perhaps cigarettes was a poor choice to use, concerning the unhealthy aspects of Chinese manufacturing. So here's another bit on a product more mundane, drinking water. I only point out these issues because it is interesting to see a new economy expanding rapidly, as the American economy did decades ago, and to observe a similar 'learning curve' take place. How soon before there is a Chinese FDA that will regulate traditional herbal medicines there? Of course we'd not be hearing about any of this, were it not for the fact that we are now at risk by their lack of oversight. But so much of what American consumers purchase today comes from this (relatively) unregulated system, we need to be concerned. The May 24, 2007 Newsweek magazine included an article about American companies that have outsourced work to China, and now are opposing labor reform there. Would they also oppose greater governmental oversight of their product safety? One would hope not, but anything that potentially hits the bottom line, like ensuring product safety, may be fair game. So until the Chinese have an FDA like ours, don't buy their bottled water:

Counterfeit Barreled Water Halves Beijing Market - Beijing Times

Posted by Michael Zhao :: 2007-07-09, 05:20 AM :: Society

Another sort of water crisis, this time maybe not deadly though. Translated from Beijing Times via sina.com (photo: see which is fake? answer in the end of story):

Beijing's bottled water professionals spill the secret that half of Beijing's bottled water is counterfeit, numbering more than 100 million barrels a year, worth 1 billion yuan. The big four brands, Wahaha, Robust, Nestle and Yanjing, with a combined annual sales of 25-30 million bottles, are the major targets of counterfeiting.

The bottled water market started up in 1997 and by 2002 the counterfeit products, also knonwn as No. 2 water, accounted for only 20%. In five years, counterfeits sweep half of Beijing. A Guangdong water firm tried to make in to Beijing but only learned it was impossible: over 1,000 water stations it approached to work with tried to teach its employees how to counterfeit. [left glass is fake, middle is tap water and right is genuine bottled water. Not much of a difference huh?]

Today is my birthday once again. Had a lovely dinner at the Briars in Bowral. So what does a Yankee expat eat at a five-star Australian restaurant?  I went for the kangaroo. In fact it doesn't taste like chicken at all. It tastes like beef. Maybe just a hint of gaminess like buffalo - but without the fat that buffalo has (you can fill a schooner with the fat in a slice of buffalo steak).

OK, a schooner is the 'large' beer glass in most of Australia - 12 oz. When you order a beer, you order either a regular or a schooner. I find this amusing. The bartender or waitress always looks at you with wide eyes like this schooner is something to be afraid of. Now 12 oz. is the normal size beer bottle throughout the world - or around a third of a liter. However in the west (Perth) and some parts of the outback a schooner is the smallest glass in the bar and the normal sized drink is at least a liter. That's more what I'm used to. A liter is a decent glass of beer. I had to laugh the first time. What's this pathetic schooner thing you gave me? I ordered a large beer.

But I digress.

So anyway kangaroo tastes just like any other big yummy steak.

Have some crocodile with that? 

The last week has been spent mostly getting settled in and acquiring all of the necessary things to function in this country. A bank account (I mean one that can be used with local currency). A car (Toyota Corolla - hey it was cheap). Picking it up tomorrow. Medicare, which is the state health care system; not just for the elderly. Today was the driver license. I think that's all the important stuff. At least now I can claim to be a legal functioning adult person instead of in some transitory state.

Now to find a job.

After a few weeks of exploring the virtual world of Second Life, I finally decided to cash in my chips and walk away. It's a fascinating world - in fact I'd love to say that it's a microcosm of everything that is wrong with our sick society; which is why it no longer interests me. In your face advertising, gambling, prostitution, crime, and of course anything having to do with sex. Sounds just like America. Except there's not much else. OK, there are a lot of buildings - where people go to find sex or have sex. If you get lonely and try and find some people, you'll find them. Having sex or trying to have sex. Notice a common theme here? If you try and approach a single person in the 'street', they'll either fly away quickly (because they're sick and tired of having sex), or you'll likely get shot with some kind of particle disruptor or attacked by a swarm of killer bees. These are really nasty, incidentally.

