robin's blog

Bravely bold Sir Robin brought forth from Camelot.
He was not afraid to die, O brave Sir Robin.
He was not at all afraid to be killed in nasty ways.
Brave, brave, brave, brave Sir Robin.

He was not in the least bit scared to be mashed into a pulp or to have his eyes gouged out and his elbows broken, to have his kneecaps split and his body burned away and his limbs all hacked and mangled.
Brave Sir Robin.

His head smashed in and his heart cut out,
His liver removed and his bowels unplugged,
His nostrils raped and his bottom burned off, and his penis...

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On Easter Sunday 2008, 28 months after his release from Guantanamo Bay, Abdallah Saleh Al Ajmi drove an armored pickup truck filled with explosives into an Iraqi army base outside Mosul, killing 13 Iraqi soldiers and wounding 42 others. His first and last letters to his lawyer, Thomas Wilner, are reported in the Washington Post:

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"To the learned attorney Tom

Dear Sir:

How are you and how is your nice team doing? I hope you are doing well. Tell me how you are doing, Mr. Tom, and what is going on in the outside world. . . .

From Peter Payne's Japan blog:

• Don't urinate on a worm, or he'll get revenge by making your private parts swell up. [For men only, I imagine]
• Don't whistle at night or a snake will come.
• Don't play with fire or you'll wet the bed.
• When you sneeze twice, it means someone is gossiping about you, a joke that pops up in anime quite a lot.
• If you see a spider in the morning, it's good luck, so don't kill it.

Google Earth | Free

Google Earth lets you fly anywhere on Earth to view satellite imagery, maps, terrain, 3D buildings, from galaxies in outer space to the canyons of the ocean. You can explore rich geographical content, save your toured places, and share with others.

Search the full text transcripts of more than 200 speeches by United States President and former Senator, Barack Obama.

Search keywords and phrases, search by speech title, speech date, or speech location in more than 200 Obama speeches online.

I feel a bit sorry for the people at Poway Honda who try to do a good job and work hard at customer service. In the repair department their work is made even harder by slipshod work in the garage and the "kick 'em while they're down" attitude of the Service Department management.

You no longer need be a slave to Lexis/Nexis or West -- the following sites provide free legal research tools:

- PreCYdent (provides search capability for library at PublicResource)

- AltLaw

- HyperLaw

- Public Library of Law

You can't get a better deal than this -- explore Semantic Web concepts with advanced tools free from Franz!

http://agraph.franz.com/gruff/

Information on the interface between the home and the network seems to be one of the last remaining wastelands on the Net, and the DSL desert is even more barren than the cable tundra. I'm accustomed to finding most any tech support I could ever need at the other end of a couple of web searches, but data on DSL routers is pretty scarce.

This became clear to me when my Netopia Cayman 3000 Series router finally gave up the ghost on Sunday after almost six years of continuous service.

Be aware that the platform you are using for entry is poorly constructed and may collapse. Be aware that on the far side of the gate you may experience reduced air quality. Be aware that on the far side of the gate you may experience increased or decreased gravitational field. The far side of the gate may not be at ground level and you may experience vertical movement on exit. Upon returning you may find that you do not hit the platform in which case you will experience an approximately twenty-meter fall to ground level.