Posts by Marshalltown

BOFH: AI consultant rapidly transitioned to new role as automotive surface consultant

Re: ... almost there....

Ah, you spell "metre," I spell "meter," you spell "fibre," I spell "fiber." There are aspects of American society that have caved to our metric overlords. Certain cardboard containers, for example, are by law "fibreboard".

Linus Torvalds affirms expulsion of Russian maintainers

How many western governments use Linux?

Think about that question. Then consider the potential to bury trojans or nastier stuff. You can bet that there are a good many minds among the five I's that are thinking about that.

BOFH: The true gravity of the Boss and the 3-coffee problem

Re: Coffee? Kindergarten?

It may not be quite that simple. Coffee does have that effect on me, clear head, relaxing, dozed off. I often have a coffee before bed. My wife thought I was ADHD, and insisted on me getting examined for it. Irony of ironies, though. It didn't find me to have ADHD, but I had insisted she take the same test, and she was the one with ADHD.

BOFH: Well, we did tell you to keep the BitLocker keys safe

Re: "You are confusing Belgian chocolate with American "chocolate""

The difference is simply the percentage of cacao. US bureaucrats permit as little as 10%. The "odd" flavor is likely the result of milk reacting with the acid in the cacao. That would tend to start the milk artificially souring. More chocolate would mask that flavor with the bitter and savory notes of the chocolate. The better US chocolates can be very high in cacao percentage. My wife prefers a 70% bar.

Innocent techie jailed for taking hours to fix storage

Re: Innocent techie?

In at least some states, you can be ticketed if you are so tired that it affects your driving. So it is possible the officer was simply acting in a preventative capacity. Long-haul truck drivers are required by law and union regulations to rest periodically on long trips, and must maintain logs to show that they have. You still have the reckless types that ignore the rules, falsify the logs, and occasionally fall asleep at the wheel, leading to everything from the truck running off the road to serious damage to very expensive transportation infrastructure. If that happens, a driver can lose their license to drive a truck.

BOFH: The greatest victory is that which requires no battle

Re: Who knows a future AI Boss could be in play?

"Why not replace the BOSS with an AI, that does or does not do things as you program it with?"

The key initial is the "I", not the "A". All you need to do is look through Amazon's catalog of reading material, and the suspicion grows that much of it is generated by AI. The same goes for YouTube content. You have to ask yourself about AI, "is it really just doing what you programmed it to do?"

I can fix this PC, boss, but I’ll need to play games for hours to do it

The good old days

I had the two pirated BASICA chips and PC DOS (IBM"S variety of MS DOS) on one of my systems. I tested dB III and IV data sets for out of range entries a lot. Once a consultant returned data where he had merged four fields into a single field "because it was really just one field." They weren't. It took an hour to undo his work in order to merge the critical fields with our database. I explained that the format was specified by a university museum, worked with _their_ cataloging system and that we were deducting my time from his bill, since nothing in the agreement included permission to futz with data formats, and worse, types. I did not buy him a beer.

BOFH: So you want more boardroom tech that no one knows how to use

'nough said

"I think you underestimate our peoples' intelligence."

"Impossible. My estimations can't go that low."

A good thing I didn't have a mouthful of coffee.

BOFH: I get locked out, but I get in again

Re: PFY's responsibilities

It's sad how unimaginative this key swapping is. Think about it:

On your keyboard, press Windows + I.

Select Time & language.

On the left pane, click Region & language.

Under Languages, highlight English (United States), then click Options.

Under Keyboards, click Add a keyboard.

Choose United States-Dvorak.

Close the settings.

How many accountants know what a Dvorak keyboard is, or would be able to diagnose one?

Back in the days of DOS, we used to edit the .bat file to do some very evil things. The screams from the next office were shear music.

BOFH: What a beautiful tinfoil hat, Boss!

Heh!

It happens way too often, and sadly we sometimes even step in to thwart evolution. I had a boss who continually reminded us that he could not see stereoscopically - though he did have two eyes, even though one didn't track as well as the other. But, he drove, he played baseball, he didn't regularly have trouble picking things up or putting them down. One day we were working the field, the real field, hot dry, California grass land, all gold and full of foxtails and other irritating things that get stuck in your socks, shade every 300 yards (meters) or so. We were walking along the edge of a bluff or cliff, over about a 40-foot (12 meter plus a bit) drop to a very rocky, dry, stream channel. I asked him, "you play baseball?" "Yes." "You even hit the ball with the bat?" "Yes" "Boss, you must have depth perception." "I don't! I can't see the sausage!" "Huh?"

He holds his hands up, index fingertips pressed together. "I can't see the sausage!" He is looking at his fingertips touching each other. "Boss? Leave your fingers right there. Now look at me." He looked past his fingertips and his mouth dropped open. He was stunned to discover that he could see "the sausage" illusion that most of us take for granted So excited, he almost backed over the cliff edge. I had to grab his shirt to stop him. I still apologize to Darwin occasionally.

BOFH: WELCOME TO COLOSSAL SERVER ROOM ADVENTURE!!

