View From the Bushes

This weekend was quite an adventure. The epic didn't start unil Saturday. My youngest has this habit of holding her breath when she starts crying and then letting loose this huge scream (hopefully you can picture the phenomenon I'm referring to). Well, when my wife put her down for a nap she did that trick and did it long enough that she passed out, fell over and hit her head on the side of the crib. My wife picked her up, and not only had her eyes rolled into the back of her head, but she was limp and blue. It only took a second before herr reflexive breathing kicked in, but as you can well imagine, it totally freaked my wife out and that was only the beginning...

Actually I need to backtrack a little bit. Starting on Friday night, my wife came down with a head-splitting, nausea-inducing headache (I think I was talking with her about World of Warcraft at the time). And that little slice of heaven continued through the whole weekend (in fact, she's still grappling with it today, which is pretty awful when you hear how the rest of the weekend went). So then late Saturday night my friend from California calls me; he's in town just for the day and he wants to go grab a bite to eat, but yet another friend can't go until midnight, so we head out to a greasy spoon. I stuff myself and waddle to bed around 2:30 am. The next morning my wife was still sick, so I got up early with the kids. I figured that I could go to bed early on Sunday night. But then...

Sunday actually went okay for the most part, but then just as the kids were getting ready for bed around 8:00, my oldest started throwing up. My wife voluteered to sleep with her, which would give me the bed to myself, but then right around 11:00 my second son threw up (without going into details, it was not pretty). With two kids we had to divide up, so I took my son. As you may know or suspect, sleeping with someone who you think may vomit at any time is not the most restful way to sleep, and that takes us to today: my wife is still not feeling well, though mercifully both kids seem to be through the worst of it. On that note, I'll end with a somewhat nauseating article on High School students' complete lack of knowledge about the First Amendment.

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Ross

Last night was a huge amount of fun, but it illustrates the problem I've had all week of being sucked into the World of Warcraft and doing less writing than I should, but I'm hoping that this weekend will be very productive. I don't have anything planned for tonight or at all tomorrow either, and on that note, rather than spending much time on my blog, I thought I would just post the recently revealed crawl for Episode 3:

Episode III
REVENGE OF THE SITH

As the Separatist Droid Army
attempts to flee the besieged
capital with their valuable
hostage, two Jedi Knights lead a
desperate mission to rescue the
captive Chancellor...

Illegitimi Non Carborundum
Ross

We're starting our World of Warcraft "campaign" tonight and being a person short, we decided to invite my brother-in-law, but of course this meant he needed a copy of the game. So yesterday I went on another massive hunt for a copy. I find that when I decide I want something I get pretty tenacious about finding it. (This might be the place to note that when I saw they might still have some copies in Rock Springs, Wyoming, 190 miles away I didn't immediatly rule out driving there.)

Right off the bat the first thing I hear is that Blizzard isn't releasing any new copies of the game until they can get the server populations under control. And there are various reports saying that if you haven't already gotten a copy you may be out of luck. Copies are going for $90 on Ebay, Amazon is back ordered, and so is Gamestop.com. I start calling local retailers and they just laugh at me, but I have to buy a gamer headset anyway, so I decide to take to the streets during lunch. Now instead of laughing at me over the phone they're laughing at me to my face. One retailer says he got a shipment in a week ago Tuesday and it was gone within 8 hours.

Having struck out locally, I decided to see what I could find online. This was, of course, infintely less preferable because we were playing the next day, but it looked like Circuit City had some copies, but I still had to figure out some way to get the game in one day and my brother-in-law was still scouring the northern half of the state. Eventually we gave up and so I decided to just order it from Circuit City. I was to step three of the order process before they too revealed they were out of stock. After another hour or so of searching I found out that it was still available through ebgames. I should have checked there first, but I couldn't quite remember the URL and I figured that since it was one of the big boys, it would have to be sold out.

Of course this still left me with the problem of what to do while it shipped. Fortunately, I bumped into a friend I hadn't talked to in three months, and he just happened to have purchased the collector's edition of the game which came with a 10 day trial, so I managed to talk him out of that and as a result I saved the day... Okay, maybe the whole point is I wasted a bunch of time, but you have to admit that I displayed an impressive amount of tenacity.

