Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

Oil and the end of civilization
August 03, 2004

Some mornings under the window in my bedroom, nightmares of nuclear holocaust would awaken me to staring blinded at the new sun in the window. I would know that I was awake, but the dreams were so fresh that the contrast in light from closed eyes to morning sun would convince me that the bombing had begun and I was just a microsecond from being crisply well-done.

Those heartbeats of fear before realization are nothing like the doom that lingers over me these days of war over oil.

Ugh, Windows.
August 02, 2004

Well, it’s been an interesting morning. I’ve been lamenting the speed of my work computer for some time now, and have secretly wondered if there was perhaps a virus on it. I’ve been running antivirus software and updating virus patterns regularly since 2000, and haven’t found anything - until this morning.

I’m not even sure what the virus was. It was detected and quarantined and I didn’t really care, as long as the scanner picked it up. See, the real issue is that the version of antivirus that I was using was purchased in 2000, and I recently got a popup during startup saying that future pattern files would not be compatible with my old antivirus version, and that I should upgrade. Ok, fine, so I did.

Bees
July 30, 2004

After work yesterday, I was watching Abby and Berta play in the front yard when Berta noticed that there was a hole in the ground near the patch of dirt I turned over last year. I didn’t realize that such a small thing could lead to such a large front-yard mystery.

Waterless Router Project
July 30, 2004

Berta and I tried to watch the Bourne Supremacy on the XBox last night after Abby went to bed. I moved the MPEGs to a shared folder on the server, and started up XBox Media Center.

The XBox is hooked to the network wirelessly using the Netgear router that Pat got me for Christmas and a separate Netgear dongle thingie on the XBox side. Because of where the router is, the reception is blocked by power cables and other network wires. As a result, the movie was stuttering quite often.

Gramps
July 29, 2004

Mom wrote an entry about her dad, my grandfather, aka “Gramps”, on her weblog recently.

As she says, there is a great deal of construction on 322 near West Chester, and the major intersection there, which used to have zero traffic lights will now have at least three. Maybe if they were there when Gramps was driving that day, he’d still be with us. I don’t know. Like my mom, I often wonder about him whenever I pass through this area.