Tuesday, October 01, 2002

posted by crunchland at October 1 10:25 AM. I'm losing my soul to an online game called BookWorm. Better than bejeweled. More addictive, too. No read now! PLAY! [MetaFilter] Oh god. It's so like crack.
4:17:40 PM p e r m a l i n k trackback [] say something []

Technical Difficulties. After posting this morning, The Raven was greeted with mysterious "missing macro" messages. Turns out the amount of hacking I've done to this blog template has resulted in a massive coding burden every time the calendar flips to a new month. Yick. [The Raven] I had similar weirdness this morning myself - after my first post, my front page crapped out, saying it couldn't find the www#prefs.txt file on my system. Once I posted a second entry, it worked fine, though. I did also realize that my month and week archives are still in the default Salon format. Gotta do something about that...

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US Supplied Germ Warfare Agents to Iraq in 80s. The United States, under President Ronald Reagan, shipped 'three strains of anthrax, six strains of the bacteria that make botulinum toxin and three strains of the bacteria that cause gas gangrene' to Iraq. These activities occurred in the 1980s as the United States was supporting Iraq after the hostage incident with Iran. [kuro5hin.org] This isn't actually much of a shocker - we've known this for a while. What's worthy of note is that it's now in the Congressional Record...

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Arianna Huffington says "Perhaps the president should put down his saber-rattle, pick up his crayons, and connect them [dots] before drawing us into a bloody war."
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posted by magullo at October 1 2:41 AM. "A lot of time is being wasted" Nancy Reagan lobbies for stem cell research. Some things never change. [MetaFilter] Well, it makes sense - Ronnie's Alzheimers might be helped by treatments coming out of stem cell research. It's traditional - don't bother funding medical research until *I* need it.
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Satellite tracks 'lost' buzzard. Concerns are growing for the safety of a young bird of prey which got lost at sea during a record journey from Scotland to Africa. [BBC News | TECHNOLOGY] Silly buzzard - trying to get into the Guinness Book of Records. That never works out well.
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Janitors on verge of strike in Boston. In Boston, Massachusetts, more than eleven thousand janitors of the Service Employees' International Union (SEIU) local 615 (formerly local 254) are on the verge of launching one of the largest strikes in recent city history, threatening to effectively shut down Boston's downtown. The strike, set to begin September 30, is part of the SEIU's nationwide Justice for Janitors campaign, which has had successes in Los Angeles and around the country. [kuro5hin.org] Our building at work is cleaned by members of the local in question. When the possible strike first came up a month or so ago, we got panicky email on how to deal with picketing janitors from our building manager. I think the building management was still reeling from a Verizon strike a couple years back that blocked two of the four entrances into the parking lot. I don't believe we're being targetted now - I think the SEIU decided to go after one specific building management company, one with a primary focus in the financial district of downtown Boston...

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A Russian Lama's Body, and His Faith, Defy Time [New York Times: International News] ...a fascinating story on the Buddhists of Siberia...
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I love waking up before dawn...I can't explain why, but there's a rush to being conscious before the sun rises, before most people are even thinking about getting up. Today, dawn was around 6:41am here, and I was up and moving a good half hour before that. Mind you, I don't actually get out of the apartment 'til much later. I like to take my time in the mornings, y'see - as you may notice from the gobs of 6am-8am entries here. I've owned a TiVo for about 14 hours now, and I'm already hooked. I'm watching a show I recorded off of Discovery Civilization late last night on life during the Ice Age, and they're talking about the Grandmother Revolution, how life was changed as a result of having grandparents around for the first time ever. No, seriously.

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