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musings of mark since 2001

Another All Hallows Eve drawing to a close on Bowen Island and the dog managed to stay in town until the main fireworks were over. I went down to the beach where the fireman had everything set up, instead of being in the crowd on the causeway. It’s not anything like the set up for the August fireworks in Vancouver every summer with finely choreographed, computer controlled, electronically fused ten inch mortars.

Bowen’s fireworks consisted of about six batteries of maybe eight two inch tubes and the choreography is just one guy saying “it’s 7:26″ and then a few minutes later a couple others telling the other guys “let’s go” and another short wait while they got their act together and finally put the fire to the sky. No computer controller here, they had punks like a larger version of what one would use to light the votive candles in a church and it’s a matter of finding a fuse that hasn’t been lit yet, and then standing back a few feet until it takes off.

The percussion from the mortars going off is fairly mild even being just a few feet away, these are not what you would call a large mortar in any sense of the word and although it’s noisy there isn’t any ringing afterwards if you don’t have ear plugs in. It was nicer last year when I had a joint to smoke beforehand, kinda lame otherwise and glad I didn’t have to go a long ways to see it!

Ann Jones spent the better part of the past four years in Afghanistan, working on education and women’s rights - and watching. She wrote about what she saw in Kabul in Winter: Life Without Peace in Afghanistan (Metropolitan Books, 2006). She usually writes about the plight of women, but in the Asia Times today she pens an article about what the situation has come to be regarding the increased poppy production there.

Talk about your old news, yesterday Yahoo posted the press release from the rightsandfreedom.com web site outlining Hossam Shaltout’s disclosure that Saddam had already capitulated well before the invasion of Iraq. I suppose the reason for the new press release is because in Europe it’s been known for years that Saddam had already made the necessary plans to remove himself to Syria so a US friendly dictator could be put in his place and start selling the oil there in dollars again; and when Hossam mentioned that in his interview in 2004 with Chris Mathews of ABC it didn’t get any main stream media attention at all.

After all, it is a crime, to invade another sovereign country as they have and to torture people as they are being held without means of habeas corpus. Our own government as the lap dog for America is just as complicit, Hossam was a Canadian National and they did nothing while he was being held for 37 days in prison for the attempt to show the world that indeed there was no reason for the invasion planned for years ahead of time. All those dead people, just for a buck or two.

Pretty nice day around here, sunny as could be but a little on the cooler side. My buddy up at Burns/Francois Lake is digging out from a 4 foot (yes, feet!) snow fall over the weekend that had a few forestry workers hunkered down for a couple days waiting for a helicopter to rescue them further east near Tumbler Ridge.

Got the last few hunks of wood split for the stove and made up for not eating yesterday with a plate of rice today. Weighed myself too, finally up to about 150 pounds but still well shy of the 175 or so that was once normal for me; but at least I’m not still losing weight. Will be nice when jeans fit again and don’t fall down when I walk and forget to wear a belt!

Got my free BC Drivers Abstract emailed so it’s handy when applying for driving jobs, nice not having to find a licensing office and being able to do everything over the phone/internet. Not much on the job boards today, never is on a Monday and even the web developer’s lists are a bit quiet. Everyone must be getting their costume ready for the Halloween festivities tomorrow night. This house stayed pretty dark last year, no kids visiting because of it and should be a quiet night around here again this year, except for the fireworks in Deep Bay if they have them, there isn’t a haunted house this year so maybe that’s a no go too. The dog likes to hide in my room when he’s scared, it’s the deepest and furtherest away from everything else in the house and he likes that when the booms start.

“Microsoft uses a different format to save files with Office 2007 that, without a special viewer that will have to be downloaded, makes them unreadable with earlier versions”. Ouch, that’s going to hurt a lot of IT departments. Makes it good for the rest of the world though as we’ve been using xml for a long time. Word was able to save xml files back in 2000, nice to see the entire suite of applications have gone this route.

It’s not really that big of a deal for users of older Office software to use the newer format, but it’s different and that’s enough to cause a lot of phone calls to IT in the next few months.  Elsewhere in the MS world, web sites like the W3C that decidedly have more tech people visiting than the average computer user, show for this month that Firefox is still gaining market share and Internet Exploder of all versions is barely above 60% of their visitors.