Picking up the Pace with a New Cafe

Once again the pace is picking up here at the Computer Cleaners/GoNOMAD office. We've committed to moving four buildings up, to an old fashioned storefront with big bay windows, space for five public computers, more desks, more storage, and parking in the back. We are going to open the GoNOMAD Cafe, where you can check email, browse the web, buy coffee and juice and talk to us about computers. We are also looking into hooking up a powerful Wifi router that will blast our signal in a wide fifteen-hundred yard radius. The possibilities are endless and we're on top of them!




Our techs will be in the back working on computers, and we will sell memory, network cards, upgrades and a whole bunch of other products..maybe even Ipods! We will design and host websites and do website search engine optimizing. We might use our network of terminals to teach classes.

Our new landlords the Rotkiewiczes are easy to work with and happy that we chose their spot. Now it's time to find out what South Deerfield thinks about us serving coffee and pastries. This is gonna be fun.

The Most Intriguing People....and the Winner

Barbara Walters has transcended the role of television show host to that of an icon, a decider....now that she has retired, we only see her on special occasions, like last night. She presented the top ten most fascinating people....and made us wait until the very end to know that her MOST intriguing and interesting person was the wife of Prince Charles, Camilla Parker Bowles.

She drove fast in a Mustang with Tom Cruise, (who refused to take back anything he said about Ritalin, and denied that Scientology demands women keep quiet during childbirth) and kicked it around with Kayne West. Singer West got into hot water when he said Bush didn't care about the black hurricane victims, but like Cruise he was polite and erudite speaking to America's Grand Dame. And didn't deny anything.

But Bowles...is she the most intriguing person? Maybe she is because she and Charles loved one another way back before the glittering ill-fated wedding to Diana. But they both bided their time, and after decades, she now goes to America and scores our top prize. I mean Babs saying you're number one...that's an honor here.

They're Lining Up to Buy the Body Farm

Iowa's rich topsoil and climate have nourished some of the nation's most plentiful corn and soybean crops. Tyler O'Brien wants to learn more about their influence on rotting corpses. {Associated Press}

"A biological anthropology professor at the University of Northern Iowa, O'Brien envisions turning some prime Iowa pasture into a body farm, where human bodies -- buried, stuffed in car trunks or exposed to the elements -- can provide scholars and criminalists with new benchmark data on human decay.

If approved, the body farm would be just the second in the nation and closely modeled after the work pioneered by O'Brien's mentor, William Bass III, at the University of Tennessee's Forensic Anthropology Center.

Inside a secure, three-acre parcel near the Tennessee campus, Bass and his team have spent more than 30 years painstakingly documenting the decay of bodies buried in coffins and shallow dirt graves, partially submerged in a pond, or exposed to bugs, rodents and hot, muggy summers.

"Do you have any idea how much heat is generated in the middle of a cornfield in the summer?" O'Brien asked. "It gets awfully hot in there, with little air. It could be very important to know how a microclimate like that affects decomposition. Different environments can change the rate of decay and tell us new facts about what happened."

If O'Brien's grant is approved -- and he has been rejected before -- the site would be owned by the university and secured by a chain-link fence topped with razor wire around a taller privacy fence.

Despite the mass appeal of TV crime shows like CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, O'Brien knows persuading the public to see beyond the grim details will be a hard sell. Bodies used at the farm would be donated by families in the region much the same as they donate a body for medical research.

Everybody Loves Roger

Chicago Magazine ran a profile on a writer who is often more famous than his movie star subjects, Roger Ebert. Here's a bit about the olden daze.

"After work, the gathering place in those days was a bar called O’Rourke's, a hangout with the look of a shabby Irish pub. The typical slog went from the newspaper office to Riccardo’s for dinner and drinks, to O’Rourke’s until closing at 2 a.m., then down North Avenue a block to the Old Town Ale House, which stayed open until four. The trek became known as the Bermuda Triangle. “Night after night, year after year, all the time,” says Ebert, whose drinking crew included Zonka, Galloway, and John McHugh.

Ebert, who drank Johnnie Walker Black Label Scotch, could finish off a bottle by himself. Later, when he worried that he might be drinking too much, he told Galloway that he had his drinking under control—the night before, he had consumed only 15 highballs.

The more Ebert drank, the jollier he became. “He might just start singing or reciting a poem,” recalls Marshall Rosenthal, who was then working as a reporter at the Chicago Daily News. Ebert and McHugh would quote Yeats, sometimes in unison, and Ebert would also compose limericks. When he stuck his hand in his pocket and pulled out a rumpled carbon copy, the regulars knew that he was about to read them his review for the next day."

Look! Up in the Sky! Conjoined Monorails!

Just weeks after voters struck down plans for a new monorail, a design glitch and a communication mishap immobilized the old one. Seattle's PI reported today.

Like conjoined twins, the Red and Blue trains remained frozen on the track above Fifth Avenue and Olive Way after the two sideswiped each other in a tight curve authorities have known about since 1989, when the inclusion of Westlake Center changed the original 1962 track design to taper at the point leading into the mall.

"It's too narrow for two to be there," said Seattle Center spokesman Perry Cooper "There was some sort of communication problem."

There are supposed to be signal lights on the track and communication between drivers when both trains are running, he said, suggesting that one or both of those safety measures failed Saturday night.
"We're very aware of the pinch point in the line, but it's never happened since it's been put in," Cooper said. "It's an unfortunate accident.

Among the Most Embarrassing Moments - Ever

The following cautionary tale must surely rate in the top five of "most embarrassing things that can happen to you in public - ever". According to UK tabloid the Sun, a 33-year-old Welsh housewife ended up in hospital after wearing Ann Summers vibrating Passion Pants to her local Asda supermarket in Swansea.

