If there is anything the nonconformist hates worse than a conformist it's another nonconformist who doesn't conform to the prevailing standards of nonconformity.

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Thursday, March 29, 2007

Yahoo Mail to offer unlimited storage

Yahoo will begin offering unlimited storage for its free Web-based e-mail in May, the company announced late Tuesday. The move makes Yahoo the first of the major free e-mail providers to offer unlimited storage, but it likely will not be the last.

Yahoo currently offers 1 gigabyte for its free mail service and 2GB for its premium fee-based service. Google's free Gmail service offers more than 2.5GB of storage, and Windows Live Hotmail offers 2GB for free.

"We are watching the trend lines of how people are using e-mail...and they are sending more photos and videos and rich media," said John Kremer, vice president of Yahoo Mail.

Google began the storage wars in earnest when it launched Gmail in April 2004 with 1GB of storage. Yahoo Mail, which launched in 1997 with 4MB of storage, upgraded to 100MB of storage shortly after Google's Gmail announcement, bumped it up to 250MB in late 2004, and then up to 1GB in 2005.

With 250 million users, Yahoo Mail is the largest global e-mail provider and the largest in the U.S., according to comScore.

The unlimited storage will begin rolling out globally in May, and Yahoo expects to have all of its customers covered within a month, except for China and Japan. "We will continue working with these markets on their storage plans," Kremer said.

Light can bend liquid

Agençe France-Presse

The gentle radiation pressure of light was able to deform and direct a stream of a special soapy liquid.

Just the gentle pressure of a beam of light is enough to bend and direct streams of a special liquid, according to a study to be published this week.

The discovery could lead to new advances in biomedicine and biotechnology by offering a way to control the flow of fluids through extremely narrow channels.

Physicists from France and the U.S. have used a laser beam to produce a surprisingly long and steady jet of soapy liquid that is narrower than a human hair. The researchers were then able to push the liquid into a "hump-like shape", by directing the laser at a different angle.

The discovery was made by accident while University of Chicago fluid scientist, Wendy Zhang, was visiting colleagues at the University of Bordeaux in France.

Here, physicist Jean-Pierre Delville had observed a strange and unexpected result after completing a previous experiment studying the behaviour of fluid under a low intensity laser beam.

Delville then turned up the laser power just to see what it could do, much the same way a motorist might test the performance of a powerful car on a deserted road, said Zhang. "He turned up the power and then saw this amazing thing," she said. "Because he has a lot of experience with optics, he realized that what he saw was strange."

What they found was that the laser beam was able to direct and bend the fine jet of liquid.

The find, Which was further probed by lead author and Chicago graduate student Robert Schroll, is detailed in the 30 March edition of the journal Physical Review Letters.

While heat can set liquid in motion, the researchers discovered that in this case it was the gentle radiation pressure generated by photons - discrete packets of light energy - that moved the fluid.

This radiation pressure is so slight it ordinarily goes unnoticed, but the liquid used in the Bordeaux experiment has such an "incredibly weak surface" that even light can deform it. "It's basically soap," Zhang said of the experimental liquid, which was a mixture of water and oil that had been precisely blended to display varying characteristics under certain conditions.

Further research is now needed to determine whether this light-driven flow could advance 'microfluidics' – that is the science of controlling fluid flow through channels thinner than a human hair. Conventional microfluidics techniques use channels etched into computer chips to control fluid flow. While this is a relatively easy process, Zhang said, a laser-driven microfluidics system might allow researchers to make more rapid adjustments.

"Here I've created a channel, but I didn't have to make anything. I just shined a light," Zhang said.

Toxic chemicals behind 'new car smell'

A new report from a U.S. environmental group suggests the "new car smell" long beloved by the purchasers of vehicles could be a sign of harmful chemicals inside the car.

Much of the smell comes from plastics and materials used inside the car, from the steering wheel to the dashboard to the carpets — parts often made with chemicals including flame retardants, plasticizers and other chemicals that can give off gas or leach into the environment.

The Ecology Centre, a Michigan-based environmental group, tested components in the interiors of 200 new-model cars for toxic chemicals including bromine, chlorine, lead and other heavy metals. The chemicals "can be harmful when inhaled or ingested and may lead to severe health impacts such as birth defects, learning disabilities and cancer," the report notes.

