It’s Tuesday, March 31, 2009 and the month did pass rather quickly, even though it brought wholly unsatisfactory weather. 
Feeling artsy for a bit. This was harder than I thought it would be:
Not feeling particularly bloggerly today for some reason.
First thing this morning Chris IMs me and says to call. I call and he’s laughing so hard, I have a tough time understanding what he’s on about. Turns out there’s an voice mail from one of our perpetual crackpot dialup users. According to the VM, she’s been a customer of our since roughly the dawn of western civilization and she always has the same problem, she can send mail, but can’t receive it. According to the logs on the mail server, she successfully logs in, successfully downloads 0 of 0 messages and disconnects, leaving 0 bytes on the server. Going back 7 days on this. Basically, no one sends her email. Chris surmises that it might be that she’s a loony and no one wants to engage her. Chris will be calling her later in that it’s his turn. I had to spend 30 minutes with Hadfilkrshingus from Red Lodge over his busted, cordless, speaker phone. What? What? What? Aaaaaaauuuuuuuggggghhhhhh!!!!!
In other news, the Japanese and North Koreans are engaged in a little saber-rattling and good old-fashion name-calling. In an Oriental version of “Mine is bigger than yours” Japan has parked a pair of anti-missile boats off the coast with their radars trained inland. Korea is beating its national chest saying “”We will consider this as the start of Japan’s war of re-invasion more than six decades after the Second World War and mercilessly destroy all its interceptor means and citadels with the most powerful military means.”
The rest of the world responded with variations of “What you say?”
I predict that North Korea will not so much launch a missile, but rather will blow one up. It might make it clear of the ground before going “BOOM” but I think it’s just gonna be one hell of an impressive explosion. I could be wrong. They might have developed or stolen or bought missile technology, which if true, their having nukes makes me go uh uh, no. I mean there’s already countries with nukes that I really don’t think should have nukes. Pakistan come easily to mind. Right next door is India. Now, the fact that these two nations haven’t already nuked each other is nothing short of amazing for me. But come on, Pakistan? With nukes? This is got to be a mistake. What the hell, if we’re letting Pakistan have nukes, why not Iran and North Korea.
In other news, I found this:
While browsing around for nothing in particular. It’s a link to a video and a pretty darned good one in that you actually WANT to click on it to find out the guys’ story. 10 points to anyone who can Identify the website.
Oh, before I forget, we sends out shouts to my readers over El Salvador way.
Best tamales I ever had from a street vendor in San Antonio who was from El Salvador. Nothing else like them before or since. The guy would show up at 11AM, open his wagon at 11:30 and be completely out of tamales by 11:45. He always made the same amount every day and always sold them for the same price. He wouldn’t let anyone buy more than 3 a day.
In other news, I may have to do something extraverted and ugly to my eldest daughter’s former mother-in-law. I realize she wants to maintain contact with Phoenix. I’m a grandparent too, so I know. The problem is that Jennifer craves not their company for her or her daughter and under the present circumstances, she gets to say where her daughter goes and with whom she spends time. That’s the way it is. So Jennifer’s former mother-in-law was calling several times a day, leaving increasingly pithy voice mails and Jennifer had quite enough.
So, she arranges with her wireless carrier to block all the phone numbers the former mother-in-law uses. This worked for a while, but now she’s taken to texting Jennifer, constantly asking if Phoenix can come for this or for that. I see it as a thrown gauntlet. One I am all to please to pick up.
I have two Linux boxen at home. Each can easily send several thousand text messages (Asterisk rules!) a second to anyone I want. I can even have it change the source of the message with every message and even the message itself. It’s pretty basking script-kiddie stuff. If you’re like me, you would probably get weary of having your inbox instantly filled with messages encouraging you to “Scrape the maggle fish!” every time you clear it out. Technology is NOT an avenue you want to use to annoy me.
Some startling facts to finish:
The 25% of India’s population with the highest IQs is more than the total population of the US.
India has more smart people than we have people.
The top 10 in-demand jobs in 2009 did not exist in 2004.
The US Department of Labor estimates that a child born today will hold 10 – 14 different job by age 38.
There are over 200,000,000 registered users on MySpace.
If MySpace was a country, it would be the worlds 5th largest.
There are 31 billion searches on Google every month.
In 2006, this number was 2.7 billion.
The number of text messages sent and received every day exceeds the number of people on the planet.
(My Fave)
There are 540,000 words in the English language.
This is roughly 5 times as many as during Shakespeare’s time.
It is estimated that 4 exabytes (4.0*10^19) of unique information will be generated this year.
This is more than in the previous 5,000 years combined.
My rabbit navigates the x-axis.
He has done this since 1985.
Boss back tomorrow. Must find ways to be productive. Productive in ways she thinks are valuable.