Living through an earthquake

The bed was shaking.  To the right, to the left, from the foot upward, from the head down. Left, right, upm down over and over.  It was pitch dark, I could hear things falling to the floor, yet I was not terrified.  On and on went the shaking, the dial on my phosphorescent watch read around 4:30. 

The shaking seemed never-ending.  A pair of table lamps fell from my headboard to the floor. After what I guessed  was between 5 and ten minutes movement finally stopped.

I groped about and located a flashlight I kept near the bed and turned it on, found my glasses and moved the light around the room.  Two lamps were on the floor, nothing else seemed out of place, no cracks or openings in the wall or ceiling joints, no windows broken or cracked.

The rest of the house was somewhat of a shambles, but I found nothing broken except for an old cedar chest whose spindly legs had collapsed.

I located my cell phone and attempted to call my wife.  “Connection error” was the message my phone returned. Same thing with a call to the electric company’s emergency line.

I returned to my bed and as I sat on the side, I felt some further movement, considerably milder than my first shaking.

The phone rang.  The screen told me it was my sister-in-law but as soon as I pressed the connect button the phone went dead with another “connection error” on the screen.  Attempts to return the call brought the same results.

I tried to sleep, but it was like laying in the bunk of a moving train.  I could never sleep on a train and I didn’t succeed sleeping as much as I tried. (In the next 24 hours over 110 after shocks would be recorded).

Soon after daylight broke I dressed.  Showering was impossible since without electricity my water system was useless.  Thanks to a rechargeable shaver I was able to clean my face a bit.

I picked up several fallen lamps around the house as well as several bottles and ornaments which had fallen to the floor.  The inside of most cupboards were in complete disarray and I discovered ONE broken glass among the total disorder in the house.  No structural damage was evident anywhere.

A quick breakfast of fresh fruit and I attempted to phone all the contacts in my phone starting from the top.  After a dozen attempts one phone rang and a Canadian friend answered. He, too, was without power and had felt the quaking, but was without any damage or injuries. No further calls produced any results.

Suddenly my guard-dog, Kelly, started whining excitedly which was strange for him.  I looked out and saw him beside the gate and in the distance my gardener was approaching on foot.  I realized that he had been considerably more terrified by the shaking which had gone on through the night than I was, and he was just happy to see somebody that he knew come to assure him that things might be OK.

I entered my car and struck out for town, looking about for any evidence of disarray or destruction in the 9 km route to town.  The first I noticed was that the approach to the bridge entering Villarrica was barricaded and that traffic was re-routed to a new bridge which had earlier been redirected for use only by traffic leaving town.  I could see little evidence of damage to the old bridge as we crossed the new one, but there was a policeman stationed at the intersection on the other side to direct traffic away from that crossing.

The gas gauge, read about 1/4 tank so I decided to take an alternate route and pass by the service station to fill up before I arrived at my business.  When I arrived at the entrance to the station, there was already a line up which stretched some three blocks to the south.  Innocently, I decided to leave the gasoline for a later moment and proceeded directly to my shop. 

A large bus was blocking the street as I approached my parking place so I had to proceed with caution to the place where I left my car.  Because of the obstruction I hadn’t noticed that a small dwelling beside the bus had completely collapsed.

On arrival at the shop, where we distribute tires and batteries, I noticed little out of the ordinary, and since it was Saturday and before 10:00 it didn’t even seem odd that the doors were still closed.

On entering, I noticed some display stands turned over and a few piles of tires had fallen, but it wasn’t till I ascended to my second-floor office that I was able to appreciate the complete shambles which confronted me there with all of the books which lined two wall almost all scattered about on the floor.

My secretary had started to put things back into order, and apart from telling me that there was no electricity could not tell me much more about the general state of affairs.  The fixed line phone system was partially working but no internet connections were available.

The 30 high sign which stood on a 1 foot steel pole was leaning against the building, slightly inclined down to where the welding on the pole had broken some 7 feet above the ground.  Any further strong shaking could easily dislodge the massive sign and bring it crashing down.  We had to find a welder who had his own electrical generator to make repairs.

Aftershocks continued, at what seemed to me on an almost regular schedule.  Since the early morning I had the impression that there were regular shakes occurring more or less every hour on the hour.

There was no sense in opening since we depended on electricity for most of our services and I sent a couple of employess off to try to find a welder with a generator when phoning produced no results.

