Disks in Rotation:
DVD • Ninja Scroll
CD-ROM • D2X
CD Carousel
• Nine Inch Nails - The Fragile
• Filter - Short Bus
• Alice in Chains - Dirt
• God Lives Underwater - Self Titled EP

Books Lying Open
• Grimm's Fairy Tales, The Brothers Grim
• Great Expectations, Charles Dickens

Soul-Devouring Worry
• All that I place importance on is but dust in the wind.

When I Grow Up:
• Going to bed hungry won't seem like such an accomplishment

Daily Blog
Second day of work in a row, eight more to go.  Yes, almost like a real person.

I'm bad about checking the mail.  Snail mail, I mean.  For one thing I tend to go about a week between checking it, and since at my apartment I just get a tiny little metal box for the mail, it ends up all being stuffed in there on top of the previous day's.  The bulk of the mail is junk, which is doubly annoying, since I don't want it, I throw it right away, and it's physically difficult to remove from the goddamn mail box.

I used to enjoy the snail mail, but no longer.  I have good reason not to, though. For one thing, I never get anything I want in the mail, other than maybe near my B-day (which is in less than a month, though I'm trying hard to forget that fact) or Xmas.  What I do get I don't merely not want, but tend to actively hate receiving. Junk mail for one thing.  Those big sheaves of glossy ads; straight into the trash.  I don't need to save a quarter on Folgers Crystals badly enough to validate the junk mail sender's efforts by hunting through to find it.  Actually I don't drink coffee at all, so it's just an example.

Bills are of course worse, since not only do I not want them, not want to open them or sort the or file them, but they cost money. I tend to ignore bills for 2 or 3 months running, and then pay them at once.  It's not the money, it's the annoyance of spending oh, 30 or 40 seconds writing a check for $55 a month to Cox Communications, rather than just cutting them a $165 check every quarter.  They tend to send bitchy letters about cutting off the service, but to do that they need to send out a technician, and if they do you can just write him a check when he arrives.  Which I've done in the past.   Ignoring credit card mails is a worse idea, since they screw you on the interest, but it's hard to pick out one from the pile of bills and other unpleasant letters.  One day I'll be denied for a home loan on the basis of constantly going 2 months between paying bills... and they'll be right to do it.  I'll march right into the kitchen and unearth the counter from beneath an 8 week stack of letters. Tomorrow.

Even worse is today checking the mail, for the first time in a week or so, I have mysterious letters from the IRS and also California tax board.  Not the type of letters they put a rebate check in either, these are thicker and look scary.  And I didn't have any rebates anyway.  I'll open them when I'm feeling braver.

Anyway, here's some news.  I'm about two hours past my bedtime Tuesday night, and I don't have any idea what to write in the essay part below these few news items.  And I'm so hungry my belly hurts.  *cries a river*

• Fascinating article about various proposed designs for Martian flying craft can be seen in Science News Online.  Why not use planes, or helicopters?  The atmosphere on Mars is too thin, so there's not enough air to provide thrust for any conventional earth aircraft to work there.  Plus current models are very inefficient, and when getting them and any supplies to Mars would be such a huge ordeal, they need to be tremendously clever in design.  The air at the surface of Mars is about as thick as it is on Earth above 30,000 feet, and a normal fixed wing aircraft would have to travel at over 400kmh to stay aloft.  Also where would they land?  The surface is entirely rock and boulder-strewn, and clearing a landing strip for planes going twice as fast as they do on earth would be an enormous undertaking. Helicopters have problems since due to the thin air, speed of sound is 20% slower than it is on Earth, and there would be problems with helicopter blades actually exceeding it, if you just try to make them spin faster.  Apparently that screws up the physics of the lift.

Ideas range from wild new machines built like insects, with flapping wings, to helicopters with huge blades, shaped like windmill fans.  I just enjoy the whole concept; planning for things to be used on Mars, or in future exploration. Certainly beats stories about idiot politicians and their interns on Earth.

More on the same topic, news that there is water and more water on Mars, frozen beneath the surface.  This is extremely good news for potential exploration of the planet.

• Klez is the most-spread virus in history now, apparently.  My d2 site inbox can certainly attest to that.  The article is interesting, as it talks about the ways it spreads, and how most people are security-clueless and easy meat.  If you don't have anti-virus protection, and especially if you don't do windows critical updates, you're just a victim, sooner or later.  Probably sooner.

• Yet another annoying feature of being religious.

• 78 Reasons to Hate SW1.  Does what it says, says what it does.  Some are even funny.  There's a similar list of 62 SW2 items, but only the first 10 seem to be online.

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