breakfast of tofu

[Kragen Sitaker]

My breakfast this morning consisted of sauteed sliced fresh garlic,
sauteed sliced onion, sauteed sliced mushrooms, and a pound of sauteed
sliced firm tofu briefly marinated in tamari, along with a fresh
carrot.  It was delicious, quite filling, and incredibly cheap.

I had to go look for my car this morning; I couldn't remember where I
parked it last Wednesday, and I thought it might be in a Tuesday
street-cleaning zone.  It's in a Wednesday street-cleaning zone, so I
can leave it there until tomorrow morning.

I got a PCMCIA modem (a Psion Dacom 56k+fax Gold Card Global) in my
"pile of junk" a week or so ago.  Now I need a dongle for it so I can
connect it to a phone line; the dongle cost about $25.  UPS tried to
deliver it yesterday when I wasn't home, so I'm going to pick it up
from the UPS office today.

I've located a new laptop with a magnesium alloy case for a cheap
enough price that I think I can replace my poor old HP Pavilion N3190
with it.  It's an old enough laptop that it won't be much of a theft
risk, and a new enough laptop that I'll still be able to get my work
done on it.

All kinds of scary things are going on in the world today.  George
W. Bush and Tony Blair have been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize,
making rather a mockery of the prize's intent.  Microsoft has hired a
new head security officer whose record indicates that he would prefer
to criminalize third-party security research and assessment rather
than improving the shamefully poor security of Microsoft's products.
Wisconsin has a bill under discussion that would criminalize tampering
with or disabling hidden spy cameras and microphones, even illegal
hidden spy cameras and microphones.  And China is having excellent
success censoring Internet access with help from Cisco, IBM, Yahoo,
and Network Associates.

And, of course, the War on Terrorism continues.  

America's attorney general, John Ashcroft, is a man whose life has
been dedicated to undermining the values of the United States of
America, and now he has a chance to impose his perverted vision on the
country, at least for a little while.
http://judiciary.senate.gov/te120601f-ashcroft.htm
http://www.opposeashcroft.com/ash_extreme.phtml
http://www.opposeashcroft.com/ash_missouri.phtml

Every totalitarian country in the world has new justification for
brutal crackdowns: "ending terrorism".
URL: http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/s435258.htm

And, in order to fight terrorism (defined as premeditated, politically
motivated violence against noncombatant targets) we have appointed
John Poindexter, who lost his job in our government in the 1980s for
funding premeditated, politically motivated violence against
noncombatant targets in Central America, to a newly created espionage
agency.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4358017,00.html


This has not been a good month for the world.  Still, slowly but
surely, progress proceeds apace.


People in San Francisco are agitating for a better election system,
the first step toward the more democratic "proportional
representation" systems other democracies use.
http://www.sfgreenparty.org/news/newsitem.gem?idx=49

Global capitalism is at its height, but worldwide consensus continues
to grow that globalism should be tempered by local control.

Europe now has one currency, a change that will have fundamental and
long-lasting effects.

Access to the Internet continues to grow, and in most places, it is
still not monitored and censored the way it is in China.  

And there is a new DVD standard --- 27 GB per disc, rewritable.  It
doesn't solve the region-coding problem, but it is very promising for
making freedom of the press more affordable.  Imagine: 5 000 000 pages
of text, a lifetime's worth of reading, in a unit the size of a CD
jewel case for US$5.  (DVD-RW media currently cost US$5.  I expect
that the price will eventually come down to US$0.5 or so.  By
contrast, transmitting 27 GB across the Internet costs about $20.)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/entertainment/new_media/newsid_1829000/1829241.stm

And, excitingly, the Supreme Court has granted certiorari in 
Eldred v. Ashcroft (previously Eldred v. Reno).  So they might reverse
the appeals court decision, which was 2-1 against the public domain.
http://eon.law.harvard.edu/openlaw/eldredvreno/

-- 
<kragen@pobox.com>       Kragen Sitaker     <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/>
We are forming cells within a global brain and we are excited that we might
start to think collectively.  What becomes of us still hangs crucially on
how we think individually.  -- Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web