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Ross

Every morning when I sign on to one of my instant messenger programs, a news window pops up. I generally take a quick look at the stories they've linked to and occasionally I'll pull one up (particularly if it's about Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston's breakup). Today there was a link to a story about some kids being arrested, so I checked it out. The gist of the story is that two kids in special ed., ages 9 and 10, were arrested for making violent stick-figure drawings depicting them killing a classmate. Here's a copy of the Associated Press's version of the story along with a poll.

There are many things that bother me about this but two stand out: first, the fact that they're being charged with a second-degree felony (making a written threat to kill or harm another person), and second, I have a very hard time imagining that they actually were in the process of planning to harm their classmate. This seems like something fairly harmless that most kids have engaged in at one time or another. And this isn't to say that they shouldn't receive some kind of punishment or that nothing should be done, but a felony??

I could go on ranting for quite a while, but I'm sure you probably already agree with me on this point, or at least I hope you do. In any case, that's it for today. The rest of my life is pretty boring. But rest assured that when it gets interesting, you'll be the first to know.

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Ross

This morning an electrician was working in the server room at work and I guess he drilled through a wire, or something like that -- I'm a little fuzzy on the details. In any case, he ended up tripping a breaker which turned off the power to quite a few critical systems. Fortunately it was at 7:20 in the morning and not 4:20 in the morning, because that could have been bad. As it was, there was quite a bit of excitement when I first got in, but it was over fairly quickly.

Of course we have uninterruptible power supplies in case the power goes out, but somehow it seems that whenever the power does go out it's in some weird way (like the one I just described) and the backup systems we have in place fail to work. I guess it's just one more case of no plan surviving contact with the enemy. Speaking of plans, I don't know if I mentioned this, but over the weekend I finally got my office to the point where I was able to say that I was done. Of course, it didn't completely go according to plan; I still have a quite a few things to do, but I had cleaned out all the boxs so I figured that had to be a pretty major accomplishment.

Before I sign off, here's a link to a BBC story that gives a pretty good overview of what they've found on Titan so far.

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Ross

So the family campaign was on Friday, and I confess I didn't really have anything prepared, primarily because once I get my writing done for the day, there's hardly any time left anymore and what little there is gets sucked up by WoW... But this didn't bother me too much, because when you've been playing and DM'ing as long as I have, coming up with stuff on the fly is pretty easy. But it did lead me to re-examine the campaign as a whole. I started (as always) with grand ambitions, but things didn't quite work out the way I had hoped. One of the big bumps in the road was when I picked up the Eberron setting and read it. I immediately wanted to start running a campaign in that world, but I had just started a new campaign a couple of months before that and it seemed too early to switch horses already...

But my lack of preperation prompted me to re-examine the question of how much longer the players wanted to go before they would let me switch to Eberron. So I asked, and I was surprised to discover that most of them either didn't care or wanted to switch as soon as possible, because they were tired of their current character. And it was easy enough to allow the rest to transfer their current character so it all worked out in the end, and instead of playing D&D we played cards, or at least they did while I helped those who weren't transfering characters to come up with different characters.

Okay, that was pretty boring, particularly if you don't play D&D, but there you go. Speaking of games, on one of the mailing lists I belonged to the discussion started about how blogs can sometimes turn away customers. I guess Chris Pramas of Green Ronin is a big Bush-hater and blogged about it at some length. A store owner commented that he had some customers who basically bought everything from Green Ronin who told him that these comments had made them stop. So in that spirit I'm going to link to a story that says we only have 10 years before we reach the point of no-return on global warming and call it blatant fear-mongering.

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Ross

Not much to say today. So I thought I'd just point you to a few links:

1- 18-years of someone's life is all for naught because someone forgot to turn on an instrument on they Huygens probe.

2- Have you seen the picture of the man who shot himself through the roof of the mouth with a nail? The weird part is that he didn't realize what he had done for six days.

3- Dot-com millionaire Paul Graham's things he wished he had known in high school.

4- And finally, a pretty good military joke.

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Ross

Last night I really tore it up on the writing, probably because instead of playing my game first, I used the game as a carrot. By about 9 I had met my goal and I decided to switch over to the game, but being the basically buggy piece of crap that it is, it wouldn't let me login. So I decided to do some more writing. I tried again about 9:30, and this time I managed to get on. I had only played for about 15 minutes when it crashed, and then when I tried to get back in, it wouldn't let me on. So I wrote so more. Finally, around 10:30 it let me on for good, and at that point I should have just gone to bed, but I had exceeded my goal by a 1000 words and I really felt that I deserved a reward, like being even more tired today...