Unfortunately, she became "so aroused by the 2½-inch vibrating bullet inside that she fainted" then "fell against shelves and banged her head". This prompted the attendance of the paramedics who "found the black leatherette panties still buzzing". Having disabled the orgasmatronic underwear, they then whisked the senseless shopper to hospital where she made a complete recovery. Staff handed her back the Passion Pants upon discharge, discreetly concealed in a plastic bag.

To its credit, the Sun does not name the woman. We assume, however, that she will be shopping at her local Tesco for the next ten years or so, or until everyone in the Asda who witnessed her ordeal is dead or has succumbed to total amnesia - whichever comes soonest."

Horse and House in Patagonia

Putawapi Chile. photo by Paul Shoul 

The Decadence of Organic Candied Lark's Tongues

Columnist Neil Steinberg just lived through the ultimate publicity and personal nightmare: He got drunk, slapped his wife, and ended up in jail and in rehab. His Chicago Sun-times come-back column promised he'd pull no punches, sober or not. "Some readers expressed concern that sobriety will wreck my acerbic view of life. Fat chance. Having your beloved crutch kicked away before being dragged backward by your heels through hell is not an experience designed to make one giddy at life's rich pageant.

...I couldn't read descriptions in Whole Foods of the coddled apples and happy chickens fed only natural grains without thinking of the Romans, and their candied lark's tongues. Organic food is decadent, even worse than the excesses of the past because it is disguised as virtue. The whole world is eating beans grown in the sludge of old bauxite mines and gnawing meat that has hung on hooks in the market for three days, while we're paying $10 a pound for maple mustard roasted turkey from birds raised on Mozart.

We're not paying for the food, really, we're paying for the packaging, and its implication that our lettuce was grown by pueblos and delivered by ox cart. I stood in gaping wonder at "American Flatbread," an "all-natural pizza baked in a primitive wood-fired earthen oven." At first I focused on "earthen" as the marvel. "I tried pizza from metal ovens but it tasted so ... technological."

And we, we are not charmless suburbanites yapping on our cell phones as we roar up to Whole Foods in monstrous vehicles that burn more money in gas each month than most people in the world earn in a year. No, we are gentle, rainforest folk, crouching under the lush green canopies of our self-regard, using our fingers to eat organic groats from wide bowls, groats gently washed with spring water, a bargain at $7.99 a pound."

Video Rentals Toasted

Edward Wasserman is Knight professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University. He wrote a commentary in the Miami Herald today about the newspaper business and other doomed species.

"The Internet does threaten some revenue franchises, especially classifieds. But it also offers a new way to reach audiences by going paperless and shedding 60 percent of operating costs.

By contrast, consider the video rental business. Now there's an industry that's toast. Or the plight of your local TV stations, the richly profitable affiliates that depend on the flow of network shows -- and those programs are heading to the Internet. Now that over half of U.S. online users have high-capacity broadband connections, the Web is mutating: no longer the electronic extension of print that it has been, it's becoming a televisual medium built around pictures and sound.

Newspaper circulation is down? Look, a half-century ago 90 million people went to the movies every week; now theaters draw barely a quarter that many. So what? Hollywood rakes in five times the money from DVDs and the like that it gets from theatrical release, which now is little more than advertising for lucrative home entertainment sales.

Just as Hollywood adapted to a new business model, so must news industry chieftains look beyond their sluggish newsprint sales and realize that the audience for quality news, information and commentary is robust and vital. That public may want to buy stories instead of subscriptions, and advertisers may demand something more effective than colorful pop-ups.

But depopulating newsrooms -- ownership's current response -- will enfeeble the industry, not transform it. What's needed is a business imagination commensurate with the editorial vision the public demands and deserves."

My smiling little grandson Nathan. 

Winner? I Don't Think So...

Five years ago, Virginia Metcalf Merida, 51, won the Powerball jackpot lottery. She told the press after she won the $65.4 million prize that she was going to quit her job making corrogated boxes, and buy a house. Her husband, a forklift operator, wanted to quit too, and make a fresh start in Australia. The AP told this sad tale today.

Mr Metcalf died in 2003, while living in a replica of George Washington's Mount Vernon estate built in Corbin, KY. He had been charged with drunk driving, not paying child support, and other run-ins with the law before his sudden death.

A man's body was found in a 5000-square foot custom built geodesic dome house she had built, coroners said he died from a drug overdose. Later the wealthy winner bought another house, but when she tried to evict the tenant, the renter sued her.

When the police found Mrs Merida at their home overlooking the Ohio river, she had been dead for many days before anyone found her.

Money in the Bank to Fix Tsunami Ravaged Lands

It's unusual in the history of disaster relief: today NY Times' Stephanie Strom writes about the surplus facing the NGOs who raised more than $1.3 million after last December's Tsunami.

"From our point of view, this is like dying and going to heaven," said Charles MacCormack, president of Save the Children. "It allows us to put together a coherent and systematic long-term plan, rather than living day to day and year to year as we normally do. Save the Children has never before gotten this much money to sustain a five-year recovery plan.

The overflow of funds provides a bonus: For the first time in its 58-year history, Direct Relief established a separate account to hold the $14.3 million it received after the Tsunami, and pledged that 100 percent of the money would be spent on recovery work. Of the $568 million raised by the American Red Cross, just $167 million has been spent...leaving millions for the work that will take many more years.

No Car Payment? Sorry Your Car Won't Start

''People come in the door and can't get a car loan and can't get a cosigner," Doucette said. ''What do I tell them, to go get a bus pass? We're in a tough economy. People don't have a lot of money. They need cars." Doucette was explaining a new device that shuts off the engines of cars whose owners are late with their payments.