The group rated the cars according to relative level of health and environmental concern associated with the chemicals in the vehicle, in comparison with other vehicles tested.

The cars of most concern included the Nissan Versa, Chevrolet Aveo and Kia Rio, which all rated above four on the five-point scale. The Chevy Cobalt, Chrysler PT Cruiser and Volvo V50 station wagon were among those rated as "of least concern."

The Ecology Centre's ratings do not offer an absolute measure of health risk or chemical exposure, the study notes. However, its investigation found some toxic chemicals at levels five to ten times higher in new cars than would be found in an average office or home.


"The nose is great at detecting small amounts of a chemical. If you can smell something, it's there," said Ernie Pokopchuk, an assistant professor in chemistry at the University of Winnipeg.

Pokopchuk said some of the chemicals identified in the story could have serious effects.

"They can be irritating, might be something as simple as making your eyes kind of red, feel like they're burning a little bit, irritation like that, or it can be as severe, with a high enough dosage, it can lead to health concerns, birth defects, cancers," he said.

Vince Gabrielli, manager of lease and commercial sales at a Winnipeg Dodge dealership, says this is the first he's heard about the issue.

"Obviously, it's a concern for most consumers," he said. "Manufacturers are always going to be wondering if there's enough toxins to be harmful to the public, and if that's the case, then they'll probably put restrictions on it and hopefully get rid of that."

Some companies, such as Volvo, are already selling cars with interiors marketed as healthier. In Volvo's case, the approach controls the use of nickel in dashboard controls, keys and safety-belt buckles and chemicals used in upholstery fabric and leather.

"Safety is much more than that small probability [of] what if I get into a crash," says Michael Rawluk at a Winnipeg Volvo dealership. "It's [also] how does this car impact my health?"

The Ecology Center hopes this study will push car manufacturers to use safer products in the future, noting that toxic chemicals are not required to make interior auto parts, and some manufacturers have begun to phase them out.

For people who already own cars listed as "of concern" in the study, the centre recommends using solar reflectors in the windshield, because heat and ultraviolet rays accelerate the release of chemicals; the centre also recommends opening the windows for a few minutes before driving off.

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

New "paint" provides wireless network protection without encryption

March 24th, 2007 by George Gardner

Forget WEP and WPA; I’m switching over to the EM-SEC Coating System, a recently revealed paint developed by EM-SEC Technologies that acts as an electromagnetic fortress, allowing a wireless network to be contained within painted walls without fear of someone tapping in or hacking wireless networks.

The EM-SEC Coating System is clearly the most secure option aside from stringing out the CAT5, and can be safely used to protect wireless networks in business and government facilities.

“The use of EM-SEC Coating as an electromagnetic barrier for the containment of wireless networks has opened a new realm of possibilities for our company and for the future of wireless communications” said Robert Boyd, Vice President and Director of Technology for EM-SEC Technologies, LLC. “As hackers, identity thieves and even terrorists become more sophisticated in the methods they use to obtain information or inflict damage, this experiment confirmed EM-SEC Coating reduces the threat from electronic eavesdropping and blocks out electromagnetic interference for the protection of electronic data.”

The EM-SEC Coating System uses a series of water-based shielding products that restrict the passage of airborne RF signals, and was initially developed to aid the U.S. Government and Military is shielding operation centers; the Military always gets the good stuff first.

Recent tests on the product revealed that this special wireless blocking paint can now be successfully used by corporate and private companies.

“We have developed an innovative shielding system that cannot only be utilized by corporate offices, boardrooms, server and computer rooms and research and development laboratories to protect their digital assets from electronic eavesdropping, but it will also ensure the safe operation of wireless networks”, said Wayne LeGrande, President and Chief Technical Officer, EM-SEC Technologies, LLC.

We’ve seen first hand that many wireless encryption methods simply do not work, and can be hacked using a couple hundred dollars worth of equipment and free downloadable software. This EM-SEC Coating solution provides strong network security combined with the freedoms that come with a wireless network, something that would have previously been thought to be impossible.

Cell Phones of the Future Could Survive Being Dropped

By Robin Lloyd
LiveScience Senior Editor
posted: 27 March 2007
11:47 am ET

Cell phones and iPods could soon be made with all-plastic chips that would allow the gadgets to survive being dropped over and over, thanks to work of a Dutch researcher.

