« January 2006 | Main | March 2006 »
February 22, 2006
Chicken Licking Good
Rain falls on everyone, the same old rain...
The sun will shine again, one day, and tropical storms will be a thing of the past. Just not yet. And all familiar and fair unless it's Carnival time and kiddo has got herself a princess's suit along with all garments and jewels that fit the trade, schematics of what the princess, prince, queen and king are supposed to look like and Wizard of Oz on, on her G4, with new spanking 160GB of additional storage space. It shines at her place with the firstborn's privileges and the casual nap, deep in the car, back from the store.
Life is grim if your name is Callahar.
Hello, my name is Kallahar (well, it's an alias, but Kallahar really is a family name of an 1800's Irish family Ancestry of William Kallahar, born 1830). I recently tried to create a user on Yahoo with my name. Unfortunately, Yahoo said it was unavailable...
Kafka reborn under the american flag and on the Kodak filtering. More rejoicing can be found in the full PDF with Mrs. Kallahar's narrative here.
Why Allah? Why now? And why an eyebrow when corporations keep shaping the body legal and ethics as they have been for a century, around the economics and an avalanche of lawyers? Or praise American ingenuity vs. opportunity, hailing to First Amendment again and again over our thousand-islands-mushroom-guacamole with taleggio on the toothbrush.
We know where we are going, we just don't know where we are.
Busy as he is in the daily command-post-like blog reporting, Juan Cole gives his best from a comfy spot at MetroTimes. It is an excellent, long interview that expands the topic to American psychology, motivations and trade strategies.
The debate is big about subcontracting handling of major American ports operations to a UEI (United Emirates) contractor. The anger in the face of the possibility that Arabs may acquire control of such operations is visible all over the blogosphere. It turns odd to me that no debate exists over the fact, not just a possibility, that 15% of McDonald's is currently owned by Pakistanis. Hush, your cheeseburger may be listening...
As you can imagine, with no big support from quantum mechanics, shares don't mind what religion you like.
Do you really want to know who owns the remaining 85% of McDonald's? I know you won't. The jucy part is unrelated to Terrorism. Joshua M. Marshall explains it well here.
The administration did not require Dubai Ports to keep copies of business records on U.S. soil, where they would be subject to court orders. It also did not require the company to designate an American citizen to accommodate U.S. government requests. Outside legal experts said such obligations are routinely attached to U.S. approvals of foreign sales in other industries...
The failure to require the company to keep business records on US soil sounds like a pretty open invitation to flout US law as near as I can tell. Forget terrorism. This is the sort of innovative business arrangement I would think a number of Bush-affiliated American companies might want to get in on. Perhaps Halliburton could be domiciled in Houston, pay its taxes in Bermuda, do its business in Iraq and keep its business records in Jordan.
Does that sound better?
Originally on Samizdata a collection of amazing aerial photos of Mexico City, here. Bizarre.
Macs are good at sharing resources with minimum effort on the user. We are sharing our ADSL via Firewire on several macs. The good is Firewire is extremely fast and the whole family can go online simultaneously from several computers. She is playing a DVD but does not really know where the physical disc is actually and I am sucking in data from one of the two storage units that I am not physically connected to and the kid is streaming Disney off of the shared Internet comm. I guess you can do the same on a PC but then again you probably have to be a Microsoft Certified Engineer with lots of days off and a double pack of painkillers. 3 macs just in the bedroom and the kid knows what works on mine must work on her.
Go explain kids to Microsoft.
Fear not, we have an update the finest. here. Yes, Yahoo Mail reverses ban on 'allah' in usernames. As everybody but some know, gods are celebrities. Left out of the grapevine? No way.
Posted by lck at 11:29 PM | Comments (1)
February 12, 2006
Swan, swan, hummingbird
It finally made it. It made it and I mean here. 21 swans out of a flock of 18 (which is, there's going to be more) found dead by the so-far-deadly H5N1, a.k.a. bird flu, within the range of this province. The event, predictable and in fact predicted, with Sicily main route for these birds to and from Russia on an average path that goes thru Southern Italy (Calabria and Puglia, 3 swans reported dead today), Albania and Yugoslavia, Ukraine and Romania and Bulgaria and, finally, indeed, Russia.
Reasons to be concerned? Cool it there maybe. Several different formulas are being final-tested for a working vaccine, including an Italian and an Israeli, the latter, apparently, very effective. The more the virus is learning from us the more we learning from him. Meanwhile avoid that swan-brushing...
I found Repubblica's special, also outlined by Zib, to be x-specially ineffective and confusing as it tries to merge a forum with structured ambientation. A better source for non-Italian readers may be this.
