I like driving through the Caldecott Tunnel late at night. Not when there is traffic since everyone slows down in the tunnel. Which is why I like it when there is little traffic. I don't slow down, and it's nice to speed by people at 60 MPH. It's kind of weird that people slow down when there's no safety room at the side of the road, especially when it's a wall or heavy obstruction. It's not as if you'd drive off the road in normal conditions, so why would you do it when there is no off road to go to?...

I finally got around and set up Macjordomo on my server machine. It's a Mac OS based list server, free and quite easy to set up. It took me like an hour since I had to set up the list processor account as well as check to make sure it actually worked. But now it would take only five minutes to set up another list.

It's simple, patterned after LISTSERV or Majordomo. You send e-mail commands to a special account, and it processes your commands. Only requires some mailboxes on some mail server to work. I'm only running one mailing list, and I'm the only subscriber in it. But a Star Trek Campaign Story List is as good an excuse as any to run a mailing list on my Mac OS server...

Late at night you see some weird infomercials. There is one that I was looking at as my VCR tape was rewinding. Some sort of Internet Business Starter Kit. And it's like, I can already do this stuff for free if I wanted to. Lots of free services on the Internet to let you set up some sort of sales-based oper- ation. So only people who don't know anything about the Internet would buy it, and those are not the type of people who'd be likely to start a successful Internet store.

And I hate it when offers include this free stuff worth over xxx amount, which is the suggested retail price. But you can get it for 1/20th the SRP in the real world. Everybody does it, like people won't figure it out. It only fools people who want to believe that they're getting something for very little. And I admit that I've fallen for that, very occassionally. But for the most part you have to be strong enough to learn not fall for those traps...

Someone on of the newsgroups I read claims that people in tribal societies live longer than people in civilized societies. He points to Geronimo and a few other primitive people who lived to 90, 100 or more. One of the points that he ignored is that live expectancy is the sum of all people. Yes, if tribal members live to be teens, they have quite a good chance to live as long as we do. Problem is not that many make it to the teens. The life expectancy is low because of the high infant mortality rate, which we can greatly mitigate with modern medical practices. We also don't take care of ourselves as well as we should, lowering our life expectancy. But I'm sure relatively active people do live a long time in our society...

Ronald Reagan will be 89 this Sunday. When he left office, there were some people who said that he will be remembered as one of our best Presidents. At the time it didn't seem possible. But the more I learn and remember about his Presidency, which spanned my 9th to 17th years, the more I think that he was a really good President. He did set the stage for our current economic boom. And it could have easily backfired. It's hard to tell that a policy of favoring the rich, and the "trickle down" theory would actually work. And it has worked, although the problems with that policy has a good chance of bringing it down in the next decade. That inflation thing, the growing monetary gap between the rich and poor, the reduction in government funding of the infrastructure, which the Democrats have tried to reverse. It's a matter of whether a strong and vibrant economy can cure all other ills. I don't actually think so, although it certainly covers a lot of the superficial blemishes.