Man, I’m a little sore. But the tree in the back yard is finally down.
Been nibbling at the thing for about two weeks now with the manual pole saw. Bought an electric pole chain saw last week, and on Sunday with Annie’s help got all but the three big snags out over the house and power lines down, so I was feeling pretty good about things…I mean, if I had to pay someone to finish the job, it had to be cheaper than taking the entire tree down.
This afternoon, my father, the guy with no fear and occasionally even less sense, came over to help me take those babies down. Other than one slightly close call, they all came down within inches of where we expected to put them (even when we both ended up on our arses after pulling the lines), and the beautiful tree where we placed Katie’s first swing is no longer a mighty maple, but next year’s firewood. No more shade for the patio where the Katester’s inflatable pool goes. And no more having the entire lawn raising up because of the mamoth structure of roots constantly growing and weaving under that lawn.
But I am gonna miss that tree.
From The New York Times: Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, has been forced to make a string of accommodations as it pushes to deploy radio frequency identification in its supply tracking process.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/29/technology/29radio.html
Too bad one of the accomodations isn’t something to protect the privacy of it’s customers…
From the looks of things in the various mailboxes I control, it’s another day of infected machines hammering every other machine on the Net with infected files. So far, the OTR Digest has received a boatload of the things.
I suppose that if people don’t get it now, they never will, but can’t we please all agree to stop opening up attachments we receive in email? I mean, this is not that hard, now is it?
From News.com: OpenOffice.org has launched a new version of its OpenOffice productivity suite.
http://news.com.com/2110-7344_3-5181119.html
I’ve been working with it a bit of late, and really like it. You can’t kick free, and it’s much more secure than the Mircosoft version.
From Wired: Over the past year, doubts about the accuracy and integrity of e-voting equipment have been growing. Election officials, secretaries of state, legislators and voters have come to agree that something is seriously wrong with electronic voting systems and the companies that make them.
http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,62790,00.html
If you’re an American voter (or, heck, a voter anywhere in the world!) you need to read this article. It’s an in-depth look at all of the problems that have been discovered in the electronic voting machines, and why pretty much anyone can steal an election nowadays.
