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Monday - 10 September 2001

Overtaken By Events. Maybe I should get a faster car because I keep getting overtaken by events...<G>

So we spent the weekend moving house, or at least some of our house. Mostly it was the bed, clothes, pots/pans, and TV. Next weekend we'll move a small sofa in so we don't have to sit on the bed or the floor while we have dinner.

Today will be devoured by flying cockroaches so I will leave you with this:

A couple of women were playing golf one sunny Saturday morning. The first of the twosome teed off and watched in horror as her ball headed directly toward a foursome of men playing the next hole.

Indeed, the ball hit one of the men, and he immediately clasped his hands together at his crotch, fell to the ground and proceeded to roll around in evident agony.

The woman rushed down to the man and immediately began to apologize. She said, "Please allow me to help. I'm a physical therapist and I know I could relieve your pain if you'd allow."

"Ummph, oooh, nnooo, I'll be all right...I'll be fine in a few minutes," he replied breathlessly as he remained in the fetal position still clasping his hands together at his crotch.

But she persisted, and he finally allowed her to help him. She gently took his hands away and laid them to the side, she loosened his pants, and she put her hands inside. She began to massage him.

She then asked him, "How does that feel?" To which he replied, "Lady, it feels great, but my hand still hurts like hell."

Aloha!

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Tuesday - 11 September 2001

Four things.

1. You now have our attention.

2. Now, the gloves come off.

3. We have awakened a sleeping giant and have instilled in him a terrible resolve. Attributed to "victorious" Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, just after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941.

4. And then shall the end come.

Oh, say, can you see, by the dawn's early light,
What so proudly we hail'd at the twilight's last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars, thro' the perilous fight,
O'er the ramparts we watch'd, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rocket's red glare, the bombs bursting in air
Gave proof thro' the night that our flag was still there.
Oh, say, does that Star-Spangled Banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

Second Verse
On the shore, dimly seen thro' the mists of the deep,
Where the foe's haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o'er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows half conceals, half discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning's first beam,
In full glory reflected now shines in the stream;
'Tis the Star-Spangled Banner, O long may it wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Third Verse
And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle's confusion
A home and a country should leave us no more?
Their blood has wiped out their foul footstep's pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Fourth Verse
Oh, thus be it ever when free men shall stand
Between their loved homes and the war's desolation!
Blest with vict'ry and peace, may the heav'n rescued land
Praise the Pow'r that hath made and preserved us a nation!
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto, "In God is our trust"
And the Star-Spangled Banner in triumph shall wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

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Wednesday - 12 September 2001

Final Solutions? Much has been said, and much will be said, about what to do about terrorism. But if you are looking to me for the answers, you're looking in the wrong place - all I have are questions.

For instance, while I do not disagree with those who say we must take ultimate personal responsibility for our own safety (e.g., being able to carry concealed automatic weapons to kill hijackers), what do we do about the lone terrorist, flying the two-wing crop duster, spraying the air with biological seeds of death? Place Stinger missiles atop every building in the land?

How do we stop people who are willing to die for what they believe, and take a lot of us with them? Is genocide the answer (I believe there is an example of this in the Bible)?

Perhaps. If so, this is not an easy task for if you start down that road, you must ensure that each and every one of them is killed. "Both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword." [Joshua 6:21] We would have to ensure that not one stone was left standing upon another. [Matt. 24:2]

Can we do that? Should we?

If not, what should we do? I don't know, but it must violent, equal to the loss of US lives, and it must be soon (if it hasn't happened already by the time you read this). If we don't do something within the next 48 hours, I am of the opinion we shouldn't do anything. For the longer the period between the attack and our response, the less effective it will be - no matter what we do.

I pray President Bush is up to the greatest task perhaps a President has had to accomplish since Roosevelt and World War II.

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Thursday - 13 September 2001

New York Times Op-Ed: See it here

Sons and Daughters of Hawai'i The effects of the attack have reached even here. So far, five people, from Hawai'i, have been identified as having died or are missing. Our thoughts and prayers go out to their family and friends. MTRIP.

Georgina Corrigan (56) - aboard United Flight 93.

Christine Snyder (32) - aboard United Flight 93.

Heather Ho (32) - at work on the 107th floor.

Maile Hale (26) - attending a conference in the WTC.

Rich Y.C. Lee (no age/picture) - at work on the 103rd floor.

