Today I'd like to pause and offer my enduring gratitude to some unknown engineer in the Powers Company, who invented the pressure balanced shower valve. Didn't have quite the same impact as the Shockley transistor or the Farnsworth television, but it was one of the more influential inventions of all time. Today the sprinklers kicked in as I was showering. My immediate instinct is still to take a dive for the shower door. But I stayed. And the pressure went down. The temperature stayed the same, just as it was designed to do. In my last condo, I would literally suffer burns if I didn't get out of the way when anybody in the entire complex flushed a toilet. A shower was a terrifying ordeal, because you never knew when somebody would flush somewhere. In half a second your skin would be scalded. One learned quickly to move very quickly.

Assuming that Saddam is still breathing - and I'm not assuming anything; it should be pretty easy to find him. His family are all spoiled brats. They can't have any quality of life unless they're spending bucketloads of money. We've found a few of the stashes, but to find the family, all you have to do is figure out where huge amounts of money are circulating. Payoffs will need to be made to keep the locals quiet. The family will need lots of new resources to rebuild their luxury life in hiding. There will be a little enclave somewhere that's rolling in commerce and no obvious industry to support it. As adminstrators of the banking system, we should be able to pinpoint it.

A customer informs me that somebody opened a music studio around the corner. It wasn't there yesterday. Music studios around the corner would be a good thing. Long as they don't sell anything but space and services. I'll have to do a walkabout after work.

At last some signs of life out there. Three guitars, a mandolin, and a celtic harp. Looks like my first break even day in about five weeks. I seem to recall that I've had two or three days this year that were actually profitable. There are still a few hours left, so my fingers are crossed. But by this point, there's no such thing as a profitable day because it only helps to marginally balance the really bad ones.