05.16.03 - Eclipse! - my camera could not image the full eclipse

I met some cool people that night, a bunch of Geologists, so I missed the moon's return to full

05.14.03 - lately I have been listening to WMVY radio - mvyradio.com during the commute and lunch, they have a free streaming web feed also. Some of the music that caught my ear, new and old....Joan Osborne - Love's In need of love today.... Shawn Mullins - Shimmer.... The Blind Boys of Alabama - I believe in you....HEM - half acre....Fleetwood Mac - Say you will.....John Hiatt - My Baby Blue....Sheyl Crow - Everyday is A Winding Road ....Bonnie Raitt .....Lucinda Williams - Righteously....~~ A bunch of other stuff I like as well, including old Grateful Dead....The Dead will be touring this summer.....
This little butterfly kept flying around me today

05.12.03 - The oil spill released up to 50 different chemicals into Buzzards Bay so a visual inspection only does so much. These compounds can be identified by gas chromatography - WHOI article , research details More Info from Buzzardsbay.org and U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service on the bird impact

05.11.03 - Mother's Day - I better call! After work I went to Great Sippewisset Marsh last friday, first time since the oil spill on 04.28.03. I am happy to say that the oil did not seem to come this way. A floating boom put accross the enterance showed little sign of oil and I did not see any clumps or oil sheen anywhere. Here are some pictures I took in Great Sippewisset Marsh . On the space front, some Helix Nebula Hubble photos

05.08.03 - Another ding letter, another 2nd interview... since the bills keep coming in I was happy to get the opportunity to roof my parent's house. Outdoors, good exercise, your own boss, right? Right! but let me tell you I have a new respect for roofers. This is possibly the hardest physical job I ever did plus it requires total mental focus. If it wasn't for my brother-in-law Tom Chase, a master roofer, giving me advice, I would be freaking out. Last summer Tom worked on Highfield Hall , a historic 1878 early Queen Anne style 22-room mansion in Falmouth Mass. I put together a page of some photos from that work (plus a boat he rebuilt). Tom said it is a dream job, 68% done at this point. The Falmouth Theater Guild is in Highfield theater next door. I have fond memories of the theater, I saw several shows there when I was a teenager plus I was sweet on a girl who worked at the summer ticket booth so I spent a lot of time hanging-out. The College Light Opera Company performs at Highfield theater during the summer season.

05.04.03 - Found a useful News search page: Newstrove.com - Search over 7,000 major news publications

05.03.03 - Digging out old software product files to toss, I look them up on the internet just to see what happened to them. Some get bought out - Landmark Performance software, others get dropped by the vendor, Emmasoft catalog on a disk, due to the internet and some Leading Edge Word Processor, Nashoba Nutshell, Fauve Matisse and Quarterdeck Desqview just go away. One of my favorites was Xtree, a DOS based file manager. I still fire up Xtreegold on an old PC now and then. There is a product based on the Xtree concept still out there, ZTreeWinAfter Xtreegold was absorbed by symantec a diluted GUI version appeared briefly in Norton NT tools

05.01.03 May day - did you ever hear of the May 1st practice of hanging little flower baskets on your neighbors door? I remember it from my childhood. Here is a write-up of the event in Annapolis

04.27.03 Found an interesting site: Our Judaic-Christian Heritage Or how about Mickey Hart's Site? check out the All world radio

04.26.03 Hubble news release distant Storm of Turbulent Gases I am designing my clamp-on outrider to allow riding railroad tracks on a bike. The plan is to get a series of photos utilizing that platform. Quote from a parent of two 16 year old girls in answer to question: what is worse, 13 or 16? answer: 16 because 16 is 13 perfected

04.25.03 Mars Odyssey captures some amazing images A Soyuz launch is today, see the news at Space.com ( thanks to my Mom for that tip )

04.24.03 XP Service Pack 1 corrupts CD-ROM and floppy-disk access - A pc I support has developed a problem with the CD drive, although this Microsoft Knowledge Base Article - 811839 is for floppys, it has been reported that the same problem effects CD drives. -- latest Spam I have been getting is selling Spam programs!! They say it is not a pyramid scheme because there is a real product, the email Spammer software. But it IS a pyramid scheme, and the later layers will lose just like all of the pyramid schemes

04.23.03 Going through old notes on superconductivity which I studied in the late 80s, so I found this site superconductors.org The superconductor transition temperature (known as Tc) had exceeded the temperature of liquid nitrogen by the time the business world had sucked me into more mundane (but paid the bills) endeavors. Speaking of Business, If owners or executives bring in a management layer to insulate themselves from the needs of employees that are trained, competent and productive, watch out! - Such a situation is happening now - My thoughts

