The day I turned 32, Margaret Cho said something I have been trying to say for a really long time. She said it well. She said it better than I could have ever said it. Thank you, my fabulous Ms. Cho!
Cyber begging has become a new artform on the Internet. People have been able to pay off their credit cards, buy breast implants, even quit their day jobs to pursue their webcomic all because everyday Internet users have donated small sums of money which added up to a big grand total.
In this spirit, Max and I would like to do a little cyber-begging of our own. We don't want you to pay off our credit cards or help us leave our day jobs - we want you all, our loyal readers, to buy us a tropical island!
That's right, Ebay has a 12 acre island up for bidding off the coast of Belize. Go out to Ebay and search for this lot number: 2393994394. This island would be perfect for Max and I. We would finally escape the world that we have grown to hate. There are no phones, no lights, no motor cars, not a single luxury! Best of all - no computers! We would finally be able to overcome our Internet addictions and just get away from it all.
There are also some other great things about Moho Caye, this lovely island is twelve+ miles off the coast of Belize, that would be international waters. So, when Max and I arrive, we can declare it our own country and claim three miles of waters around us! Ta-da! No more debt! The new country will declare the owners as new-born god-kings who are not the same people they were before they were newly born - Max and Jericho will be declared dead.
We can legalize whatever we want, for example, pot-smoking and prostitution! These will most likely become the main source of income for the island. We'll take an acre or two and turn that into a pot plantation. We'll set up a few huts on the beach for the sex workers. Any visitors will be charged $1000 for a week of free pot, grilled fish, and all the booty they can pay for. The sex workers will charge whatever the market will bear and we'll take 25%. Ah - paradise!
This is where you come in. If you use the donation button below, you will be added to the lists of respected visitors to Moho Caye. Donations from a dollar up will earn the donator a free day of access once a year to the Caye. We will hold a yearly party, we'll eat fish, play in the sand, and enjoy ourselves. Maybe we'll bring in some live music, we'll certainly have locally produced booze!
Donations of $1000 or more will grant you a second free day of access to the island, plus, we won't charge any sex workers you are with our 25% cut. I'm not sure how it will translate out for you, but, hey, who knows!
Donators of $10,000 or more will get to come to the island anytime they please. They will have full access to all the food and pot they can consume. We will also remove the 25% cut. Vavoom!
Donators of $100,000 or more will be at the Royal level. They can come down anytime, do whatever they want, and it's all on the house. For the rest of their lives. No, really, no kidding.
Donators of $250,000 or more are considered Partner level. At this level, you enjoy all the benefits of Royal level. Plus, all island profits will be divided between myself, Max and the partners. Since this is my idea, I will control 51% of the island. Max will control 25%. The last 24% will be divided among the Partners evenly annually. Imagine all the money that will flow in from all the pot heads of the world as they come to this tropical paradise to smoke like they have never smoked before! We'll be rolling in it! And so can you. Just donate below.
Once the initial $400k is raised, we will begin the process of purchasing the island. We will then have 10 years to pay, so this could go faster than you might think. If we get into trouble or if we can't raise enough to actually buy the island, individual donations greater than $10,000 will be returned. Sorry, we might need the rest for legal fees!
Round about 1997, I got myself a free email account from an internet company called Hotmail. It was the only form of communication I had with my roommates, who, at the time, were also my ride home from work. I was training for a new job at Boeing, there was only one phone for us to use and it was busy every break. I didn't have any money, and this was before cell phones were as common as they are now. Plus, we hadn't gotten email accounts at work yet. At the time, I would have gotten internal email only on the mainframe system. There were only a small percentage of the company working with this new product called "Exchange."
I liked Hotmail. I could keep up with Max, I got a news feed from Wired magazine, and it gave me something to do for the first month at the job when I had nothing to do. Not bad for free. They added some features, I had a calendar and some other stuff. Even better and still free.
Then, an announcement came up on Wired. Microsoft was buying Hotmail. They were putting together an ISP service called MSN and Hotmail was going to be one of the cornerstones. This bothered me and then again it didn't. I liked Hotmail as a service and I wanted to keep it around for a while, the instability of internet companies, even before the bubble burst, was legendary. Microsoft buying Hotmail meant that it had a better shot of being around for a while.
However - did it have to be Microsoft? I'm a long time Mac guy, but I have never been particularly anti-Microsoft. I use Office just like the rest of you, I actually like Office, and Exchange and Outlook and a lot of other Microsoft products. But, Hotmail was a free service. These are two words that Microsoft does not deal well with. "Free" might as well be a word from a dead language as far as they are concerned. There is money to be made everywhere, and if Microsoft can't make money from something, well, it's not from lack of trying, believe me. "Service" involves a level of humanity that Microsoft just doesn't possess. Microsoft makes some great products, but they have usually sucked at the whole service thing. If they were better at customer service, they would be in less trouble and have fewer people hate them, I would bet. You can't make money from good service - so Microsoft will have no part of it.
