June 1, 2005

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  THE XANGAVERSARY ARRIVES, LEAVES

  
  

  (Lomita, CA MFN) It was on Memorial Day of 2004 that I established WhenWordsCollide on the Xanga servers. They gave me something called “Premium content” but since it sometimes takes me a while to start up a new webendeavor, I wasted a month of this “premium content” and on June 19th of last year wrote: “The latest news, this Saturday evening, is that I just figured out I have the “premium edition” of this Xanga software, and after six days, the site “returns” to it’s “former” self, whatever that is, and I guess the access to highlights, fonts, photo backgrounds, links, etc, all disappear, and my carriage turns back into a pumpkin, the horses become mice again, and my finery returns to rags.”

  
  

  Needless to say, I “bought” the farm, and now I spend more time on “these” pages than on any other on AllThingsMike. So happy Xangaversary to me. I will admit that in six years of “internetting”, including maintaining four rather large websites, running the ElectricPoetry Group on Yahoo, participating in at least 10 other groups, and, pre-Xanga, writing six blogs on Blogger, I have made more internet friendships, have found more creative people, and have actually established that perhaps this very Xanga service is one of the “internet communities” or “islands” I have written about so often.

  
  

  In the “very first” blog entry I ever wrote, back in 2000 on the Homestead version of the ElectricPoetry website, in what I called a “diary” because I don’t think “blog” software became popular until a couple of years later:  “MARCH 30, 2000:  I couldn’t have thought it could finally happen, but after nearly a year, I am finally getting to see some readers return, and as I make more webfriendships, which are stimulated by building a COMMUNITY of websites, then I realize that there is a lot of  very interesting and vital art and literature being produced on the internet today by a vast variety of people. I really feel this is a companionship that can breed and multiply, enhancing all of our lives. I really have only recently begun to feel this “real” “virtual” sense of community, and since I always wanted to have a “perfect society” on an “island” somewhere, I serenely feel like the internet is the sea, and ElectricPoetry is my island.” Of course the “internet island” DIDN’T happen back in 2000, but, ever the optimist, I am somehow finding the fruition of those labors happening now, and I proclaim that I have never felt better about the idea of mass communication on the internet than I have on the Xanga “community”.

  
  

  So I’d like to take this opportunity to “break the fourth wall again” and give thanks to the “regular readers” and the “new readers” who drop by, leave a few comments, and spark my curiosity to wander over to your sites, where I often find myself wandering for hours on end, awash in the true sense of artistic integrity that the internet, and Xanga in particular, is bringing out of “normal folks” like you and me, and helping to foster community in the bargain.

  
  

  COMPUTER PROBLEMS CAUSE HEADACHES

  
  

  (Lomita, CA MFN) It’s been over two weeks since the “troubles” arrived right here at AllThingsMike central, and although I have attempted, and perhaps accomplished some “fixes” I am still having problems. I keep the “task manager” in a window now, and try to find where the CPU is being used. The “performance” “jumps” to 98 or 100 percent even when nothing is going on, and no applications are running. I have been reading of “problems” occuring on countless other computers. I have been reading “Geek Message Boards” even though I only understand about half of the language. I fear it’s time to upgrade my processor. The last programs I installed, earlier this year, were “itunes” for the ipod, and I burned lots of mp3s from CDs into both drives (the 80Gig “C” and the 250 Gig “I” drive) and Picasa2  for image manipulation. As I’ve blogged before, the program which really seems to slow the system, or the one which causes everything to slow and then “freeze’ when running it, is my old Micrografx Picture Publisher, my main image editing program, and one of the old “Win98″ programs that is difficult to reinstall, because I used to have to go to the Micrografx site to get “patches” to allow me to run the program on XP. (And Micrografx doesn’ t exist anymore.) The “I” drive is almost full with “avi”, “wmv” and other movie files, and all the “itunes” or mp3 files are on the “C” drive. I’ve defragmented, I’ve run checkdisks, I’ve fiddled with the virtual memory. I am stifled by the fact that the processor will show 100 percent usage, yet my System Idle Process can be at 89 or 90. This certainly doesn’t make sense. If the processor is 90 percent “free” then what is causing the CPU to run at 100 percent? I’ve googled almost all the 50 or so processes that show up on the processes tab and they are all good. Either they are from the SBC Yahoo browser, the system itself, the McAfee programs (firewall and virus protection) or the applications I’m running. I don’t think anything is on the puter that shouldn’t be.  Well, at least I can still make my “composites” like the one above, which is the new “News and Notes” logo. It just takes a….l…o….t…….l…o..n…g…e…r  to make them.

  
  

  This Just In:
  STRANGE WEATHER ON THE WAY
  By Michael Christie
  Mon May 30, 4:57 PM ET (edited but not embellished by MFN)
   

  
  

  MIAMI (Reuters) – If hurricanes again pound the United States this summer, their roar is likely to be accompanied by the din of another storm — an angry debate among U.S. scientists over the impact of global warming.

  
  

   Last season’s $45 billion devastation, when 15 storms spawned 9 hurricanes in the Atlantic and Caribbean, prompted climatologists to warn of a link to warming temperatures.

  
  

  But hurricane experts say the unusual series of hurricanes, four of which slammed into Florida in a six-week period, was the result of a natural 15- to 40-year cycle in Atlantic cyclone activity.

  
  

  After a lull between 1970 and the mid-1990s, the number of storms picked up dramatically from 1995 and higher-than-normal activity is expected for the next five to 30 years as a phenomenon known as the “Atlantic multidecadal mode” holds sway.

  
  

  “Really, for the folks that are doing work on hurricanes, there isn’t a debate (about global warming),” said Chris Landsea of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s hurricane research division in Miami.

  
  

  Many climatologists disagree. They say the large, decades-long swings in hurricane activity may mask, but do not rule out, longer term climate change trends.