04.21.03 Aerial view of Great Sippewisset Marsh. GEOS 12 ir and GEOS 12 visable These very big images are from Space Science and Engineering Centerat the U. of Wisconsin

04.18.03 The Crown of thorns blooms all year long.

04.15.03 I never get tired of looking at the views from this satellite: GEOS 8 Full disk - 100 K in size

04.14.03 Updating the web site but this week is full up so I'll be doing it at night

04.09.03 Found that the linksys firmware upgrade modified port behaviour. Spring? the
fuchsia thinks so.

04.08.03 Found the kids computer loaded with spyware, seemed to be associated with a cartoon install from twistedhumor.com done a couple of days ago. The PC was running very slow due to all the sneaky software that got installed along with the "cartoon" that was offered. A firewall that allows internet surfing connections will not stop these types of installations. Here is page of collected info about the spyware found. Are game cheats worth it? I own the Unreal tournament game . I found some "God" controls on the internet, it was fun for a while, now I don't play anymore. We also own Chaos Island ( derived from the Jurassic Park movies ) and the Kid found some cheat tips on the internet. I warned it may ruin the game and the Kid told me recently that the game is now less interesting

04.07.03 Many people with a home network on a cable modem use a Linksys router, older firmware (built in program) for the router has potential security flaws, this plus other technical info is described here: Bugtrak Vulnerability Report For Linksys Devices Security is a good reason to update the firmware of the routers. The update process is very easy: linksys download area. Linksys provides a utility to do the update in the zip file. Only caution I have seen is to have just one computer connected when actually doing the update. I found the login authentication was noticably improved when I updated from firmware version 1.42.7 to version 1.44.2

04.04.03 On Wednesday I dragged Charles (see 04.02.03) out of the house for a walk and we had some philosophic discussions, here are some pictures from along the way: Walk with Charles

04.03.03 I interviewed with some very nice people at the Joseph M. Smith Community Health Center. For computers, the Klez.E worm virus is very active, I received one today in email just like it is descibed here: Symantec description plus removal tool The email was disguised as a cure for Klez.E and encouraged you to run it, it had the subject line: Worm Klez.E immunity and had a .bat file and .jpg file attached. I extracted the attachement without opening it and verifyed by virus scan that it was indeed the Klez.E. A email gateway scanner will stop this stuff normally, hotmail scans for viruses but ATT broadband, now Comcast does not!

04.02.03 A tragic end for the hard working parents of a friend - Kury Obit I have fond memories of staying in their house as a teenager, Their son and I met back in 1969 and have kept in touch as adults. I dined in the Cafe Budapest several times and enjoyed their hosbitality. Back then they often took their son Charles and I on trips to other resturants. I got to drive a brand new Cadillac on one of those trips when I was 16. Mrs. Rev-Kury was always kind to me and Mr. Kury was a regular father who tolerated our teen-age shenanigans.

03.30.03 Light echos

03.26.03 True story - A maintenance guy at a local establishment was burning yard waste in a bonfire. Apparently it was not burning well enough so he climbed on top the lit mound with a beer, a cigarette and a can of gasoline. Yes, the gas can exploded, blew him off the fire, he survived with burns to the hands and face. Now what was it they say about open flame and gasoline?

03.21.03 A interesting Baysian SPAM filter under development and currently free can be found here: K9 SPAM filter. SPAM about Somatotropin has caught my eye as great claims are being made for life extension, seems that the Bovine form (BST) has been used since 1994 in the USA to increase milk production. It is related to Human Somatotropin (HST) sometimes known as Human Growth Hormone (HGH). The amino acid sequence of BST differs by about 35% from that of human somatotropin (HST). BST appears to increase the production of IGF-I Insulin-like growth factor(IGF-I) which some people rave about IGF-I is deeply involved with developmental growth of young animals and humans. HGH causes the liver to produce IGF-I

03.19.03 Change is in the wind, so here are some calming images from Boyden nature preserve

03.17.03 My server has been off line...

03.13.03 fun with fractals.. Windows XP updates - SP1 is 30 Meg! Even on a fast connection it takes some time, on a modem one should plan on an overnight download. XP is also very chatty, for example Windows Messenger and M-SEARCH XP also has a number of security issues for example Universal Plug and Play which should be turned off if there is no firewall or NATed router between your PC and the internet. The feature is for the Microsoft future vision of a smart house. Read about it here at grc.com where a utility is provided by Steve Gibson to test your PC.

