Hmmmm..... I suppose it's been a while again.

New Zealand departure is in less than a month now. Which is probably why
I've been finding US politics less important to write about!

I'm sure there are things that have been happening that are worth writing
about, but I can't really think of any right now.
Work is frantic as I'm trying to finish up a month + worth of work in the
next 2 weeks, but then that's kinda hardly unusual.

I'm trying to figure out my packing requirements for 2 years of back packing
as well... not somethign I've done before, so thus far I'm taking the "Lay
out all your things, then get rid of half of it and take twice as much
money" maxim with the assumption that I don't actually know what I'm going
to want/need and NZ should actually have perfectly appropriate gear if
needed.

Disturbingly, right now the result is that I'll be taking about a weeks
worth of clothing and a rather disproportionate amount of electronics.
Weird.

But it is getting rather exciting. as long as I don't think about how much I
need to resolve before I leave. :) Story of my life.

Back to "resolving" that work stuff...

But here's something fun:


and we'll see if that works.
my score is 70. That Probably means that I'm awesome.

So apparently there is now a spam bot(net) out there (at 88.232.98.61,
92.81.250.109, among others) that has harvested my work email as a sender
address.
This means that I'm getting about 2 or 3 bounce messages per hour telling me
that "the addresses was unreachable" and that "our bulk email filter has
rejected you email" etc. Lucky for me I seem to be mostly selling watches.

But I'm pretty frustrated because there doesn't seem to be a solution and if
this goes on for much longer my address (and/or company domain) is going to
make it onto some official spam black lists... which will prevent me from
getting (real) emails to any one.
Bah!

Does any one have any ideas? I personally think I'm just screwed. I just
wish I knew where they're harvested my address from. I don't even get that
much spam normally, I'm pretty defensive about where I give it out.

globeandmail.com: The other place bisphenol A lurks: our
teeth<http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/rtgam.20080424.wldental24/bnstory/specialscienceandhealth/home>

BPA is a hormone disruptor that can mimic estrogen, and some research has
linked it to health consequences, including early puberty in girls, breast
and prostate cancer, and *attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder*.

(Emphasis, mine.)

So besides the increasing freakiness of all the unexpected places that this
BPA stuff is showing up (Dental Fillings? really? Well at least it should
only be a problem for people who are old enough to have been bingeing on
HFCS for long enough to get cavities.) But what really caught my eye was the
ADHD mention.

It's often been noted that the US seems to have a higher rate of ADD/ADHD
than other countries, and this has variously been linked to: the mindset on
the imigrants who make up the population (restless/ADHD people are more
likely to move, thus the population has "self selected" for ADHD like
traits) ; the over medicalization of the US population mindset (ie
everything can be fixed with a drug even if it didn't used to be a problem);
among various others. But this raises the prospect that it might juts be
that Americans are more exposed to various endocrine disruptors and other
chemical products that have a relatively short history of existence and use.

We learned, from Rome, that lead pipes, while useful will eventually poison
you. I wonder what lessons the rest of the world will learn once the US
finishes poisoning it's population (I'm still holding out hope that it will
be clear enough to learn anything from in the end, though that seems
increasingly unlikely. And besides, we've never been very good at keeping
the mess in our own back yard, so there may well be no one left to learn the
lesson.)

PS: Brita pitchers and filters etc are made of Polystyrene, not
polycarbonate, so they are and have always been BPA free.
PPS: of course as with all of the various scary chemicals around... The ADHD
connection could be bogus: no one has done the research, which, really, is
the whole problem.

I'm sorry, if I had wanted to disrespect you I would have ________________.

SAIL.IE <http://www.sail.ie/wp222/?p=91> has an interesting article about a
guy who has made some pretty hefty investments in shipping wine by sailboat.
I find this hugely appealing for so many reasons.

I wish I had more to say about it but, really I just want to be able to buy
some!

Oh. Notice that they'll be shipping to Canada starting this summer!

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/03/16/news/16shariaht.php
I've read most of the first page. I'm excited to read the rest of it.

Rather unexpectedly... a slight diversion from my (recently) typical
election related news commentary.

I feel as if the only things that I've read today have been about rising
comodity prices (most particularly: food).

I've had 2 articles from the Financial Times open in my browser since last
week. The first is a guide page to their significant selection of actual
articles and content about rising food prices <http://ft.com/foodprices>,
while the second page that I've had open is the associated multimedia
content<http://cachef.ft.com/cms/s/2/f5bd920c-975b-11dc-9e08-0000779fd2ac.html>.
Both of which I'm really interested in reading/viewing but which I've not
taken the time to yet. Of course I'm sure that having that open has coloured
my perception of the days content.

Then over lunch I was reading the WSJ and they also also had a front page
article about resource shortages. This time instead of food it was
sawdust<http://online.wsj.com/article/sb120451039119406735.html>
.

I think there was another article somewhere... it might have this one about
the potential of a commodities
bubble<http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10733105>from
the economist.

Anyway I don't really have anything to offer about these except that it
paints a bit of a bleak future if news coverage is an accurate indicator of
future trends.
Or present trends for that matter.

Clinton says she wants to make trade deals enforceable?
http://www.google.com/search?q=Softwood+lumber for just one example of where
the US has been the side to let down the deal. To say nothing of the deals
and treaties that the US has been part of shooting down or at least pushing
for the rules to be so lax as to be irrelevant.
http://www.google.com/search?q=WTO+doha+round

I'm pro free trade. done right. ie when there are appropriate
moral/environmental conditions. and
no/minimal/mutually-agreed-but-otherwise-necessary subsidies.

I'm in no condition to be trying to make coherent arguments.