Author: NewMexiKen

Practicing safe computing

Walter Mossberg devotes his April column to computer security and includes a “quick guide to Windows security measures” including software (some free and some not). After listing the software he adds:

Beyond installing, monitoring and updating all this software, you need to be careful online. Don’t open e-mail attachments you don’t expect and that come from strangers. They may contain viruses or spyware. Don’t download software unless you really need it and are 100% certain of the author’s trustworthiness. It could be an infection in disguise. Never click on a link in an e-mail purporting to be from a financial institution, even if it’s your own bank and it looks official. It could be a scam to steal your identity.

Always get a second opinion

After years of telling athletes to drink as much liquid as possible to avoid dehydration, some doctors are now saying that drinking too much during intense exercise poses a far greater health risk.

An increasing number of athletes – marathon runners, triathletes and even hikers in the Grand Canyon – are severely diluting their blood by drinking too much water or too many sports drinks, with some falling gravely ill and even dying, the doctors say.

The New York Times

Speaking of new services from Google

Google just unveiled its latest service for cellphones.

If your phone has a Web browser (that works with XHTML — about 70 percent of current phones do), direct it to mobile.google.com/local. (Bookmark it so you won’t have to type all that the next time.)

In the What box, type in what you’re looking for, like “Italian restaurant.” In the Where box, put your Zip code (or city and state). Click search, and boom — Google shows you the Yellow Pages and Web results, in a list and even on a map (which you can scroll or zoom).

By highlighting a result, you can click to place a phone call to that place, or get driving directions from your current location.

It’s all free, and there are no ads. You go, Google.

David Pogue

Netflix …

intrigues me. Two weeks ago I returned three DVDs to Netflix (mine go to Denver) from my daughter’s mailbox in northern Virginia. The very next day Netflix sent me the usual emails saying each had arrived! It had not been 24 hours since I put the little red flag up. (Congratulations U.S. Postal Service for your part in this.)

This week the video I returned from Albuquerque this past Saturday seems to have gotten lost in Sunday’s Denver blizzard. I’m wondering if there isn’t a mail truck stuck in the snow somewhere up around Raton Pass.

Last weekend’s films by the way were Closer and Vera Drake. Excellent, excellent acting in both. (Three Academy award nominations between them.) The Motorcycle Diaries is sitting here waiting for my attention and Finding Neverland is on its way to me.

Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument

… was established on this date in 1937.

OrganPipeCactus.jpg

Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument celebrates the life and landscape of the Sonoran Desert. Here, in this desert wilderness of plants and animals and dramatic mountains and plains scenery, you can drive a lonely road, hike a backcountry trail, camp beneath a clear desert sky, or just soak in the warmth and beauty of the Southwest. The Monument exhibits an extraordinary collection of plants of the Sonoran Desert, including the organ pipe cactus, a large cactus rarely found in the United States. There are also many creatures that have been able to adapt themselves to extreme temperatures, intense sunlight and little rainfall.

National Park Service

The Paris Hilton Tax

Congress is working on permanently repealing the Federal estate tax so that ne’er-do-wells like Paris Hilton and the Wal-Mart heir Elizabeth Paige Laurie who paid to have her college papers written can keep their “inheritances.” As a point of reference you can calculate what your heirs might have to pay if the tax were simply left as is.

Pointer and Paris Hilton idea via Hesiod at The American Street.

The federal estate tax was assessed on less than one percent of the estates of people who died last year.

They’re licked

“The U.S. Postal Service files a request seeking a two-cent raise in the rate for regular mail,” noted David Thomas of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. “Atlanta Hawks players respond by requesting cost-of-living raises so they can continue mailing it in.”

Sideline Chatter

Bully boy Bolton

In caustic and unusually personal testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Carl W. Ford Jr., who was assistant secretary for intelligence and research, said Mr. Bolton was a “kiss-up, kick-down sort of guy” who “abuses his authority with little people” …

The New York Times

Really? A person like that? A “kiss-up, kick-down” personality at the State Department? What a shock.