I walked down to the service station on the corner to see if the line had diminished and saw it was longer than before. I spoke to a police man who informed me that one of the highway to Valdivia was impassable due to a 15 meter wide rupture but that other roads were passable.  The problem with travel was not so much the roads but the availability of gasoline as evidenced by the line at this station … and the fact that some stations would be without any fuel at all.

My secretary suggested that it would be an idea to use a gas can she had in her car to purchase at least 10 litres of gas, but when we sent someone to the station they refused, saying that only vehicles were being filled, and that we’d have to get into line.  Knowing the owner, nor being a regular customer wasn’t of any use.

We were on the point of setting out to join in the line when I decided to send someone to inquire how much fuel they had left.  It didn’t make much sense to me to get into a line of several hundred cars only to have the station run out of gas before we reached the pumps.  It turned out that while we were making the inquiry, the pumps ran dry and no word was available as to when the tanker would arrive to refill their supply.

I managed to communicate with my wife at her Inn in Lican Ray and learned that she had electric power re-established.  Since no word was available from the local power company as to when power would be available in the town or the rural area where my house was situated, I decided to drive there in spite of the limited fuel I had.  At least we would have electricity, water and a stock of food for a few days.

Up to that point, the only thing that I had been able to learn about the general situation in the country was from a neighbour who had learned from his car radio that the epicentre of the quake seemed to be near Concepcion where a force of over 8 on the Richter scale had been registered.

A walk around Villarrica revealed relatively little damages.  The small dwelling about three doors down from my shop and another small construction where a cement wall had fallen down were the only damages of houses we observed.  A large store, which had been in a very old, poorly constructed building had suffered considerable damages.  Most businesses, likely for the lack of electricity, kept their doors closed.

Before I left to drive to Lican Ray I was surprised to have my phone ring showing a number which I didn’t recognize on the screen.  I answered and wonder of wonders, was speaking to a friend from Ecuador who had heard of the quake and was concerned for our well-being.

I assured him that we were physically in good shape but almost without any communication and knowledge of the rest of the country.  He assured me he’d communicate with my two daughters to put them at ease over our well-being.

There was one minor fissure in the highway from Villarrica to Lican Ray which hardly was noticeable and only one structure, a local handicrafts store, had a canopy over the entrance which had obviously collapsed.

On arriving I drove by the town’s single gas station, in the hopes that it might be operating and have little or no line up.  This line was only slightly shorter than the ones at Villarrica’s stations. I chose to go directly to the Inn and wait til things had stabilized a bit before trying to get gas.

How Amazon could Help

Just a couple of weeks back I had purchased a Kindle e-book reader from Amazon.  Since I had not established with any external or national source I decided to see if it’s wireless connection was working and discovered that I could connect with the on-line store.

It occurred to me that I might register a plea for help by putting in a search for a book called “Help Major Earthquake in Chile”  The search  did not produce any results, as I rather expected, but still I hoped that someone might review their logs and might somehow trace the origin of the message to my general whereabouts.

Even if it didn’t work, this seems to me an excellent potential for assistance in disaster situations perhaps by establishing a special code which would allow the contact to be routed for special handling.

Next I decided to do a search on Wikipedia for Chile Earthquakes and was amazed to discover the extensive information which had already been published by them about the size, extent and general overview of the situation, barely 12 hours after it had taken place.

I have managed to connect, very briefly to the internet to send out a short email to many of my friends and relatives who might have concerns about what is happening but that connection was short lived.

I’ve seen, on TV locally the enormous effort which the country and the government is making to re-establish a basic level of normality to the situation, and must say that from what I’ve seen so far, it is very impressive over how well they’ve been able to handle the situation, especially in light of the estimates I’ve read which estimate this earthquake to be over 500 times that which has recently devastated Haiti.

The government has declared that the entire country is in a state of catastrophe with over 13 million persons affected.  While I don’t mean to diminish what this has meant to others who have suffered losses far in excess of what we’ve experienced, I do believe that the “affect” which most people have seen here is likely much more like mine than the few which have been featured and dramatized by much of the news media.   Personally, my greatest agony, I think, has been from Internet withdrawal. I hope my story serves as a useful counterpoint.

Technorati Tags: earthquake,chile,villarrica,lican ray,disaster,internet withdrawal

The Ad Runs!

The “objectionable” photo in the ad I tried to run on Facebook was modified to fall within their standards.

