Mackley is traveling to exotic places to film a show called "Dangerman". You can follow him on rambocam.com.

El Cholo has improved many things on Cholovalderama.com and Quitapesares Stero. His web site is back up and his Live365 station is playing using the mp3pro sound codec if you are a subscriber.

23 February 2004 - I got a telephone call from an old friend. He needed help getting an old project running again. I am working on the old version of EFP. You can read about the new one at Mohr and Associates.

22 February 2004 - I have been getting hit by 211.76.240.245 many times a day. I don't have any idea what you are up to, so, I am allowing the IP to access this web page and logging all activity. FYI, 211.0.0.0/8 was denied at my firewall because of inappropriate behavior. It was much easier to deny all than the many. I think at times that it must be a class project to crack web sites or hack into servers. The IP belongs to the Northern Taiwan Community Univ. and that has me curious. I had written an e-mail to cschen@mail.nctu.edu.tw with all of the entries from my security log and decided to wait before I send it.

13 February 2004 - This is a test. I have converted web page maintenance to using KDE's Quanta. This is an attempt to avoid having to boot the computer I call opal to Windows XP.I am doing this on a computer I call ruby, which is an AMD-2400+ XP running FreeBSD 4-stable.

9 January 2004 - I went across the street to take a photograph of my front yard. I live in a desert area and 3 inches of snow for the entire Winter is a lot. My front yard has at least 12 inches of snow on it. I found a web cam that is located at a local TV station. See, KVEW TV web cam. They are predicting temperatures as high as 45° F. When this happens, we have a condition where the snow melts very fast and produces a runoff problem. Our worst floods occur in the Winter after a warm chinook wind has arrived.

17 December 2003 - The local national laboratory has produced a home computer security guide. Click the link to go to the site.

14 December 2003 - It was kind of strange to stay up until 4am to watch the live press conference where they showed the capture of Saddam Hussein. He really didn't look up to causing all of the mischief that has been occuring in Iraq.

13 December 2003 - I encountered a 2nd hacked site last night. It was ExtremeStorms.com. They seem to be hitting people that aren't running current versions of Apache. The latest versions of Apache are 1.3.29 and 2.0.48. The 1.3 version is considered the "production version" for busy sites. There is a bug in them if you use the mod_usertrack. For more information, visit Apache.org.

9 December 2003 - I was curious what Llanera.com is running and visited Netcraft. They show up as Linux and Apache 1.3.29, which was updated on 8 December. That made me curious how the hackers got in because there are some known hacks into older versions of Apache. I updated web server to include the updated Apache-2.0.48.

7 December 2003 - I saw my first hacked web page today. I was looking at some of my links and visited Llanera.com. Instead of the normal page that I was expecting, a rage against governments popped into view. I was really shocked.

2 December 2003 - It is time to add a few more links to Google. I visited Cholo's web site to see what was new and found he had added a number of new pages and some links to other web sites. The search engines seem to stop when they hit a Spanish web page; however, if an English one references them, they are in the search engines in about a month. We will have to see how this developes. For now, I am going to add the links to my web page of places and things that I found interesting about the Llano region of Columbia and Venezuela. I was really concerned today when mp3.com disappeared because I couldn't play any of the songs on Cholo's web site. This messed up my whole day. I was late for dinner at the buffet, which cost me the dinner rate instead of the lunch rate. Then I found Quitapesares Stero on Live365. I have it installed on the 4 Windows XP computers that I normally use.

29 November 2003 - I updated topaz to a 2400+ using the 2nd motherboard and cpu that I bought. The difference here is much greater. Topaz was an AMD Thunderbird 900 and the jump to a 2400+ XP dropped setiathome wu times from 32K seconds to 14K seconds.

23 November 2003 - I had planned on upgrading coral from an AMD 1600+ XP to a 2400+ today. I had decided that I needed more space on the XP side and had too much on the FreeBSD side. I backed up the 3rd disk and rearranged it. I didn't have any problems and figured that it would be running the 2400+ by night. Wrong, right in the middle of moving the 2nd disk, I hit a hard format error. Now I was in disaster recovery mode. I had backed the drive up and have the restore in process.

