Good news from MSNBC:
An NHL team owner who asked for anonymity said the league is
expected to cancel the season either Thursday or Friday….
Let us hope that basketball and baseball follow hockey's lead, and we
can enjoy a spring & summer of peace & quiet.
President Bush is on the road for a few days, talking up his plan to save
Social Security. He's not going to raise taxes, or reduce benefits: instead,
people now in their twenties & thirties will have to wait even longer to
retire, and will get less money when they do. But that's not a reduction
in benefits!
He's also pushing for partial privatization of Social Security. Under the
current system, the government takes your money and gives it to people who
have already retired; but under the privatization scheme proposed by the
President, the government takes your money, gives most of it to people who
have already retired, then invests the remainder in a private account.
(Having one of these private accounts will sharply reduce your eligibility
for traditional Social Security benefits.) When you retire, the government
will take most of the money from your private account and give it to other
retirees. You'll get to keep what's left, which will not make up for the
Social Security benefits you lost by having the private account.
That will save Social Security, in much the same way as all those
(apocryphal?) villages in Viet Nam were saved…
NOAA reports 36° as of 1:00pm. Perhaps the sump pump has thawed
out.
Pitcairn Island, 4½ square kilometers of volcanic rock halfway
between New Zealand and Peru, population 46 (which works out to 9¾
hectares each), has not one but two web sites: the Pitcairn Islands
Office (http://www.government.pn/),
which is apparently all the government they need; and the Pitcairn Island
site (http://www.lareau.org/pitc.html).
The Notes For
Visitors page isn't very welcoming. I would paraphrase it as
follows:
- Getting here is difficult, and expensive.
- Leaving is even more so.
- There are no banks, no grocery stores, no hotels.
- There are no doctors. If you die, it's not our problem.
- There are no tourist attractions.
Even so, if I had the leisure time and disposable income for it, I'd love
to spend a month on Pitcairn Island.
The island newspaper, the Pitcairn Miscellany, has its own web site:
http://www.miscellany.pn/. (Great
name for a newspaper, I must say.) Alas, one must subscribe ($10/year)
to get the news from Pitcairn Island.
Useful web site: http://www.metric-conversions.org/.
Wondering how many square inches in a hectare? Now you can
find
out!
The Carmi Times (http://www.carmitimes.com/)
reports today that Toni M. Finchem and Ricky Burris were
involved in a car vs. truck accident Wednesday afternoon,
in Carmi. No injuries; they didn't even have to call for a tow
truck. (So ‘accident’ might be an overly grand
word for what happened.)
I'm just guessing, but I believe that this Ricky Burris is
the son of Gilbert Burris, who was the brother of Fred Burris, who
married my grandmother, Vina Sturm, on February 1st, 1936
(which marriage was annulled shortly thereafter).
Small world, or something.
Thinking about backup options for nessus. Five years ago, when I was
assembling nessus, the plan was to back up files to the cd burner: a 650MB
CD-R seemed luxurious compared to the 100MB Zip disks I was using.
But these days we have gigabytes of digital camera pictures, and even
more gigabytes of iTunes music; it would take an entire spindle of CD-Rs
to back that up, not to mention the time it would take to shuffle all
those blanks in & out of the burner.
A better option would be something like the Maxtor OneTouch, which is
a 160GB external disk that plugs into the FireWire port. Backing up one
disk to another just seems more sensible. And only $190, too.
Problems re-importing George Harrison's Cloud Nine
into iTunes: “An unknown error occurred (0x77686174).”
Well, that's certainly helpful.
Alas, it's late (10:05pm). I'll have to try again tomorrow.