During the brief time I was on the first time, I had spotted a quest (these are somewhat unrealistically indicated by a huge yellow exclaimation mark above someone's head). When I finally got back on, I couldn't remember exactly where I had spotted this quest so I spent the first 30 minutes trying to find it again. I finally did, and it was easy enough to complete, but when I went to the person I needed to talk to to complete it, they would get part way through the completion and then stop. So I checked out one of the websites and sure enough everyone was reporting that it was busted... I then proceeded to die several more times. I guess the moral to all of this is: if it's 10:30 and you have a choice between going to bed and staying up, you should go to bed (as sti alluded to in his comment.)

To lend an air of respectability to this whole discussion, there's the issue of "virtual profiteers," people who sell virtual items for real money. Most MMOG's try to discourage this, but Blizzard may be the first to be really pursuing people for it, the idea being that Blizzard owns all of the virtual property. There's an interesting article which was linked to from slashdot today on the enforcability of "Terms of Service" agreements and "End User Lisence Agreements." But overall. I think ownership in a virtual world may turn into quite an interesting topic in the next few years. I think that if someone wanted to fight Blizzard on this, one path they might pursue is the idea of consideration. If the money we pay for the game and for monthly subscriptions isn't in consideration for this virtual property, what is it in consideration for? Fun? A contract which says in exchange for your love I'll give you $100 is not enforcable...

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Ross

I knew that at some point I'd pick up World of Warcraft and get addicted, and last night all I did was play World of Warcraft, so it appears I was correct. But it's interesting how it happened. My wife was gone for the evening and I had the kids, who immediately started bugging me to play the game. But I was strong and I decided to at least wait until after dinner. Once that was done I figured, well I'm watching the kids, it's not like I'm going to get anything done anyway, and my boys like watching me so much; the plan being to play until they went to bed. Well once they went to bed, I thought well, I'll just take care of some of the boring things I've been putting off, then it was I'll just play until my wife gets home, then it was well my wife wants to hang out after her long day, and I can do that more easily when I'm playing a game than when I'm writing, next thing I know it's 12:30...

While I was playing with the kids I decided to watch American Idol. I'm not much of a fan of the show when it's actually about choosing the winner, but the first few episodes where they have all the hopelessly deluded people is comedy gold. Also, it's one of those shows that doesn't require you to pay a lot of attention so you can do something else, like play World of Warcraft for example.

The story of last evening does have a somewhat happy ending. I woke up this morning at 6:00 and managed to hammer out all of the writing I had planned to do last night, so I actually didn't fall behind, yet. Though with only six hours of sleep last night, I'm not sure how productive today is going to be. Your link for the day is The Fantastic Four trailer. Frankly, it's something of a disappointment. My initial reaction to it is that they are far more interested in special effects than story.

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Ross

Well, I had the big World of Warcraft LAN party on Saturday. It went basically from noon to midnight. One of the big advantages of a third person game over a first person one is that I don't get nearly as ill. But there is still quite a bit of motion involved, so after 11 hours of staring at the computer screen I had quite a headache, so I left a little early. Still it was a lot of fun, and a nice break from the 12-14 hour days I've been pulling since the beginning of the year (8 hours at my normal job and then 4-6 hours of writing in the evening). And on top of that, I was reasonably productive yesterday. I got all my writing done, worked on some of the secondary items (plot synopsis, chapter summaries) for the open call and went through about half of the boxes in my office in my continuing quest to organize.

In addition to all of the above, I managed to play a little World of Warcraft, though not as easily as I would have liked. Apparently Blizzard (the publishers of the game) has been having a lot of problem with their servers (16 hour downtimes, login servers not working, etc.) so in response they placed a lower cap on the number of people who could be on a server. If the cap is exceeded and you try and log on, they put you in a queue. My sons desperately wanted to watch me play the game, but when I finally gave in, I was 480th place in the queue with an expected wait time of 45 minutes. It was an hour before their bedtime (which I figured was about the right amount of time to play), but with the wait they only got to watch me play for about 15 minutes...