It'll cost you about $5 for the hardware and software to actually have sex (but of course the sky is the limit if you want to upgrade). Don't buy the cheap one, get the Xcite. I could give you twenty reasons, but the most important is that the Xcite is interactive and you can tweak the size and color and uhm 'hardness'. The cheap ones come in a single skin tone and are one-size-fits-all and you can either put it on flaccid or stiff. Nothing in between. No refunds, and you can't sell it later. The Xcite will react if someone touches your privates (and you allow them to arouse you). There's also a female version and they all interact automatically. OK, that's the basic hardware. You also need to be around 'pose balls' to have sex. These are little blue and pink balls that you'll find everywhere, and they play a little (possibly x-rated) animation starring you. Usually the guy gets the blue ball and the girl gets the pink - but of course there are variations. Different balls have different poses. Doggie, missionary, 69, on the desk, etc. If you want to run a sex parlor, you'll need a bunch of these puppies. They cost about a dollar each. If you don't want to run a sex parlor, you're going to be awfully lonely - because that's where everybody is going.

But the cruel irony is that you won't be able to get it up in the free sex clubs where everybody goes to try out their hardware. Too many people - your system won't respond in a timely manner. They call it 'lag'. The only way to truly exercise your hardware is in private with a call girl (for about $5 for a half hour). They're everywhere, because this is the one profitable business you can run in SL without owning land (which will cost you somewhere upwards of $25, depending of course on location, location, location; and an account upgrade to monthly fees of $5 on up depending on how much land you want). Get out your credit card.

I probably should qualify all of this with 'so I've been told', because of course I would never do these things.  

But there's an upside to all this. There's a future for Second Life yet. We give all the sex offenders and perverts in our jails second life accounts and let them live out their twisted perversions. They'll be ecstatic that they can do whatever they want with like-minded people and get so absorbed in the fantasy that it might just keep them off the real life street. 

The girls have landed in Australia. Now it's my turn to get the house sold, get all the rest of the stuff packed up and then I'll soon be joining them.

Apologies for being brief, but there's a lot to do and not much time remaining.

So where ARE the million and a half people who are full-time military? On today's front page of the San Francisco Chronicle, we find out that:

Soldiers of the 1st Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division had so little time between deployments to Iraq they had to cram more than a year's worth of training into four months. And some soldiers were assigned to the brigade so late that they had no time to train in the United States at all. Instead of the yearlong training recommended prior to deployment, they prepared for war during the two weeks they spent in Kuwait, en route to Anbar, Iraq's deadliest province. Some had only a few days to learn how to fire their new rifles before they deployed to Iraq -- for the third time -- last month.

Whether you agree with the 'surge' or not, this smacks of criminal negligence at best. Why are we sending poorly or even untrained people into a war they know nothing about? They don't know the language or the culture that surrounds them,and no one, from the President on down. seems to think this is wrong. Do we also issue our troops a blindfold and a last cigarette?

here's the link to the entire article: 

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/02/04/MNG9ONUKVT1.DTL&hw=anna+badkhen&sn=001&sc=1000

This went by on jwz's dnalounge blog the other day, but my feed processor doesn't import embedded videos from the wild, so you might have missed it.

Lucky you...

Sorry folks for the problems connecting this morning. Had our very first million hit day, and the servers in La Brea weren't ready for it - and neither was I....

It was a combination of several things converging at once. Shamita Shetty  apparently was exposed on the Style Ikon channel, and even with an overlaid star to protect the family jewels it seems that a bunch of folks from the UK couldn't get enough of it. Wonder what this incident did to the transatlantic backbones...

But what really killed the servers was that as this was going on - Google, Yahoo, and Ask Jeeves and a couple of other search engines all converged on 10-12 of my sites at the same time to do their normally periodic crawls. Normally I'll get one or two crawlers doing one or two sites a day. 

This belongs to MichaelAnn. Reproduced here because I love it. I would normally just import the feed except this one is setup with teaser (short) feeds where all the articles are chopped off in mid [...]

You've reached support, how may I help you?

I must admit, if you change "England" and "British" to "America" and "American", I'd agree with this in a heartbeat. Please keep in mind that all the teachers in San Francisco together will not make what Barry Zito makes, each year for the next 7 years.  And goodness knows we could use some "community cohesion"!

