CNN is reporting that the theory that liquid water is behind the plumes jetting up from Saturn's moon Enceladus' south pole may not be accurate. "In an alternative view published in Friday's issue of the journal Science, other researchers propose that buried ice clathrates -- not liquid water -- are responsible for releasing the towering plumes through a sudden tectonic shift in the crust that causes cracks in the ice and gas to vent." The reported presence of water, hinted at by results from the Cassini probe, had set off the thought of life beyond Earth. The presence of water elsewhere on Enceladus may still hold out hope for those believing the theory.

Mondays are invariably bad -- this is a given. However yesterday has to rank right up there with the worst Mondays I've ever had.

To start, my 20-month old daughter is sick and was up till the wee hours, so sleep was at a premium. I overslept (never a good thing when you have a 2 hour commute) and was in a rush to get going. I told my wife I was taking our youngest son (stepson really, but I don't make that distinction) to the bus stop. When I went to get in my car, there was a big stick in my driver's seat. I didn't give it much thought; we have two boys and boys collect things like sticks and stuff. I suspected it was just somebody hiding someone's "lucky" stick in my car.

After dropping my youngest son off, I returned home to get my things. When I got out of the car, I glanced down at my hood and then got the shock of my life. Someone had scrawled the words "THIS IS YOUR SONS FAULT" on the hood and I recognized the coloring of the letters as belonging to the stick. I noted that for the most part the words were simply drawn on the hood, but there were some other scratches that looked like actual damage.

Well, needless to say, I was livid. I've been trying to sell the car, as I need to cut down on my payments and generate some cash. This was not going to help. I ended up emailing work to tell them I would be late, then waiting around for the police to file a report.

Now, our older son is a bit of a hothead, has an air of superiority about him, and a temper (all inherited from his birth father, and that's a tale I need to write a book about!). He gets in trouble, not a lot, but sometimes his behavior has been inappropriate. He gets picked on, especially on the bus, and we've had issues concerning that that had be chatting with the asst. principal. Our other boy is a as sweet as pie -- the brothers are like night and day.

Bottom line: someone who knows where our oldest son lives and doesn't realize I'm not his birth father left us a little present. To say I'm pissed is an understatement. To say I'm further pissed because I don't know who did it, when they did it, or why, is an even bigger understatement. I want to find the miscreant and/or miscreants and mete out punishment. I want to be able to dress down their parents and tell them what a lousy job they are doing. I want justice.

Sigh. Can't wait for 2007. Things have to get better.

This offends me on so many levels:

PlayStation 3 Shopper Shot Outside Wal-Mart

1. Can Sony possibly do anything else to look and act stupid or have they plumbed the depths at this point?
2. Ok, how stupid do you have to be to be standing outside Wal-Mart at 3 am waiting for a game console? This isn't water from Lourdes we're talking about here -- it's a gaming system!
3. Did these these thugs actually thing they'd be able to hold up a whole line of people without someone saying no? More importantly, unless they were planning on killing everyone, they can now be fingered by dozens of people for the crime. Even forgiving how bad eyewitness testimony can be, I suspect the cops won't have a hard time making this stick.
4. How many of these "enthusiasts" were actually there to buy one, only to turn around and sell it on eBay or elsewhere for 2 to 3 times what they paid for it?

From the Apache documentation:

Sending the TERM or stop signal to the parent causes it to immediately attempt to kill off all of its children. It may take it several seconds to complete killing off its children. Then the parent itself exits. Any requests in progress are terminated, and no further requests are served.

I was reading the above statement, which comes from the section on starting and stopping Apache, and I thought the whole thing sounded vaguely like something out a manual for serial killers. I've obviously been at work too long.

It's not just laptops the Federal Government has to worry about losing -- apparently sensitive nuclear documents can also turn up in the most interesting places. CNN is reporting that a raid on a scientist's home in Los Alamos, NM has turned up classified documents taken from the Los Alamos nuclear weapons lab. The raid Friday night on an unidentified female scientist's home was part of a larger methamphetamine investigation, according to the FBI. What's scarier: the fact that these documents were there, or the fact that they were there in the home of someone who may be part of a drug ring?

Everyone has them: pet peeves. I've decided to air mine whenever the mood strikes me. Needless to say (which is why I'm saying it -- who thought up that phrase, anyway?), inspiration has struck and I have a peeve.