I was in the 7-11 picking up some Dr. Pepper yesterday and I was checking out all the tabloids and celebrity rags they had in front of the counter and as always my eye was caught by the "Weekly World News," in particular the cover story that Bigfoot was involved in a college panty raid. I guess there's some frat boy out there who really wishes he had shaved his back. I was hoping to link to the story, but I couldn't find it on their website; instead I offer you (in honor of my French boss) this story about the Eiffel Tower being a portal to Hell.

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Ross

I wanted to post something on this yesterday, but the results just weren't yet available, but you should check out what's happening with the Huygens probe, particularly the 'drainage channels' picture a little ways down the page.

Ross

This weekend is one of those that us poor corporate rats look forward to way too much: a three-day weekend. I mean, sure it's nice to have one more day, but do you really enjoy it any more? Mostly it's just an excuse to tackle the big projects at home. And then you're inevitably disappointed because your sense is that you have all the time in the world and in reality you have only one more day. Plus, there's the battle between Work Ross and Play Ross...

See, Work Ross is thinking, look at all this extra time, I'll be able to get caught up; I'll be able to get all this stuff that I've been putting off done; it will be the most productive weekend ever. And then Play Ross is saying with an extra day we can work and play. I mean, come on, Work Ross will still have plenty of time to get stuff done, but you have to be able to squeeze some play time in there; you've got a whole extra day. As a result, both Ross' are disappointed. I neither play, nor work as much as I would like. I do get in plenty of vacant staring into space and bitter self-recrimination.

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Ross

I've started getting the Wall Street Journal. I had some frequent flier miles which weren't enough for a flight, so instead they offered me some magazine subscriptions. I guess it's okay, because they were basically free, but I don't have the time to read the magazines I actually pay for, so now on top of the Economist, I added Time, Newsweek (long story) and the WSJ... and that's just the news stuff. I also have a subscription to Bicycling (probably the one I need the most), PCGamer, Dungeon, Dragon, Games Quarterly, and probably a couple others I'm forgetting. I figure they're there if I need something to read or if something really exciting happens. Of course, this doesn't even cover all the Internet content I'm trying to stay on top of.

Speaking of the Internet, have you noticed that it attracts emotional cripples the way gaming attracts fat people? Just yesterday I came across two examples of this: the first I don't have available to me at the moment (but I may post a selection later), the second is a thread over on ENWorld entitled how to hit on girls without being creepy. First off, asking for advice on picking up women on an RPG message board is like asking someone in Bermuda how to dress in sub-zero temperatures. Secondly, as is so often, the case the guy is just so pathetic it's funny. I know the 19 pages of post may seem daunting at first, but trust me, it's a comedy gold mine. A relevant quote, and exchange between the original poster (Hida Bukkorosu) and the hero of the thread (Teflon Billy):

Originally Posted by Hida Bukkorosu
...it's just plain not right. it's not just non-good, it's a downright evil act to decieve someone in such a manner.

I don't think you want help, Hida. I'm not sure what you do want, but you have shot down all advice given you here and in that "Are gamers this pathetic" thread.

Comedy gold...

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Ross

I'm still slowly organizing my office and sorting all of my books. I know people are probably sick of hearing about this seemingly interminable project, but the fact that I managed to squeeze any work at all on the office last night after writing 1500 words, going to the library with the family, installing World of Warcraft, and setting up a new monitor, has got to be pretty impressive, right?

While I was going through my books, I came across quite a few compilations of science fiction short story collections. In some respects I think that I enjoy (when I have time to read them) scifi short stories more than novels. Possibly because often times they end up being really interesting explorations of unconventional ideas -- oftentimes, ideas which cannot be examined outside of the context of a sci-fi story. For example, I was chatting on IM earlier with a friend about a story where robots ended up fighting Armageddon, and as such they were the ones that we raised up to heaven rather than the humans who watched. Certainly, that's a subject you couldn't possibly examine outside of a science fiction story.

Along those lines, there were a couple of articles today which examined just the sorts of questions I'm talking about. The first (once again from Wired) examines what sort of ethics we should apply to robots; the second examines the question of who owns your e-mail when you die. Both are questions which would have been hard to imagine 20 years ago. Though somewhat ironically, the first question was considered a long time before the first, and yet of the two it is the more hypothetical.

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Ross

I purchased World of Warcraft on Friday, but since then it has languished at work in an overhead bin. But now that I'm (mostly) past my big deadline (12 hour day yesterday) and reasonably free this evening, I think I might take it home. I'm not sure if I'll actually get around to installing it tonight, as we learned in the classic movie, "What About Bob?" It's important to take baby steps...

