What a lovely day for an execution, don't you think?

The anti death penalty group was hilarious in their lack of conviction singing "We Shall Overcome". Pulleazze... Oh look, the TV cameras are rolling, we need to sing a protest song. The verses don't fit the situation at all, but I found myself instead humming the chorus lines to "Will the Circle be Unbroken?" - which does.

In the sky, Lord, in the sky...

Amusing that most all of us have watched hundreds of thousands of enacted violent deaths on television. But we don't get to watch a real person strapped in a chair fall alseep for the last time. Too violent... But that's OK, because this chemical bullshit is too humane. We Americans want to be entertained by our murderers. That's what this is all about. OJ entertained us. Is it just a coincidence he went free? I think not. Let's have televised firing squads, or a return to 'eye for an eye' justice. If we're gonna' kill the dude, do it right. Strap him into a truck full of ammonium nitrate set to detonate at a random time within the next week. For added realism, parked directly underneath a couple thousand tons of concrete. Live streaming webcams. Now that's entertainment.

Has anybody but me noticed that there's an expiration date on packaged water?

One of the often recurring email spams is the headline "PENIS ENLARGEMENT", often with about a page and a half of introductory text and miraculous results via pills or surgery or whatever. I don't know because I never read them. Today I got one that must've been a joke, but it wasn't from anybody I know. I clicked to select it for deletion and up pops some porn with a tremendously sexy female model with a male body builder type model inside her. No text on the page, no links, no advertisement. Just a picture. Danged if it didn't work...

10-Jun-2001

For those who still think the entire problem is easy access to guns we need look no further than Japan, where the latest schoolyard massacre occured. Eight dead and fifteen wounded. The weapon? A kitchen knife.

The first section of retaining wall is now complete except for stucco. It may sound like an accomplishment, but this is only about 12 feet of wall so far. I've got about 80 to go. However, this now let's me start on the patio for the barbecue 'nook' and several other sub-tasks.

The ominous sign of a hard drive ready to die - takes five minutes to spin up and only after you whack the case a couple of times. This is really a juggling act. The hard drive in question is like the seventh generation I've managed to save most of my work and project files from back in DOS 3.1 days. Not Windows 3.1, DOS 3.1; when I was using a Korean PC clone with a 20 meg hard drive. I also have several generations of Linux going back probably 8 years that I've migrated to newer hard drives as they've died. But this is the end of an era. I just copied everything - Linux, DOS, old windows stuff - from four different 1gig hard drives (see how old they are) onto a more recent 20 gig drive; and I now intend to turn off SCSI for good. There was a time when having SCSI was important but that time is long gone. I can probably also knock the background noise in my studio down about 8 db.

Should probably just put all this old stuff on CD and not worry about it anymore. It's archive stuff after all. I'm not messing with those files anymore except to find them occasionally. But I've been lucky. Do you trust CD-R? Don't... I've had them fail. Guess the moral is to put important data in as many places and as many formats as you can and just pray; although there isn't much data from over a year ago that I would consider irreplaceable anymore. If this hard drive had just died completely it would be shocking at first, but I haven't looked at it for six months. It probably wouldn't be a great loss.

Update: So I just physically removed four hard drives, one CD recorder/player, a tape backup unit and an interface card from a computer and rebooted. Luckily this was Linux but I had reason to be concerned. It came up normally and surprisingly quiet without all those hard drives humming. If this was Windows it would've been kicking an epileptic fit about now.

09-Jun-2001

The girl behind me at Home Depot was giving me the strangest looks. I had as much rebar and concrete that I could load on the cart (and fit in the car)... and 24 chrome drawer pulls for the kitchen cabinets. "So you're like building cement bedroom furniture?"

The City of Riverside told the Independant System Operator that they refuse to have rolling blackouts like everybody else. Pretty arrogant of them. Especially when they've got more air conditioners per capita running 24 hours a day than most of the rest of the state. Poor baybees....

Too nice a day to be slogging through a ton of concrete. So I grabbed the new camera, a Maxwell Silverthorn CD (but of course), and hit the highway with the top down and music cranked. This is how California is meant to be experienced. Went down through Hollister to San Jaun Baustista. Looked at antiques and art and took a few shots of interesting stuff. You can find them off the new photo gallery link. These were medium-low resolution (1024x768). I'll save hi-res for something I know is going to be a winner. Trust me that I'll spare you from downloading 4megs a picture unless they're just plain incredible, and these weren't quite. Had some good subjects, but the light was on the wrong side of the day. Reminder to self: photograph San Jaun in the morning - everything interesting faces east. This camera is a gazillion times better in terms of focus and exposure than the Sony. Just like working with a 35mm; and I even turned on the "shutter sound" to add to the illusion - except I've got 868 pictures per disk in basic web mode (640x480)and 224 at 1024x768. That's a lot of shots.

Drove back via the old Monterey Highway as I did the previous time I made this drive. Before 101 was finished in Gilroy this was the vege-route. Used to drive down there on Saturdays and pick up two weeks worth of fresh produce, fruit, and vegetables for about 5 bucks. Nowadays you don't get any breaks at the roadside stands. Same thing you pay at Safeway, and most of the stuff isn't grown locally anyway. Why bother?