Independence Day. Some people have been comparing the attack on New York and the Pentagon as looking like something out of a movie. Specifically, Independence Day. I think it appropriate to quote the rally speech that the character playing the President gives to his troops before going into the final battle:

In less than an hour, aircraft from here will join others from around the world. And you will be launching the largest aerial battle in the history of mankind.

Mankind....that word should have new meaning for all of us today. We can't be consumed with our petty differences anymore. We will be united in our common interests. Perhaps, it's fate, today is the fourth of July, and you will once again be fighting for our freedom. Not from tyranny, oppression or persecution. But from annihilation. We're fighting for our right to live...to exist.

Should we win today, the fourth of July will no longer be known as an American holiday. But as the day when the world declared in one voice: "We will not go quietly into the night...we will not vanish without a fight! We're going to live on! We're going to survive! Today, we celebrate our independence day!"

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Friday - 14 September 2001

Keep On Keepin' On. The time for a quick response has passed. Now, I think whatever the response is will not be effective in keeping this from happening again (in another form, probably). Note, I didn't say there wouldn't/shouldn't be a response, just that it wouldn't be effective if it wasn't swift and sure (remember it was US Gen. Collin Luther Powell, during the Golf conflict, who was the one advocating not going after Saddam Hussein and look where we are now). Did I mention I was not optimistic? But life goes on.

P.S. To all the people of the world who have expressed their sorrow, and solidarity with us, a heartfelt thank you. It made my eyes misty to see the outpouring of support - including one European leader saying the US had stood by them in their darkest hours of WWII, how could they not stand now with the US in our darkest hour? And another saying; Today, we are all Americans! Again, thank you.

KDE 2.2.1 The bug fix version of 2.2 will be on the wire on Monday, September 17th (see the announcement here). This is the version I will download and install, and should have been the version released a month ago. So it goes.

Win98 ScanDisk to the Rescue. We had a minor crisis on Wednesday when a diskette with an important WordPerfect document on it had problems. All of the files except one were readable. Of course, the one that had problems was the most recent file and, of course, was the one that needed to be recovered. The error message, when trying to open the file in WP, was a cryptic message about insufficient memory.

A quick look at the WP site found all kinds of ways this message could appear, with very few of them actually related to insufficient memory (I have 384MBs of RAM and even WP doesn't use up that much RAM). So I figured one of two things was occurring, either the file was corrupted or the diskette had bad sectors (which in turn corrupted the file).

I decided to check to see if the diskette was bad by running Norton SystemWorks 2001. So I ran Norton DiskDoctor and it found no problems. Okay, therefore the problem must be a corrupted WP file, something I've been running across all too often [once is too often - ed.], since version 5.1 for DOS. So I went back to the WP site and downloaded, via ftp, the WP8rest.exe file (find it here).

This file, WP8REST.EXE, "is a utility to restore damaged Corel WordPerfect documents. Originally designed to fix problems reported with password-protected files, it is also often useful for repairing various other document problems, such as corrupted files. This utility will work with documents created in Corel WordPerfect for Windows 6.x and newer."

So I installed and ran the file but no joy. I still couldn't read the file. I then tried to copy the file from the diskette to my hard drive. When I did that I got a DOS "Error performing inpage operation." Hmmmm. Inpage operation, well isn't that descriptive and helpful. Not. So I go over to the Microsoft site to see what this means. In my case, it means I'm getting an I/O error.

Now that folks, is a problem with a bad diskette. So why wasn't Norton finding any problems? So I tried running chkdsk to see if it found anything. And just as Norton, nothing was found bad with the diskette. This was getting very frustrating.

I happened to have an old Win98 Startup Disk (I'm currently using Win 2K Pro) in my drawer so I decided to boot from that to see if I could do a copy without all of the Windows overhead. That didn't work, but in trying that, I remembered that the start-up disk creates a RAM drive full of utilities. One of which is ScanDisk. So I ran that and, lo and behold! Bad sectors! In fact, ScanDisk was able/willing to move readable data to good sectors.

Yes! Almost there. The recovered file did not include the headers that a good WP file needs but then, I did have the WP8rest program - which will provide, among other things, the needed headers. So I ran the file through the restore program and Mr. Hocus, meet Mr. Pocus, I had a readable WordPerfect file. No, not all of the data was there, but about 90% was. So my boss, whose file this was, was happy and I was happy.

Additional Resources
Detecting and Correcting File Corruption
How Do I Retrieve data from a corrupted file?

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