22 November 2003 - One of the side effects of P2P support is that regardless of the number of people on a list, there may only be 1 person that gives a s**t about your question. When you PO that person, you no longer get support.

17 November 2003 - My computer that I call ruby has been replaced. There wasn't anything left to repair. Anything plugged into the motherboard was dead. It is now an AMD 2400+ XP. It used to be a 2000+. It is doing setiathome workunits around 10% faster than the 2000+ did. I will have a real number after 100-200 wus have been processed.

10 November 2003 - My fastest, largest computer died this morning. When I walked into the computer room in my basement, the power light on ruby was off.. It is my test machine and I use it to build almost everything I use on FreeBSD. The power light being off was a very bad situation. So, I walked to the side of the cluster and pushed the power switch while I was looking at the ruby's motherboard. Immediately, there was a loud bang, a flash of light, and the smell of burned electronics. Ruby was really dead now. I needed 3 days and a powerful flashlight to find the part that exploded. The destroyed part was one of the voltage regulator ICs. A large chunk from the top right corner was missing. A piece of shrapnel with sharp edges flew some place but didn't hit me, at least that I noticed. I found out later that all of the cards plugged into the PCI bus were dead. If I plugged any of them into a good motherboard, the system wouldn't boot. The only possible survivors at this point are the case, which was made of metal, and perhaps the 512 MB stick of DDR-2700 memory and the power supply. I have an Antec power supply tester. You pull all of the power supply connections from the computer and then connect the ATX to the tester. If the power good led comes on, the power supply is good.

I walked into Circuit City and saw an Antec Sonata piano black computer case with really cool blue lights to indicate the power is on. It holds a slow version of ruby right now and is running an AMD Duron 750. The drop from an 2000+ XP to the Duron is significant. A build world requires about 2.5x longer than the XP did. The replacement will be a 2400+ XP. I don't think it will do buildworlds 20% faster but the 2nd 2400 will replace a Thunderbird 900 and I will notice the difference on that system. Based on past experience, I will also need less heat in the basement this winter :).

27 Oct 2003 - Last night I received my nightly NY Times Frontpage email with the news about the car bombings and not too much later later I walked past my copy of Tom Clancy's "The Teeth of the Tiger". The quote on the back cover is "If you want to kick the tiger in his ass. You had better have a plan for dealing with his teeth." The implication is that the USA is the tiger and Al Queda kicked us in the ass.

I think that Iraq is also turning out to be a tiger that we have by the tail and we can't let go until we have solved the situation there. There is an old saying that goes like, "Yea tho I walk through the valley of death, I shall fear no man, because I am the meanest son of a bitch in the valley. We can't pull out because Sadam would still be the big dude in the valley.

31 October 2003 - Riverbend wrote about Ramadhan. It was a simple explanation of how people deal with Ramadhan. The part that brought tears to my eyes from laughing was where she was in a hurry to get where they were serving "kunaffa drenched in a sugar syrup". I don't have any idea what it tastes like but it must be good. I have been told by "mi amigos de México" that I would like "churros y chocolate" and from the sounds, both must be sweet enough to drive a diabetic into sugar shock.

I found her reference to the google search in the archives for August. I also found out that she has a university degree and works. She gives the USA hell for Haliburton but her views aren't any stronger than some of my more strongly biased friends that belong to the Democratic Party. Her written English has a sense of humour to it and the phrasing is also better than the written English of most Americans I know.

22 Oct 2003 - I recently encountered blogging. It began with an English article about Salam Pax, the Baghdad Blogger. This is a sort of online diary and provides insight on life in Baghdad from an Iraqi point of view and begins long before Baghdad was bombed by "Operation Iraqi Freedom". He was complaining because he left Iraq for 5 weeks and Riverbend, whose site is called Baghdad Burning, had caught up in the rankings on Google.