And the added benefit of plastic—it's cheap. The cost of our beloved tiny toys would drop.

Paulette Prins of the Delft University of Technology demonstrated that specially rebuilt plastic conducts electricity as well as the silicon wafers that are commonly used to make the semiconductor chips that are the brains of cell phones, MP3 players and other portable consumer electronics.

Other applications include electronic devices with flexible screens that can be rolled up, she noted in her doctoral dissertation, defended earlier this month, and in a paper published in April issue of the journal Physical Review Letters. It will probably take several years for such products to reach the market, she said.

The limiting factor in making droppable electronics is the chips inside them, Prins said.

The reason iPods and cell phones stop working after pavement bounces is that the chips contain many nearly microscopic pathways that send operational signals throughout the device. Those pathways are disturbed by drops. Plastic chips could absorb bounces better.

Currently, the chips inside electronics conduct electricity at least 1,000 times better than plastic. Prins discovered that in plastics, the movement of charge was mainly hindered by the chain-like structure of the material.

Prins extended the work of a German group that had rebuilt the chain in plastics to form a ladder-like structure. By bombarding the specially developed plastic with electrons from a particle accelerator, she was able to study rapid electrical reactions and demonstrate the new plastic's ability to conduct electricity much better than regular plastic and as well as silicon chips.

"My research shows that the mobility of charges along isolated chains can be as high as the mobility of charges in conventional semiconductors," Prins told LiveScience. "When the organization of the polymer chains in electronic devices is optimized, all-plastic electronic devices can be developed that benefit from this high mobility."

A Quincy youth shoots for a perfect run in record time in Super Mario video game

By Billy Baker, Globe Correspondent | March 21, 2007

QUINCY -- Here's how Andrew Gardikis would capture the holy grail of video game records: He pulls out his battered Super Mario Brothers cartridge, blows on it so it will work, stuffs it into the Nintendo Entertainment System that his older brother and sister bought 15 years ago, hits record on his VCR for posterity, picks up the boxy, two-button controller, and then -- for the next five minutes and seven seconds -- he plays the best-selling video game of all time better than anyone in history. For one shining moment, Gardikis, 17, will achieve the philosophical absolute. He will be perfect.

This is not that day.

"Ugh," he says as he reaches down and hits the reset button for the umpteenth time. "I screwed up. I lost a couple 10ths."

Gardikis, a high school junior from Quincy with shaggy blond hair, is trying to break one of the most coveted video game records in the world -- a perfect run on the original Super Mario Brothers.

"It's the quintessential video game," said Kelly Flewin, a senior referee with Twin Galaxies, the organization that tracks video game world records through a website, who has been overseeing the Mario war. "It was the breakthrough. It launched Nintendo. It's hard to find someone who hasn't played Super Mario Brothers."

Twin Galaxies has been a widely recognized authority on video game and pinball records since 1981, when Walter Day, the owner of an Iowa arcade of the same name, began recording high scores from arcades around the country.

Of the Mario speed run record, "the only thing close to it in the classic gaming world is a record for Donkey Kong," said Flewin. "Any time someone sets a Mario speed run record, it's such big news that it crashes the Twin Galaxies website. They're approaching human perfection. It's for all these reasons that we call it the 'Holy Grail.' "

For a little over a year, Gardikis, who is also a remarkable juggler and seems gifted with superb hand-eye coordination, shared the world record for the "minimalist completion speed run" -- which allows players to take the shortest route through the game using "warp zone" shortcuts and is easily the biggest of the Mario records -- with a time of 5 minutes, 9 seconds.

In October, that record was broken by Scott Kessler, a 31-year-old from Monroe, N.C., who is a heavyweight in the gaming world. Kessler holds 137 world records -- including the speed runs for Metroid, Zelda II, Super Mario Brothers 2, and Super Mario World -- and came out of a two-year retirement to snatch the crown for the original Super Mario with a time of 5:08. (Another gamer, Trevor Seguin, a 22-year-old from New Milford, Conn., has since matched that record.)

"I know I can do a 5:08," Gardikis says as he begins another attempt at the record, breezing through the first world without even a hint of a mistake. "I've studied each level. I can play them all perfectly. Some people think a 5:07 is impossible. I think I might be able to do it, but it will probably take a live performance [in front of judges] to overcome the VCR lag." (Gardikis believes the VCR records just a bit slower than his real speed, costing him about a 10th of a second every minute.)