Payment Protection Systems Inc., the privately held company in Temecula, Calif., that manufactures the engine-shutoff devices, says it has sold more than 200,000 of them since 1999, and sales are growing 40 percent a year.

More than 1,500 dealerships across the nation are using the On Time devices, including eight in Massachusetts and 10 throughout the rest of New England, the company said.

Mike Simon, chief executive of Payment Protection Systems, said the device isn't meant to be punitive. He said drivers unable to obtain financing or forced to pay astronomical rates for a loan are often able to strike a much better deal if they agree to have the shutoff device installed in their cars.

''We're here to help you, not to shut you down," Simon said. ''We help people continue driving and help them get better interest rates and cars."

Simon said his On Time device has been installed in everything from a Mercedes-Benz to a Ford Taurus. He said drivers aren't stigmatized by the units.

''These people know they've had financial trouble," he said. ''It's not a secret to them."

The device, which costs about $250, is typically installed just under the steering column. The keypad on the device flashes the number 3 three days before the next car payment is due and then the number 2 two days out. On the last day before payment is due, the number 1 flashes and a beep sounds.

At the end of the third day, if a payment is not made, the engine is disabled. It won't shut off while driving, but once the vehicle is turned off it won't restart. Codes are available in case a payment is not made but the vehicle owner has a temporary emergency requiring the use of the car.

Francisco's strong hands.

 
 

Strong Hands Massage has opened at 9 Mountain Rd. S. Dfld. 

HEY NOW! Hooking Up in Seattle

Bloomberg carried this story last week.

"Geeks, Single and Proud, Turn Seattle Into Online Dating Mecca: To find a date in Seattle last April, Allstate Corp. attorney Steve Takahashi carried a stick of salami around a Trader Joe's grocery store. He was following the instructions posted on a chat board, called Trader Joe's Love, frequented by devotees of the trendy food chain. The item was a signal to female shoppers he was available.

``This city is really good for being single, going out, flirting,'' says Takahashi, 43, a Seattle native who estimates he has been on 250 dates since 1979.

Seattle is rapidly becoming the computer-assisted dating capital of the U.S. as chat boards and online services like Match.com help to transform local dating traditions. In the process, the city that has long had a reputation as being populated with computer geeks is turning into something of a singles paradise.

The Web-based BestPlaces guide this month ranked Seattle the No. 1 place in the U.S. to ``hook up,'' based on 33 factors, including male-to-female parity, membership in online dating services and the number of coffee shops and dog parks in the city.

Match.com, owned by New York-based IAC/InterActive Corp., chose Seattle as one of four cities in the country to test a new dating site called chemistry.com, designed for people ``actively seeking meaningful long-term relationships.'' The company says there are 186,480 active members of Match.com in the Seattle area, equal to roughly 6.1 percent of the population of 3 million. That's the highest proportion of online daters among the 12 largest metropolitan areas, based on 2000 U.S. Census Bureau statistics.

Not all Seattle singles are interested in embarking on a long-term relationship, of course. For some, dating itself is the objective."

Pillars Fall, Beau Winds Up in Jail

Rico, an instructor on a Semester at Sea Voyage, writes a blog about the trip.
Here is a story about an unfortunate student travelern named Beau.

"What would you do? One of the students in the trip you lead gets a little silly and while running after a monkey, knocks down a pillar in an ancient Siem Reap temple. It starts a chain reaction that destroys several hundred years of civilization in a matter of seconds.

Poor Beau. Stuck in a Cambodian jail. All other 57 students made it back to Vietnam. Did the one thing you don’t do in a Buddhist country: mess around in a Buddhist temple. Bad things are bound to happen.

Or so the ship thought. You see, Beau lost his passport in Phnom Penh. He wasn’t sure where it was in the afternoon. He might have lost it in the morning at the hotel. Or he might have been pickpocketed the night before. Whatever, he was really stuck in Cambodia. It is one of the worst things you can do on Semester at Sea, losing your passport. Because you need a visa to enter Vietnam, and you need an exit visa to leave Cambodia, and because it takes a few days to get a new emergency American passport, and because it was a Cambodian holiday, Beau didn’t make it to the ship. It wasn’t that big of a deal, just an expensive pain in the arse. He’s an adult who can take care of himself; he would meet us in Hong Kong once the paperwork was straightened out.

But the ship didn’t know this. So we agreed as a trip to tell the story that Beau was arrested in Cambodia. We would be vague with the details, “I didn’t see it, but I think was climbing the temple to take a picture,” or, “I saw him pretending to be Sarah Croft earlier and next thing I know you hear this crashing sound.” But he had knocked something, and didn’t come back to the ship."

Hot Older Gals for Fun

The Village Voice's Lusty Lady with advice on older women and sex.

"For her, it's still a meat market in some respects. "I can date younger or older men. It's a question of do they want to date me? Men want younger, hot-looking women to boost their egos and impress their friends." Some women have taken the same route and turned to virile younger men. There's even a website for such couples, agelesslove.com, a "community for age gap relationship support."

These authors have shown me life doesn't necessarily begin at 40 but can be just as passionate, fulfilling, and yes, infuriating. Unlike Maureen Dowd, who's trying to figure out why men might be scared away, they've seen the thrill of being true to themselves, and it's a guy's loss if he lets a woman's age deter him.

Austin's advice? "I no longer care about being embarrassed; I only care about not being bored. Enjoy every minute of every day, and don't worry about what anyone else thinks. Women, and a fair number of men, will envy you and want to be with you, just to figure out how you do it."

Mellowing out on Mountain Rd.