Here’s the version of the ad which was approved. 

Same image but with the color taken out.  It would be interesting to know if this was approved by the same person who rejected the earlier ad, or if another person with a bit more open frame of mind OK’d this one.

No sense of humor

Today I was shocked to discover that Facebook, or at least some of the people who work there are far too serious … perhaps even to the extent of being prudish.

This all began several months ago, when I created a group on Facebook called I used to have a bellybutton and described it as a just for fun – totally pointless group to encourage others to post true facts which don’t make any sense. (I might add that I “lost” my own BB a couple of years ago during major surgery and occasionally joke about my “loss”.)

Recently, I decided to promote this group out of curiosity to see how many other people also might share my condition.

I applied to Facebook to run an ad promoting the group and displaying the above photo only to have it rejected with the following explanation:

The image of this ad is either irrelevant or inappropriate. Per sections 3 and 8 of Facebook's Advertising Guidelines, the image on your ad should be relevant and appropriate to the item being advertised. Images that are overly explicit, provocative, or that reveal too much skin are not allowed. Images that may either degrade or idealize any health condition or body type are also not allowed.

I didn’t particularly feel that the image was too risqué, however, I changed the picture and tried again with the following ad:

Again, the ad was rejected on the same grounds.

To me, the whole idea of seeing if there are others who share my condition was a bit of a lark, but the reactions of the people who run Facebook’s ads seems to me exceedingly conservative.

What do you think?

Fighting Ecology

Michael Phillips has written a blog encouraging us to fight Ecology, in which he urges us to do things which are inconvenient for ecologists.

While I am a sort of rebel at heart, and have committed some utterly stupid things in my life because I resented being told what to do, I don't feel I can wholeheartedly endorse Phillip's position.

When he points out that some of the things which have been done in the name of ecology which have produced negative effects, such as the increase in the world's affilictions for malaria in underdeveloped countries because DDT has been banned worldwide, I agree.

But when it comes to increasing the use of Styrofoam simply because ecologists are trying to ban them, I feel that is senseless.

Banning airports, which restrict result in travel restrictions, and congestion in airports, may not be convenient to Phillips, but at the same time, I believe that if there are costs which affect others in expanded airports (such as noise, air pollution, greater car traffic congestion) these costs need to be met and paid for by the people who directly benefit from the expansion.

It is not always easy to get the benefit users to pay for all the costs of a particular service, and it is quite likely that some of the costs may not even be known until many years after something has been put into place, but that doesn't mean that we need to place roadblocks into the path of development simply because we cannot foresee the dangers which lie in the future.

In the end I object to and resist laws imposed by politicians based on vested interests, either for or against specific interests and I fear we have far too many laws which do exactly this.

Somewhere I remember reading about a proposition that ALL LAWS should automatically expire after a certain period of time unless they are specifically renewed by the legislators. This could go a long way in at least providing a way to escape from many of the senseless laws that do more harm than good, or benefit only specific vested interests which are not apparent when the laws were passed.

Pro Commerce: This puts it together

Pro Commerce: This puts it together

Michael Phillips points out that most young people tend to favor socialism over capitalism (or commerce), tending to think of the latter as inherently evil.

The problem, in my opinion, is not that capitalism is inherently evil, but rather that what is popularly known as capitalism is not what true free-market capitalism is -- or could -- be.

The US is popularly thought of as the foremost modle of a free ecomomy, but the truth is that is is not -- and has NEVER been -- a free market economy (FME), and it is my guess that virtually all of the defects which are attributed to the FME are actually due to attempts to control the economy rather than letting natural forces run their course.

Sample Blog with Windows Live Writer

This is an effort to see what can be accomplished in this blog using Windows Live Writer.

We can add photos and manipulate them in several ways.

The text can be manipulated also and tables can be added

left	right
1	11

Devaluation in the works?

In watching the TV reports of the US budget along with all the commentary and analysis I was suddenly stuck by an odd realization: This year is two thousand nine, next year is twenty-ten. What happened to the other one thousand nine hundred and eighty (2000 less 20)?

I realize that this is an acceptable alternative way of speaking about the year, but still it strikes me a bit odd that for the first 9 years of this centry we used one form and then in the 10th year we switch to another. Is there any rational explanation for this?

