Flights

I've been hearing waterfowl flying over the house all the cloudy night, but I don't know what kind they are. The cries are faint, and high-pitched. They are neither geese nor ducks, I'm sure. A great variety of species winter in the wetlands of the Central Valley. I expect to see a few flocks passing, mornings and evenings, for the next couple of months, but those who fly by night I never see, even when the moon is bright. The moon will be a sliver tonight, but that, too, I probably won't see. This morning is even grayer than yesterday afternoon. It may be raining by the time I wake. Soggy days lie ahead. I'm well pleased.

(no subject)

A bunch of trees have piled up in my room, disguised as newspapers. I keep forgetting to remove them. They have their own spot in the garage, where they wait for recycling, but they stubbornly refuse to go there on their own. They want to be carried. Big babies. I suppose they're vengeful about having been pulped. Like it's my fault that news keeps happening, and that goods and services need to be advertised, and that the two have formed a symbiotic relationship so that disasters and specials on deodorant both end up being displayed on the same trees! I'm a victim, too! The trees have been pulped, but imagine what has happened to my brain!

The rain began before I got to sleep this morning, and was almost as effective a soporific as a cat's purr. It turned out to be a brief re-emergence of the sun which woke me. It shone for an hour, and then was concealed again before it could set. Now there is intermittent rain, occasional mist, and the utter absence of any sound of insects. When the storm has passed, the afternoons will be filled with the tiny, slow-moving gnats of autumn. They have transparent wings, which they do not fold upon landing (itself a rare event.) I sometimes manage to swipe one in midair, and it will sit on my hand for a moment so I can examine it. They are hard to see, being smaller than ants, but the wings are comparatively large, and catch the light to make of it small, ephemeral rainbows which vanish almost as soon as glimpsed. For some reason, the newspapers never mention this. Did they do so, the trees might be less resentful.

DRMed CD Warning

This page is written mostly in Geek, but it contains a timely warning for anyone who is playing recently-acquired CD's on their computer. It's a weblog entry by Mark Russinovich of Sysinternals, telling about his experience with software surreptitiously loaded onto his computer by a CD made by Sony. He sums it up thus:

"The entire experience was frustrating and irritating. Not only had Sony put software on my system that uses techniques commonly used by malware to mask its presence, the software is poorly written and provides no means for uninstall. Worse, most users that stumble across the cloaked files with a RKR scan will cripple their computer if they attempt the obvious step of deleting the cloaked files."

Yet another compelling reason to refuse to buy the increasingly malicious products of the decadent and corrupt record industry.

Incidentally, something strange happened when I loaded this page on Opera. All of the test of the webblog entry following the first couple of paragraphs reversed before the page was fully loaded- I mean, each individual word came out backward, so that Sony become ynoS. The comments and other sections of the page were unaffected. I fetched the page with Firefox, and it displayed correctly. Apparently some quirk with Opera. I'll inform them of it.