Ha, thou also? I was a member from the late 80s to the end, and still consider its closure a tragically premature act. ;__; I still carry my membership card in my wallet.

I was immediately reminded of that very strange story (but all of his stories were very strange) by J.G. Ballard - The Crystal World (1966) - where this sort of thing was mysteriously occurring on its own in a jungle somewhere in Cameroon.

My first thought was that Skynet was making its move here. But aside from that (as troubling as it may well be), are the microsatellites otherwise functioning all right? That is, are they doing what they are (officially) supposed to be doing? Just curious.

Coming in way late, arrgh... I'm the other way around from Em. My "firstname lastname" is about the commonest combination of a fairly common name. OTOH when I include my middle name I come in at the top of the Google list, followed by two Canucks and a Mormon biker (all three deceased BTW).

Starting off with AOL for the last three months of '96, I briefly tried and quickly abandoned Inept Exploder, going with Netscape for the balance of the old century and into the new, passing through Windows 3.1, 95 and 98 on my way to various flavors of Linux. About 8 years ago a friend helped me set up a NetBSD box for my intarwebz usage, insisting I try Seamonkey - and I have been using it with some satisfaction since. My current rather dodgy setup (inb4 "get a better setup", I have a couple of candidate boxen that I'm working on, but money for parts is tight), which doesn't run anywhere as well as I would like, handles Seamonkey 2.8 rather well, and certainly better than the current version of Firefox - a beast that can hardly be said to run at all and frequently locks the system so hard I am forced to physically shut the computer off entirely. Seamonkey's bookmark manager is amazingly good, while Firefox ... doesn't seem to have a bookmark manager of any kind. My chief complaint against Seamonkey is the problem arising from an update that so totally broke several plugins involved with flash video (such as YouTube) that I have been unable to repair them. (background music: Lightwave's "Tycho Brahe.")

I seldom have much occasion to post here, especially as I'd probably wind up unread at the bottom of a zillion earlier posts (which I haven't read), but...OK ... The reason I am still on dialup is because I can't fscking afford broadband. I have occasional access to broadband when I happen to visit my ISP, so I know what I'm missing. Make it affordable and available and see what happens then.