I knew that Hotmail would change drastically when MS bought it. I was correct. They immediately began to eliminate services. (There's one of those words!) They cut the news feed, they killed the ability to retrieve POP mail from other services. These were both some of my favorite reasons for having Hotmail. As the spammers began to ramp up, my Hotmail box was simply flooded with garbage - why? Hotmail was the easiest target on the internet. Even with Microsoft's "anti-spam" efforts, my 2MB of space was frequently lost in a pile of drek. Then, every other week there were security holes that MS was plugging up. Then, MS killed Hotmail Calendar. All of the features I had once enjoyed for free were now only available through the MSN pay service. There was no way I was going to pay for something I once got for free, especially considering all the problems that MS was having. No thanks.
I kept my Hotmail box, it's the only steady email box I have had for the last seven years. My "home" email address has changed a half dozen times, there have been about that many jobs, each with a different email address. However, I was always reachable at Hotmail. It's the only reason I have kept the box. It's the one place all my friends know they can catch me.
Now, in that time I have also had a variety of other "free" email addresses. One of the first was my address out at Yahoo! I liked the Yahoo! search engine early on and they have just gotten better and better as they became a "portal". As MS took features away and made them "for fee", Yahoo! kept adding new stuff. My Yahoo! account had 4MB of space to start with, then they added another 2 for we loyal users. Yahoo! kept their calendar, added Egroups, Briefcase, and on and on.
However, for whatever reason, I just never used my Yahoo! account all that much. Even with all the features, I reached for Hotmail long before Yahoo! to send a quick email. Something to do with habit, I had done a better job of keeping my Hotmail address book up to date, etc. It's silly now that I think about it.
In recent months, the "free email" services have been raising the stakes. Google, that kick-butt search engine, has delved into the free email service field. Google is looking to become a portal in it's own right and directly compete with the likes of Yahoo! We Blogger users have a chance to check out the new email service, since Blogger is owned by Google. Gmail, right from the get-go caused a stir by offering a gigabyte, yes, 1000MB of space. No other service is even close to that, pay or otherwise. They also have a unique method for organizing email. I've had fun playing around with it. But, I'm not sure it will become my "daily driver".
To answer this, Yahoo! has comeback with offering 100MB to all of their members, new or old. They are also freeing up a bunch of accounts that haven't been touched for years. With all the features, with all the extra space and the fact that Yahoo! has never steered me wrong, I think Yahoo! email will become my first choice for daily email.
And, as for Hotmail? Well, I'll keep the crap cleared out of the box. People will still be able to find me there. But, beyond that, to hell with Microsoft! When they bring out a new version of IE for the Mac, maybe I'll cut them a little slack!
Last fall I began online studies for a Master's Degree in Computer Information Systems. I was a little less technical and a little more business oriented than I would have preferred. But it looked like an opportunity to move up and it was the first program I saw that would be completely covered by student loans. I wasn't keen on going deeper in debt. But I was less keen on staying where I am.
Earlier this year, my employer thought it would be a great idea to cut staff in half. Now, they are the great business minds and I am merely a frontline tech, so far be it from me to question their wisdom. I am certain the fact that we were suddenly unable to handle the call volume, that we went from rarely being in queue to having them 50 deep, is naught but a coincidence. Still, something had to be done. Hiring more people would have been too easy. Instead they instituted mandatory overtime.
That was right around the time I started one of the most challenging classes in my program, with one of the least helpful teachers I have dealt with. I was strained to the limit, my class was suffering and something had to give. I dropped the class with the intent to take it back up once the mandatory overtime was over with. It made sense at the time. The thing is, I didn't realize (because I obviously have the common sense of a member of the Bush administration) That I was going to still have to pay for the portion of the class I did take, as well as pay for it all over again when I started back up. So, now my loans are just shy of $1000 dollars of covering my tuition. That means I am now out of school, with nothing to show for it but several grand in new student loans to pay off.
Yup. Another brilliant move on my part.
Oh, and I have yet to hear back about that job I interviewed for. Of course, I am told I would have hated it anyway. That I hate everything and will never have any chance of being happy. Or something like that. So fuck it. At least I'll have more time to read.
"To find out the function of some of these highly conserved non-protein-coding regions in mammals, Edward Rubin's team at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California deleted two huge regions of junk DNA from mice containing nearly 1000 highly conserved sequences shared between human and mice.
One of the chunks was 1.6 million DNA bases long, the other one was over 800,000 bases long. The researchers expected the mice to exhibit various problems as a result of the deletions.
Yet the mice were virtually indistinguishable from normal mice in every characteristic they measured, including growth, metabolic functions, lifespan and overall development. "We were quite amazed," says Rubin, who presented the findings at a recent meeting of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. "
