I am not sure when I signed up for Gmail, but the first message I ever received there was three years ago today. I must have deleted the canned “Welcome to Gmail” message, so unfortunately the first email of record was a telephone bill from Verizon. Not very exciting, but it demonstrates how much I rely on Gmail (and email, for that matter) in my life. I have been using my last name as my email domain since 1998, but I switch providers and email clients so often that trying Gmail made a lot of sense. No more bemoaning the loss of a Eudora email archive if my hard drive crashed, or having to worry about storage limits at my ISP. I needed a Web-based email client that offered HTTPS and a decent user interface. I had tried SquirrelMail previously and really hated it. I began forwarding all of my @lastname.org email to Gmail for reading and storage — and I’ve never looked back.
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No, not me — my friend-by-way-of-Starbucks Special K. Special K is a nice fellow, whom I put in the early twenties at most. Very friendly and easy to talk to. As such, it wasn’t long before we spent long periods of time discussing motorcycles. He owns a 1200cc Suzuki Bandit, and it’s his first street bike. According to him, he practically grew up on dirt bikes and ATVs. Despite spending a lot of time on two wheels, Special K is having some difficulties acclimating to road motorcycling. In the two months that we’ve discussed motorcycles, he’s crashed three times. I’m not talking about the new-rider snafus like having your feet go out from under you while pushing the bike backwards, or slipping on a patch of oil at a stoplight. I’m talking about crashing the bike, with injuries and all.
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Happy birthday to Sleep Panda!! I am sorry we won’t be able to see you today, but you’ll be in our thoughts just the same. We need to get together for a Monsters Menace America or Betrayal at the House on the Hill as soon as possible.

I hope you have a great day planned — I miss you!

Don’t freak out if you tune into SomaFM today and hear the San Francisco public transit system. Along with several other online radio stations, SomaFM is participating in a day of silence to demonstrate what Internet radio would be like if the increased Internet royalty fees are instated.

While I’m going to miss Soma’s Groove Salad station today, I hope that this day of protest doesn’t turn into a permanent silence.

Thanks to Pixie for sending this to me — there is a free test at IQtest.com that consists of thirty-eight questions. My score was 128, which is slightly above average. While I realize no online test is a true IQ test, the results seem to be in line with the results of my MENSA online quiz. I wish the IQtest.com test had a breakdown of what I got right versus what I got wrong; I’m willing to bet I missed almost all of the geometry questions and some of the mathematics questions. The language-based questions seemed very easy to me.

Like the MENSA test, you are not supposed to use anything other than your mind to answer the questions. Some of you used pen and paper, tea leaves, or whatever the fuck to get higher results. Just imagine the letters and numbers in your head this time, okay?

Warning: the test will require an email address for your results. If this skeeves you out, make a new disposable address, or use a spam-address. The site will also try to get you to buy personalized “intelligence analysis” results for $10. You don’t need to buy anything to get your results. I took this screenshot to show you what NOT to click.

Oregon Trail was a game I originally played on the Apple IIe a long time ago. The concept was simple: put your family on a caravan and try to get to Oregon. You could die in all sorts of horrible ways, from raids to starvation to dysentery. Combine traveling in a hostile environment, plus trading, plus bands of post-apocalyptic renegades, and you have the Flash-based game Caravaneer.
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There hasn’t been much going on lately that I can discuss. I’ve been trying very hard to get out of consumer debt by this August, and when I mostly write product reviews, shoot guns, ride my motorcycle, or games, there isn’t much to write about when I’m not buying products, shooting guns, riding my motorcycle, or playing games.

However, more Gibberish articles are on the way. I got a new mobile phone this week and will review it after I’ve put it through its paces. I purchased some textile motorcycle overpants about a month ago, but I’m waiting to get caught in the rain before I write my review. There’s a lot going on in DrFaulkenland, but I either consider it too personal or too boring to discuss (I mean, really, who wants to read about playing EVE). Gibberish is not really an online diary, so I’d rather keep silent than post what I ate for breakfast.

In the meantime, help me to help you. Please email me or reply to this message if there’s something that you’d like me to cover.