Gardikis was not even alive for the Mario mania of the 1980s, when the little guy from Brooklyn with the mustache and overalls became the world's most famous plumber. Mario had his own TV show and lunch box; buskers and symphony orchestras played his theme song; more than 40 million people owned the game, which came bundled with the original Nintendo; and countless more snuck off to a friend's house to navigate through the mushroom kingdom on the way to save the princess from the evil dragon, Bowser.

So how did the junior at Norfolk County Agricultural High School get into the mix?

"We've always had this game around the house, and I've always been good at it. I guess I have good hand-eye coordination," said Gardikis, who can juggle seven balls and push a video game button more than 12 times a second (he's timed it). "Then, about three years ago, I saw something on G4" -- a cable channel that covers the video game world -- "about a guy who had the record for the Super Mario speed run. And I was, like, 'I think I can beat that.' "

At that time, the record was 5:20. Gardikis's best time was about 6 minutes, but he practiced for a couple weeks and got it down to a 5:21.

Then, out of the blue, Kessler dropped the record to 5:13.

"Every time I'd get close, someone would lower the record," said Gardikis, throwing his shoulders into the controller as he vault ed Goombas and stomp ed on the Koopa Troopa turtles.

In 2005, Gardikis recorded his 5:09, which tied him with Seguin and another gamer for the world record. ( He thinks his time was a few 10ths faster; Twin Galaxies does not track 10ths of a second for the Super Mario speed run.)

"It's around here somewhere," he said as he dug through a pile of dusty VHS tapes underneath the television that sits underneath a Super Mario clock in his cramped bedroom on West Street. Finally, he pull ed out a tape labeled "Super Mario Bros. 1 World Record 5:09.3. Don't Lose This!"

As the tape starts, it looks like a computer simulation. Mario is moving without hesitation, hitting every jump perfectly, destroying any enemies that get in his way.

Suddenly, Gardikis gets up and pauses the tape on level 4-2.

"See here," he said, pointing at the screen. "I paused before I hopped on the vine. I think that cost me three- 10ths. " He continue d through the tape, pointing out microscopic errors -- "This is a slow execution of the jump over the piranha plant" -- before Mario finally sends Bowser into a flaming pit and saves the princess.

For all his prowess with a controller, Gardikis says he's just a regular teenager. He has a girlfriend, Laura Mahoney, one of his classmates; he runs on the school cross-country team; he enjoys pogo sticks and unicycles. But, he concedes, it's pretty cool to be a gaming star.

"People would kind of freak out when I told them I had the record," he said. "A lot of people thought I was lying. I told my teachers about it, and they were like, 'How?' 'Why?' "

Gardikis currently holds 35 Twin Galaxies records, including nine for Track & Field for the original Nintendo system. (He also unofficially holds the record for the full completion Super Mario Brothers speed run -- without using shortcuts -- with a time of 19:57, though he has yet to submit the tape to Twin Galaxies for verification).

But as he leans back on his twin bed and extends his long, lanky frame, he says that none of the records are as important to him as the quest for the holy grail.

"I've gotten 5:09 six times," he said with a hint of frustration in his voice. "I'll play it for a week and then I'll have to quit. It's kind of driving me nuts."

It is a madness shared by his competitors.

"For that 5:08, I would guess I recorded 50 hours of tape," Kessler, the gaming heavyweight who is a software engineer by day, said in a recent telephone interview. "That's hundreds of attempts, because it only takes 5 minutes to finish and you stop if you mess up. I've never been so stoked about finally setting a record."

Kessler, who said that he and Gardikis are "friendly rivals," believes that if a 5:07 is possible, Gardikis has the skills to do it.

"What they're doing is mind-bogglingly difficult," said Flewin, the Twin Galaxies referee. "You make the tiniest little error and, poof, there goes the perfect run. It just grates on you and makes you go crazy. That little mistake will haunt you.

"But you can always hit the reset button, and away you go."

Small PCs present big problems for users and interface designers

FLIPSTART, OTHER TINY COMPUTERS CAN BE A HANDFUL
By Jessica Mintz
Associated Press

SEATTLE - Watching users fumble and nearly drop an early version of the FlipStart compact PC practically gave Robin Budd a heart attack. The culprit was the three-key sequence, Control-Alt-Delete, required to log off or reboot a Windows PC.