There's another thing that occurred to me in mulling this over. Maybe, this is the way the politicians plan to deal with the massive debt and deficits which the US government is running and planning. Divide a trillion by 100 and it becomes 10 billion. Doesn't sound quite as bad, does it?

Is the US dollar going to be devalued during the Obama administration?

7 million miles of toothpaste wasted!

There's a web site that deals exclusively with toothpaste, if you're interested in picking up a lot of trivia about a very common household commodity: Toothpasteworld - World's Largest Toothpaste Collection. Also see Toothpaste in Wikipedia

Colgate, Proctor and Gamble, GlaxoSmithKline, and Unilever, which manufacture the major brands sold around the world, are among the largest companies on the globe today.

If you stop to think about it, there is an incredible about of toothpaste consumed every day.

I don't know if anyone has ever tried to calculate the actual consumption but let's make a rough attempt. In almost every ad and photo you see of toothpaste in use, a strip of about 1inch is spread on the brush. At this moment, the world population is somewhere over 6.8 billion people. If we suppose that only 25% of the people in the world use toothpaste, and that they only brush one time per day, the world consumption of toothpaste is a strip which measures some 26, 830 miles EVERY DAY!

That's more than one complete circumference of the globe.

What's the point of this?

From my own experience, I've discovered that you don't need 1" of toothpaste to effectively brush your teeth. In fact, I even have my doubts if you really need it at all, so long as you do brush your teeth regularly. But, in my own case I have found that just 1/4" of toothpaste does a very nice and refreshing job of cleaning in my mouth.

So, if the world's population were to reduce their use of this product to the level I have found effective, we could conserve all the resources and energy which is needed to make 20,123 miles of toothpaste each day. The annual savings would me more than 7 million miles of toothpaste.

Just one simple, small change which is within the capacity of everyone without any cost or inconvenience could add up to significant impact.

About Cantaloupe and dietary fiber

For years I've been hearing about dietary fiber which is also called roughage or bulk.

My American Heritage Dictionary define this as:

Coarse, indigestible plant matter, consisting primarily of polysaccharides such
as cellulose, that when eaten stimulates intestinal peristalsis.

I can remember family members who had problems with their digestion buying something in the pharmacy which looked to me to be nothing more than some kind of seed (I believe the product was called Metamucil, or something similar).

What stuck me as odd then, and even now was that many people I know who have had a problem with their digestion, always removed the seeds when they ate watermelon (Citrullus lanatus), whereas I simply swallowed them whole whenever I encountered them.

If our body actually needs a certain amount of indigestible plant matter, it didn't make much sense to remove them from what we ate, especially if they weren't unpleasant or difficult to ingest.

Over the past few years, I've started eating the seeds of cantaloupe (Cucumis melo var. reticulatus)too, also without chewing. When I first tried it, they seemed a bit repulsive as I scooped up a spoonful from the center of the fruit, mostly due to their "strange" appearance and the fact that -- by custom -- I had previously consider them to be garbage.

Now that I've become accustomed to eating them, I consider them to be the most delectable part of the fruit. The membrane which surrounds them is generally quite juicy and has a much more intense flavor than the remainder of the flesh.

On top of everything, I believe I'm helping my intestinal processes and have never had a single one one sprout while still inside me.

Respect and Authority

This morning I was thinking about respect for authority and wondering if there is more, or less respect for authority than there used to be.

In my case, I think I respect authority less than I used to, mainly because I've learned, over the years, to think for myself. Any authority that I do respect must earn my respect. I do not respect authority simply because they are --or are called-- authorities.

That being said, I do not run around deliberately or flagrantly acting contrary to laws, or what the government authorities say I should do, there are other reasons that might make me act in a way that would make it appear that I do respect authority.

In the case of many laws and regulations, my reason to act in seeming conformity to them, may be simply because I feel that the complications to my life for not conforming are more than the benefit I might perceive from doing otherwise.

There is another aspect of my superficial respect for authority. I have a practice of treating most people with respect, because I respect them as people until they give me some reason to not respect them. So, I may be entirely polite and deferential to someone who might consider my actions as respect for their position where, in reality, I am simply giving them the benefit of the doubt because I don't really know them as a person.

Much of the turmoil we see in society around us these days is, I believe, due to the fact that people in positions of authority are confused with this relationship between authority and respect. The respect does not come from the authority, nor is there anything inherent in authority that leads to a person automatically respecting it.