Vigilante update

A lone Army reservist accused of holding seven Mexican nationals at gunpoint this week at a desolate Arizona rest stop has renewed concerns about vigilante justice and violence along the Arizona-Mexico border.

The arrest of Sgt. Patrick Haab, 24, comes as various civilian groups embark on self-described border-patrol missions to target undocumented workers and help stop the flow of illegal immigration along the busiest illegal crossing on the Southwest border.

Haab, an Iraq war veteran, was apparently acting on his own when sheriff’s deputies say he saw seven men pile into a sport utility vehicle on Interstate 8 and ordered them to lie on the ground or be shot. But Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio said his actions were dangerous and illegal, underscoring the risks posed by citizens patrolling the border and taking the law into their own hands.

“Even law enforcement has to have probable cause before taking people out of their cars and telling them to lie on the ground. . . . He threatened to kill them,” Arpaio said. “He did not have the right to do what he did. How did he know they were illegal aliens?”

The Arizona Republic

Conscience money

Wal-Mart has embarked on a partnership with the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and is committing $35 million over the next decade to purchase one acre of what it calls “priority wildlife habitat” for every acre it has developed for company use. The Arizona-Utah purchase is one of six projects Wal-Mart is seeding initially.

Salt Lake Tribune

Goodbye to Privacy

“No Place to Hide” — its title taken from George W. Bush’s post-9/11 warning to terrorists — is all the more damning because of its fair-mindedness. O’Harrow notes that many consumers find it convenient to be in a marketing dossier that knows their personal preferences, habits, income, professional and sexual activity, entertainment and travel interests and foibles. These intimately profiled people are untroubled by the device placed in the car they rent that records their speed and location, the keystroke logger that reads the characters they type, the plastic hotel key that transmits the frequency and time of entries and exits or the hidden camera that takes their picture at a Super Bowl or tourist attraction. They fill out cards revealing personal data to get a warranty, unaware that the warranties are already provided by law. “Even as people fret about corporate intrusiveness,” O’Harrow writes about a searching survey of subscribers taken by Conde Nast Publications, “they often willingly, even eagerly, part with intimate details about their lives.”

From a book review by William Safire in The New York Times

Scrabble anyone?

It’s the birthday of the man who invented the game Scrabble. Alfred M. Butts was born in Poughkeepsie, New York (1899). He was an architect, but during the Depression he was out of a job and decided he’d invent an adult game. He classified games into three groups—chance, skill and a combination of both—and decided that the last was the most promising. He went methodically through the dictionary and several popular newspapers and counted by hand the frequency of letter usage to come up with the point value for each letter.

He trademarked the game in 1949. He had trouble selling it to major board game companies, but a friend of his decided to produce it on an assembly line in an abandoned schoolhouse. The first few years, only a few thousand copies of the game were sold, but in the 1950’s the president of Macy’s played the game on vacation and got hooked. He ordered more for his store, and Scrabble became a great success.

Alfred Butts enjoyed playing Scrabble with his wife, who was a good opponent. He said, “Nina knows more words and spells better than I, but my architectural training helps me to plan better.” The game has been beloved by many writers, including the novelist Vladimir Nabokov, who had a special Russian version made for himself and his wife.

The Writer’s Almanac

Apollo 13

It was on this date, April 13, in 1970 that Houston learned Apollo 13 had a problem.

This report from the next day’s New York Times:

The Apollo 13 Astronauts, their lives threatened by a serious oxygen leak, were forced to evacuate their command ship late last night and use their intended moon-landing craft as a “lifeboat” for a fast return to the earth.

In cool and cryptic words, they were instructed by mission control here to use the attached lunar module’s rocket to power them back to an emergency splashdown in the Pacific Ocean at about noon on Friday.

There will be great risks and little margin for error or delay. …

Capt. James A. Lovell Jr. of the Navy, the commander, and his two civilian co-pilots, Fred W. Haise Jr. and John L. Swigert Jr., crowded into the two-man lunar module at about 11:40 P.M. Eastern standard time.