``They would be holding the device in one hand, and they would try to get their three fingers on the keys at one time,'' said Budd, senior director at FlipStart Labs, a venture backed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. ``You can do it if you're fairly nimble with your fingers, but it's sort of a tippy, precarious thing.''

When the shrunken-down laptop goes on sale later this month, early adopters might get a kick out of FlipStart's solution: a dedicated key marked ``Ctrl Alt Del.''

The FlipStart, like other so-called ultra-mobile PCs, may give workers tools to do more from the road. At the same time, the Control-Alt-Delete problem is a reminder to electronics makers that the human body isn't keeping up with ever-shrinking gadgets.

Manufacturers haven't found ``the sweet spot between small enough for portability and big enough to use and interact with,'' said Gregg Davis, a principal at Design Central, an industrial design company in Columbus, Ohio.

The FlipStart has a laptop-esque clamshell design, so that users tired of thumb-typing can set it on a desk and peck away and still see the screen.

Other tiny PCs

Another ultra-mobile PC, Sony's VAIO UX, sports a slide-out keyboard, designed to allow ``stand-up computing'' so Japanese office workers crammed into commuter trains can be productive.

An ultra-mobile made by OQO, the forthcoming model 02, has a backlit slide-out keyboard for low-light use; Samsung's own Q2 sports a split keyboard arranged on either side of its tablet-style touch screen.

Each device maker also has a different sense of how small an ultra-mobile can get before it becomes impossible to use. For instance, Microsoft thinks the tiniest screen possible measures 7 inches diagonally, but FlipStart Labs settled on 5.6 inches.

So far, the devices are used more by certain groups of workers -- real estate agents and health care workers on the go, for example -- than by average consumers. Among ordinary folk, there's no clear design winner.

``Everybody seems to want something different in a little tiny PC,'' said James Kendrick, who consults as a geophysicist for oil companies and also avidly blogs and writes about mobile PCs.

Kendrick prefers a larger tablet-style notebook, the Fujitsu P1610. When he uses anything smaller, he carries around a fold-out portable keyboard.

Myriam Joire, a video game software developer and OQO enthusiast, says that even though her computer's tiny keyboard isn't perfectly comfortable, it beats using a stylus and touch screen for writing code, which she occasionally does on her OQO model 01.

``I'm a believer that some typing's good enough,'' she said. Learning to use keyboard shortcuts instead of the eraser head-sized joystick and increasing font and icon sizes also made the device easier to use, she said.

Ergonomics experts point out that even a standard laptop is far from ideal. If the screen is at a comfortable position, the keyboard isn't, and vice versa.

``Right now, we fit the laptops,'' instead of laptops fitting us, said Waldemar Karwowski, director of the Center for Industrial Ergonomics at the University of Louisville.

For computing in general, and especially for ultra-mobile PCs, Karwowski said he's amazed the industry still uses keyboards for input. The thumb-typing necessitated by the shrunken-down keyboards is tiring and can lead to discomfort and injuries, he said.

Other challenges

The challenges aren't limited to hardware design; ultra-mobile PCs, for the most part, run a full version of Microsoft's Windows operating system. That's a problem, said Mark Rolston, senior vice president of creative at Frog Design, a Palo Alto design group whose past projects include early models of Apple's computers.

``Windows is a fine interface for that general-purpose, desk-centric, sitting-throne-position environment,'' Rolston said. But mobile computing is what he calls ``high context'' -- the device needs to perform a very specific task, based on where the user is (in the car, for example) and what she's doing (like trying to find the mall).

``Just because you can make it small doesn't mean you should,'' he said.

On that count, Microsoft agrees.

``If you just take Windows, the deeply immersive mouse and keyboard experience and plug it down on a 7-inch or 5-inch screen, you have some problems,'' said Bill Mitchell, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Mobile Platforms division.

By Microsoft standards, ultra-mobile PCs have screens that measure less than 7 inches, weigh less than two pounds, run a full version of Windows and have a touch screen. Mitchell said that for this category, Microsoft shifted focus away from an interface that required fine motor skills, and made it easier for someone to get the information needed while in the car or walking down the street.

