Semper Ubi Sub Ubi

readme:

So I turned on the local news the other night to see when it would stop raining. I wasn’t really paying close attention; I actually had my back to the TV and was writing something. After a few minutes, however, it percolated into my frontal cortex that the people on the tee-vee were very excited about something, so I turned around and noticed that emblazoned across the screen in flashing orange was FEROCIOUS WILD ANIMALS ON THE LOOSE — RUN FOR YOUR LIVES! or words to that effect. Turns out that some … jerk, to put it mildly … had been keeping fifty or so lions, tigers, mountain lions, cheetahs, wolves, grizzly bears, black bears and monkeys, plus a giraffe, in tiny cages on his “wildlife preserve” west of Zanesville. And now, for whatever reason, he had chosen a dark, rainy evening to turn them all loose and then shoot himself. You saw all this as the top story on CNN, the BBC, et al., I’m sure.

The particular problem for us at that moment was that the “preserve” was just about 25 miles due east of us. That sounds like a long way away, but it’s all open, mostly flat country around here, and the authorities seemed a bit unclear as to exactly how long these animals had been loose — at least five or six hours at that point. Still, it seemed unlikely that they would make it this far, or it did until the news helpfully reported that there had been credible sightings in southern Licking County, about seven miles away.

So it’s a dark and stormy night, and we’re sitting in the proverbial isolated farmhouse, with lots of big windows and flimsy doors, surrounded by cornfields and our own woods backing up on a few hundred more acres of cornfields. I have already learned to be careful when I take the dogs out at night because the coyotes around here are numerous and aggressive. And there have been consistent and credible reports in recent years of large cats, probably escapees from just such private zoos, being spotted (and in one case photographed) in our area.

And now we apparently had a wave of ticked-off tigers, grizzlies and lions headed our way. What I wanted at that moment was a bunch of floodlights and an AK-47. What we had were two arthritic dogs, both largely deaf, and a whole lot of useless but no doubt tasty cats. Around 2 am it occurred to me that for any large and hungry carnivore downwind of us, our house would smell like a big box of food. And these critters were accustomed to being around (and fed by) people, so the natural shyness that keeps coyotes (mostly) at bay would be, as HR Haldeman would say, inoperable.

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Semper Ubi Sub Ubi

readme:

OK, enough already. We get it. Suffocating heat and humidity. Constant rain. Giant mutant bugs. Tropical-sounding birds and absurdly dense vegetation that grows a foot a week. Yellow-gray air that smells like sulfur and burns your throat. Lightning flickering on the horizon at 2 am. The lights dim ominously. Don’t look now, but I think somebody broke the planet.

On the bright side, great thanks to the anonymous reader who sent me a recertified IBM/Lenovo T60 ThinkPad from Woot. Apparently Lenovo released these packages to a number of outlets; Woot sold out quickly (which is the whole point of Woot), as did Newegg, but Newegg now has them back in stock for about $225. The consensus seems to be that it’s a great deal. I love this computer.

A thing of beauty.

Back in 2006-7, the T60 was the top of the Thinkpad line, selling for $2500-$2800 new. These things are built like tanks, extremely solid and close to indestructible, sporting a magnesium roll cage protecting the innards. This particular model comes with a smallish hard drive (60 gigs) and not really enough memory (1 gig), but more memory can be had for ~$25 for 2 gigs and the HD is easily swapped out if you really need more room. It comes with Windows XP, but I cured that with Linux. It runs like a top and has a dual-core Intel processor, which makes it snapper than my desktop, which is coming up on its tenth birthday.

Interestingly, it also comes with an IBM docking station, which is very, very cool. (The docking station alone goes for $209 on Amazon.) When the computer is in the dock, you have both VGA and DVI monitor connectors, serial and parallel ports, digital sound output and all sorts of other neat things. But what I really love about the dock is that it solidly holds the computer at a slight tilt, the perfect angle for typing. It’s actually reminiscent of using a portable typewriter. Combined with the legendary ThinkPad keyboard, this is a really great machine for writing. The screen resolution is 1024 x 768, again a bit outdated, but also perfectly suited for writing. It also has a built-in 56k modem for when civilization collapses next year and a tiny little keyboard light atop the screen for when the grid goes down. And, for some strange reason, a fingerprint reader. And Bluetooth.

By the way, if you’ve never used a ThinkPad keyboard, you really don’t know how good a laptop keyboard can be. I cannot believe folks seriously use those ghastly MacBook keyboards all day. They’re like tapping on glass. ThinkPad keyboards make you want to type. (I must really like them; I use an IBM UltraNav keyboard, essentially a standalone ThinkPad keyboard, with my desktop computer.)

Oh yeah, before I forget: at the foot of each entry here you’ll see a teeny-tiny Google +1 button you can click if you have a Google account of some kind. It’s the equivalent of a Facebook “like” button but more immediately useful to me, because the number of “+1′s” a post gets shows up in the Google search rankings, and about 70% of my traffic comes from people searching for a word or phrase on Google. So, if you are so inclined….

What else. Falling Skies is over until next summer, if there still is TV next summer. I’m gonna miss it. Yeah, it’s seriously silly in many ways (e.g., How come the aliens don’t seem to have heard of aerial reconnaissance?), but it’s good, goofy fun. Still, this business of shows being off for a year (or longer, in the case of HBO) drives me a little nuts. I guess it’s back to Pawn Stars and Law & Order (Original Recipe) reruns at lunchtime for me.

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