CHUMBY

Kathi Derevan:  “I was on the waiting list before they were released to the unwashed hordes, so I have had mine for  quite a while. I especially enjoy having the pug clean the inside of my screen.”

MOZY ON OVER TO MAC

Aaron Stevens:  “I appreciated your plug for Mozy and encourage everyone to do regular backups.  When my last IBM ThinkPad died in December (and I did have backups that I laboriously burned to CD every week), I got a MacBook Pro.  Mac has made backups so easy, it’s automagic.  There’s a program called Time Machine, part of Mac OSX Leopard, included for no additional cost. You plug in a USB hard drive, and that’s it.  It makes automatic backups every hour, only of files that have changed since the last backup. It keeps hourly backups for 24 hours; daily backups for 30 days; and weekly backups until you run out of disk space, at which point it clears up space by deleting oldest first. And by using a neat Unix file system trick, it doesn't actually create duplicate copies of any of your unchanged data, but merely bookkeeping links to those files, so disk space is used very conservatively.  Given your love for the iPod and iPhone, you should really consider a Mac next time. Oh, and it runs Windows better than my IBM did, but that’s another story for another day.” 

F Hey, tell that story.  (Anyone switch to Mac and not enthusiastic?)

HE LIKED ADLAI

Stewart Dean:  “I grew up in the South (or in a border state, Kentucky) in a liberal intellectual family in the ’50s and ’60s.  I was nearly the only kid in my school for Adlai.  But God, that we had two such men, Adlai and Ike.  And that Ike was followed by Kennedy!  And my older brother was gay, which must have been very disturbing and hard for him in that benighted time and place.  I must have been 10 or 11 when he was out of the house and I snooped out his secret stash...and found some beefcake magazines.  It was one of those things you remember, like where you were when you heard that Kennedy was shot.  I remember thinking, ‘Huh????’ and then put everything back and never said a word.  I am a raving heterosexual, as were our parents, mated like lovebirds; they were befuddled but stretched themselves to accept it.  Bill died in the early days of AIDS epidemic, when that diagnosis was the Black Spot of Death, miss him.  I think it is one of the few great mercies of our time that gay and lesbian people can finally be themselves after some fashion.” 

AND SPEAKING OF BRITISH SEA POWER

Okay, so the Taiwanese ordered a little $100 battery and we sent them the tip for a nuclear warhead.  Who’s perfect?  According to our friends who so well explained the subprime crisis in an earlier video, the British military aren’t perfect either.  Thanks to James Musters for the link to this day-brightening video.