It's Wednesday 3/24/99 04:39:28 and the big news is the sudden death Monday night of WBAI Program Director Samori Marksman.

I've fixed the “permissions” settings for the mailing list pages, to which you may link below, and I've put the link to the new face on Mars in, d'uh I'd forgotten to put the link in Sunday night. Maybe I was just rusty after a month! I'll still be adding to this page over the next couple of days.

How long has your computer been running continuously? If it's 49 days, 17 hours, 2 minutes and 47.296 seconds then goodbye! Bill Gates' boys have done it again. Windows 95 & 98 count the milliseconds since they were booted up. After Windows 95 or Window 98 count 4,294,967,296 milliseconds they run out of numbers to count with. At that point Windows 95 or 98 crashes. I liken this piece of brilliant programming with a car that stops running when its odometer gets to all nines, except that takes a lot longer. Yet another lovely illustration of what can happen when the business side of things takes over from the technological side. Look here for Microsoft's “fix.”

And speaking of the Microsoft giant, where have you been, what have you been doing, to whom have you been speaking and what documents have you written or edited lately? No, don't tell them, they'll tell you! Or maybe Microsoft will tell someone else. I'm talking, of course, about that little “feature” that Microsoft included in Windows 98, the one where they surreptitiously get your name, address, phone number and more from your computer if you go to their tech support people. Yeah, right, they didn't know they were doing it. Put this together with the Pentium III serial number that other people can secretly turn on in your computer's CPU and you may as well walk around in public with a big sign that has all your personal information on it.

When the male ex and I went to see a movie a bit more than a week ago we ran into the phenomenon of people going to a movie, paying full price and then only sitting through the trailers (movie previews). Of course the trailer they came to see was for Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. When the trailer ended there was great whooping and applause, after which the loudest folks left rather than bother with the movie they'd actually paid to see.

You can save yourself the price of a movie ticket and see the trailer on line at George Lucas' own site. Be forewarned: this trailer is 25+ Mb and took me over an hour and a half to D/L at 52,000 bps.

Here's just an interesting Web site I found. An eclectic individual's Web site can often be better than most of the big deal sites. The Web is still a great place for ordinary people to communicate with each other.

Looks like it's going to stay that way for now because FCC Chairman William Kennard says the FCC is not going to allow phone companies to charge long distance rates for people accessing the Internet.

In case you haven't heard enough about the Teletubbies yet, here's something you can color in. Remember to wash your monitor off after you use your crayons on it.

Hey, there's a new “Face on Mars!” I wonder if the nuts will latch onto this one as evidence of a population on the planet?

There are a lot of issues that we can't talk about on the air at WBAI. But there is an Internet list called “Free Pacifica!” which you can subscribe to, and these issues are discussed there. If you subscribe to it you will receive, via E-mail, all of the messages which are sent to that list. You will also be able to send messages to the list.

If you want to subscribe to the “Free Pacifica!” list just click on this link and fill out the form, and you'll be subscribed. Could open your eyes a little bit.

The above list has occasionally produced a high volume of E-mail because of the attention that the issues have drawn. If you would prefer to subscribe to a low volume list that only provides announcements of events related to these issues then subscribe to the FreePac mailing list.