Muse

In the mid 80's, when I was in my mid-teens, my mom lived in Terryville CT for a couple of years . When I would go there to visit in the summer, I'd generally split my time between fishing at a nearby pond or playing Tron at a local deli. Sometimes, though I had to walk "downtown" to the larger stores to buy stuff I couldn't find at the deli. This walk always took me past a little brick house on Main street with a sign in front that said "Lock Museum of America". I didn't believe it; a museum of locks, of all things ?? Here, in this little building, in this little central Connecticut town ? Well, one day I went in and looked around. Not surprsingly, it was full of locks and keys (!!), and I learned that CT was the home of Mr Yale (as in Yale locks).

But what I really learned, or actually what I realized, was that pretty much anything can have its own museum; and that the words "National" or "American" don't necessarily imply grandeur or enormity. This is something I should've realized earlier, having been born in the tiny city of Corning NY, home to the Corning Glass Museum, and just down Rt 17 from the National Warplane Museum and the National Soaring Museum, among others (all fine museums, of course.)

I bring this up, because I found a little entry on girlhacker about another little New England museum; this one for buttons.

More museums here.

Peeve!

I use Eudora as my email client and I use Norton AV as my anti-virus software. Norton has an option to check incoming emails for virsuses, but it's error-prone; it will often screw up its own settings and lose track of the login name and password it needs to actually go get my email. That's sub-optimal. So, I disable the incoming email check. But... when Eudora downloads an email with a virus attached, Norton's "auto-protect" feature sees that something (Eudora) is trying to write a file containing a virus and it deletes the file immediately (often before the attachment has finished downloading). And then, because it's so very proud of its accomplishment, it throws up a big yellow message box for me to click. But, at the same time, Eudora panics, because it can't download the attachment like it wants to, so it beeps, and tries to download that attachment again; Norton sees that a file with a virus is being written, deletes the file, puts up a message box, Eudora panics, and so on.

During periods of high virus activity, like the past few weeks, where 1 of every 5 messages is a virus, I have to disable the Norton auto-protect feature entirely in order to get my email. Sub-optimal.

Is McAffee better than this ??

Oh, the places I've been

States I've visited:

This summer I think I'll be able to add Colorado to the list.

Interestingly (to me), I've hit every state on both coasts (and if I wanted to count layovers in airports, I could add Texas, to nearly complete the Gulf Coast, too). In fact only 1/6^th (4) of the states I've been to have no ocean coastline - though three of those have Great Lakes coastlines, which is nearly the same thing. Only little landlocked Vermont has no access to a significant body of water (yes, Lake Champlain is a pretty big lake, but it's no Lake Superior).

Make your own damn map, here.

Snarkout

I'd like to recommend that everyone who is interested in the history of things, trivia and arcana take a look at snarkout.

For example, here it discusses how we got our current calendar; here it discusses how Valentines Day came about; here is a discussion of the continuing history of "Adventure" games (ie. Adventure, Zork and other text based puzzle games). All fascinating stuff, IMO.

Hey, how much you want for that hymen?

Plastic has a strange story about a student in the UK who wants to auction off her virginity:

Ms. Reid's inability to get a handle on her student debt directly led her to take the extreme measure of selling her virginity. Although she "qualifies for a Government loan of £3,000 a year," this, according to her, "is less than half what she needs to cover fees and other outgoings." Indeed, "to pay her tuition fees and living expenses," she "works three shifts a week as a waitress. She often does 12-hour shifts, which means sacrificing lectures to make £4.50 an hour." As she explains, "The way things are going, I'll leave university £15,000 in debt. That's why I am taking this drastic action."

And, by the way, she's a lesbian, and her girlfriend says "I won't be there in the room with her when it eventually happens but I will be very nearby."

Clever girl. I wonder if she could get a spot on the next "The Apprentice"...

Train train train

Sitting in a training class all week. Luckily, it's a C# / web programming class, so they had to leave IE on the machines. Sweet. So I can surf and learn, at the same time.

The war on carbs

defective yeti outlines the latest political battlefield: The War On Carbs:

"When I was Governor of Vermont, no one ate their pizza crust!" Dean boasted in a fiery speech given at a recent rally. "And when I become President, we're going to go after Big Bread! We're going to go after Big Potato! We're going to go after Big Sugar and Big Cracker and Big Muffin, yeeeeargh!'"