A warm Thanksgiving....the Franklin stove was crankin all day and the result was a warm house, while the snow blew outside. My sister and family are all joining Steve for a 38-person feast in the hills outside of Hopewell, NJ. That's too many people around a turkey for me...

We only had a group of six. As the effects of the triptophane sunk in, we watched tv and held the baby, who at dinner wore a tiny oxford dress shirt and corduroys. Tiny ones. We hadn't done anything all day except for Kate who had cooked so much food, so it was a day to just relax. rare. nice.

Spurning Gifts from Iranian Captors

Mark Bowden wrote an article about the Iran hostages in December 1979, including this dispatch about one prisoner's defiant gesture.

The hostages and guards were having a Christmas party, allowing Rev. William Sloane Coffin and others to come into the embassy and cheer up the hostages. But Michael Metrinko would have none of it, he wanted no part in a propaganda show. "When his guards brought him a gift of a plate of turkey and stuffing, cookies, and marshmallows, the food was tempting. He was hungry but galled by how self-congratulatory his captors seemed. He accepted the plate and stared at it. Then he said he needed to use the toilet, and emerged carrying the gift plate before him. He marched down the hall into the bathroom and dumped its contents into the toilet bowl. He made sure the guards saw him do it.

They were furious with him. He had insulted their hospitality and kind intentions. He was crazy! When they shoved him back into his room and slammed the door shut, Metrinko felt a momentary pang at having lost the meal. What a glorious treat he had denied himself for. But his remorse was nothing next to the pleasure he took in delivering the insult. It had hit home and wounded them, and that was something that gave a more lasting pleasure than the food ever could have."

Goodbye to Britain's Fabled "Lock In"

It's a tradition that had been enjoyed by generations of drinkers, with even the likes of Prince Harry enjoying a few covert pints. The BBC reported today on the new effect of longer legal hours at pubs, and the fading away of the "lock in" a British pub tradition.

While publicans risked losing their licence by allowing them, police often turned a blind eye if things were kept low key.

They did crackdown when things started to get out of hand, with police recently finding 140 patrons enjoying an illegal after-hours drink in one County Londonderry pub they visited.

Friends may have foreseen the end when the government announced back in 2000 that it was considering the biggest overhaul of drinking laws for 90 years.

Licensing laws in England and Wales had changed little since 1915, when they were tightened to stop factory workers turning up drunk and harming the war effort.

While some said the shake-up was long overdue, lock-in regulars knew time would be called on their exclusive after-hours drinking club.

No flowers.

Mag tells 'Nazi' singers: Heil, no!

The NY Daily News reports on a pair I wrote about here a month ago. "Teen People nixed a story about Hitler-loving teenybopper twins Prussian Blue - amid outrage that the glossy had promised to avoid the words "hate," "supremacist" and "Nazi" in its piece on the racist singing sisters. A Web-based teaser for the February story originally called the hatemongering duo "aspiring musicians" and compared them to wide-eyed sensations Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen.

The only hint that 13-year-old Lynx and Lamb Gaede praise Hitler, call the Holocaust an "exaggeration" and count former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke among their fans was a watered-down description of their message as "white pride."

The freckled twins from Bakersfield, Calif., call nonwhites "muds" and play a video game called "Ethnic Cleansing." They wear tartan plaid skirts and Hitler smiley face shorts - and croon songs that glorify the Third Reich.

"The last thing we need is to celebrate hate in this country," said Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, who helped lead a Monday demonstration outside the office of Teen People's parent company Time Warner. "I'm absolutely thrilled it's not running."

Partying Naked at Columbia

Following in the footsteps of their exhibitionist peers at Brown and Yale, Columbia undergraduates are staging parties with one basic ground rule - all guests must part with their clothes upon arrival. The invitation circulating around Morningside Heights bans three additional items: cameras, masks, and "spikey things." The NY Sun had the story today.

"Join us for a night of champagne, martinis, witchcraft, psychedelia, syncopated rhythms, thin bass lines, and body paint," reads the invitation, which was obtained by The New York Sun.

While it's too early to say whether a tradition has been born, the naked party appears to be taking root at Columbia, a school better known for its stringent sexual misconduct policies and grinding course work than for its freeloving co-eds.

Students who have mustered up the courage to go to one, however, are more likely to downplay the sexual nature of the event. It's more of a social opportunity, they say, to lose one's inhibitions, to engage in interesting, more personal, conversation, and to feel comfortable in one's own skin.

A student who attended the party in the spring, Richard Lipkin, said about 80 to 100 naked people - including a fair number of law and business school students - were concentrated in one apartment. Clothes were dumped near the entrance. Women slightly outnumbered men, and people were generally - if not exclusively - good looking, the type who are often more willing to flout culture's restrictions on nudity.

Mr. Lipkin said he had no recollection of the music that was played.

"It was surprisingly comfortable," he said. "Most of the people were quite comfortable. Everyone was pretty mature about it. I don't think anything inappropriate went on. ... People were definitely networking, but there wasn't anything bad going on."

Damn! I Wish I Could Remember that Joke!

Douglas Rushkoff has written a new book called "Back in the Box: innovation from the inside out," and it includes this sage observation.

"Observe yourself the next time you’re listening to a joke. You may start by listening to the joke for the humor - because you really want the belly laugh at the end. But chances are, a few sentences in, you will find yourself not only listening, but attempting to remember its whole sequence. You’ll do this tentatively at first, until you’ve decided whether or not it's really a good joke. And if it is, you'll commit the entire thing to memory - maybe even with a personalized variation, or a mental note to yourself to fix that racist part. This is because the joke is a gift - it's a form of social currency that you’ll be able to take with you to the next party.

