Yesterday, I bought a copy of FranklinCovey Planning Software from CompUSA. I had previously downloaded a trial edition from the FranklinCovey web site and liked it so much that I decided to go ahead and make it legal. We'll see where this goes.

IMHO it is unconscionable that the major television networks chose not to air the President's speech about the danger of Saddam Hussein.

Update on the amazing, disappearing web site content: it is back!

It is not a good thing when you try to visit your web site and find out that it no longer exists. That is what happened to me this morning. I was maintaining three weblogs at 0catch. My sites appear to no longer exist. Judging from the comments in the user forum, quite a few other people have experienced the same problem. There is a possibility that the lost content may be restored, if the situation is due to some glitch that the host techies can fix. Here's hoping!

This being a typical Saturday, I took my Mom to (1) the grocery store, (2) the pharmacy, and (3) the library. In other news, it seems as if tropical storm Hanna may be bringing some rain our way. I don't mind--I mowed the lawn last weekend, and the grass is still fairly short; the only thing that I have to go out for tomorrow is to wash the clothes at the coin-operated laundry (it has been three weeks), so I can't complain.

What the Supreme Court of the United States has done with religion makes me angry. The founding fathers would be appalled that the government they created now forbids prayer in its schools. The idea was to establish freedom of religion, not a ban on religion. Banishing prayer, and any reference to religion, from the government schools amounts to a tacit repudiation of religion and, by extension, a repudiation of the morals that religions are, in part, designed to convey to the younger generation in their formative years. In my opinion, unless, and until, we, as a country, are able to come to grips with this reality, the much-commented-upon breakdown of morals in this country will continue, and even accelerate, which will necessitate the building of ever more prisons. However, to judge from past experience, and from the rate of recidivism of paroled and discharged prisoners, prisons, which are far from being "correctional institutions," are definitely not the answer.

It is difficult to believe that it is already September. This year seems to be passing so quickly, and I don't know why, unless it is because I am getting older. Yes, it is September, but the high temperatures are still in the nineties! Lows are in the lower seventies and the upper sixties. Today, I took my eighty-one year old Mom to a local mall, to walk. We didn't go very far, but it was a lot farther than she has been walking. Most days, she doesn't even get out of the house at all. I have told her that I would be glad to take her to walk every day, after work. We'll see.

Sheesh! There were not one, but two, bank robberies in my home town yesterday. In the first one, two robbers herded customers and employees into the bank vault and then cleaned out the tellers' cages. The local news reported that, in terms of the amount of money stolen, it might have been the most successful in the city's history. The second robbery occured at a branch bank that I use. Somehow, the money was recovered, shortly after the robbery.

The weather was actually rather pleasant this afternoon when I got off work. A "cold front" passed through the area, and the humidity is lower, compared to the past few days, so, instead of feeling like a blast furnace, it felt nice. When I say that a "cold front" passed through the area, I mean that in a (very) relative sense. The temperature, right now, is eighty-six degrees Fahrenheit, and the humidity is fifty-nine percent, which makes it feel as if it is ninety degrees. Some "cold front!"

Our delivery personnel had some time on their hands this afternoon, and the lead furniture installer asked me if one of my customers was ready for a desk that they had ordered from me. We had originally scheduled it for delivery tomorrow, because the customer was returning a desk that she had bought from a competitor of ours, and the competitor was supposed to pick it up today. I telephoned her anyway, but the competitor had yet to pick up their desk. My customer said that our people could go ahead and deliver her new desk today, but they would have to move the competitor's desk into another office. Knowing how the boss dislikes our delivery personnel doing anything for free, I told her that we'd probably have it delivered tomorrow, as originally planned, thereby giving the competitor time to pick their desk up. However, my customer said that the competitor is giving her the run around about when they are going to pick up their desk.

Update on the story of the two missing girls in Oregon: Two sets of remains have been found at the home of a suspect. One set has been identified as that of Miranda Gaddis, one of two girls who disappeared from the apartment complex early this year.

Typo3 is a free, full-featured content management system that rivals commercial programs costing thousands of dollars. I do not have any experience with installing it (yet), but I understand that the installation is not as simple as some.

STAY AWAY FROM 'SKEETERS!

For free blogger templates, check out BlogSkins! Hey, that's where the global industries template came from.

The following is the text of an op/ed piece entitled "The Anthrax Files," by Nicholas D. Kristof, from the August 13, 2002 issue of "The New York Times:"

"It's time for me to come clean on "Mr. Z."

