Before the sill broke at Gibraltar, there would have been a salt lake in the deepest part of the Mediterranean valley (since water escaped only by evaporation). Even today, the amount of water that evaporates from the Mediterranean is greater than the amount that flows into the Mediterranean from rivers. The difference is made up by an inflow of water from the Atlantic Ocean. There is also a smaller outflow current of extra-salty water. During World War II, Allied submarines were able to use these two underwater currents to sneak into or out of the Mediterranean without running their motors, thus being silent and more difficult for German and Italian military vessels patrolling the surface to detect.

Of course, you have probably just made your way onto the do-not-fly list.

"Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look. He thinks too much. Such men are dangerous."
William Shakespeare, _Julius Caesar_

Insurance companies have been known to reject claims as pre-existing conditions, even when it is obvious that this is false, in hopes that the patient will give up and pay for the treatment themselves. CNN had a recent news item about an insurance company initially refusing to pay for a broken wrist, claiming that the injury was a pre-existing condition.

I upgraded my laptop from Ubuntu 8.04 to Ubuntu 9.04 today. It totally screwed up the X configuration, probably due to misidentifying the video chip set. It picked a video mode that the hardware didn't support, resulting in the right and bottom portions of the virtual screen being off the physical screen. I tried picking a lower screen resolution, only to end up with a totally-garbled display. I then tried to manually reconfigure X using dpkg-reconfigure xorg-xconf, only to find out that, in version 9.04, this only allows you to reconfigure the keyboard, not the video setup. After tweaking the settings for about an hour, without ever getting a readable X display, I gave up and reinstalled Ubuntu 8.04. Fortunately, I did have /home as a separate file system, so my personal settings were intact. I just had to reinstall a few programs.

I used to be the system administrator for a small company. At one point, a hard drive controller failure led to data being written to the wrong location on the drive, overwriting other data. Unfortunately, by the time this was discovered, it had been going on for two weeks. The backup system hadn't reported any errors, as it was making a faithful copy of already-corrupted data. Once the hard drive controller had been replaced and the disk reformatted, I had to restore from backup, check the results on the hard drive, and then repeat the process with the previous day's backup if the data was still corrupted. Finally, with two-week-old backups, I was able to restore uncorrupted data. Then, every transaction that had taken place over the last two weeks had to be re-entered into the computer, while making sure that we didn't send out duplicate data to suppliers and customers. It took a month of hard work by all of the office staff to get the system totally caught-up again. So, just because the backup system worked correctly doesn't necessarily mean your data is good.

I started my programming career at age 29, and have worked as a programmer/analyst for 23 years now. I have chosen to stay in the programming field, rather than move up into management. I have more technical skills than interpersonal skills, and prefer dealing with the technical side of the job. I still enjoy my work after 23 years.

I started my programming career at age 29, and have been working as a programmer/analyst for 23 years now. By personal preference, I have stayed with the technical side, rather than moving up into management. The only point where finding a job was a real problem was when I was laid off after working in the field for six months. At that point, I was being turned down both by companies that wanted someone with two years' experience, and companies that wanted someone fresh out of school with no experience (one HR person told me, "We want people who haven't learned any other company's way of doing things"). Eventually, I found a company that valued ability more than a strict rule on how much experience you had had, and have worked pretty much full-time since then.

A few years ago, I was struck by a car while crossing a downtown intersection. The car was stopped at a traffic light, and I was crossing the street from the right (passenger) side of the car. The driver looked to his left, saw that no traffic was approaching, and pulled out into a right turn (legal in Tennessee) without checking whether anyone was in front of him. I didn't have time to jump out of the way, but instead had to topple onto the car's hood and bang on the hood to get the driver's attention. He carried me 20 feet or so before coming to a stop. Had I toppled backwards, he would have run over me, and would probably have simply wondered why the street was so bumpy. Fortunately, I just ended up with bruises on both shins from being struck by the front bumper. If you add a heads-up display on the windshield, many drivers will be paying even less attention to their surroundings than they do now.

The truly-scary thing is an administrator with a screwdriver. A former boss of mine tried to do his own computer repair, and managed to connect the case of his machine to 110V AC. Fortunately, the only casualties were the PC, one input port on the server, and a scorch mark on the wallpaper above the cable jack. Had this been more recent, with networks rather than RS-232C connections, the damage would have been considerably more expensive.

Wireless power covering an entire room will have to wait until wireless devices' power requirements go low enough that the radiated energy won't be a hazard to the user. At the power levels currently used by laptops, the power source would have to emit enough energy that you would microwave-cook the user. The device described in this article is probably using short-range magnetic coupling, not radio waves; not a particular threat to health, but putting your laptop on top of the charger would probably scramble the hard drive.

However, if the pressure should increase in the future, the borehole is the likeliest route for the lava to come out, as this is probably now the thinnest point in the magma-chamber wall.

And then the geologist says, "Someone's been eating asparagus!"