Environment World

I know I’ve gone off about smoking before but I really loathe the stuff. I smoked for nearly 20 years and gave it up a year ago (again). I live in Japan where the stench of smoke is a part of daily life. I read something today that picked up my spirits. This article gives me hope that I don’t have to sue the Japanese government for making me sick from second-hand smoke. It turns out that Japan Tobacco has nearly doubled their profits but sales in Japan has gone down 2.7%. The Japanese government may be able to divest from the company (the Japanese government owns 2/3 of Japan Tobacco) and once that happens there may be more of an effort to promote quitting smoking to the population.

This page was completely whacked (more so than now). My first thought was that I had been hacked. I felt violated, abused then I felt kinds of proud. Some cracker (not to be confused with hacker, cracker - bad, hacker - good) took the time to hack MY site, wow. After I got over that sick masochist feeling I tried to solve the problem as fast as I could. After checking the template and the page itself I found the problem. I hadn’t been hacked, no one actually reads this page except you. I learned that XHTML can be very unforgiving if you don’t match things properly. I had updated one entry and to my dismay I had entered class=’spanking”. That’s bad. what is correct is class=”spanking”. I’ll be more care full in the future.

Two consecutive entries on the same subject, lame. But this recent court decision affects me personally. I work as an IT consultant, developer and sad to say, Microsoft is good for business. The servers that are installed with an OS from Microsoft require a lot of work to run reliably and securely. Business are willing to pay big bucks for that peace of mind. With the big buck that surrounds the microsoft’s name it’s amazing to me that shareholders, people who own a part of M$, don’t see any profit. You see M$ doesn’t pay dividends, shareholders make money when they sell M$ stock. Talk about the king’s new clothes. During the last M$ shareholder meeting there was a call for dividends which was promptly shot down. This makes no sense to me and maybe common sense has escaped the SEC in the US.