Out of the pages blogging about Baghdad that I have seen, Riverbend's is the best written one from my point of view. I like both the appearance of the page and her style of writting. Both sites provide insight into basic things that are happening that bother Iraqis. You may not agree with Riverbend's point of view but she always has a point. During the Vietnam War, I used to watch the news on CHEK TV, which is channel 6 on Victoria Island, because they had a different bias in their reporting than the American tv channels did. You didn't know which was closer to the truth but there were always some slight differences in how events were interpreted. Of course, we never saw the North Vietnamese version of the truth. The closest I came was to seeing snapshots of Hanoi shot at 30,000 feet from the cockpit of a B-52.

Both bloggers also provide insight in to things that non-Muslims are doing that really offend Muslims. An example, is a non-clean individual touching a "Quran". We don't wash ourselves before we touch a bible and touching someone's Quran is really offensive. They ignore the fact that the person tried to carry the Quran past a screening checkpoint. To me, that was similar to trying to carry a knife looking object through an airport screening area. If the Quran had been hollowed out, sufficient plastique explosive could have been carried into the building over time to make a big bang and ruin the day of a large number of people. The screening people can't tell if the Quran was a book or transport device until they touch it and thumb through the pages, which is a no-win situation regardless of the validity of the reason for touching it.

3 Sept 2003 - Watching the 4th anual Latin Grammys was awesome. Of my favorites that were nominated, Juanes, Olga Tañon, and Enrique Iglesias took home 8 grammy awards. Olga´s scream of delight expressed her feelings without having to say a single word. All 3 are in my "Playing Now" list. I purchased "Un dia normal" when Juanes won a grammy in 2001. It is hard to imagine an album that old still winning awards; however, I am one of the people that still like it that well. Quizás by Iglesias was the first album in Spanish with songs that I mostly understood on the 1st play.

Joan Sebastian is also in my "Playing Now" list and he won 2 grammys for an album that I also own.

26 July 2003 - The song Casi from Soraya's latest album was #1 on the Billboard Latin Singles. It may have a short stay at #1 because Chayanne's "Un Siglo Sin Ti" entered the list at #5. The bad news is that locally only Best Buy and our Wal Mart supercenter stock the album. Wal Mart may be a "stocked" because the one I purchased hasn't been replaced yet. I started checking albums in the Latin Music sections and many of the hot albums or singles are not available locally. It is like the purchasing people don't have a clue as to what people are buying. You can buy stacks of Thalía, the English version. Even Costco has a couple of stacks of Thalía.

I had to laugh recently because I decided to clean up the "playing now" selections and Marco's album was in the list at least 6 times. The distinct advantage of the Zen2 over the iPod is your ability to manage what is playing. Even when I was being very careful, Soraya ended up in the "playing now" list several times. I try to normally have 3 albums of Soraya in my "playing now" list. The albums are Soraya, Cuerpo y alma, and En esta noche.

9 July 2003 - I was looking at the Spanish language CDs in our local WalMart supercenter and found a copy of Soraya's latest CD. Needless to say, that CD is now in my possession. I told the checker that I had been looking for it for 2 months. The album also appeared in the local Best Buy store. I just didn't see it for several days.

I didn't really like the album "Soraya" that much at first. Her voice has this almost vulnerable sound to it. She usually sings such strong songs but this album works its way in much like Marco Antonio Solís latest album does.

You have to listen to the album "Tu amor o tu desprecio" by Marco Antonio Solís 5 or 6 times. The first 2 or 3 times I didn't really like it. Somewhere in the next 4 or 5 plays, the album went from a * to a ***** star rating and it was the only thing I played in my car for at least a month. I have a Creative Nomad Zen2 with a 20GB HD, which currently has ~200 albums loaded, and that was all that I was playing on it too.