So is the great majority of the media we watch and even the products we buy. HBO understood this well enough to base an entire season’s advertising campaign on the "water cooler" effect. In a series of fake ads, the water cooler industry thanks HBO for giving workers something to talk about the next day at the water cooler. The message of these ads was clear: watch these shows to gain social currency."

Progress. Real Progress.

RIght ON! I love reading newspapers on line but HATE having to register. I'm not alone.


"Houston Chronicle website drops registration requirement

"In response to passionate pleas from many readers, we no longer require you to register to read stories or access most of the site’s content," says a chron.com note to readers. "Registration is only necessary in specialized areas -- to post comments in our forums, access our newspaper archives, get breaking news alerts or build your own comics page."

When the Worst Happens, He Cleans Up

Today's NY Times answered a question I've often asked myself. Who cleans up after gruesome murders and grisly deaths? The answer in Andrews Jacob's piece is Ronald Gospodarski, a former paramedic who runs a company called Bio-Recovery Corp, in Long Island City.

"I've had guys left dead for months where fluid seeped down six floors and everything had to be torn out...you can't leave one drop of blood or body fluid or the place will stink." He went on, explaining a $3000 technique used on the most dreadful of deathscenes, where superheating an entire apartment kills every odor producing microbe. But mostly they just use industrial strength cleansers and wear protective gear.

One of the hardest crime scenes Gospodarski had to clean up was a house in the Bronx used for Santeria, the South American religion that involves ritual slaughter of animals. Amid razor blades, animal hoofs, bottles of poison they unearthed what looked like a clump of human hair. "I'd rather be dealing with a gunshot victim," said one worker, "I don't like this one bit."

Eleven is the Number for Rebuilding Cities

While I was spending big bux at Whole Foods this week, I added a copy of the Atlantic Monthly to my cart. Inside was a short story called "Cities Rising." They compared recently demolished New Orleans with other flattened and destroyed cities. Here are some other tales of cities coming back to life.

* Tangshan, China was entirely destroyed in 1976, losing 97 percent of its buildings and 78 percent of its industrial buildings. More than 240,000 of the one million inhabitants died. Within a decade the city was completely rebuilt with drably uniform concrete apartment buildings.

* Galveston, Texas, 1900. With 8000 residents dead, over eleven years the city was raised by as much as seventeen feetand sheltered by a seawall, big enough to cover the incredible sixteen-foot storm surge.

* Warsaw, Poland, 1944. Destroyed by Hitler, 80 percent of the city turned to rubble, and 800,000 of the 1.3 million people died. Within eleven years, it was returned to prewar level of population. But the Soviets never rebuilt any areas with religious ornamentation, and old style buildings replaced with modern ones.

*Chicago, 1871. It took just two years for real estate developers, seizing the fire as a great opportunity, to rebuild whole blocks back. About ten or eleven years later, Chi-town pioneered the vertical city of steel-framed skyscrapers.

Inside new space. 

Vacant space that might be our new office. Downtown South Deerfield. 

My beautiful daughter Kate with Nathan. 

Gentlemen, Start Your Mice on Cyber Monday

After Black Friday comes Cyber Monday: The Monday after Thanksgiving is a big day for e-commerce; consumers will see more deals this year, reports CNN Money, breathlessly.

"While the "official" start to the 2005 holiday shopping season kicks off for most retailers on "Black Friday," or the day after Thanksgiving, online merchants have their banner day on "Cyber" Monday.

Cyber Monday, the Monday after Thanksgiving, is quickly becoming one of the biggest online shopping days of the year.

According to the Shop.org/BizRate Research 2005 eHoliday survey released Monday, 77 percent of online retailers said their sales increased substantially last year on the Monday after Thanksgiving, a trend that is expected to drive serious online discounts and promotions on Cyber Monday this year.

"On Cyber Monday, consumers set their sights on surfing for holiday gifts and shopping online," Scott Silverman, executive director of Shop.org, said in the report. "This year, online retailers will be capitalizing on the increased traffic by offering special promotions and discounts."

More than one-third of the 1,890 consumers surveyed for the report said they will use Internet access at work to browse or buy gifts online this holiday season. More than half of young adults the ages of 18 to 24, and nearly half of those aged 25 to 34 said they would shop online during work hours.

Mexican Things

Kelly and Quang publish a new blog we've added to the GoNOMAD blog network. here is a dispatch upon leaving Mexico.

"The police are proud of their guns, and I’m not talking a handgun stuck in a holster and worn about the belt. I mean semi-automatics. I mean M-16s. I mean shotguns. Rows of bullets are slung about shoulders or looped about the waist. After a month, we are used to it, but the first few times we rubbed shoulders with an M-16-toting officer in a crowd, we both let out a little yelp.

6. School children run about in their school uniforms all day long. So much so, that Quang and I started joking that kids never actually went to school. They just got dressed up to look like they were going to school. Eventually we asked someone what school hours were.

There are an awful lot of Notary Publics. In every town we’ve passed through, on just about every block we’ve walked down, there is a sign outside a building advertising a Notary Public. Sometimes there are two Notary Publics in one office building and another one across the street. We figure this probably says something about the amount of red tape and bureaucracy in Mexico. Plus, in all our Notary Public talk, I learned something I never knew about Quang: he used to be one—that is until he let his license expire.

I think he should definitely renew when we get back to the States. I told him I’m going to hang a Notary Public sign off our mailbox and see if we can attract any business from our neighbors."

Look Mom, Clean Clothes and No Water!

Researching a column I am writing for the Daily Hampshire Gazette, I came across this news from The Gadget Blog.

"A waterless washing machine that removes stains from garments in a few minutes has been developed at the National University of Singapore, the facility said on Wednesday.

The appliance uses negative ions, compressed air and deodorants to clean clothes.

