19 Aug 2006
Latest Virgin Mary sighting: Chocolate drippings

Why just the other day, I was walking through my east pasture towards the creek when this freshly fallen pile of cow dung caught my eye ...

Workers at a chocolate company have discovered a 2-inch-tall (5-centimeter-tall) column of chocolate drippings that they believe bears a striking resemblance to traditional depictions of the Virgin Mary.

(link) [CNN.com]

By the way, did you notice that CNN did not put this in 'Offbeat'? Apparently, unlike ag stories, sightings of the BVM are considered top news

Update: CNN has finally moved this to 'Offbeat' - but it was in Top Stories - just look at the URLs in the links above, copied from their news feed.

23:54 /Humor | 3 comments | permanent link

All Hail Cisco!

Got my new Cisco 804 ISDN router today, via FedX Ground. And all I can say is: wow! This is a professional product, and it shows.

For the first time since we've had ISDN service (going on 6 years) we have time and date stamps available for Caller ID. Netgear routers just didn't pass the information, nor would they display it themselves. Our phones now actually pick up the time from the router - also a first.

The router actually hangs up the line correctly when a caller disconnects: preventing that annoying "bzzzt bzzzt bzzzt" noise for 30 seconds at the end of every answering machine message. And the answering machine works again - it's been down for the past week since we had to install our backup router.

This device also apparently senses the availability of compression technology, and automatically avails itself of it. Most pages load faster now with one channel in operation than they used to do with both lines humming.

The setup program automatically detected the central office switch type and our SPIDs - basically all I had to manually enter was my ISP phone number, username and password. It even detected our local network correctly (like our Macs do with Rendezvous)and set up the nameservers and DHCP server correctly. All in all setup and configuration took less than 30 minutes, and most of that time was letting the router test the connection and make sure everything worked.

About the only deficiency is the monitoring program - it could be a bit meatier, but hey! it works.

And the price was right, too. I paid a whopping $73 for this beauty - eBay has it's uses after all.

We're on line for real again, and we actually have useful phone service. Now if we can just keep the lightening away ...

21:17 /Home | 3 comments | permanent link

Colombia’s Coca Survives U.S. Plan to Uproot It

Sometimes numbers add up to nothing. After all, a billion here, a billion there, pretty soon your talking about real money... putting it on a bit more human scale, this single "battle" in the "war on drugs" cost every man, woman and child in the United States $15.66, using a round 300 million as our population.

If the estimates are correct, and we indeed spend $40 billion a year on this insane war, that works out to a little over $133 for every man, woman and child in the US, or $333 per taxpayer (with a base of 120 million taxpayers). Every year.

And what have we gotten for our hard earned dollars? An economic sector completely controlled by criminal gangs and based on smuggling, with all it's attendant murder and mayhem. And nearly all politicians from both major parties wholeheartedly endorse this effort, despite it being such a provable waste of money and time.

And people wonder why I'm cynical about government...

A $4.7 billion effort to slash Colombia’s coca crop has left the availability of cocaine on U.S. streets unchanged.

(link) [New York Times]

07:32 /Politics | 1 comment | permanent link