I also purchased Tahlía's recent release called "Thalia". My amigos de México can't understand why I buy her albums and after listening to her do a weak version of Rap (it may be hip hop), I don't understand why I did either. She doesn't have a strong voice and she is trying to emulate singers that do. The reviews that I have read haven't been especially kind. Her choice of songs in this album simply don't work. Instead of using the strengths of her voice, they seem to just point out where she is weak. I personally think that the last really good album that she produced was "Arrasando". Jenifer Lopez has similar problems and I haven't bought any of her recent work. Doing vulgar rap doesn't count as music in my mind. The problem is that once you have this image in your mind, it is very difficult to buy something that will change it. So, you are locked into the bad image.

26 June 2003 - In the process of complaining about a spam email, I learned about a site called CyberAbuse. This server will search all of the main whois servers for the lookup of an IP address and provides the email address of the network abuse contact that covers the IP address. Before I found CyberAbuse, my lookup chain was something like ARIN, APNIC, KRNIC, RIPE, registro.br, and etc. If I use CyberAbuse, I avoid having to deal individually with each of these sites.

10 May 2003 - It has been 4 days since Soraya's new album "Soraya" was released and none of the local music stores are stocking it. I haven't seen such bad marketing since Pontiac proved they could kill the Fiero line in 3 years of neglected marketing.

6 Mar 2003 - I was introduced to dry cooked tortillas. I had dropped off 2 copies of photo's of Sandra's sister Lorena and Ricardo. Sandra asked me if I had ever had Méxicano style tortillas. I had eaten American style but not the way she cooked them. So, she got out the skillet that her mother had sent from Michoacan and started cooking tortillas. She had some "Caique Ranchero Queso Fresco" and some long sliced jalapeños.

I started out using just the queso (cheese) but noticed that Pedro was using the jalapeños and had to try it. I have a tendancy to like food spicier than Sandra and Pedro do but this combination was just right and tasted really good. No more greasy tortillas for me.

I found a pancake pan (sartén "para crepas") by Lodge Cast Iron at the local WalMart store. It even had a photo of a taco on the insert. Breaking the pan in required a little work but the 2nd set of tortillas tasted just fine.

xx Feb 2002 - I don't have a date but the FreeBSD version on opal, which is the computer I use use to maintain my web pages, was replaced with their new release called 5.0. I used opal because the HD structure was inadequate for my usage. Opal also has a number of USB-2.0 devices on it, which 5.0 handles better than the 4.x-stable I am using on the rest of the computers. One of the USB-2 devices is an Epson 2450 scanner. I ended up with a / fs of 500 MB and then my typical /tmp and /var with 1.5 GB each. I have 512 MB of DDR memory and /swap is 1024 MB. For buildworld speed, /src and /obj are each 1.5 GB and on their own controllers. You only need about 400 MB for src and obj but I believe in safety margins. The rest of the storage is split into /usr, and /usr2. So far, FreeBSD 5.0 has performed very well. I had problems with the keyboard after my first system upgrade, which required changing the boot hints.

There are some security upgrades that need to be made and my ports on opal are getting seriously out of date. Since 5.0 deals with them differently than 4.x does, I will have to do the builds on opal. I can't use the AMD 2000+ XP based system that I call ruby. Ruby's main purpose in life is running setiathome, doing port builds, and maintaining my local cvs-mirror of FreeBSD.

Since the upgrade, everything has just worked like I expect FreeBSD to do. What OS can you find a bug, inform the maintainer, and have it fixed for people around the world in less than 4 hours. I have had problems in the system that were fixed in less than an hour. Microsoft would have taken months. For example, I found a bug in Windows 98 systeminfo program. When I went to print my system info, I found that it thought that all of my HDs were 126+ TB and MS didn't fix it until they upgraded to 98-se.

I had to chuckle recently. Mac OS-X is based on a different kernel and FreeBSD's userland. Someone made the SA remark that there were 5x more users running OS-X than Linux. I am not sure I believe that statement; however, I have noticed that since Apple chose FreeBSD for the userland, FreeBSD has become very, very stable.