Industrial design students Wendy Chua, 21, and Gabriel Tan, 23, said they were inspired by the technology in air purifiers, which uses negative ions to clump dirt and bacteria, making it easier for the particles to be sucked out. The ions are a natural cleaning agent.

The sleek and compact design is modelled after a waterfall, a natural negative ion generator. It does away with the expensive task of sending clothing to be dry cleaned and protects favourite garments, said Chua. No detergents are used.

"It's not meant to replace the traditional washing machine, but it's more a hybrid of the washing machine and the dry cleaner," The Straits Times quoted Chua as saying."

Fanning's Snocap:File Sharing with a Twist

"I hate mornings," Shawn Fanning said as he arrived one bright day last spring, dressed in torn black jeans, a black ribbed pullover and gray sneakers, looking much as he did five years ago on the cover of Time magazine. He was profiled in the NY Times on Sunday about his new venture for file sharing called snocap.

"Now Mr. Fanning is on the verge of settling, somewhat reluctantly, into a more adult phase of his life. He left the house he shared with two buddies in Silicon Valley and moved into a loft on Potrero Hill in San Francisco with his girlfriend, who works at Apple Computer.

Neither she nor the neighbors are quite so accommodating as his old roommates when it comes to his desire to play drums and guitar; when he really wants to cut loose, he says he now has to visit a friend's music studio.

When Mr. Fanning starts to explain the details of the complex software and business arrangements behind Snocap, his eyes glow with the intensity of many of the 20-something entrepreneurs of the dot-com boom. But he is living their dreams in reverse: first he revolutionized an industry, then he made the cover of Time and now he is figuring out the PowerPoint presentations for the business model.

The heart of Snocap is its sophisticated registry, which will index electronically all the files on the file-sharing networks. "Rights holders," which are what he calls musicians and their labels, will use the system to find those songs on which they hold copyrights and claim them electronically. Then they will enter into the registry the terms on which those files can be traded.

It could be just like iTunes - pay 99 cents, and you own it - or it could be trickier: listen to it five times free, then buy it if you like it. Or it could be beneficent: listen to it free forever and (hopefully) buy tickets to the artist's next concert. Of course, the rights holders could also play tough: this is not for sale or for trading, and you can't have it."

Leaving Eggs in Other Duck's Nests

Sitting in the kitchen looking out the window watching wood ducks float on Cindy's pond. That made me think about where their nests are. Found out some more about these ducks including this item from Google.

Interesting notes: The female wood duck has the unusual habit of laying some of her eggs in other wood ducks' nests, leaving the raising of the nestlings to another female. Called "brood parasitism" or "dump nesting," one study showed that over 50% of wood duck nests may contain eggs from more than one wood duck (Semel and Sherman 1986). Some nests have been reported to contain eggs from as many as four or five different wood ducks (Belrose 1976). What would cause this behavior? The most obvious answer is that the female is then relieved of child-rearing duties, however, this doesn't explain why a female that has dumped some of her eggs in another wood duck's nest will still make her own nest and raise young.

A currently accepted theory, for all animal behavior, is that each animal is driven by the need to leave offspring. In contrast to the old, and no longer accepted, idea of "survival of the species," most animals act in ways that will insure their offspring's survival. If the female wood duck leaves some of her eggs in another wood duck's nest and also raises her own, she increases her chances of leaving more offspring (Davies 1991).

Sweet Truck in Hadley, MA

Find the Perfect Match--One of Us Maybe!

Trolling the 'Net on this cold New England Saturday morning, and voila, found this nugget on the very reliable boingboing.net. Edited by Cory Doctorow, this site always has blogworthy material.

"Users sue Match.com for date fraud: Frustrated Match.com users are suing the online dating service over complaints that company employees posed as interested date prospects -- online and in-person! -- to trick accountholders into re-upping paid subscriptions.

Match.com is accused in a federal lawsuit of goading members into renewing their subscriptions through bogus romantic e-mails sent out by company employees. In some instances, the suit contends, people on the Match payroll even went on sham dates with subscribers as a marketing ploy.

"This is a grossly fraudulent practice that Match.com is engaged in," said H. Scott Leviant, a lawyer at Los Angeles law firm which brought the suit.

In a separate suit, Yahoo!'s personals service is accused of posting profiles of fictitious potential dating partners on its Web site to make it look as though many more singles subscribe to the service than actually do. "

Blogs, Vlogs and Ipods

Computer geeks gathered recently and had the conversation below. Mike McDonald writes in his Webpronews column about this at a Las Vegas convention.

"When our conversation steered towards blogs, and podcasts etc. she (internet expert) posed the following question:

"A year or two from now; blogs up or down?"
I said down.

"Podcasts. Up or down?"
I said up.

"Video, or Vlogs. Up or down?"
Again I said up.

Nobody disagreed with me.

To me, blogs reek of a trend to some extent. Podcasts and video blogs on the other hand, I think they have feet for a long run.

Think about it in terms of offline progression of media. Print was first, changed the world for hundreds of years. Then, along comes audio (radio) and after that video (TV) nothing kills print and there will probably always be a place for it but look at the ratio of people that get their news and information in today's world from the radio or television compared to those who actually read a magazine or newspaper. On a protracted timeline, I could easily see internet media following a similar progression."

Stunning Costs that Started at Fort Devens

Reading the Republican newspaper and found this information in their science section.
The source is Harvard College.

"In September 1918, at Fort Devens, outside of Boston, the world's worst pandemic flu got its start. The Camp hospital, built to house 1200 soldiers, was overflowing from the war injuries with more than 6,000. These previously healthy and fit young men began to feel ill. Within 12-24 hours they were choking to death, their lungs filled with fluid.