NewMexiKen attended the Washington, D.C., premiere of Ron Howard’s film Apollo 13. Astronauts Lovell and Haise were there with several of the other principals from NASA. (Astronaut Swigert, played by Kevin Bacon in the film, died in 1982, shortly after being elected to Congress from Colorado.)

The film was very well done. Late in the movie as suspense builds over whether the astronauts will survive and make it back to earth, NewMexiKen actually had to remind the person next to him: “Relax. It’ll be OK. They make it back. They’re here in the theater.”

Thomas Jefferson (II)

This was what I posted on TJ a year ago:

It seems to NewMexiKen that the country could use a federal holiday during that long spell from Washington’s Birthday to Memorial Day. I propose that today, April 13, Jefferson’s birthday, would be ideal.

At a White House dinner honoring 49 Nobel laureates in 1962, President Kennedy remarked, “I think this is the most extraordinary talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”

Despite serious flaws, Jefferson remains one of the most remarkable Americans — statesman, scientist, architect, philosopher agronomist, author.

Click on the image to view Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence.

Thomas Jefferson

Jefferson.jpg… was born on this date in 1743.

Eight-three years later, at the end of his remarkable life, he wished to be remembered foremost for those actions that appear as his epitaph:

Author of the
Declaration
of
American Independence
of the
Statute of Virginia
for
Religious Freedom
and Father of the
University of Virginia.

Runaway alarm clock

After centuries of cowering helplessly as their owners bash them every morning, alarm clocks are starting to run away.

“Clocky,” invented by a grad student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, is round and furry and has wheels. It takes off in search of a hiding place as soon as you hit the snooze button.

That you have to get out of bed to hunt it down after it rolls off the nightstand is considered good news by slugabeds like its creator, Gauri Nanda.

“I’ve hit the snooze button for, like, two hours,” the 25-year-old said.

Los Angeles Times

Offensive teams

Almost a decade after American Indian mascots were banned from Los Angeles public schools, California lawmakers this week are again considering a statewide prohibition on “Redskins.”

Proponents contend that the legislation would banish the mascot from five California schools that use it.

Los Angeles Times

California Governor Schwarzenegger vetoed a similar bill last year, saying the matter should be decided locally.

Fort Sumter

Fort Sumter — a man-made island some four miles from Charleston, South Carolina — was a symbol well beyond its strategic value in the tensions leading up to the Civil War. Since December 1860, South Carolina officials had been demanding the surrender of the fort as state property. To Northerners, surrendering the fort meant surrendering the very idea of the Union.

When Lincoln took office on March 4, 1861, he was informed that the small garrison at Fort Sumter was running out of supplies. By April, he ordered a relief expedition and informed the Governor of South Carolina that it would be “with provisions only,” not men, arms or ammunition. This put the next move into the hands of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Davis ordered that the fort be reduced before the supplies arrived.

The Confederacy opened fire at 4:30 AM on April 12, 1861. The Union garrison surrendered after 33 hours, and the American flag was lowered at Fort Sumter on April 14, 1865.

Fort Sumter

FortSumter.jpg

America’s most tragic conflict ignited at Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, when a chain reaction of social, economic and political events exploded into civil war. At the heart of these events was the issue of states rights versus federal authority flowing over the underlying issue of slavery.

Photo and caption from the National Park Service.

I do solemnly swear

TrumanOath.jpg

Harry Truman takes the oath of office at 7:09 PM (Eastern War Time) on this date sixty years ago. Franklin Roosevelt had died just over two hours earlier at his retreat in Warm Springs, Georgia, the “Little White House.” When called at the Capitol and told he should rush to the White House, Truman is reported to have exclaimed, “Jesus Christ and General Jackson.” Once at the White House, Truman was told of FDR’s death by Mrs. Roosevelt.

The following day, Friday the 13th, is when Truman told several reporters: “Boys, if you ever pray, pray for me now. I don’t know whether you fellows ever had a load of hay fall on you, but when you told me yesterday what had happened, I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me.”

Information and quotations from David McCullough’s outstanding biography of Truman. Photo from the National Archives via the White House web site.