  
  

  The warmer waters and increased air moisture that global warming is expected to produce are, after all, the primary fuels that hurricanes feed off during the June to November season.

  
  

  “Global climate change is happening. The environment in which these hurricanes form is clearly changing,” said Kevin Trenberth, a climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado. He is also a lead author of the next major U.N. report on climate change, due in 2007.

  
  

  Landsea withdrew from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change this year after accusing Trenberth of linking current heightened hurricane activity too closely to global warming.

  
  

  The public clash highlighted the sensitivity of the climate debate in the United States, which under  President Bush dismayed environmentalists by rejecting the Kyoto pact on cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

  
  

  According to meteorologist Thomas Knutson of NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, higher carbon dioxide levels have probably resulted in a 1/7th of a category increase in Atlantic cyclone intensity in the past century, and likely will raise a storm’s potential by half a category in 80 years.

  
  

  Hurricanes are graded under the Saffir-Simpson scale based on wind speeds, with a Category 5, marked by winds higher than 155 mph (249 kph), the strongest and most destructive.

  
  

  Similarly, studies by Kerry Emanuel, a professor of meteorology at the  Massachusetts Institute of Technology, indicate the 2 degree Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) increase in sea surface temperatures predicted by the IPCC would raise the upper limit on a storm’s intensity by 10 percent.

  
  

  Landsea said those changes were largely imperceptible given the overall ferocity of hurricanes.

  
  

  He added that other factors, like the El Nino weather event in the Pacific, and the differences between lower level and upper level winds, called wind shear, play as critical a role as water temperatures in determining whether hurricanes form.

  
  

  “We are so far along, this is happening so much faster than we thought it would happen,” said Paul Epstein of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at     Harvard Medical School.

  
  

  “I think this summer will portend some really strange weather.”

  
  

  
  

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  Let’s all quarrel about it while the ice caps melt and the oceans rise, shall we? Does this sound like some of the ’debate’ in last year’s Summer Blockbuster “The Day After Tomorrow” or what?  (from the movie: Jack Hall: “Our climate is fragile. The ice caps are disappearing at a dangerous rate.”
  Vice President Becker: “Dr. Hall, our economy is every bit as fragile as the environment. Perhaps you should keep that in mind before making sensationalist claims. “
  Jack Hall: “Well, the last chunk of ice that broke off was the size of Rhode Island. A lot of folks would say that was pretty sensational. ”

  
  

  I’ve been following this story for a week or two about a big chunk of ice which broke off of the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica in 2000 and is floating around “down under”.  I still remember the first “Earth Day” back in 1970. We were a bunch of hippies then, full of spit and vinegar and a desire to “do something”. Now it’s almost forty years later and have there been any accomplishments? Does buying a Prius ease one’s conscience about the situation at hand? I hate to keep referencing movies, but I seem to remember one called “Waterworld” not too long ago. Maybe we should be purchasing boats?

  
  

  And to say “this summer will portend some really strange weather” seems a mite strange since here in SoCal we had almost a six month “monsoon” season of rain in a place where “it never rains”, and then over in Indonesia there was that tsunami. Oh, sorry, that’s not “weather”. But it’s “all” Mother Nature, and I certainly would be pi**ed off if I were her! Nuff said? I think the “strange weather” pheonom has been around a while now, but the “thinkers” still can’t figure it out.

  
  

  DAY OFF TODAY

  
  

  My roommate Joel (Cancerboy) has to go in for his post chemo colonoscopy today, so I took the day off work, just like the first time, to drive him to and from the hospital where they are performing the process. The first time, when the colonoscopy told him he “had the cancer” was a little more than a year ago. I am praying that everything is still alright, and that the cancer has been completely irradicated after 1. an operation to remove most of his large intestine and of course the “mass” and 2. nearly a year of intensive chemotherapy treatments. It sure was a surprise, to me, but especially to him. I hate the guy at times (most of the time). We’ve lived in this ‘temporary’ situation now for over a decade, and we get on each other’s nerves, but we live in separate parts of the house, and are getting along more since I established my own living quarters away from him. But I still pray that he is okay, and that the cancer has fled his system, and nothing else is wrong.

  
  

  My own health seems to be fine except for the sight in my left eye, and I go in for the second consultation, this time with an opthamologist, in about two weeks.

  
  

  So I’m taking Joel in at about 11:30. It’s 8:30 now. I’ve actually noticed three “comments” from people I don’t even know on my previous post, so I’ve got some blog sites to go explore, and I promised I would read some entries on subscriber sites that I haven’t gotten to, so in honor of my Xangaversary, I think this shall be a “Xanga Day”. Do I dare turn on the instant messenger. No, probably not. Somebody always “calls” me. But I do have the old standby email, and I will of course be “commenting” as usual. This Xangaversary would mean that I would be “charged” more except I subscribed to the service for another year.

  
  

  Upcoming in a future entry will be an essay detailing my “spiraling credit card debt”. I am in the midst of “digging myself out of the hole” but had to borrow more money (to the tune of ten grand) in order to begin digging the hole. This time I promise not to go out and put a down payment on a new car!!!!!!

  
  

  Until later, I remain, your correspondent,

  
  

  Michael F. Nyiri, poet, philosopher, fool
  

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  Expect another exciting installment of “My Sexual History” either tomorrow or the next day, and more photos from the Getty. I hope to have my  Webshots Gallery folder up today, since I’m off work.  (BTW: The next edition of “My Sexual History” wil PROBABLY be a protected post, so you can start asking to be put on the “list” before the chapter appears if you want. It’s been ages since I wrote a PROTECTED entry. As the “Sexual History” advances, it might get a bit more graphic than I want to “publicly” post, you understand.
  

  • 11:06 am
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