Suddenly after the Fort Devens outbreak, 250 people a day were dying in Boston. The epidemic spread to NYC, within a few weeks 21,000 children were orphaned. In less than one year, nearly 1 billion people were infected worldwide. Between 20 million and 40 million eventually died--many or more than have died of AIDS in the past 25 years.

In 1968, another pandemic flu struck, and it killed one million--only a fraction of 1918's toll--but it cost the economy $70-167 billion. That's about the cost of the war in Iraq, or of rebuilding after Katrina and Rita.

A Smoker's Suggestion

Sweden May Have the Answer says ABC news. A friend of mine is trying to quit, this might be helpful.

"Sweden has developed a safer, less toxic kind of smokeless tobacco called "snus," and sales are booming. "In two or three years, we're going to sell as much in cigarettes as snus," said a Swedish store owner.

With far fewer dangerous chemicals than American products, many Swedes have made the switch from cigarettes to snus. Cancer rates, including oral cancer, are on the decline.

"There's a tremendous amount of debate about it," said Sweanor. "There are some Americans who have published studies saying that this would clearly be a part of the solution to the smoking epidemic."

Surgeon General Admiral Richard Carmona says he cannot endorse any smokeless tobacco until there are a lot more studies about its relative safety.

"What I do know is that smokeless tobacco has carcinogens and can cause oral cancers and can cause nicotine addiction and can cause significant problems," Carmona said. "So I couldn't possibly recommend that because I'd really be asking you to substitute one form of carcinogen for another form of carcinogen."

Many fear that if smokeless tobacco is endorsed as an alternative to smoking, companies could use that to draw in new customers.

Since tobacco is unregulated, it would be up to tobacco companies decide what the products contain.

"The level of trust with the tobacco industry is virtually nil, and if this is the industry we're going to rely upon to come up with safer products, we are going to be very, very cautious, very cautious," said Maureen Connelly of the Harvard School of Public Health.

That caution is necessary. But in the meantime, every year, nearly half a million American smokers who can't quit die — nearly all of them from the smoke."

How to be a Popular Professor

Michael Agger wrote in slate about what happens when student ratings for college professors are viewable on line...and what they want from their profs...

"Don't play favorites, yet don't deny students extra credit or a second chance on a paper or test. Don't "get sidetracked by boring crap." Don't refer to yourself in the third person. Don't ever call on students. Don't be "mean," "hateful," or "ambiguous." Don't take attendance. Don't be "high on Viagra and full of yourself." Don't be "distractingly spastic." Very important: Don't talk about stuff in class and then put other stuff on the test.

Most important: Don't give low grades. Do show slides. Do offer easy assignments. Do crack jokes and "provide a fun teaching atmosphere." Do show up at your office hours. Do give A's on all group projects. Do walk your dog around campus. Do resemble a celebrity of some sort. Finally, try your best to be "awesome."

A lovely Idea: Build A Damn Fence!

Mimi Hall writes in USA TODAY about a grand idea.

"A once-radical idea to build a 2,000-mile steel-and-wire fence on the U.S.-Mexican border is gaining momentum amid warnings that terrorists can easily sneak into the country.

In Congress, a powerful Republican lawmaker this week proposed building such a fence across the entire border and two dozen other lawmakers signed on. And via the Internet, a group called weneedafence.com has raised enough money to air TV ads warning that the border is open to terrorists.

Even at the Homeland Security Department, which opposes building a border-long fence, Secretary Michael Chertoff this fall waived environmental laws so that construction can continue on a 14-mile section of fence near San Diego that has helped border agents stem the flow of illegal migrants and drug runners.

“You have to be able to enforce your borders,” says California Rep. Duncan Hunter, the Republican chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. He's proposing a fence from San Diego to Brownsville, Texas. “It's no longer just an immigration issue. It's now a national security issue.”

Colin Hanna of weneedafence.com says “there is incredible momentum on this issue,” fueled by the specter of another Sept. 11. His group aired TV ads in Washington, D.C., this fall and plans more next year.

Fencing the border, originally proposed in the debate over how to stop illegal immigration, is controversial. The Bush administration argues that a Berlin Wall-style barrier would be a huge waste of money — costing up to $8 billion.

Border Patrol Chief David Aguilar says it makes more sense to use a mix of additional agents, better surveillance and tougher enforcement of immigration laws — and fences.

But Hunter points to the experience in San Diego, where the number of illegal migrants arrested is one-sixth of what it was before the fence was built.

“People have made stupid editorial comments about the Great Wall of China,” he says, “but the only thing that has worked is that fence.”

The Worst Place on Earth to be a Woman

Helene Cooper wrote an op-ed piece in yesterday's NY Times titled "Waiting for their Moment in the Worst Place on Earth to be a Woman." She discussed the recent election of Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf in her native Liberia, Africa's first woman president, and she contrasted that country with another miserable place, Bukavu, Congo.

"I've been unable to get one image from Bukavu out of my mind. It is of an old woman, in her '30s. I saw her walking up the hill out of the city as I drove in. She carried so many logs that her chest seemed to touch the ground, so stooped was her back. Her husband was walking just in front of her. He carried nothing. Nothing in his hand, nothing on his shoulder, nothing on his back. He kept looking at her, telling her to hurry up.

I want to go back to Bakavu to find that woman, and to tell her what just happened in Liberia. I want to tell her her this: Your time will come, too."

They Just Can't Seem to Finish College

The AP today ran a story about how hard it is to get students to finish college. While for decades higher education leaders focused on getting more and more high schoolers to enroll in college, today, just 54% of them ever get a degree--six years later! The era of the perpetual student has given way to a mass 'I give up," when it comes to college.