03.08.03 Colorado picture taken by my father last year
Colorado Elk

03.06.03 Hubble space telescope continues to gaze outwards Latest news release

03.05.03 An entertaining story of data recovery I saw in the SANS newsletter Symantec has a nice online virus scanner in the Security response page I've noticed that when Adobe acrobat reader 4.0 is used, the 'portable document format' process remains running even after IE is closed.

03.04.03 Oh brother - Flash has a security flaw, read about it in an Information week article Macromedia says to download latest version http://www.macromedia.com which appears to be 6,0,79,0

03.03.03 I modified my resume to better reflect my technical qualifications, See the update in Adobe PDF or in Microsoft Word

03.01.03 Its snowing now but spring is close,
my Iris is blooming today.

02.28.03 The foam in the nightclub fire appears to have been sourced according to the Providence Journel article, it was not fireproofed. Virus update, Norton Anti-virus now detects the worm I found on a client's PC and submitted to them as the Backdoor.SdBot.B which is a good thing, But I never heard back from Symantec unlike Sophos....

02.27.03 Spectrum of human experience - life is so fleeting and fragile, lots of death in the paper lately - the Korean subway...earthquake in china.... I fear the backlash from supposed Iraq war, The President is fond of circular logic, It was a much clearer issue when his dad went in, the invasion of Kuwait was easy to understand...

02.26.03 Nightclub tragedy update - many errors came together - Appears that the acoustic tiling was donated and installed prior to or in early 2000, the club was inspected at least twice since then...According the Band's tour management firm the pyro displays are typically verbal agreements between bands and clubs. (the industry avoids the permit issue) The nightclub was over capacity on a regular basis, legal limit was 300, at least 360 that night, 450 to 500 claimed on some contracts signed by the owners. No fire extingishers on the stage, none carried by the pyro technician. Obtaining pyro permits is responsibility of the band according to Maine's fire marshal office. The pyro display were much too big for the venue according to club industry professionals. This info from the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald

02.23.03 My thoughts and prayers go out to victims and the families from the tragic nightclub fire. West Warwick is about 25 miles away, we get all the Providence TV here. Nobody thought a Rock Concert could be that deadly. The fire appears to have been accelerated by sound proofing insulation that was installed in the last few years at the club. It also created the thick black smoke.....The survivors are in shock, many were burned, some beyond recognition...the video taken inside is haunting, many were slow to react...A wood frame building with a capacity of 300 but no sprinklers, no obvious fire extingisher on stage, in retrospect these seem like glaring issues.

02.19.03 RE: The trojan virus - a friend expressed concern about visiting the web site here, It was never on this site, it was on a clients computer I was working on, the infection occurs through IRC ( Internet relay chat ) or email.....Wierd PC failure dept. - Another friend back in Indiana has a cranky Gateway with Windows ME that has plagued him lately by crashing much and not starting up after sitting overnight, turns out the motherboard had some bad capacitors

02.18.03 Its Official! I discovered a previously unknown Trojan virus, here is what Sophos had to say

02.17.03 The online virus scanner does not un-install correctly - Doh! - I tryed installing on old videophone camera and it screwed up outlook (assertion failed)...for the 2nd time..guess I got to scrap the camera..an Outlook info page

02.14.03 I may have found a previously unknown trojan/worm, I have submitted it to some anti-virus companys, here is everything I know about it...If you have no anti-virus program try this online scanner

02.13.03 - Fun with PCs - The Dell Optiplex GX1 (PIII 500) has a auto-senseing BIOS so that if you replace the onboard video with a faster pci video card, it deactivates the built-in video. Turns out that if you add memory at a later date, the machine may not boot ( just a 2 beep parity error ) Pull the video card and it should boot, you can then re-install the video card.

02.11.03 - Kazaa Warning - Worked on a couple of PCs recently, they were used for Kazaa by teenagers in different housholds. Norton antivirus was disabled on both PCs and a keylogger (steal passwords) plus several screen scrapers (steal info typed into web pages ) were found. Kazaa is similar to Napster and is now embroiled in lawsuits as well. The initial defeat has not stopped the file sharing company. Can a company built on the trafficking of other people's property shed the secrecy surrounding its operations and go legit? - I don't know but the shady operation brings lots of sleazebag software along for the ride when Kazaa is installed. More on this soon.....TAX,TAX,TAX - I have done a fare share of Tax analysis - had to add a custom ( C language) Tax module to a wholesale distribution system back in 1998/99 anyway, here in Massachusetts, according to the Dept of Revenue, a herbal cough drop may or may not be taxed depending on HOW IT IS MARKETED....(ouch)

02.06.03 and earlier weblog