Ladewig.com

Now I’ve seen it all. Someone has an eBay auction (for a starting bid of $49,000 no less) for the publishing rights to what they claim is a report showing family ties between Jesus (as in the Christ) and various people. But wait, there’s more! You even get the domain name http://jesuskin.com! What a deal!

These folks even point out that the bible documents Jesus’ link to Adam & Eve through Joseph. So people will be flooding you with orders to buy this valuable genealogical research tool once they find that out! Of course, if someone accepts as factual the story of Adam & Eve, wouldn’t they believe we are all related to Adam & Eve anyway? If someone really included Adam & Eve in their family tree, I doubt they’re all that hung up on little things like documentation and proof.

I think I’ll save my $49,000 and wait until some more swizzle sticks from Disneyland’s Club 33 show up on eBay.

I’ve needed new tires on my car for some time now. I just never seemed to find the time to take it in and get it taken care of. Today, however, my car made the decision for me. Sometime after I arrived at work, one of the tires decided to go flat.

No problem. I have one of those emergency air compressors that you can use to inflate a tire. Wrong! Turns out I hadn’t charged it up for a long time, and charging it takes several hours. I wound up having to put the emergency spare on and head over to Dobbs.

Now, $500+ later, I have a new set of tires, and my emergency compressor is charging itself. Guess the car was tired of me putting this off.

The last cruise photos have been posted online. These are from Kristin’s camera and the waterproof camera we used on Princess Cays and at the beach in St. Thomas.

Found a posting over on Medley that mentioned an anti-Gmail site. I don’t have any concerns about Gmail myself, but I’ve been intrigued by people who wail about the bad things that will happen because of Gmail. I checked out the site and it appears to me that many of the concerns that people have about Gmail aren’t specific to that service.

One issue is they claim messages will exist indefinitely. They complain that Google will keep all messages, even deleted ones, which will remain accessible internally. Turns out they’re talking about backups of the mail system. Have these people never heard of backups before? Do they think Google is the only mail provider who makes backups of their mail system and actually keeps them around for a while? Do they think that when they delete a message it magically disappears from all backup media that contain that message?

They also complain about messages that are older than 180 days being subject to a subpoena instead of a warrant. Assuming this is true (which I have no reason to doubt), how is this specific to Google? Any mail system where people keep their mail on a server instead of on their local machine would be subject to the same rules. Are they implying that only Google provides enough space to have messages that are more than six months old? There are many systems out there that offer large mailboxes with some already jumping on the GB+ bandwagon (Spymac offers 1GB, and Aventure offers 2 GB!) We have messages that are seven years old on the mail system I manage at Olin.

In the end their solution is to simply not send messages to anyone with a gmail.com address. I wonder if this person has ever heard of forwarding? When you send email to someone you have no idea where that message will ultimately wind up, where it is stored, or what the recipient does with it. At Washington University, alumni are now able to keep their @wustl.edu addresses after they graduate. Mail sent to their address is forwarded to whatever external account they provide. So this person who said they would never send mail to Gmail users might send mail to someone with @wustl.edu on their address, thinking they are safe, not knowing the message is being forwarded to a Gmail account. Hmm, maybe they better go back and rethink that plan.

The people behind the anti-Gmail site should really stop sending any email if these are things which truly concern them.

I came across a link to this on Chris Brooks’ site. Matthew Baldwin imagines an amusing scenario where the DNC looks to even things up in light of the outpouring of goodwill following President Reagan’s death. Check out DNC Urges Clinton’s Demise on Matthew’s blog, defective yeti.