It's pretty sad, really, when you think about how responsible I've become (this is one of those times when it's a good thing that it's me and not my wife writing). I have purchased two computer games which I haven't gotten around to playing because I'm not done with my work. That never would have happened 10 or even five years ago. I don't know if I could have conceived of the idea of buying a computer game and then not playing it.

Which brings us to a wired story with some great anecdotal evidence on the deleterious effects of playing video games too much. I think the story about the woman yanking the wheel of the car while her husband was driving has scared me enough that I may wait until tomorrow to take the game home.

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Ross

Today was pretty hellish and doesn't really show any signs of improving, so as a result this will be short and painful. My weekend was relatively productive, despite or because because of the fact that I spent quite a bit of it asleep. In between naps and sleeping in, I managed to get the two remaining bookshelves put together (it would have been much easier without the molding, I can tell you that). So now all that remains before I can finally declare the office done and play a little Pirates is to actually take all of my thousands of books and put them away. There's a tiny voice inside my head that is saying, "You're half done with this at best..." I hope it's wrong.

As I mentioned, this is going to be short and painful. Hopefully we're past the painful part and we just have to take care of the short part. Turns out that Iapetus has this huge ridge running around its equator. The details are pretty interesting; you should check it out.

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Ross

As potentiallyred pointed out, yes, I have sort of switched to using "Illegitimi Non Carborundum" whenever I'm having a taxing day. I don't know if I'll continue to do that, but it's a neat little switch. For those unfamiliar with this faux Latin phrase, it basically means, "Don't let the bastards wear/grind you down." Good advice for us all.

The plan yesterday was to arrive home, have my friend pick me up and immediately go and get the car. My friend was running late so I decided to shovel the driveway (it had snowed about 2-3 inches). That turned out to be a mistake. It was so late in the day that the little bit of water/slush that was left after I shoveled immediately formed into a sheet of very thin, but very slick ice which coated the entire driveway. Luckily no one was injured, but I think the lesson is clear. Don't bother shoveling snow -- it's a waste of time and you may just make things worse.

Well, I have a lot to do this weekend and a big deadline on Monday, so I'll end here, but not before I provide a link to the 25 funniest political quotes of 2004. I particularly like #1.

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Ross

This hasn't been my week. I detailed the whole annoying OfficeMax thing and then there was the $850 I got hit with in car repairs, but then, just when I thought the worst might have passed, my wife calls me this morning and tells me that both of the boys are sick and throwing up and that all the stuff (toilet, sink, shower) in the upstairs bathroom is draining slowly. For those paying attention, this is basically the same problem I spent $700 on back at the beginning of October. Oh? "Well then it must be under warranty," you say? 90 day warranty... Today is day 93...

But perhaps the most annoying thing of all happened last night. When I bought my Nissan Sentra about a year ago it had around 90,000 miles on it. Since that time, I have been the driver probably 99.5% of the time. Well, the car has been approaching 100,000 for quite a while now and I confess I was a little excited to watch it turn over, but because the other car is in the shop, I ended up having to trade cars with the in-laws and in the time they had it, the odometer rolled over. That 0.5% of the time I wasn't driving it turns out to be the very time I wanted to be driving it.

Okay, not seeing the car's odometer turn over is not that big of a deal, but I can't help but feel a slight sense of loss nonetheless. Moving on... I realize the links have been sparse the last few days, and that's not likely to change, but I thought I would post a link to yesterday's Order of the Stick. Normally I wouldn't bother posting a link to a D&D themed webcomic, but since this one was a take-off on a well known Monty Python sketch (with a nice twist at the end), I thought I would link to it.

Illegitimi Non Carborundum
Ross

One of the more tragic subplots of the office rennovation story came to a conclusion last night. See, I bought most of the furniture from an Office Max where a friend of mine works. When all was said and done, I had spent just under $500. The very next week (the week I was on vacation) everything went on sale. My friend called and told me about it; all I needed was the receipt and I could get $110 back. Of course, this immediately triggered a corollary of Murphy's Law. Only receipts which have no purpose will be kept and easily located, and any receipt which has any value will immediately be lost (or destroyed by your children).

