The Japanese have the weirdest obsession with crazy new toy concepts.

Meet Danbos.


Look at the quality of these boxes! Makes Amazon.co.jp that much cooler.

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-- Photos belong to Randy Santa-Ana
-- What in the world is a Danbo?

A murder of crows is shrouding Linwood right now.
They are cawing up a frenzy. They have been fluttering around since the afternoon. I wonder if one of the baby crows has fallen out of a nest or if someone has died on the street.

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1. Photo from
2. American Crows have a fascinating natural history

Didn't you know?

My building management wants me
to freeze to death.
Can't feel my toes or
the tip of my nose.
My fingers are turning
a lethal shade of whitish-purple.

No. That's not Deep Purple or you know, Annie Lennox. It's just that weird fifth floor tenant in that corner building up the street from (e:PMT) - croaking to the tune of Die Another day. So in celebration of not being frozen already, I just read this on the fresh loaf:

I decided to revive my dormant Carl Griffith's 1847 Oregon Trail starter last week, so I had a lot of nice ripe starter by the end of the week on hand that I wanted to use up. I used an excel spreadsheet I made up for Flo's 1-2-3 sourdough to use up any amount of excess ripe sourdough starter, except in this case, I needed to increase the hydration since I was using all whole wheat flour in the final dough, so it became 1-2.25-3 bread (78% hydration final dough). The reason I made this as 90% whole wheat is simply because the excess starter I had was made up of about 25% whole wheat and 75% AP, so even though the final dough is all whole wheat, there is about 10% AP in the overall formula due to the large amount of starter

That is just so very confusing on so many levels. I am going to try and decipher all of this patiently. So Griffith made some kind of a sourdough starter from the yeast he collected from the Oregon trail? Back in 1847? And in 2010, exposure to these mutant yeast made thefreshloaf bloke use Excel for quantum calculations. He has an alter-ego Flo, who is learning to count at the kindergarten - obviously a Frog, by the sound of it. That much is crystal clear, thank you.

That's it. The rest of it is quite clearly in *that* cryptographic code taken from the most superficial crater on Jupiter's 10th moon. I think my fingers are too purple for wikipedia.

Dilli (better known as Delhi to most) literally means the "City of Hearts". But I doubt if any hearts are beating there this week after months of harassment of the ordinary Dilliwala. Endless construction, trench digging, random curfews, road blockades, military deployment on the streets and the obscene hubris and corruption of a parade of filthy, mean-minded, grubby and sadistically-selfish politicians have managed to wreck the spirit and soul of Dilli - something that centuries of British oppression couldn't even come near to doing.

The government, in its infinite wisdom, has poured more than $7.5 billion into staging this absolutely loathsome spectacle called the Commonwealth Games. And now it wonders why the average Dilliwala isn't buying the overpriced tickets to any of the games after paying out the entire $7.5 billion in super-inflated taxes.

So. $7.5 billion. $7.5 billion!!! Mind boggling. Corruption at various levels of politics made it possible for the venal government to pay out insane amounts of money like the $200 for each roll of toilet paper at the game venues and the $130 for each umbrella over empty seats in the sunlight. The list of excesses goes on till it makes a reasonable person nauseous - well, maybe not the person who actually paid the 40 cents for the TP and pocketed the rest of the $199.60.

This very same government refused to fund family planning and health services for Dilli because it argued that $5/person was clearly too astronomical an amount for something so trivial as healthcare.

I am heartbroken along with the millions in Dilli who are now wondering if they belong in the city at all. It is time for a revolution - rather like the ones the Frogs pulled off. But the question is does anyone have a heart and guts to bell the evil little political monster in Dilli anymore?

Ever since my discussion with (e:Paul), I have been thinking about the whole data-security issue at RPCI. The monitor and input-devices only desks make so much sense, really. In organizations that deal with secure and sensitive data, there is really no place for personal workstation-processors. Additionally, having personal processors for everyone adds to operating and maintenance costs unnecessarily.

We not only get new computers, but also new monitors and new keyboards and new mice every 3-4 years or so. WHY on earth do we need to buy everything again and again and renew stuff that could easily be avoided for at least a decade? All that really needs to be renewed is the computing power for newer resource-hungry software. Can't this easily be done at a mainframe-common server level? After all, it will be a one-time investment for many employees - not a many-time investment for all the employees over and over. RPCI really needs to rethink it's IT strategy and look at this absolute waste of resources it's incurring all the time.

I recently read a lot about Drupal. The usefulness of a modular, dynamic Drupal-like system in a mainframe office would be immense. Content that employees would need to work with could be served dynamically on their monitors, depending on who has the verified credentials and pre-assigned rights/clearance (determined by who logs in at that terminal). And of course, when your work is done, you can't store stuff in your USBs or local storage - where they might easily get stolen or lost. As an added advantage, not having processors and hard-drives at every desk would also save energy and operating costs.

Health data is protected data. It's time we treated it in the same way as other professional organizations such as government secret services treat their files in their offices.

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PS: This is an article on how we went from a centralized big computer to many small computers. I think that it makes sense, especially where data security is concerned, to move back to the centralized serving, more powerful computing model. Personal computers have no place in a work environment.

PPS: I am not doing justice to the magnitude of advantages of such a system. A few immediate and key advantages could be:
- Cost saving (in many ways; avoiding not only repeated costs for buying unnecessary peripherals, but also maintenance costs and energy costs)
- Energy saving
- Tougher and more efficiently administered data security
- Tidier offices and more deskspace