Another, more basic problem also is on his radar: People look silly trying to cram an ultra-mobile into a too-small pocket. His best solution so far dates back to his work on the Handheld PC in the late '90s.

``I just ordered fanny packs for everyone,'' Mitchell said. ``We're probably not going to convert the world to fanny packs.''

Talking about Cell phone rings when it's baby time - Pregnancy

Cell phone rings when it's baby time - Pregnancy - MSNBC.com
Updated: 2:15 p.m. ET Oct 30, 2006OKYO, Japan - Is it a phone call, a text message or simply time to make love?A new mobile phone available through Japan’s NTT DoCoMo can ring to let would-be mothers know when they reach the most fertile part of their monthly reproductive cycles.By tapping in data on menstruation dates, the user can program the phone to alert her three days before ovulation and again on the day. The company warns that the calculations are based on average cycles.

Thursday, March 22, 2007

Capoeira

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

MeowChat: It's not just for crazy cat ladies

In a sea of the über-hip at Austin's South by Southwest Festival last week, I was talking to SXSW panelist and blogger Liz Henry and mentioned MeowChatters, people who role-play online as their cats.

So did she laugh scornfully and make fun of the crazy cat ladies? She did not. She nodded, her eyes lighting up, and encouraged me to add information about the phenomenon to her wiki on fictional blogging.

Her curiosity made me think back to its beginnings. I first became aware of the existence of MeowChat in the mid-90s, when I was running the Pet Care Forum on America Online, but the exact moment a cat first learned to use a computer is not known.

I'm kidding, of course.

MeowChatters are people who create online identities in the names of their cats, and interact on Internet forums and e-mail lists and in chat rooms. The humans behind the cats are a surprising mix, mostly women and a few men. They include college students and retired grandparents, high-tech workers and humane society directors and even a doctor or two -- and, of course, more than a few crazy cat ladies.

As part of an ongoing and often ephemeral creative collaboration, elaborate virtual worlds are created, such as CatHobbyist.com's MeowChat Village, where cats meet, marry, have careers, adopt kittens and tease and comfort their human companions. There are also MeowChat virtual towns, stores, political campaigns, armies, universities and television networks that find more permanent form in mailing list archives and message boards.

Part of the MeowChat world is MeowChat itself -- the language used by the cats. While there are cats who converse in conventional English, most of them use a language comprised of equal parts phonetic spelling, puns and baby talk. A classic example is the story of the first Thanksgiving, as told by the MeowChat Village Hisstorian:

"we know dat da pillbugs camed here frum da old comfy, but we not know why and how, aftpurr dey landed at plywood rock, did dey get to meowchatvillage?"

The answer to that question involves a long sea voyage to escape a major flea infestation and eventual settlement in a magical land known as MeowChat Village, where all the animals live in peace. Or, actually, "peas."

Many cat owners object to having the cats use anything other than perfect English, reasoning that felines are highly refined, intelligent creatures. According to Kathy Gittel's MeowChat FAQ (ostensibly written by the cats themselves):

"We are highly intelligent. Some of us have difficulty spelling because our paws don't fit the human keyboard or because we telepathically send our posts to our humans, who type them for us, and something gets lost in the translation."

MeowChat's distinctive approach to spelling and syntax has been the source of much feuding between those who love and those who deplore the practice. People who join online discussions simply to discuss pet behavior or pet health issues are often annoyed at being addressed in the MeowChat language. As a consequence, many communities have developed conventions such as requiring that posts be tagged "Meow," or some have banned MeowChat altogether.

And then there is the most precious resource of the entire MeowChat community, the GLOW Bank, where good wishes, prayers, positive thoughts and hopes are banked for those who might need them. MeowChatters routinely make deposits and withdrawals from the GLOW Bank, for the benefit of cats, humans and even the occasional "sub-feline life form" such as a dog.

(I really shouldn't have used the word "dog," because any self-respecting MeowChatter would probably die before letting such a word escape the keyboard. The proper term for a canine is "d*g," or, if you prefer not to mask your vulgarities, "goggie.")

MeowChat cats do let GLOW out of the bank on behalf of special d*gs, however. My own d*g Bran, whose story I told in my last column, was the recipient of hundreds of GLOW e-mails and message board posts from AOL and CatHobbyist.com MeowChatters during the time he was ill.

