Snakes in Paradise...

Snakes in Paradise...  There's one poisonous snake here, a particularly docile and low-toxicity rattlesnake called the Great Basin Rattlesnake.  We haven't seen any of these yet, but we're not worried about them as they're amongst the least aggressive and lowest venom toxicity of all rattlesnakes – pretty much the opposite of what we were dealing with in Jamul, California.  However, I have see four snakes here – all different, all small (about pencil diameter and 10" to 12" long).  I haven't identified any of them, though one of them I'm pretty sure was a garter snake.  One of these was on the shore of Porcupine Reservoir; the others in our yard, spotted while I was mowing.  It's interesting that all last year, even with all the outdoors work I did, I never saw a snake.  Now in the first few days outside this spring, I've already seen four.

Polygamy...

Polygamy ... a kind of “polyamory”.  When I was a kid, lo these many decades ago, such things were to be found only in breathless tabloid articles and dry histories.  Once in a while you might see a reference to contemporaneous polyamory in exotic foreign lands.  Never would you run into it as a possibility in mainstream American society.

Things change.  Faster than I'd ever have thought.  What's the next frontier in permissiveness after polyamory?  I'm guessing it will be the mainstreaming of bestiality, but I stand ready to be surprised...

Way back in about 1995...

Way back in about 1995 ... I worked for a company called Stac Electronics.  My boss tasked me with designing an ecommerce-capable web infrastructure – a fairly advanced notion for the day.  This was primarily an education problem for me, as when I started I knew almost nothing about the subject.  One of the requirements my boss gave me was for redundant ISP connections, and I figured out pretty quickly that one could only do this, practically speaking, by connecting fairly close to the “backbone” and running a routing protocol called BGP.  When I dug into BGP, I quickly ran into lots of discussions about security problems with BGP.

Twenty years later, nothing has changed.

The inertia of the Internet is truly astounding...

Meh...

Meh...  I used to care.  Now I barely notice...