September, 2003
September 30, 2003 — Parkersburg, West Virginia. Received a message from the Belpre Chamber of Commerce this morning requesting that I help them with their website (http://www.belpre.com). It made my day. I feel honored and excited to see what we can do to improve it.
September 19, 2003 — Alfred, Ohio. Received word from my brother today. His description was interesting to me since I have never experienced a hurricane.
I worked till noon today. We only lost power once this morning at the
office for about twenty minutes. When I left at noon the rain was
sideways. Even with an umbrella I got pretty wet just walking to the
car. I went back to the hotel and watched the wind and rain for a few
hours. It wasn't that bad. Just like a strong thunderstorm except it
kept going. I lost power at the hotel around three and just got it back
at 7:45. It's rather calm right now, The eye is already in Virginia.
Since the hurricane was moving so fast there wasn't time to dump much
rain. I am guessing around 5 inches by looking at the pool out the
window. It filled up and overflowed. I guess I can call this a training
hurricane.
September 16, 2003 — Alfred, Ohio. Hurricane Isabel has been in the news a lot recently. Growing up in Ohio, I normally don’t think of such things. However, I’ve got a brother who is on a temporary work assignment in North Carolina. I asked his exact wherabouts this morning and he replied “I am about 40 miles east of Raliegh, about 100 miles from the coast as the crow flies. I expect to get some rough weather Thursday but it looks like Isabel is loosing strength so probably the biggest danger here is flooding. Rocky Mount got flooded by Hurricane Floyd in 1999 and they are still recovering from that. I’m on the second floor of a hotel room in moderately high ground (there are no real hills in this area of the country).”
September 12, 2003 — Alfred, Ohio. Here is a test of your powers of observation. Take a look at these three images. Now tell me what you see?
image 1 
 image 2
image 3
OK, times up. You may have noticed that image 2 is somewhat smaller than the other two. You may have also noticed that image 2 has a bluish tint to the background compared to the darker background of images 1 and 3. Anything else? Images 1 and 3 are spiral galaxies photographed by the Hubble telescope from light that was emitted from them eons ago. Image 2 is a photograph of hurricane Isabel taken only a day ago.
September 11, 2003 — Alfred, Ohio. Happy birthday Mary Ellen! Imagine that, a 9/11 birthday. She turned 21 last year. I felt bad for her at the time but she has since made me feel more at ease about it. In fact, she made light of it by saying that at least she had the pubs pretty much to herself that night (the first year anniversary). I'm certain she means no disrespect to anyone, only that she has a right to celebrate her birthday like anyone else. There is always another angle if you keep looking and listening.
September 10, 2003 — Alfred, Ohio. This seems a pretty sad and reflective day and the events of today seem to reflect as much. I'm sure that tomorrow will be better.
Today, we noticed that the Eastern web site (the school district my son goes to) was hacked. This is the third time in as many years. The first time was probably by a Chinese group. I'll take the blame for that as I did not keep the server patched properly (I didn’t realize that was my job). I called the FBI that time and they didn’t even know what I was talking about. Last year we had someone from Morocco hack us. Here is the hacker log I kept back then. I really had the machine patched to the gills and still he was able to get through. I've since been to the school nearly every Saturday morning checking for updates from Microsoft and running a virus scans. I wouldn’t give you a nickle for all of Microsoft right now. The message today had to do with the Middle East which leads nicely into my next thought.
Nearly two years ago I wrote an article that was a suggestion for peace in the Middle East. The conditions have only worsened with time. I've updated my suggestion and encourage anyone with a better idea to post it or send it to me and I’ll post it here.
September 4, 2003 — Parkersburg, West Virginia. The good people at SuSE* gave several copies of their product to the MOVLUG. The monthly meeting was held tonight and I received a boxed set of the 8.1 professional version. Wow! Thanks SuSE. I intend to install it at Eastern and use it for a list server. I'm thrilled and will let everyone here know how it compares (IMHO) to RedHat.
* SuSe is a company located in Germany and is part of United Linux. They are one of the most popular distributions of Linux in the world even if not so well known in the U.S. If I recall correctly, they pretty well have the Linux market in Europe to themselves. They also have a pretty strange logo (no doubt you have already noticed it below).
September 2, 2003 — Alfred, Ohio. This is the ending of a four day weekend for me. The white water rafting adventure was great! My body was feeling pretty old for a day or two afterwards. It was kind of neat feeling muscles I had long forgotten about. Good thing for me it was a long weekend.
Friday was my birthday, Saturday I met Jeanie (25 years ago), and Sunday was Jeanie’s birthday. Our son Steve works in an executive office and had the president of the organization send both Jeanie and I an email Friday afternoon wishing us both a happy birthday. Thanks RG for indulging my son. Sunday, Joe and Angie stopped in and fixed us an Italian meal with wine. A person could get used to not working. :) Better still, I've only got two more years until I can eat off the senior menu at most restaurants.
I spent today working at Eastern updating Windows machines for the school my son attends. I’ve spent so much time recently applying patches to shoddy code that I’m beginning to feel like an unpaid serf working for Microsoft. Fortunately, I've got a plan… MOVLUG will have their monthly meeting this Thursday, September 4th at 6:00 P.M. and I intend to be there. The day will come when Microsoft will no longer be able to command my time. Mark these words.
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