11 Feb 2003 - I visited Kodak's Professional Digital Camera web site where they provide marketing information on their DCS Pro 14n. This is an absolutely awesome digital camera. It is one of a group that represents the first real digital cameras in my mind. I thought that there was a Nikon to go along with the Kodak but all I could find was the Canon EOS-1Ds. Since I use a Canon EOS-7e, that would be my choice anyway. Regardless, all of these new cmos based digital cameras are totally awesome. It is similar to going from a 45rpm record to a multilayer DVD. When I was copying my historical photographs, a 35mm camera was not sufficient and I had to use my 6x6 camera. I think either of these cmos based digitals would have done the job and with out the processing to go along with it.

03 Feb 2003 - I did a web search on "Marco Antonio Solis" recently and ended up with a number of pages stating marcomusic was Solis' official web site. That address has been grabbed by someone that wants you to watch her on her web cam. The official Solis site is marcoantoniosolis.com.mx.

28 Jan 2003 - I was reading about the SBC suit on website pages where some of the data remains fixed while other positions changed. The modern forms resemble forms that we did over serial lines in 1980. We did data entry in to fields as you progressed through the form. I don't see what SBC did that wasn't a simple enhancement to what was used 22 years ago to do data entry at Hanford. The SBC patent actually deals with "frames" but every editor on Unix has done frames since I first used it. The major kicker is an article on "The Register", which is a UK based IT site.

The computers that were used at Battelle were mostly DEC Vax 11/780s. They even had some primative networking that Larry Gerhardstein and others did with coax cable. The network was not fast by current standards; however, you could run a number of connections between buildings on the Battelle Campus.

The memory of this database frontend has always brought a smile to my face. Battelle had an open house and they wanted to have the Startrek game running on the open house computer. Completely refreshing the screen was too slow when there were a number of terminals running. So, I added simple x/y cursor positioning to the redraw. A few weeks later, a lady by the name of Jan started work on the Hanford databases and I told her what I had done to Startrek. The next thing you knew, it was in the data entry modules. They couldn't play Startrek after the openhouse but the techniques that made it run on a number of terminals were part of the future. Even back then, I didn't think the usage was original. We just added technology I had used to other computer programs.

This computer group at the PNNL labs were really productive. For example, one of the staff members was Jim Russell who has the original patent for the PCM coded audio CD-ROM that has affected the life style of most of people in the world. As a percentage, how many people listen to LP albums or cassette tapes any more, I don't think it is very large. You can read about the patent in the archive of the Tri-city Herald Newspaper. A number of years were required before Sony and Phillips developed a marketable device. The concept was developed on a Saturday in 1965 and brought Battelle 4-5M$ in licensing revenue.

24 Dec 2002 - Sometimes I think I have strange taste in music but tonight I heard something really different. The name of the song was "Lo Bueno, Lo Malo, Y Lo Feo". It was, of course, "The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly" played on Andean musical instruments. The group "Aymarinkas" is a collection of professional Andean musicians.

18 Dec 2002 - Welcome to the "new" Crystal. Crystal used to be an Intel Celeron 433a with 128 MB of memory and a 5+ and a 7+ GB HDs. It is now the Intel P-III 866 Coppermine that was ruby when the motherboard died. The cpu, and memory are at least 2x faster. The HDs went from UDMA-33 to UDMA-133s and the sizes are 40 and 70 GB.

1 Dec 2002 - My setup is getting complicated and for someone that really believes in keeping things KISS simple, it is a no-no. Because of my need to simplify everything, a top-down redesign is being done. Extensive use of "mouse actions" are being used to ease navigation. On pages with links to images, clicking on a thumbnail brings up a popup window that can be closed by clicking on the full size image. The first ones to be rewritten are Yellowstone Park and Mt. Rainier. No more "back" button with the associated refresh. It is click and instantly you are back at the main page. Since this is a learning project, if it doesn't work right now, check back «smile». If it doesn't work then, something is seriously wrong and I haven't noticed. If you are looking for my mountain images, they have been moved.

28 Nov 2002 - I decided to add a section on who I like to listen to on MP3.com. The list isn't very long and you will find links straight into their web site. My MP3-list.

