Odds & Ends

-I received copy of this delightful essay this morning and I'm passing it on for those who may have missed it.

- I will make an addendum to my gratitude blog entry in regards to the foiled terrorist plans to blow up US bound planes. It so happens that the day the plot was rumored to happen was August 16, the date my youngest and her Mr. Wonderful are flying from New York to Madrid. Not that they would have been in any danger but it might have been a frightening, confused day for us...planes grounded or diverted to who knows where. And even more gratitude for all who stopped this disaster

-Tomorrow evening Senator Barak Obama will be holding a question-answer session at our little local college. Never do I recall any US Senator venturing this far south in our fair state and miracles of miracles, it's not even an election year. Even my conservative husband wants to go with me. A friend showed him an article on Obama from the Wall Street Journal which impressed him favorably. He, as I, like Obama's determination to end the silly partisan name-calling which stops cold any possible dialog.

-Ted Kaczynski's cabin is now up for sale on eBay. What can be said other than morbid sensationalism sells. It now seems that poor Ted's brain was scrambled by top secret psychological experiments done by Dr. Henry Murray, of the Thematic Apperception Test fame, at Harvard. One wonders how many others were damaged to a less dramatic extent. And Ted's insanity like that of John Nash (A Beautiful Mind) only reinforces the common misperception that highly intelligent people are mentally unstable.

-Firefox's latest update was nearly the subject of a "my list of gripes" blog rant. The automatic update deleted all my bookmarks and RSS feeds. And the search toolbar was unusable. I was furious. I did a system restore but Windows XP wouldn't restore the earlier version of Firefox. Microsoft was telling me "Hahaha! That's what you get for using Firefox unstead of our wonderful Internet Explorer". Firefox's bug reporting site, Bugzilla, was full of complaints. I was never able to restore the lost bookmarks, but after several exchanges with tech support, a link was sent to me which instructed me how to activate the search toolbar. All is well, but Firefox normally is free of this sort of blundering which is exactly why I switched from IE in the first place. But I thought better of a lenghty "list of gripes" since the world is full of gripers and I don't want become another. This mini-gripe will suffice.