After finding out about the deal I spent the next several hours looking for the receipt (which for a variety of reasons should have been easy to find), but somewhere in the chaos that was Christmas and the vacation it had disappeared. I found receipts from 2000, I found Office Max coupons from last year, I found every other receipt even remotely associated with Christmas, but I could not find that receipt. I'm not sure about you, but when you are looking for something important and you can't find it, it tends to consume your life.

Of course you would think that in this day and age it would be a simple matter, if you had the amount, the time, the credit card number, etc. that they could print you a new receipt. Not so... apparently for Office Max, finding a receipt is the equivalent of performing major surgery, and even if it can be found it doesn't have any of the necessary information to do something like give you a rebate. Fortunately when all was said and done, my friend came through (which I guess is why you buy through you friends in the first place). They did a receipt-less return, exchanged it for identical merchandise and added in the discounts. Unfortunately a $25 coupon I had used the first time around was lost in the melee, but I did end up with a $90 gift card. Which, while not as good as cash, is almost as good considering that I'm sure I'll probably spend at least another $90 at OM completing the office. Well, that's the story for today.

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Ross

The pressure to play World of Warcraft increases every day. A week from Saturday the guys I work with are having a WoW party where everyone will show up, start at level one and see how far they can get in the space of the night. Another friend whom I occasionally role-play with has switched his campaign from table top to a WoW campaign, where everyone will start at the same time and only play when the other people are on. I have to tell you, all of this makes me very afraid. I think I have enough time to play it with my friends in the settings I've just described, but should that lead to a full-on addiction then that would quickly mean that I won't be able to get anything done...

Of course one might think that I'm mature enough to avoid getting hooked on a video game, but they would be wrong. I'm still not done with the office, so I haven't played Pirates yet, but complete avoidance may be the only thing that's saving me there as well. This just in: once again my car is in the shop and this time it's $850. The mechanic told me what it was, but I was in too much shock to really remember the details (something about $550 for a differential control thinger?) He's family, so generally I can trust him, but maybe lulling me into a false sense of security has been his plan all along. In any case, I'll get the used parts from him tomorrow.

I have to confess that the amount has sort of put a damper on this otherwise fine day, and I don't think I have the energy to write much more or track down a link; maybe tomorrow.

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Ross

Well, I'm back. Of course, this was one of those vacations where you feel like you need a vacation from your vacation, if you know what I mean. I went skiing twice; that was pretty ugly. The ugliest part came when my younger brother prevailed upon us to finally try a black diamond run -- this hubris would prove to be his undoing.

He was two turns into the hill when he fell; not a big fall, in fact it would be difficult to imagine that you could fall any less severely than he did on a black diamond. I skied to where he was and was waiting for him to get up when I noticed what looked like the top of a toy truck in the snow. As I looked closer I realized that it was part of his binding. Looking around in the snow it appeared that the back part of one of his binding had completely shattered.

My brother had apparently watched Better Off Dead too many times and as a result he decided he could ski the rest of the way on just one ski. It turned out to be a lot more difficult then he imagined, and he could either ski five feet and then fall down or get going way too fast without any way of stopping. He choose the latter method to get himself off the black diamond. He had crashed on and ended up wiping out in truly spectacular fashion the minute he hit the cat track. When the snow cleared on it we discovered that he had hurt his shin.

We continued down the hill again and before we had reached the half-way point he crashed again and this time his other binding broke in exactly the same fashion as the first one (I told you it was an ugly run). This time the binding parts went sliding down the hill. My sister took off after them, but every time she got in front of them they would bounce over her skis and continue down the hill. I went down to help her, but before I could get there she had crashed. I'm not sure if she crashed because she was flustered or if she threw herself on top of the binding parts. Whatever the case, she did manage to land on the parts and secure them, but not without losing her ski which started its own descent down the hill. I had just managed to grab it when I heard my brother yelling, "I can't stop!!" He was flying down the hill on his bibs and headed straight for me.

Fortunately, I managed to stop him as well. After this three stooges routine was finished, we managed to make it down the rest of the hill uneventfully (Actually that's not entirely true. My other sister crashed in spectacular fashion after doing the splits and once again almost ran me over, but after what had already happened it was somewhat anti-climatic.) With no posting last week I completely missed the big news story of the tsunami, but I'd still like to post this link to some before and after satellite pictures of some of the affected areas.

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Ross