Another MeowChatter with GLOW experience is Portia Neff. If you spend any time in MeowChat Village, you'll probably meet Portia, or rather her online alter ego, her Maine Coon cat, Ash. Portia began MeowChatting as Ash (and sometimes one of her other cats, Zade or Antares) several years ago, and has formed close friendships and an extensive support system with her fellow MeowChatters -- a support system that proved invaluable when Portia was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis three years ago.

"I hadn't been feeling well, and I didn't know what was wrong with me," Portia said in a phone interview. "I was getting, 'Oh, we'll be GLOWing for you' from the other MeowChatters, and it was nice. But when I came back with my diagnosis of MS, the outpouring of support was unreal. I have no idea how many GLOW posts were made to me, and I got instant messages, e-mails every day: 'How are you feeling? What have you found out? What can we do?' Everybody was there. I'd pop onto a chat and I'd say, 'I don't want to bore you guys,' and they'd go, 'No, no, we want to know.'"

After struggling with the fatigue and complications of her illness, Portia made the decision to participate in her first National Multiple Sclerosis Society Walk two years ago. The MeowChat community came through for her, accounting for at least half of her pledges that year and every subsequent year.

Portia's experience belies the stereotype of Internet users as isolated social misfits and illustrates one of the reasons online interactive groups are called "communities." But the fact that so many of these groups are centered on online friendships isn't coincidental. Being able to meet people through words, ideas and a collaborative creative process, instead of in person, makes it possible for those with physical limitations or anxiety disorders to experience social contact without stress.

"We have a number of people wrestling with different physical issues," Portia said. "I think that this is another thing that makes the Internet in general, and MeowChat in particular, especially valuable. You don't have any preconceived physical, in-your-face things to see. I know one of our gals has a lot of physical problems, and I imagine she meets up with a lot of stares and so on, but when she comes to MeowChat, she's the same as everyone else. There's acceptance."

But Portia believes MeowChat serves a purpose beyond support and socializing. "Cats can express our fears. There are things you can laugh about as a cat, but we're afraid or reluctant to verbalize as ourselves. It's a form of therapy for the humans -- the power of adopting an alter ego to express yourself. Kids in therapy have play therapy. That's what we're doing."

Portia has noticed that her interaction with the group, as well as her writing style, is very different depending on which of her cats she is using as her alter ego at the time. "If I'm feeling bitchy, it's delightful to go into MeowChat as Zade. I can put on my Bengal personality and be hissy and pick a fight. But absolutely, that alternate ego, that role-playing, is an escape. It's half the fun of it. That alter ego becomes very strong."

Portia sees the MeowChat language as a crucial part of the collaborative process used in MeowChat. "I love all the double meanings of words and the word play and the puns. It's so funny sometimes. Most of the time, we know everyone who's in [the chat room], and we will kind of unconsciously fade in and out of MeowChat in our conversation as it goes along, and no one thinks twice of it. It flows in and out as if it was your own private language."

She likens participating in MeowChat to the childhood storytelling game where one person comes up with the first line and each person in turn adds another line until you have a story. "It's like whispering a story in someone's ear," she said. "It goes all the way around the room. That's the fun of creativity. What one person can't think of, the next person can."

Portia laughed and said: "In the MeowChat room (on CatHobbyist.com), we have a pond and a Ferris wheel. We flooded the room and went ice-skating. We didn't mean to flood the room, but what happened is we wanted to roast marshmallows and inadvertently set the floor on fire. So Ash quickly changed into his fireman's costume and turned on the sprinklers. And you know cats don't like water, so we opened the windows and let the water freeze and went ice-skating."
Of course they did.

My own forays into MeowChat have been brief and usually prompted by a special event, such as one of the famous MeowChat weddings, or to express my gratitude for the GLOW sent to Bran when he was sick. My cat MissDaphne kindly shared her recipe for Mouse Rolls with the CatHobbyist.com MeowChatters and telepathically gave me permission from beyond the grave to share it with my readers here today:

MissDaphne's Mouse Rolls

Take one mouse.
Roll it around.
Eat it.
Yum.

Close friendships and clever stories aside, is there something special about the MeowChat world? After all, it's not uncommon for intimate relationships to arise among people who interact online, and many communities are based on elaborate role-playing models. There are, in fact, online role-players who have participated in world building on a scale undreamed of by the MeowChatters. "So," you might ask, "what makes MeowChat so different?"