We have a water cooler on our floor, just a few cubes down from me. Monthly we get a large supply of replacement water bottles, so that everyone may enjoy the benefits of clean, cold bottled water. Everyone that is, save myself.

Whether by fate, karma, or just God's way of playing practical jokes, invariably I approach the cooler to fill up my bottle, only to find the water depleted. And I don't mean that I'm taking the last visible bit and the bottle naturally needs replacing -- I mean arid and barren desolation. I am forced to then retrieve a water bottle and reload the machine. This must happen at least once a day.

My parents raised me right and so I make sure that if I use up the last of the visible water, I change the bottle so the next person doesn't have to. The admin who sits there is grateful for my fastidiousness in this regard and is very unhappy with those who can't be bothered to do it themselves. She's even told me that people will discover that the machine is empty, and rather than refill it (or ask someone to do it -- not everyone in my office is big and burly like myself), the walk to the kitchen area on the other side of the floor and use the countertop machine, which gets its water from a water line, leaving the empty machnie for the next person.

I don't get it -- how hard is it to either a) replace the bottle yourself if you have the capacity or b) ask someone who does have the capacity to do it to replace the bottle? Have we become that lazy in this country (the USA for our foreign readers) that we can't do even this simple thing for convenience of our co-workers? Does anyone else encounter this problem?

Before there were the missing Apollo 11 lunar landing video tapes, there was the missing Apollo 11 'article.' Neil Armstrong maintained that when he uttered his now famous quote, he in fact "That's one small step for a man..." though the audio that everyone heard seems to say otherwise. Enter Peter Shann Ford, Australian computer programmer, who, using software that allows the disabled to communicate with a computer via nerve impulses, claims to have found the missing 'a'. For the complete story, you can read all about it on the Control Bionics web site.

Here's something to raise the hackles of the Slashdot communtiy: an article over at LifeHacker by editor Gina Trapani states that IE7 handles RSS feeds better than Firefox 2.0. From the article: "Now, I'm not suggesting that IE7 is a superior browser. Obviously Firefox has all of our hearts here at Lifehacker. But in this case, it's surprising to see IE7 do something by default better than Firefox does." Of course this seems to be more of a subjective opinion than anything definitve.

Over at The Register, Dr Stephen Juan has this interesting article on Internet Addiction Disorder (IAD). Apparently this has been around since at least 1995 and there are those lobbying for it to be included in the DSM-IV. While some people use the Internet a lot for work or to keep in touch with family & friends as well as banking and bill-paying, it's interesting to thing that some people actually become addicted. There's still a lot of controversy over the diagnosis, whether this is true addiction or not. There is more detailed information available in this paper from Viriginia Tech.

There's been a pretty bad train accident in Germany involving a Maglev train. Bloomberg.com is reporting that "One person died and ten people are missing, feared dead, after a Transrapid high-speed magnetic- levitation train crashed today on a test track in northwest Germany." Apparently the train hit a maintenance vehicle while only a kilometer or so from the station. The accident has caused German Transport Minister Wolfgang Tiefensee to break off his 5-day visit to China, where the same system is used to provide transportation between Pudong International Airport and the Lujiazui financial district.

Found this on Wired News via Boing Boing: Lore Sjöberg has a column on blogs, blogging, and the perfect entry. Needless to say, Slashdot is not ignored.

If you liked the yellowing case problem, you'll love this. Apparently, some MacBook users are experiencing a problem with random shutdowns. Their MacBook is sitting there, minding its own business, and suddenly turns off for no reason, 10 - 20 times per day, and then may be hard to turn back on. It has also been noted that this happens when playing Quicktime movies, or removing the AC adaptor. The problem has even inspired its own blog.

Here's some food for thought: does a "crime" committed in an alternate world have any ramifications in the "real" world? Case in point is this article from the Gamers With Jobs web site, outlining the exploits of one Dentara Rask, a character in CCP's Eve Online massively multiplayer online world. According to the information in the article, Dentara Rask ran a Ponzi scheme within the game, amassing a large amount of on-line wealth (700 billion ISK) and then bragging about it. The question is posited: since a Ponzi scheme in real life is a punishable criminal offense, what about when it happens in a MMORPG? Assuming there are no rules within the game environment to prevent this, how would you go about punishing someone in the real world for something they did in an artificial one? And can they be punished?

Everybody join in! The Joy of Tech: Pluto's a Planet Protest Group

Apparently, extraterrestrials who visit Earth prefer Firefox. Warning: they should probably not land in Redmond, WA.