I also started adding my photographs from my 2002 visit to Yellowstone National Park. It is available from my Gallery Index on Crystal. If you are on OWT.com, you have a couple of redirects. The web page on OWT is setup to automatically forward you in 5 seconds but a link is there just in case it fails.

25 Nov 2002 - I went to visit Llanera.com and found they had completely redone their web site. So, if you try one of my links and it doesn't work, the rewrite on my end is in progress.

15 Nov 2002 - It seems like everyone has gotten their photographs of Mt. Etna back from the film processors and have them on their web pages. I have found that when it comes to taking photographs of mountains, you have to be lucky. The Oct-Nov 2002 eruption of Etna has provided absolutely awesome shots to everyone with a camera. There are a number of web sites on Etna. In sort of the order of discovery, they are: Vulcano Etna, Italy's Volcanoes: The Cradle of Volcanology, From Etna to Stromboli, and Etna Volcan Sicilien. Some of them are in Italian but if you understand any of the romance languages, you can generally make out what is being said.

14 Nov 2002 - I dropped by the local Hastings Book store and found a new book by Julia Alvarez. I started a small comment here but it grew until it was a small story and violated my small comment rule. So, it was added to my web page on my reading habits. The Cafecito story is not about Alvarez and her husband Bill Eichner but is an eco-parable story about the history and philosophy behind the Alta Gracia project. You can read more about it at the "Café Alta Gracia" and using fair marketed coffee. My full comments are in my Reading tastes web page. I haven't run out of things to say and it surely will grow longer.

13 Nov 2002 - I happened to visit Telmex's El Popo web site. The interesting view was from their Tlamacas cam. It is 5am in that part of México and still dark. The whole crater looked like it was glowing and that light was shinning on the gases coming from the crater. The view is updated every 5 seconds. A modem is not the way to view this site.

5 Nov 2002 - The most information I could find on Volcán de Reventador was at Ecuador Ciencía. There are photographs of Quito with a lot of ash in the air. The best images of Etna are at La Sicilia. You have to choose "Galleria di immagini" and "avanti" to advance to the next image.

15 Oct 2002 - I was sitting at one of my computers, listening to George Strait on Yahoo's Launch and thinking about español. This is the first time in 2 years that I have listened to anything but Spanish music. I have found recently that I can listen to música latina and understand much of the song. On Enrique Iglesias' album Quizas there were 4 songs that I could sing along as they played. This was almost an emotional moment. I decided that it was time to give credit. I think my transition improved significantly after I purchased a book and CD by Stacy Tipton from Musical Spanish. That seemed to be the turning point in my "Battle with Spanish".

29 Sep 2002 - In case you haven't figured out, I follow volcanos and my current interests are Popocatépetl and Volcán de Fuego in Mexico. I am awed by some of the photographs and paintings on CENAPRED´s web site. What also surprises me is how 3 million people can visit the home page and less than 4,000 have visited the "EXPOSICIONES DEL CENAPRED". Jorge Obregón's paintings are awesome; however, I am left with nothing but "¡WOW!" to say about Alejandro Boneta's photographs.

22 Sep 2002 - I finally started adding photographs from my Yellowstone vacation. This was a pleasant vacation. I didn't do anything in a hurry; however, I did get up around 6am so that I could use the 4 hours that the road from Madison Junction to Noris Geyser Basin was open for traffic. Getting up at 6am was tough because that is when my body decided that I should go to bed after I retired.

23 July 2002 - I purchased my first Mp3.com CDs. I chose Cholo Valderrama's "Caramba primo!" and Ihara's "Me Late El Corazon". I don't have an mp3 device and had to buy a real CD.

20 July 2002 - I collapsed my comments on the Columbian folklore artist, singer and composer Cholo Valderrama because they were violating my KISS principal. These entries were intended to inform where I had made changes and I had deviated from that design. Cholo has a new web page (http://www.cholovalderrama.com) that is under development. His web page on Mp3.com/Cholo was also changing. He currently has 79 songs that you can listen to for free and 4 CD-ROMs that you can purchase. The music of the Llano has a haunting sound to it and I was drawn to listen to it. So, I have moved my comments to my web page on Cholo and created the Llano region of Columbia and Venezuela web page where I can make them longer, and longer and smile while I am doing it. It also separates geography material into its own web page.