Respect must be earned, authority can be given or taken by anyone for any good or bad reason. Much too often, authority is abused, and for that reason, people as they are more and more exposed to that abuse, tend to respect authority less. This can reach extremes where authority completely looses meaning.

Contrepreneur

con'·tre·pre·neur n. A person who habitually uses deceit, deception, and misrepresentation to earn a profit in a business venture.
--con'tre·pre·neur'i·al adj.
--con'tre·pre·neur'i·al·ism or con'tre·pre·neur'ism n.
--con'tre·pre·neur"ship' n.


Today, I'm coining a new word, to describe people like Robert Metzler, president of Allstate's of America, Inc., a Miami, company which I have had the misfortune to deal with.

Although Metzler, may be the world's first contrepreneur, he is not necessarily the best, or even the first contrepreneur to exisit, but simply the first to be described by this term which combines the term "con man" with "entrepreneur".

I believe we need a term for this kind of business person, because, although they are in the minority, we all have had, or will have an encounter with this type sometime in our lives and unfortunately the bad taste which we are left with as a result of such an experience, tends to seriously taint our feelings about business people as a whole.

After having my experience with Bob Metzler and his company Allstate's of America, Inc., located in Miami, I had considerable difficulty in comprehending how such a deceitful operator could continue to operate for 34 years, as Metzler claims. (Or was his 30 plus years in business just part of his story?)

As I thought about this, and gathered more information in my quest to seek some retribution from my dealings several things became clear to me that explains how a person so unethical can continue to operate for such a long period with impunity.

Metzler acquires discarded, replaced or damaged automotive service machinery and equipment, cleans and paints it, and resells it as supposedly reconditioned, tested and guaranteed equipment. In this sense, he is providing a wanted service to the owners of the obsolete equipment, taking it off their hands and providing them some payment for it.

Next, he specializes in exporting. A significant portion of what he sells is shipped out of the US, to countries where equivalent new equipment would be considerably more expensive than the used alternatives he offers.

Most of this equipment is heavy and bulky. Shipping it is expensive and the importation of these things into their destined markets is both fraught with red-tape, and expensive duties and taxes.
There are no existing laws or agencies which regulate and enforce standards of quality, warranties and general compliance with sales/purchase agreements. Agencies such as the Miami Better Business Bureau (which rates his business with it's lowest "F") and the State of Florida's Consumer Affairs Office, do not have any authority to do anything apart from attempt to communicate with the business and request a voluntary reconcilliation. This is in spite of the fact that the BBB has a long list of un-resolved complaints against this business.

According to Detective Kenneth Joseph with the Economic Crimes unit of the Miami Police, no US police force would respond to any complaint against Mr. Metzler as long as he shipped something -- anything -- in return for payment.

While the cost of most of his equipment is expensive, much of it running to several thousand dollars per item, it is not a mass market and the absolute total value of his transactions is not large enough to justify the cost of legal action either on an individual basis or even as a class action. The cost for a foreign complaint to attempt court ordered resolution in small claims court is prohibitive.

The fruits of Metzler's fraud are not of much interest to any news media who would reach other potential victims. This is no mass consumer problem or multi-million dollar fiasco that affect thousands. Local news media are likely to turn a deaf ear to reports of wrong doing because the only outcome would be loss of local jobs and purchases from local businesses. National and international media are too sophisticated to focus on a miniscule ripple in a distant, backward nation who should be thankful that cast-off American products are available in the first place.

So there you have it, the formula through which for anyone with limited scruples to find a lucrative niche .

1. Provide some limited service to somebody in the community.


2. Caters to a hungry market which is outside the base community.


3. Sells products which involves considerable extra expense to receive.


4. Operates in activity in which there is no regulation.


5. Police have no jurisdiction.


6. Legal action involves high costs.


7. Scale small enough that news media are not interested.

The internet now offers us some tools which may help to make these contrepreneurs better known. Two that I know of are Ripoff Report, and My 3 Cents which allow individuals to publicially expose these kinds of operations. I encourage everyone to use these kinds of opportunities to avoid falling prey to contrepreneurs and to spread the word so that the world becomes more aware of their activities.

Anyone who is interested in the sordid details of my dealings with Metzler and Company can find them at:

• http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/0/381/RipOff0381909.htm and
• http://www.my3cents.com/showReview.cgi?id=44703

Seizure of Arms stashes

Every time I see a TV news report of a seizure of an illegal arms stash, I find myself being amazed at the attitude of the reporters who seem to build up the idea that the public is being relieved of a tremendous threat to their safety. But never do these reporters ever try to answer the question: "Why do these stash of arms exist?"

