The Richter Scale^®

When I get into deep philosophical discussions with friends about the meaning of life, I typically try to explain that my goal in life is to leave the world a better place than when I entered it. But outside of explaining that both my actions and the way I am raising my children to be good people are the means to this end, I have struggled to put the overall concept into a succinct set of words.

Last night in my hotel room I found decorative words, part of a poem or small essay, etched into a framed brush glass surface, attributed to American essayist, philosopher, and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson. Reading these words left me completely speechless and stunned for a while, because they so well described my life’s philosophy.

There is some speculation that perhaps he didn’t write these, and that they (or a variation) were perhaps written by Bessie Stanley in 1905.

Whoever wrote them, they still speak to me:

To laugh often and much;
To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children;
To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends;
To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others;
To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition;
To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived;
This is to have succeeded.

Wow. There you have it.

Last year I made an on-line donation to the American Cancer Society in honor of a dearly departed friend. As I typically do, I created a unique e-mail address at one of my domains to register with the American Cancer Society. These address have some sort of descriptive text component followed by a number and sometimes some more random letters to the left of the ubiquitous “@” sign. They are quite unique and very unlikely to be guessed by traditional dictionary attacks.

So, imagine my surprise when, a few hours ago, I get an e-mail addressed to the unique address provided only to the American Cancer Society (ACS), which has nothing to do with ACS activities.

The mail message had a subject of “Just to her...” and was offering “Soft V__gra” (two letters blanked to avoid poorly designed spam filters), with a link to a web site presumably selling the offered goods.

The implication is that the American Cancer Society, a reputable organization, has had some part of all of its mailing lists hijacked by a spammer.

This could have happened in several different ways:

1) A PC which had my unique address on it at the ACS or an outside mailing house contracted by ACS, got infected with spyware which stole all the e-mail addresses and forwarded them to spammers (a vast majority of spyware and viruses are used for data collection these days).

2) Someone hacked into said PC(s) and outright stole the mailing list(s).

3) Someone with access to said PC(s) took the data and sold/gave it to someone else.

Regardless of which of the above methods caused my address (and thus very likely many others) to leak out to a spammer’s database.

Worse yet, I have just gone and done a search on my filtered spam archives, and find that I have been regularly receiving similar spam to that unique address as of July 17, 2005, so the theft of addresses likely occurred before then.

I count six spams - three for medication and three for pirated software.

Just goes to show that companies need to take the security of their mailing lists extremely seriously. I have reported this to the ACS, and urge anyone else who can trace the source of spam to an ACS list leakage please contact them.

Back at the end of March, my family and I took a one week vacation aboard the S/V Polynesia, one of the ships of the Windjammer fleet. These four masted schooners are small cruise ships in their own right, holding around 100 passengers (capacity varies based on which ship you’re on), and are pretty campy and persona(ble). Definitely not as formal, rigid, stuffy, or impersonal as the big cities-on-the-sea from cruise lines such as Carnival. No black tie nights on a Windjammer cruise. Windjammer cruising is also called “Bare Foot Cruising”.

Anyhow, we had a great time with Capt. Casey and his crew, seeing Sint Maarten, Anguilla, Nevis, St. Kitts, and St. Barths. Highly recommended.

But, the point of this blog post is that on that trip, we took some pictures, and my ever talented painting wife recently finished paintings based loosely on those photos.

You can find these paintings under the titles “Windjammer” (how apropos!) and “O Sunset” on her web site at www.LindaRichter.com (I won’t repost the pictures here because they are too large).

An interesting footnote is that the S/V Polynesia is now calling on Bonaire every week for a couple of days. We’ll have to hook up with Captain Casey once we’re all back on island at the same time and show him the paintings.

I had over two weeks in July where I vacationed in New England, visiting with my in-laws, checking out an inn in Vermont where Linda and I took some cooking classes, heading out to the coast for lobsters, and visiting with a couple of friends. I’ll cover some of these in future blog entries.

However for now, let me share one of the highlights of my time away from most work and from this blog - trying out a Segway Human Transporter.

Turns out one of the friends we visited has an “in” with Segway, based in nearby (to them and us at the time) Manchester, New Hampshire, and managed to bring home a couple of loaner Segway HTs for us to try out.

What a blast! Segways have been out long enough so that the idea of being able to balance on two wheels doesn’t seem so outlandish any more, but actually trying one is still a thing of new found joy - I felt like a big kid playing around on one. After our hosts felt I had shown enough aptitude, I even managed to graduate to “fast” mode (peak of 12.5 miles per hour) from training mode (5 mph max).  That’s done by using a different magnetic key to “start” the Segway HT.

Driving one of these requires a bit of practice. You move forward by leaning forward, and slow down or even go back by leaning back. Turning is accomplished by turning the left handle on the handle bar. Turning gave me the most trouble - I kept twisting the handle in the wrong direction - that’s problematic when moving at a good clip, as I discovered. Once you get in the groove it’s pretty easy to operate. I only wish there were an even faster mode available.

Linda and both the kids tried out the Segway HT as well. Linda was okay with it, Bas (age 8) loved it until he collided with a park car at a low velocity (turns out he was also a bit too lightweight for the unit and it couldn’t easily detect his weight shifts), and Krystyana (age 10) took to it as well as I did.

I am contemplating one of these for back home on Bonaire, but am concerned if I had one, I’d just get lazy - I should be riding my bike instead of using powered transport. For folks in urban areas, I would think the Segway HT would be a great thing though - you can use it on the sidewalk in some cities even.

On The Richter Scale, I give the Segway HT an 8.5 out of 10.0, especially for being fun and cool (never mind practical).