Did you know that the H5N1 flu virus has been circulating continuously in poultry in south-eastern China for a decade?
A massive genetic analysis shows the virus has mainly been spread by poultry, but also that wild birds carried it from southeast China to Turkey. Yi Guan and colleagues at Shantou University, plus scientists in Xiamen and Hong Kong, say the only way to stop the virus is to control it in southeast China. The Chinese authorities have denied the country is the epicenter of the virus and opposed independent flu research.
One overshadowed aspect so far is the impact bird flu is having in Africa, as detailed in a report from Nigeria, where birds are being toasted by the tens of thousands, indiscriminately. In a strange twist the Nigerian government now claims H5N1 did not reach the country via migratory birds, but through smuggled "pets and birds". Which is???
Small poultry farmers in Nigeria close to where the deadly H5N1 avian flu virus was detected said on Thursday birds were dying in large numbers and they did not know why.
The west African state is the first country on the continent to report the virus that is endemic in poultry in parts of Asia and has killed at least 88 people since late 2003.
The unexplained poultry deaths raise the possibility that the virus has already spread from four big commercial farms to small farms and even households in Africa's most populous country, posing a greater threat to human health.
[...] The Agriculture Ministry said 45,000 chickens had died at Sambawa Farms in Kaduna state, and confirmed cases of H5N1 had also been found at two farms in the neighboring Kano state and at one farm in Plateau state, which also borders Kaduna.
We still lack a single case of human-2-human transmission that we can demonstrate beyond doubt. Viruses, in their struggle for new flesh, can be very patient. Unless they can not figure it out.
Detailing the first significant outbreak (of a disease believed to be deadly) in the country with a constellation of mp3 audio and video galleries that most times break depending on your PC platform and plug-in type is a very unprofessional approach. Italian press is using flash video and WMV and intermixed. Let's hope next time they will get the story in a more old-fashioned way than this.
I can still count on North Korea for the best in denial arts. NK may deny Earth orbits around the Sun along with a sleuth of fancier things, like Microsoft's own anti-virus product (still in beta but being distributed as if it was not) tagging Symantec's Norton Anti-Virus as a virus and prompting you to delete it. Which is crazy enough to an already busy IT staff. But the best is that it is indeed possible (practically) to travel at near-speed-of-light, no headaches. Available here and quickly getting into mainstream. And for once NK would be with the wise guys.
Beam me up.
Posted by lck at 12:41 AM | Comments (2)
February 04, 2006
A fish for a fish
The day is a feast-full of the weirdest, from a flower-shaped rock spotted on Mars soil, a volcanic formation possibly, to the astronaut's suit filled up with dirty socks and let go to float out and around the ISS space station. By gravity's courtesy the suit won't go far and by way of temperature the batteries will freeze after an hour or so. The so-called "experiment" was videotaped by ISS personnel and available on the web. The narration all but clarifies what the experiment was for.
Do we need to remind our muslim friends and neighborhood that religion is a form of expression? As a form of expression in all its genres, its visuals and not, religion can any other day collide with others, who possibly express their ways differently. Unless we crave to grant religion a special status and protect it legally from collision, which we have been bordering for a while with political-correctness, a common ground has to be found. Burning flags, taking down embassies and threatening journalists does not make anybody better. Common ground to life is that it ends and if you we not cope with the simple idea that religious beliefs are a form of psychological self-shelling ourselves from the unknown and unbearable we need to find a good psychiatrist. This is true not just for muslims, which I am far away from targeting here, it is true for anybody. How great would it be if we all give up and focus on "here and now" versus the "there and after", a place we all know biologically impossible. Don't ask yourself if you are tolerant of others but do ask yourself what you want to do before you die.
The baby wanted a goldfish today. Initially she thought to give it to the turtles and enjoy the slaughtering as she discovered that turtles are predators. The wife was nodding on the same murky design. I hated both and especially their convergence. So there we go and buy a little anonymous goldfish that the kid could carry at home. While carrying it she changed her mind, now she wanted to keep it. Wife hated to push for a second fish to satisfy her need for a grand show. Now we're all starring at little Pierre going circles in a glass bowl soon to be forgotten as fishes don't do anything exciting besides circling around. I guess we all miss the original gruesome intentions now.
Posted by lck at 07:05 PM | Comments (0)
February 01, 2006
Cal Update
The Cal06 gallery has been updated (banner-click or here) with my Feb06, Wendy's perfect shot of a pretty exotic dye coloring process (the dark silhouettes are leaves) and Christian Lindemann's of lindedesign vector illustration. Cute Whale!
Posted by lck at 05:56 PM | Comments (0)
