News and Views

Derek graduated from high school yesterday, so we no longer have any “kids” in the family. We do have a couple of young men in college, so that’s not a bad trade.

Derek graduated 5th in a class of about 500. He was President of the National Honor Society his senior year and Saxophone Section Leader for two years. In his junior year he had the highest score in the school on the State Math Test (including seniors), and was exempt from taking it his senior year. He was active in the Marching Band and several sports (Track, Soccer, and Football), as well as several clubs.

Derek applied to only a couple of colleges, and is happy to be going to the University of Arizona in Tucson next fall. He hasn’t decided what he will major in, but officially it’s “Mathematics”. He is also interested in Medicine, and next month will probably be interested in something else too. He has a full-ride scholarship, covering all his tuition and more. He is in the “Honors College”.

Big brother Devon is spending the summer at his college (Harvey Mudd, in Southern Cal). He has a job doing research. Next year is his senior year, so it’s almost time to think about graduate school applications and the GRE exam.

I’m not proud of these guys, or anything… Don’t go reading between the lines! 🙂

They caught the man who killed our friend. See here.
The wounded mother and father have been discharged from the hospital, and are staying at an undisclosed location.

It feels good that he is not running around, and will have to pay for his insanity, but “feels good” is only relative, since our friend, Zhao Jian-Yun, will not be coming back.

These 3 were all friends of Gisele (and me). They went to Gisele’s church.

We gave them our love seat when we didn’t need it anymore. I was at their house more than once to help with computer problems.

They were such nice people. Every time we would visit they would try to feed us, and send us off with home-made food. They took us out to eat a couple of times, as we did them.

The 30-ish daughter was so friendly and cheerful, always smiling. She had got involved with the man when she was much younger — I don’t remember the details. He gambled all his money away, then stole from her to gamble more. He used to beat her. He was obviously crazy. I helped her understand some of her divorce and court hearing papers a few months ago. She was studying nursing at MCC, struggling as a waitress to support her parents and child while going to school.

She has a 10-12 year-old son (not the child in the picture; her parents were baby-sitting that child). I haven’t heard where he is but assume somebody from the church is taking care of him. Hopefully he was at school when all this happened.

Last we heard the parent’s injuries were not expected to be fatal.

I mentioned a few days ago about the spam fighting company “Blue Security”, with their program “Blue Frog”, and how they were in a war with spammers.

Don just pointed out to me that it looks like the spammers won. BlueSecurity has given up and gone out of the spam fighting business. They said they are concerned that if they kept up the fight they would bring more problems for their clients.

It’s a shame, but it looks like the spammers own the internet.

If you installed a Blue Frog, immediately remove it from your computer. If the spammers get control of the server, they can use the Frog to control your computer. See more here.

We’ve got a little travel planned for the summer.

Gisele is going to France for a tour of castles (“Chateaus”) the first couple of weeks of June.

Then the first three weeks of July the whole family is going to Peru. We’re friends with a family who came from there and they have organized a tour of about 10 friends. We’ll see Lima, Cuzco, and Machu Pichu for the high points, with lots of little places in between. There may be a side trip to see the “Nasca Lines” from the air, but it might not fit in conveniently.

Otherwise, it will be a quick trip to bring Devon home this weekend, and a quick trip to take him back next weekend. He has a summer job at the college he attends (Harvey Mudd). Derek will be going down to Tucson for a two-day orientation at the U of A in preparation for his enrolling there in the fall. He was accepted into the Honor’s College.

Maybe a trip or two to the mountains to escape the heat.

And that’s a brief preview of our summer travel plans!

There’s an interesting major Internet battle going on right now.

There’s a company called Blue Security. (I won’t provide a link because they are down.) People can download their software (the Blue Frog) which sends emails to spammers whenever they receive a spam message. This overloads the spammers server, slowing them down or halting them.

Several major spammers have cried “Uncle” and agreed to remove everybody who uses Blue Frog from their email list, but one evil entity has instead starting fighting back. He somehow figured out how to send multiple messages to many of the people who use Blue Frog, telling them that they were going to keep receiving these until they turned off the Frog. He also has brought the Blue Security web site down with a “DDOS” (Distributed Denial of Service) attack; basically forcing many diverse computers to overload the Blue Security site. Basically, what he is saying is “You must accept my spam. You cannot refuse it. If you try to refuse it, I will send you even more.”

Blue Security has been down for a couple of days now. This guy is pretty sophisticated.

You can read more about this here and here.

Somehow, we have to take back the internet from the spammers and scammers. Perhaps this will be a wake-up call to do some long-needed modifications to email to make it more traceable and controllable.

Version 1.5.0.3 has been released, less than 2 weeks after 1.5.0.2. Nothing major, just a security fix (which I guess is really pretty major).

If you have automatic updates turned on, it will happen automatically, though you will have to restart Firefox to finalize the update.

If you don’t have automatic updates turned on, you can get it by selecting “Help”, “Check for Updates”.

Note that the update doesn’t completely replace your existing Firefox implementation; it just updates a few necessary files, so it’s fast and easy.

In 1797 the US Congress ratified, and President John Adams signed, the Treaty of Tripoli which proclaims, “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion“. This, barely 10 years after the Constitution was ratified, by many of the same people. There was no debate or objection to the statement by Congress or the public. It was an obvious, accepted statement of fact.

Many people today claim that the US was founded as a Christian nation. From the mouths of the founders, it was not.

In the preferred pronunciation of “often”, the “t” is silent. I hear more and more people pronouncing the “t”, so I expect that through common usage it may gradually become acceptable.

Espresso doesn’t have an “x” in it, though you often hear people pronounce it as if it did.

Did you have a “real-a-tor” help you sell your house? It’s “realtor”.

Did you say “I could care less”? Then I guess you care, unless you mean that you “couldn’t care less”.

Have you heard people say they need to “orientate” themselves when they mean “orient”.

I’ve already talked about “nucular”. I’ve heard that Americans have more trouble with this than Australians or the British.

What frequently mispronounced words bug you?

I sat next to a Pro Football Hall of Famer, Joe Perry tonight at a wedding reception. Had a very interesting conversation with him.

He was the first black player for San Francisco in 1948, and he says it wasn’t easy. Many of the players didn’t want him around.

He also talked about serving on an all-white battleship in the Pacific during WW II. He said he had to fight every night at first until they learned to respect him, after which he made life-long friends.

He’s 80 years old, but when I met him I thought he was in his 60’s. He is still quite sharp and fit. You’ve got to respect someone who’s lived the life he has, and excelled despite the adversity.