18 July 2002 - I added a "New Artists" link to my music web page. The new artists will most likely be on Mp3.com. They are people that I find interestesting. They also haven't made it to the major CD-ROM producers. The first ones to be added to this web page are Leila and Ihara. Both have really smooth voices. If I buy all of Thalía´s albums, I would probably purchased their CDs (even on a bad day). This is kind of tongue in cheek comment because I think Thalía's last album is really bad.

I found an interesting web site by José Antonio Millán. He has a number of interesting links; however, the language resources with respect to computers and the Internet was what I was most interested in. For starters, see, Vocabulario de ordenadores e Internet or his "Recursos sobre vocabulario de ordenadores e Internet". The last link is an index to web pages in various languages.

1 July 2002 - I drove North to Canada on 30 June 2002. A friend has a share of a condominium at "The Grand Okanagan Resort" at Kelowna, British Columbia. My experiences in Kelowna have been added to "Vacations".

11 June 2002 - I finally found an advertising popup that I thought was worth mentioning. It is off of the main web page for Tiscali Networks. I sat in awe for the short time that it ran.

23 April 2002 - One of the places that does not connect to Inkamerica is Andes_on-line. This Mp3 station lists a number of artists. I also happen to like the sounds of Rogelio Rangel. He has one song called "Amanecer (The Dawn-deep pipes)" that rates pretty high. It fits in because I just happen to like watching the sun rise on some volcanos around the world. I ended up creating a favorites list that includes everyone I have written about plus a group called "Pachamama".

4 April 2002 - I liked Inkamerica so well that I added a kind of fan web page. I grabbed some of their images temporarily. There are a number of artists on mp3.com that are interesting to listen to. I just happen to zero in on something new and listen to it for a period of time.

3 April 2002 - I moved my "Music of Interest" web page into its own folder. I had previously moved my comments on Cholo Valderrama and the "Música de la llanera" to a page off of my "Music of interest" web page. It was also moved to the new folder.

24 March 2002 - I had an interesting experience tonight. I walked into the living room during the Academy Awards and encountered a performance by Cirque du Soleil. I was so astonished that I didn't sit down until they finished.

9 March 2002 - Finished correcting and adding a few people to my genealogy web pages. I had a correction from a Brown that connected with one of my Wayment ancestors. I also had an error pointed out in my Wade - Merry line which also tie into the Wayment line. At the same time, a scanned image of Joseph Wayment and Ann Reed arrived in my email inbox. Joseph is one of William Wayment's sons.

22 February 2002 - Began the complete restructure of the photo albums into a Photo Gallery. The Site Contents was getting too large.

8 February 2002 - Volcán de fuego de Colima was active tonight. You could see many landslides involving red hot rocks. Fuego means fire in Spanish. My guess at translating the name would be "Colima's volcano of fire". There are also bulletins on the web page following the "Volcán de Popocatépetl". Popo is special to me because I frequently watch the sun come up on it via the "Tomaño A" en vivo web page. El Popo's altitude is approximately 5,452 meters or about 3,500 feet higher than Mt. Ranier. I have a tendancy to stay up until morning and you will frequently find me watching El Popo. I find sunrises (salida del sol) to be a special time on Popo.

31 January 2002 - I have also added some of my 2001 trip to Yellowstone photographs into "Current Photo Album". I have also scanned some 30 year old negatives. The new images are about Mt. Rainier. I had to reinstall Windows 2000 because trying to upgrade the USB from version 1.1 to 2.0 left me in an inoperable condition with respect to the new scanner. That didn't work and I ended up installing XP-Pro, which is what I am using to do this. I have also included some scanned images from early 1980 photographs of Mt. St. Helens. You can see some of the then and now changes that have occured since the erruption. I also moved the sunsets out of the "Archive Photo Album" and into one of its own on the menu on the left side.

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Last revised: Saturday, April 21, 2007