I was chatting with another friend today, who, though he never knew Brad, has fought his own battles with drugs, and lost friends to them. I asked him what he'd tell a kid who was starting to use drugs, but was in denial about what he was doing. I thought the answer he gave was worth repeating, so here it is:

Here's the story with drugs...
When you first get into them, you have control...
and so you continue...
but eventually you pass a line where they dominate you...
and that line is not something a user can tell....

and Id tell them its fine and dandy what they're doing in one way,
but they will cross a line, and when they do, there will be no
coming back

and they will have no idea where that line is or when they crossed
it....but everyday they do drugs, they get closer to it

And thats fact

RE: Brad

] BALTIMORE - The clamor over a plan to abandon the Hubble
] Space Telescope -- and along with it, the most striking images
] of the universe the world has ever seen -- has been so
] loud that NASA's chief says the decision will be reviewed.

Yay. :)

NASA to Review Decision on Fate of Hubble

] David Bradley spent five minutes writing the computer code that
] has bailed out the world's PC users for decades. The result was
] one of the most well-known key combinations around:
] CtrlAltDelete. It forces obstinate computers to restart when they
] will no longer follow other commands.

Meet the inventor of 'CtrlAltDelete'

] Idiom Studio
] Governor Howard Dean, M.D
] Iowa Caucus Speech

RtS writes:
This site features videos of the now-infamous Dean speech in Iowa, but from the perspective of the crowd. Lend some context which the media stripped out in order to sensationalize it.

Yup. I'm not a huge Dean supporter, but I could tell that his actions were taken out of context, and I'm glad that this video allows people to see the whole story rather than just "the scream".

Dean Iowa Speech: The other point-of-view

Escher drawings made 3-D physical in LEGO blocks.

Fun. :)

Escher's 'Ascending and Descending' in LEGO

While speaking with a teenaged friend recently, I used the term "catch-22" in conversation. He was baffled, having never heard the term, so I sent him a link with more info. He'd also never heard the term "being in limbo." Overall, he's a bright and inquisitive individual... I guess he was just in one of those eddies of society where those particular memes never swirled.

Dictionary & Encyclopedia - Definition of Catch-22

] The worm was first intercepted by MessageLabs on the 26th
] January, 2004 at 8:03 a.m. ET and as of 7:00 p.m. ET,
] MessageLabs has stopped over 170,000 copies of the virus,
] while providing complete protection for MessageLabs'
] 8,000 business customers worldwide. The email containing
] the first copy was sent from Russia.

More bad stuff coming out of Eastern Europe / Russia, where laws are lax about stuff like this, and credit card fraud is ubiquitous and blatant. Can anything be done about the blackhats in that area of the world?

MessageLabs: 'Mydoom' worm originated from Russia

Four robots performing a quasi-traditional Japanese fan dance and something of an N'Synch routine. These aren't the robots of the 60's.

Well, I'm not trading in my Roomba for them, but this is still pretty cool. It's both in degrees of motion, and the way they can shift weight (or appear to shift weight) from one leg to the other that really gives them an interesting look.

How much, and can I buy them for Xmas presents yet?

'Dance, Will Robinson!'

Decius wrote:
] Apparently my political views score most closely to that of
] the natural law party. The natural law party sounds like a
] bunch of lunatic spiritualists to me. Talk about coming at a
] solution from a different angle...

I voted for the Natural Law candidate in one of the Presidential elections once. :) They do have some rather, um, unconventional ideas, but some of them I agree with. For example, they state that if all felons were required by law to learn transcendental meditation, that the crime rate would decrease. And I think that's probably true. :)

RE: United States Natural Law Party - Wikipedia

] Ong identified herself and her seat number, and said,
] "OK, our number one got stabbed, our purser is stabbed.
] Nobody knows who stabbed who, and we can't even get up to
] business class right now because nobody can breathe."
]
] Commission members said Tuesday that the phone call and
] other evidence indicated the hijackers used Mace or
] pepper spray to help seize the plane and isolate
] passengers from the cockpit. Mace was also found in
] hijacker Mohamed Atta's luggage, which was left at Logan
] Airport in Boston.

9/11 commission hears flight attendant's phone call