To me it seems that the reasons criminals accumulate arms is because they want to be prepared for a possible confrontation with armed opposition, which quite often might include those people who legally have the right to have extensive arms ar their disposal ... that is to say law enforcement agencies.

What I'm thinking is that if authorities in any country did not possess extensive and powerful armed weapons, then those who oppose them, or who might wish to, wouldn't go to the bother of building up their firepower.

This line of thinking is an extension of the idea that violence begets violence, and while it might be argued that the legitimate arms holder only have their arms in order to do their jobs and protect the public from anti-social elements, it might also be true that if they weren't armed in the first place the criminals wouldn't be as violent as they appear to be.

I don't claim to have the answer to the elimination of violence in the world, but I do believe we need to start looking for ways of stopping the bullies without resorting to the same tactics which the bullies use so that our "good" bully beats up the "bad" bully. Sooner, or later the good bully is going to be tempted to abuse his power and when he does he will be the bad boy.

The Woman in the other time zone

Last night I had a most fascinating dream.

I dreamed I was beginning an intimate relationship with an exotic woman who told me that she, and her entire family lived in a different time zone. She explained that they did this to constantly remind themselves that they were different from the rest of the people around them.

I became acquainted with her when she came to do some work for me. What I didn't know until we began our relationship was her different time zone. In effect she was living one hour different from me. If I asked her to come to work for me at 8 am she arrived on time, but it was 7am in the world in which she lived and while I thought she finished the day a 4pm, she was leaving at 3pm according to her watch.

She told me, that if she committed herself to me, she would be willing to live in my time zone, but if I wanted to really become accepted by her family I'd have to adopt their time zone.

Of course this was just a dream, but it seems to me that the idea could be expanded into an interesting story or novel. If anyone is inspired by the idea, please feel free to use it ... and let me know: I'd be delighted to read what you come up with.

How To Leave A Trackback

I wonder if I will ever see a day when I'm not amazed by something or other on the internet.
Well, today, I've just learned about Trackback from Marcus Hochstadt. How To Leave A Trackback In this blog he demonstates how this works byproviding this link to where his learning all began, which was a blog entry by Kirsten Farris. You want to learn about Trackback too? Do what I did, and follow these links. Then try it out, maybe by tracking back here where YOU first started your lesson.

In this blog environment the link you use for trackback is named "Permalink". You can right-click on it and copy it's content to use in the post you want to make.

An irony of life

I just realized recently that one of the great ironies of life is that when you finally reach the stage where you can have the privilege of parking next to the door, your doctor insists that you park two or three blocks away in order to get more exercise!

The other side of the coin

Keywords:

Humor,

wikipedia,

Uncyclopedia

Recently I've been spending a lot of time fooling around at the Uncyclopedia ( http://uncyclopedia.org/)

I suppose there are some who would say that I've been wasting my time, but I differ in as much as I believe that humor is an essential part of living a good life.

The Uncyclopedia is a wiki, founded as a spoof of Wikipedia, which is in my opinion one of the really great marvels of the Internet. If you're not familiar with it, I'd encourage you to use it and what's more participate. It seems a bit daunting at first, but once you get the hang of it, it's quite easy.

Surely you know something about some thing which is unique, or special, and you may also have some need to exercise your sense of humor which is just like any other ability we have: if you don't use it, you loose it.

Try them both, I'm sure you'll find it time well spent.

Confusion about profits

Keywords:

profit, economics,

prejudice, commerce,

business,

spyware, adware

Recently I've become involved in a project which involves publishing books on various topics. One of the books deals with adware and spyware, which is a hot topic of much concern these days to most everyone who has a computer connected to the internet.

One of the most frequent objections I noted to spyware/adware is that the intruding software collects data which may be private and confidential and that this may then be used by some unknown party to earn a profit!

What I find strange about this attitude is that it seems to imply that if the person using the information were not using it to make a profit it might not be sooo bad, perhaps even acceptable.

There is a prejudice rampant in the eyes of many people that equates profit with something evil. I cannot accept this and I don't believe that anybody who has ever thought about it very much would stick with that attitude. Yes, there may be greedy people who seek to make unreasonable profits, and there are too many people who seek to make profits using illegal, immoral or unethical means to do so, but that does not make profits, nor the wish to earn them bad.

