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Well I finally finished “Hearts in Atlantis” by Stephen King. An audiobook which weighs in at a 17 hr. listen, my longest listen to date. This audiobook is a series of 5 short stories that have themes and characters in common. This is a book written for the generation of people which lived through the 60’s, rather than a book that gives a glimpse into that era. Nothing expressed here is new or novel concerning the 60’s that hasn’t been beaten to death by dozens of other writers (except the “low men”). I didn’t garner any clearer idea of the ideals of that time. The 60’s were a huge time, of that I have no doubt. Just when a writer wants to “cleanse” him/her self of those memories is when I have problems. This was a time to change the world but this book failed to explain why.

Hearts in Atlantis

Authored by Stephen King

Read by Stephen King & William Hurt

The stories involve 3 close friends as they grow up, grow old and die. In the first story King kind of dips into his nom de plume of horror writing but it’s little more subtle then the stories of his I’ve read (Not that I would be an expert, the last Stephen King book I read was “It”. The ending made me so angry I never read another). Second story involved college in the 60’s, far out man. Third story involved guilt about Vietnam Vets, spare some change. Fourth was war stories and how it had been back in the “bush”. The fifth and final was a reunion and trying to get a feel good ending out of the whole thing. In this collection the stories I enjoyed most were the first and last as they were the most connected and act sort of bookends to the collection. Stephen King writes like Stephen King and his verbosity fits in the audiobook format, it’s just that the content of the novel itself wasn’t my cup of tea. William Hurt and Stephen King took turns reading the short stories. Hurt does a great job of reading after a slow start, he sounded kind of bored at the beginning, that soon changed once the characters were established. King has this voice that I find very unappealing, high and a bit nasally. Even with my comments on what was wrong with this audiobook it still was entertaining and a good accompaniment to my 50-minute commute to work (took almost a month to go through the entire thing). Can’t say that I wore an odd grin on my face during the read but it did help me keep my sanity and that’s a Good Thing.



Pros: William Hurt’s great acting ability and rich voice.

Cons: The 60’s again, Stephen King’s voice.

With the recent election and the Republican led government in place most political pundits aren’t saying IF there will be an war but rather WHEN it will start. I agree with these forecasts and I am sure that there will be many tears shed in Iraq for lost loved ones. Let’s try to keep things in perspective. Here is a cartoon to help.

The tale concerning the Japanese abductees continues. From this article, “Yasushi Chimura, one of the five Japanese abducted to North Korea in 1978 but now back in Japan, on Thursday clearly stated his wish for the first time that he and his wife Fukie want to meet in Japan with their three children, who are still in the North.” During the talks between NK and Japan it was proposed to let the families meet with their children in a third country, this request was ignored by NK. I hope that they can be reunited with their families.

With my recent entries about microsoft I thought I would try to be even-handed and report to you on the alternatives to M$. Found this article about Mozilla and the 101 things it can do that Internet Explorer cannot. You see, I am unbiased in my reporting on M$.

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.

Well the US legal system got it wrong again, first OJ now Microsoft. I know, I know not in the same league with respect to offense committed but still …

I don’t consider myself anti-microsoft, it’s a simple, usable platform anyone can use. Seeing that most people have only in the last few years started using computers a standard is a good thing. Even if that standard crashes once a day, how much work are you really getting done each day anyway? I refuse to put up with failures that generally result from greed (don’t test, sell), Gates greed. So I don’t use the microsoft platform as my computing platform of choice.
Update: 06 - 11 -01

Many aritcles getting printed online about this topic (include my bandwagon jumper), but I think this one stands out.

With that aside, after many years of court arguments M$ was found to be guilty of US anti-trust laws Microsoft’s new remedies seem more like a slap on thier well protected wrists. David Coursey, of ZDNet, had this to say. David Coursey is typically pro-microsoft but lately he’s been a little more even handed in his OS remarks. While he doesn’t wish the extremes that Judge Jackson (the prior udge in the case) ruled for, he not entirely opposed to the present ruling. He does make a great point that the US anti-trust laws are woefully out of date. It is my opinion that District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly’s ruling was based on the fact she didn’t want to be overruled by a higher court, she paid no attention to the marketpce nor did she want to put a penalty on Microsoft because they broke the law (as proved in court).We can all hope that the EU doesn’t follow the lead of the US courts and that they get it right.

As I was sitting watching television today I noticed a slight wobble in the fabric of time. Nothing metaphysical but a sizable earthquake shook Japan today. Here In Shinagawa, Tokyo it was a very small wobble, barely noticeable. North of Tokyo it was very sizable at 6.2. Thankfully there are no reported injuries at this time.

This is a little HowTo to demonstrate how you can use your Moveable Type Personal Publishing program to maintain links. This is so obvious now that I hesitate to do a write-up for this hint but as I miss the obvious maybe you do also. The big advantage is that once everything is setup to add a link for you readers it is a simple matter of adding an entry, the same is true for editing a link.

First requirement is that you have MT setup and running on a computer acting as your web server. After which you download and install the FilterCategories plugin. MT can do limited filtering but not enough for my purposes. You can get the plugin and view the documentation here.


1. Tell MT to generate Category Archives.

Go into your Blog Config screen and open the Archiving portion of the configuration. Click the box next to Category (not under the Del column) and click the SAVE button.


2. Add categories

Got to the category screen and add the category “links”. This is were we will be keeping the links. Add any other categories for your blog now. You will have to categorize all of your entries from now to keep you site working.


3. Edit your template

For the main body of your MT tags for your entries add:

<MTCategories>
<MTFilterCategories exclude=”links”>
<MTEntries lastn=”5″>

…
</MTEntries>
</MTFilterCategories>
</MTCategories>


This will prevent your links (any entry of the prior defined links category) for adding an entry in your


For the links to show up your page add:

<MTCategories lastn=”10″>
<MTFilterCategories include=”links”>
<MTEntries><$MTEntryBody$><br /></MTEntries>
</MTFilterCategories>
</MTCategories>


Add the formating to fit into your style.


4. Add your entries

In the Entry body of a new entry add your link, <a href=”url”>URL Name</a>, under the links category you added early. Do not check off the various options available and save as a Draft. Next go into the Edit Entry screen and click on the Power Editing mode. Publish each of the links and save. It is important to add a category to each of your entries now for the entry to show on your Blog.


5. Rebuild the site