From the BBC News: 

Schools in England should teach "core British values" alongside cultural diversity, a report says.

Education Secretary Alan Johnson has said schools should "play a leading role in creating community cohesion". 

He commissioned the review in the wake of the London bombings. Ministers see schools as a key place to promote understanding between communities and to combat intolerance and religious extremism.

He said youngsters should be encouraged to think critically about issues of race, ethnicity and religion with "an explicit link" to current political debates, the news and a sense of British values.

"I believe that schools can and should play a leading role in creating greater community cohesion. The values our children learn at school will shape the kind of country Britain becomes."

Sir Keith Ajegbo, a former head teacher of a London school and Home Office adviser, was asked to look at how "citizenship" and "diversity" was being taught in schools.

Sir Keith said: "Britain is committed to the values of free speech, the rule of law, mutual tolerance and respect for equal rights. They are things that are fundamental to our society."

He said: "It is the duty of all schools to address issues of `how we live together' and `dealing with difference', however difficult or controversial they may seem".

The link to the entire article:

I've been playing a bit with creating a 3d tic-tac-toe game for the website. Turns out that it wasn't horrendously difficult to program, but I forgot how easy it is to win. There are a variety of popular handicaps. A popular one is to remove/disable the center square on the second level. This makes it marginally more difficult to win easily. Another popular tweak is to turn it into four-square (4X4X4) which also removes the center spot advantage. I haven't yet decided which tweak to go with, or figure out if I can balance the odds even further. 

You can try it out at here, but be advised that I've still got a lot of work to do, and it still has some bugs.  

Mommy look at that man over there - trying to ice skate. Gimme' your camera. This is too funny. There. Did you see how he was waving his arms before he fell this time? Look! There he goes again, right into the wall. Splat! Oooh, that must've hurt.

Sigh...

Hillary Clinton announced that she's in the running. Wow! That's like so totally unexpected!

Unfortunately, that pretty much wraps the race. The only thing that stands in the way of a Clinton victory is if a) she self destructs, or b) a real leader is found that is willing to run against her. I wouldn't put money on either of those probabilities.

Once again the SBC (oops AT&T) DSL stopped working.

So once again I called tech support. Since it was late at night, I got the India call center. (The sun never sets on the British empire). My line is dead. Can you fix it?

How far away are you from Irvine?

Oh, about 400 miles.

Scratches his head... OK, I see an outage in Menlo Park also, is that near you? 

It's about fifteen miles. 

Then that's the problem. It will be resolved by 11PM. Have a nice day.

Grumble, grumble. My POP is in Santa Clara. It doesn't go anywhere near the Menlo Park circuit. I've traced it numerous times. Whatever. Good night.

7:30 AM - still not working. I call again. This time I get Ireland. (The sun never sets on the British empire). My line is dead. Can you fix it?

Can you authenticate via PPPoE?

Uhm, I wasn't using PPPoE. That's why I got a static IP address.

No, you're definitely using PPPoE. Try authenticating again.

I can't authenticate. I don't have any PPPoE authentication software. I couldn't run it if I did, because I'm behind a Linux gateway. Everything worked fine yesterday. Then it just stopped. Nothing in my network has changed except that suddenly there's no IP routing through the ATM circuit. The ATM link still appears to be there.

Hang on... (goes away for thirty minutes).

It seems that your circuit was moved. You're now using PPPoE, and by the way, you've got a new IP address.

Uhhm, that's why I ordered a static IP (and am paying through the nose for it). So that my address wouldn't change, and also so I wouldn't have to use Windows to authenticate. I don't use Windows. I use Linux.

Well, that's too bad. You've got a new IP, and you're going to have to authenticate. Here's your new address. We don't support Linux, so you're going to have to use Windows, unless you get a new modem that does PPPoE authentication.

Have a nice day. 

Is there some reason why you guys couldn't tell me this was going to happen? I mean, why do I have to find out by the fact that my line is dead?

This is like calling the post office to find out why the postman hasn't been around lately and being told that it's because your street address changed to another street in another city. Oh, and you'll have to sign for all your mail in Fairbanks, Alaska.

Sigh...