In fact, if we look at the way history has developed, a very great amount of the progress which we have enjoyed over the time we have been civilized has beed due to people who have sought to make a profit by providing some kind of product or service which other people wanted, and the lure of profits was the incentive which gave many entrepreneurs the spark they needed to invent or provide new and better solutions to old problems.


Returning to the issue of adware/spyware, I agree that much of it is a menace today not because private information is used to make a profit but simply because it is used, without permission, and that it is gathered often without the awareness of the person who is being targeted using his own resources without agreement. The issue of profit is simply incidental.

To pee or not to pee. That is the paradox of parsley

Keywords:

Parsley, bladder disorders,

Prostate Enlargement,

nocturnal urination

I feel sure that even Shakespeare would not be unhappy with the licence I've taken with one of his famous lines when it's pointed out that after men pass the age of 50, it is very common for them to experience the need to get up several times during the night to urinate..

This is, at the very least, an annoyance, and in the worst of cases symptomatic of some serious problems.

If you are experiencing this you need to know about parsley.

The paradox is that while parsley is a diuretic, which means that aids in the elimination of liquid from the body, drinking a small amount of a tea prepared boiling a handful of parsley (preferably fresh) in about a quart or liter of water, will cut down on the number of times you will feel the need to get up in the night to visit the bathroom.

I don't know where I first learned about this, but I've tried it, and I find that if I brew up about a liter of the tea and keep it in the fridge, drinking about 2 wine glasses of this a day, my need to get up in the night, is at least cut down by half, and I can often pass an entire night without making those little excursions.

The flavor is not particularly disagreeable, and you may even find it pleasant once you get used to it.

Parsley, in different forms has various other health benefits, but this use alone puts it near the top of my list of favorite vegetables.

Microsoft Giving away Pendrives

Keywords:

Microsoft, Windows,

pendrive,

marketing survey

As a reward for responding to a questionaire concerning licencing of Windows by corporate users, Microsoft is giving away a pendrive with supposedly "useful information" recorded on it. If you'd like to respond to the survey use this link: Mystery Solved See the icon on the right side of the screen. Oh, you must be a US resident to qualify.

Naturally Ridiculous - 100%

Keywords:

Natural, man-made,

advertising, promotion,

language

For quite some time I've been ruminating about why we have become so fixated on things which are "natural".

Yesterday, at the Music Festival in Viña del Mar in Chile, Tonka Tomicic was selected as the festival's queen on a platform of being a 100% Natural Model.

Now, I'm not in the least bit criticising her, and even find what I've seen of her personality most appealing but 100% Natural is ridiculous!

Like almost all uses of this phrase that we see today, it is liberally interpreted to apply to the subject in the way which the promoter finds convenient, but other aspects are completely ignored or considered irrelevant.

However attractive and delightful this woman is I would not be the least bit surprized if she had had orthodontic work done sometime in her life, if she had died, tinted or colored her hair (it certainly was cut by someone), had depilated her body, and either performed or been subjected to any number of processes or practices in her lifetime that are anything but "natural" in the purest sense of the word.

In fact, I'd dare to guess that if any person, man or woman, were to be presented to the public who was truely and completly natural in every possible way the result would not be pleasing at all.

The other day I noticed on a packge of peanuts and raisins the sticker "Oil-free, 100% Natural" and had to ask myself, what is natural about finding salt on raisins and peanuts wrapped in a plastic container?

Why are natural shampoos supposedly better? In nature, cavemen washed their hair with nothing more than water -- if they washed it at all!

I think we can find in our daily lives many examples of things, from foods to medicines and various practices where not only do we prefer a man-modified version but might even find that the result we desire from it is better in the artificial, synthetic version that the natural one.

Why have we fixated on this idea that anything man-made is less desireable than what is found in nature?

In practice, I think that many combinations of man-made and natural things end up producing the most desired and attractive result. Man has a capacity to "improve" on what nature provides. Sometimes, perhaps too often, he errs or doesn't notice his incomplete understanding of some natural phenomena, but that doesn't mean that it is better to drop everything that he has done and return to a natural state.

We have the capability to learn from our mistakes, so if we discover some instance where a natural version seems better than a fabricated one, let's use that as a opportunity to learn more about what we might improve on, instead of rejecting the natural intelligence which we have been given.