Nothing, and that's the point. Some people might consider MeowChatters a bunch of crazy cat ladies who wouldn't know a blog from a hard drive, but MeowChatters can just as accurately be described as collaborative world builders and role-players.

Not, as Ash would hasten to assure you, that there's anything wrong with crazy cat ladies. Meow.

Christie Keith is a contributing editor for Universal Press Syndicate's Pet Connection and past director of the Pet Care Forum on America Online. She lives in San Francisco.

An end to cow farts

Berlin - German scientists have developed a pill that stops cattle breaking wind.
Methane emissions from cattle are responsible for four percent of harmful greenhouse gas emissions, and any reduction would be a major contribution to reducing global warming.
Scientists at the University of Hohenheim in Germany say they have now tested a pill which in combination with a special diet and strict feeding times should make cattle less harmful to the climate.

The pill, which is still being tested, breaks down the methane in the cows' stomachs, and also has health benefits for the cattle.

Winfried Drocher, head of the faculty for animal nutrition at the university, said: "It will make this energy available for the cows' metabolism. The cattle can use the methane to produce glucose instead of just passing it out and it will enable them to produce more milk."
The only problem at the moment is that the pill is about the size of a fist, which is hard to persuade the cows to swallow.

"It needs to be this big as it dissolves slowly, releasing active ingredients over several months. Our aim is to increase the well-being of the cows and to reduce the emission of greenhouse gasses," said Drocher. - Ananova.com

The Dangers Of Falling Into The Role Of The Family Tech Support Guru

This is how it starts. You're visiting a relative (cousin, brother-in-law, whatever), and they invite you to have a look at their home computer system, which is filled to the neck with spyware, adware, malware, and more viruses than you would find on a downtown hooker.
The system is bloated with hundreds of pointless programs, irrelevant icons, and feckless folders, the hard drives have never been optimized, and the temporary cache hasn't been emptied since the Reagan years. You offer to clean up all the digital flotsam, and voila, the computer is running faster than a white man at the L.A. riots.

But then, after you've performed a miracle more amazing than a John Edwards vision, you instantly regret the tiny bit of technical support you've freely given to your relative, because now you're being worshipped like a Star Trek officer on a primitive alien world.
And once you've started helping your kin with their simple computer woes, there will be no end to it. You see, you've already established yourself as the family computer specialist. Pretty soon you'll be doing memory upgrades, network installations, and graphic designs. Before you know it, you'll be the webmaster of the new family website, photoshopping out grandma's age spots on all the family pictures. You'll be on 24-hour pager duty, at the beckon call of remote cousins, aunts, and in-laws.

In the old days, you could always preach the old saying: "Read The Fucking Manual." But that kind of wise-cracking will likely earn you a mouthful of soap from your mother. And no family member wants to read instructions when you are just a phonecall away. And forget getting paid. The best you can ever hope for is a slice of your Auntie Jennie's pumpkin carrot pie, and a basket of dry cornbread muffins.

Now, you're not going to be able to get around fixing grandma's Internet connection when she's got that online canasta tournament, and you pretty much need to reinstall Windows for your sister, especially if you ever expect her to set you up with her cute college friend. But although you are willing to provide driver disks, patches, and upgrades to your close relatives, it doesn't mean that you should have to walk your great-uncle through a fourty-five minute install of bargain bin poker software.

It's dangerous enough when you offer free counsel to friends who want to buy new laptops. But when you start making house-calls to little-known in-laws because they don't know the difference between drag-and-drop and dragon droppings, you're pretty much throwing away your personal freedom. You'll be branded a guru, and the only way to lose your credibility as the 24-hour family tech supporter is to (accidentally) delete your brother-in-law's collection of nude women on ponies. Once you've established fallability, your value as a computer specialist will deflate faster than a five-dollar blow-up doll.

You'll probably find that the easiest way to prevent yourself from falling into a permanent tech support role, is to tell your family that you "only know Linux". This way it preserves your computer-savvy reputation, and puts you out of the league of most relatives. Of course, this ruse will only work until your Uncle Fred decides to tinker with that new release of Red Hat.

>>> Considering I don't know the author of this funny tidbit, I can't give proper credit at this time, I would be glad to if someone let's me know who wrote this.