Since May, I've written periodically about a former U.S. Army scientist who, authorities say privately, has become the overwhelming focus of the investigation into the anthrax attacks last fall. I didn't name him.

But over the weekend, Mr. Z named himself: He is Steven J. Hatfill, 48, a prominent germ warfare specialist who formerly worked in the Army labs at Fort Detrick, Md. Dr. Hatfill made a televised statement on Sunday, describing himself as "a loyal American" and attacking the authorities and the media for trying "to smear me and gratuitously make a wasteland of my life."

The first thing to say is that the presumption of innocence has already been maimed since 9/11 for foreign Muslims, and it should not be similarly cheapened with respect to Dr. Hatfill. It must be a genuine assumption that he is an innocent man caught in a nightmare. There is not a shred of traditional physical evidence linking him to the attacks.

Still, Dr. Hatfill is wrong to suggest that the F.B.I. has casually designated him the anthrax "fall guy." The authorities' interest in Dr. Hatfill arises from a range of factors, including his expertise in dry biological warfare agents, his access to Fort Detrick labs where anthrax spores were kept (although he did not work with anthrax there) and the animus to some federal agencies that shows up in his private writings. He has also failed three successive polygraph examinations since January, and canceled plans for another polygraph exam two weeks ago.

So far, the only physical evidence is obscure: smell. Specially trained bloodhounds were given scent packets preserved from the anthrax letters and were introduced to a variety of people and locations. This month, they responded strongly to Dr. Hatfill, to his apartment, to his girlfriend's apartment and even to his former girlfriend's apartment, as well as to restaurants that he had recently entered (he is under constant surveillance). The dogs did not respond to other people, apartments or restaurants.

Putting aside the question of Dr. Hatfill and the anthrax, there are two larger issues.

First is the F.B.I.'s initial slowness in carrying out the anthrax investigation. Why did it take nine months to call in the bloodhounds, or to read Dr. Hatfill's unpublished novel, "Emergence," which has been sitting in the copyright office since 1998 and draws on his experiences in South Africa and Antarctica to recount a biological warfare attack on Congress?

Second is the need for much greater care within the U.S. biodefense program. Dr. Hatfill's résumé made claims (a Ph.D. degree, work with the U.S. Special Forces, membership in Britain's Royal Society of Medicine) that appear false, but these were never checked.

Moreover, what was a man like Dr. Hatfill who had served in the armed forces of two white racist governments (Rhodesia and South Africa) doing in a U.S. Army lab working with Ebola? With a new wave of funding for smallpox and anthrax research, we must be doubly careful that the spread of pathogens to new labs solves problems rather than creates them.

The White House is putting strong pressure on the F.B.I. to solve the anthrax murders. Top administration officials would love to find an Iraqi connection, but would settle for solving the case. The F.B.I. director, Robert Mueller, is pushing back, saying that nothing would be worse for the bureau than a premature prosecution that would fizzle in court.

To its credit, in the last few months, the bureau has finally picked up its pace. Its experts in Quantico are belatedly examining anthrax hoax letters sent in 1997 and 1999 that bear fascinating resemblance to the real anthrax letters. Investigators are looking at another hoax letter with intriguing parallels to the real one; that hoax was sent to Senator Tom Daschle from London in mid-November, when Dr. Hatfill was visiting a biodefense center in England.

Partly because of the newfound energy, the F.B.I. has lately been enjoying genuine progress in its anthrax investigation. People very close to Dr. Hatfill are now cooperating with the authorities, information has been presented to a grand jury, and there is reason to hope that the bureau may soon be able to end this unseemly limbo by either exculpating Dr. Hatfill or arresting him."

U. S. to begin fingerprinting aliens--The Justice Department has chosen Sept. 11 as the starting date for a new program that will require tens of thousands of foreign visitors to be fingerprinted and photographed at the border, U.S. officials announced Monday.

There has been a new development in the investigation of last Fall's anthrax attacks. A field swab test on a mail collection box from Princeton, New Jersey, returned a positive result. Since late last year, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service has been checking every mail collection box ? the blue boxes on the street ? that feed into the central mail processing center in Trenton, where the anthrax letters were postmarked. This is the first such box to test positive.

This program, w.bloggar, is great! I've just learned how to use it to post to multiple blogger blogs!

Small-town police think it's funny to give a man with a learning disability a fake lie detector test; are sobered up by one million dollar lawsuit man slaps on them.

The two teenage girls that were abducted this morning in California have been found unharmed. The man who snatched them was shot to death by a sherrif's deputy.