It first started about a month ago. Porter brought a stick up to the porch when I called to him. As normal, he dropped the stick before trotting inside the house, except it wasn’t a stick. It was a dead bird. No big deal, I thought, and scooped the bird in a doubled-up plastic bag. I may have mentioned it to Lady Jaye but we didn’t give the incident much attention. Fast forward to today. I picked up another dead bird, again dropped from Porter’s jaws. This brings our known casualty total to five or six in a month. I think we either have some sort of bird epidemic on our hands, or Porter and Rosie are waging a campaign of terror on the local avian population.

Before we begin, let me clarify a few things and set the stage. Rosie is about thirty five pounds. Porter has lost weight, but is still probably lower fifties/upper forties. Rosie is super fast, and Porter has good burst speed, but he’s no greyhound. Plus he doesn’t bend his knees when he runs. I can’t imagine either one of them running down a bird and killing it, let alone five or six of them. The dogs certainly don’t jump, although Porter and Rosie are about two and a half feet tall or so when they stand up on something. Porter can stand up like a bear indefinitely, but his coordination doesn’t seem good enough to actually, you know, snatch a bird mid-flight.

So what the hell is going on? At first Lady Jaye and I thought a bird was sick, or died in some less-fantastic fashion, and dropped to the ground. We also considered that a young bird was testing his wings and failed. But when the bodies starting piling up, I had no option but to consider that my two furry children were bird-killers. I really can’t imagine the dogs charging down a bird. However, I seem to recall from my hunting days that when ducks “set” their wings to coast in for a landing, they must land before flapping off again. Perhaps the mongrels are pouncing at this moment, giving them enough time to strike before the birds fly off again. Or maybe Porter distracts them while Rosie ambushes them from behind? Seems unlikely, but the idea of Rosie in a Ghillie suit is just too humorous to ignore.

To our knowledge, the body count and prey composition is thus:
1 blue jay
3 (perhaps) juvenile or female American Robins
1 or 2 “others,” it was too, uh, well-handled for identification. Possibly a juvenile sparrow, although the bird was taller than what I would consider a sparrow.

Not to put a super serious spin on this post, but I am worried about them picking up some disease from the birds (or bringing it to us). Both dogs have had decreased appetites last week, which has only returned to normal two days ago. Every time I fetch a “stick” from Porter I think, “if this was an H5N1 situation, we would be dead.” If we get the Avian Flu in the US, it looks like the dogs are going to be on attended leashes when we go outside.

As we enter tornado season in the midwest and 2007 projected to be a big year for hurricanes on the east coast, Gibberish readers may want to investigate purchasing an emergency radio that does not require AC power or batteries to run. While we have a stockpile of batteries in the Gibberish HQ, it’s worth having an alternative means to power certain devices, a radio being one of them. I purchased and reviewed the Grundig-made Radio Shack emergency radio six months ago and am very pleased with the device.

Redundancy is a big keyword when it comes to disaster preparedness. The Radio Shack unit is in my Montero right now in my car-based readiness kit. That left the house itself without a radio. I figured that if we were in a big storm we’d be close to the house, but having more than one radio around is just the right thing to do. I considered buying some more Radio Shack units but they were back to full retail price. I have been lusting over one of those orange Grundig models, but couldn’t justify the price. Woot.com to the rescue: about a month ago they listed a Excalibur emergency hand crank dynamo radio flashlight combo for $9.99 before shipping. I bought three for $35 shipped.
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Lady Jaye, Teach, Ninja Mary and I went out to the shooting range yesterday. I hadn’t been in a few months, and it was at least six months since Lady Jaye had been to the range. When I took Teach and Ninja Mary out in January we fired my shotgun, my .22 rifle, and my Glock 27. This time they wanted to try out some revolvers. I took my G27 and my Marlin 60 rifle again. I needed to practice with my daily carry handgun and I always enjoy shooting the Marlin, the first firearm that was ever “mine.”

I am fairly certain Teach and Ninja Mary rented a Smith & Wesson Model 36 and a S&W Model 64. They are both chambered for .38 Special, which was what I recommended. I was hoping that the range had some heavier, .357-capable revolvers for them to shoot .38s through, but in the end everything turned out okay. The important lesson learned for the day was that when it comes to firearms, one size fits none.
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