Graduation rates have been stagnating for years, especially in the lesser known 'non elite' schools. Minnesota, for example, barely graduates 40 % of its students, while Penn State sends 80 percent packing with sheepskins. Some take issue with the fact that high schools with similar graduation rates get taken to task, while people don't seem to be as upset with this happening in colleges, even though high school is free and college leaves you with loans.

The Retail Business

Steve stopped by Computer Cleaners yesterday. A shaggy haired fellow computer geek who owns a shop in Hadley, he was coming to visit his northern brethren, and he chatted for a while.

He said that old style computer monitors use about 100 watts each, like a big lightbulb burning all night. And that the sleek new flat screen displays use just 15 watts. The electric company will pay a rebate if you change dozens of these screens, so he easily sells many many of them. He keeps the old screens in his dusty crowded shop on Route 9 in Hadley. Then he gets rid of the CRTs by offering them free to college customers if they put up 100 flyers in their dorms.

The retail business is one thing I remember well from my days as an ad rep for the Daily Hampshire Gazette. Working with hundreds of shopkeeps, I learned their techniques. Now we have a quasi-retail storefront of our own, here in busy South Deerfield village. With that comes the need to advertise, and we've done a lot of that. We mailed out letters to all of the P.O. boxes and did two Valpak mailings. We run buttons on the Daily Hampshire Gazette and Recorder Websites, and run regular print ads in the Greenfield daily. We are finding out which ones work, and pumping lots more into the ones that do.

Orphans Go from the Streets to Jihadi Camps

Pakistan’s leading human rights organisation, the Ansar Burney Welfare Trust, said jihadi groups fighting the Indian government were taking orphans off the streets and putting them in training camps. The Times on line and little green footballs had this story today.

The organisation said it also had evidence that sympathetic government officials were passing children on to the jihadis to be looked after.

The popularity of the Islamic militants has risen sharply since the earthquake struck on October 8, killing more than 87,000 people.

The militants were among the first to arrive with aid at some of the worst affected villages. Their organisation and ability to commandeer lifting equipment and tents have generated significant new support. But according to human rights campaigners they are using their new popularity to smuggle weapons and recruit the young and vulnerable.

“We have heard from very reliable sources and seen with our own eyes that orphaned and lost children are being taken by jihadi organisations in northern Pakistan to be trained,” said Fahad Burney, of the trust.

Jamaat-ud Dawa, one of the largest jihadi groups in Pakistan, has called openly for orphans to be handed over for an “Islamic education”.

Unwittingly Sending out Viruses

Woe to the shoemaker whose children have no shoes, or the baker who is without bread. I felt like this tonight when I stupidly clicked on an email claiming to be giving me a password and found my computer hijacked by the evil worm that turned out to be a malicious virus. The w32 Frethem attachment proceeded to email everyone in my Outlook mailbox the same 'password' file virus and I got three calls from folks telling me I had sent them a bad thing. I know, I know, never download these things.

But...I own a computer cleaning company...so I quickly got to work. I Googled the words 'password in email' and found the name of this bug, then got to Symantec's website where there was a long description of the problem and a button to download the removal tool. All was fine until I couldn't find where the downloaded solution had ended up...but then, I thought again--Just find the name of the program I used to download it, (Flashget) and look under programs to find that directory. Voila, there was my file.

This is all a good lesson but it still felt good to be able to fix it. Apologies to anyone who got the evil email I didn't send. Just don't open the damn thing!

Everything Else is Anticlimactic--after N. Korea

Bruce Wallace writes in the LA Times (thanks World Hum) about the trip of a lifetime--to North Korea--for a group of hard core world travelers, including Joe Walker, whose been nearly everywhere else on earch.

"This is definitely the weirdest trip I've been on," he said as the Ilyushin headed back to Beijing. "I would love to go back for another five days. I want to get into the mausoleum to see Kim's body.

"Everything else is anticlimactic after North Korea," he said with a sigh.

But I think it's your obligation as a visitor, and as an American, to leave a good impression," Walker added. "You have to try to do everything you can to not come across as the Ugly American."

It is a syndrome he sees frequently in his travels.

"I used to think it was the bad 10% of Americans who ruined it for the other 90%," Walker said with a rueful smile. "But now I think it's the bad 50% ruining it for the other 50%."

Anderson says he sees himself as a diplomat when he travels, trying to win people over one at a time. But trying to strike up a candid conversation with North Korean officials about their lives was frustrating. "We'd buy them drinks at night, and I'm pretty good at being charming," he said. "But this is the first country I've been to — and I've been to 125 — where I couldn't get past the official statements. Nothing worked."

Perhaps only people as widely traveled can understand the appeal of a city as austere and superficially joyless as Pyongyang. Each of the five understands the instinct to see something different in a world that keeps shaving the edges off its differences and variations.

"These are the only people that really understand me," Altaffer said of the other travelers. "You get home and you can't talk to your friends about Pyongyang. They don't know, they don't understand, and they don't care."

The Flight to Quality--Trying to Escape Lousy DSL

Boy what a bad idea. I thought I'd save some money by switching my home internet to cheap Verizon DSL for $14.95. More than a few times I wondered if the $42.95 Comcast clipped me for each month was worth it...hey it's all high speed, right? WRONG! Verizon suckers people in with this pathetic 758 mps speed 'high speed' internet that is terrible. I feel like I used to back five years ago when I first surfed the 'Net on a dial-up.

I talked with Brian who works for a Wifi Equipment company on Long Island last week. He talked about the 'Flight to Quality,' meaning that people will pay more for better services, even when they begin at a low price. Well I'm dying to make that flight...and now Verizon's number is eternally busy, and their website do