Re: Fond memories

I quit playing Colossal Cave after the maze became unmappable. That was a version adapted to CP/M. It ran on a Kaypro II. But the version I acquired to play on my first PC was a different kettle of fish altogether.

Re: "That floor is open. Someone could fall down that,"

I saw the results of someone stepping through a hole in the floor. He was carrying boxes of files stacked high enough that he was peering around the (wrong) side. The hole was for an inspection plate that allowed access to something between the subfloor and the suspended ceiling below. I was in the room below when a pair of legs followed by remarkable language fell through the ceiling tiles.

BOFH: Get me a new data file or your manager finds out exactly what you think of him

Re: Oh the pain!

"And if that's not bad enough, how about websites with 'help' options - none of which remotely deal with the problem in hand."

Or worse I my view, the error that pops up, and when you check the forum, you notice that the same error has reappeared and been repaired over the last 15 years. The developer seems incapable of not reiterating the past.

BOFH takes a visit to retro computing land

Re: A phrase to remember

" . . .somehow violates the school's no-phone policy :(."

Time for carpet and quicklime. There are Darwinian levels of stupidity that need recognition.

Modular finds its Mojo, a Python superset with C-level speed

Bah

"Architected" means "designed," just as "trialed" means "tested." Idiot usage.

BOFH: I care a lot ... about onion bhajis

Usenet BOH

Yep. We considered the BOH a training manual. The World Wide Web was invented shortly after that discovery, but we considered useless for quite a while, sticking to tools like "archie", and of course usenet. What was the name of that tool for stitching digital images back together after down loading the various chunks from a news group?

Outstanding line

"Sometimes I cannot believe how well I've trained him."

BOFH: The PFY has won an award … for outstanding service?

Re: Extra Mileage, Extra Fun

"So, Mr. Draws, what is your problem?"

BOFH and the case of the Zoom call that never was

" . . .as the red mist threatens to descend."

Ah yes, or peripheral vision loses all color, as the target becomes preternaturally sharp. The beard prickles. The target's eyes open wide. Must not throw him over the cliff. He signs the pay checks - his partner signs them - must not - his partner won't mind at all - mmmmuuusssttt not. Oh look he almost backed over all by himself, and I stopped him. Later, his partner, "what's wrong with you?"

BOFH: It's 4ft tall, heavyset, has optional fax. No they didn't take the toner!

Re: Another great BOFH episode

Yep, from my own biased palette wine is merely spoiled grape juice. Well there are a couple I do cook with - mainly pan sauces for the steak.

It's been 230 years since British pirates robbed the US of the metric system

We are really "not" not using metric measures

One of the peculiar realities anyone who uses measures a good deal runs into is the AVP/Imp/Metric schism. From a US point of view the differences between AVD and Imperial are much more confusing. Canada for instance uses Imperial Gallons, the US uses an older version that is smaller in volume. A US gallon is 0.83267 British gallons, a bit more than 4/5 ths of a Gallon(Brit) as Glover's Pocket Ref would put it. [The Canadians also seem to get milk in bags, which seems - well - Canadian.] In Britain you often see Youtubers using inches and feet, and the reason is that for some activities such as building furniture, "old money" is actually easier. The numbers are all smaller for example, and the fractions are common fractions which are fairly easy to deal with in your head, while decimal fractions are more difficult. 16 1/5 inches for instance is 419.1 mm. You can round that to either 420 or 419, but finding that on a ruler when you're older and the eyes are showing a lot of mileage is a fussy and frustrating task. A 1/16 inch is 1.5875 mm, finding the right 1/16th can be fussy and irritating as well, but if you are using the right scale, there WILL be a graduation mark there. Obviously you can work to whole millimeters and the problem should go away. However . . . using "old money" drawings means that you convert every measure to meteric, and because of rounding, errors creep in. You have to define a tactic to prevent the random noise of rounding from turning your build into a cat' cradle of odd angles - not quite square, and non-Euclidian surfaces - not exactiy flat, and places where things join oddly. You must in short employ a different kind of approach to measuring. It doesn't look that way, but it is.

You hear a good deal of metric disparagement of the use of a human body part, e.g. a foot, as a standard measure. The trouble with this arrogance is that it assumes a lot. Furniture, even metrically laid out designs still work to standardized human proportions. You'll discover that measures such as 300 mm, and 600 mm occur frequently (one and two feet more or less). This is because humans really are more or less standardized. The traditional measures employ that in ways that guarantee than most furniture will fit most people (not all), and where you have volumes, people will tend to feel they are not being cheated. To habituate from a gallon down to a liter takes practice. (Though many "traditional" volumes and weights are outright weird, such as a pipe, a tun, or a quarter).

What is more of an actual issue is that the measuring is the different arithmetic. The "old money" system uses "12" with simpifies a lot of fractions, because you get nice common fractions. That harks back to Babylon and Summeria where a hexagismal (bas-60) system was employed. This offers many more common fraction solutions and whole number results than base-10. The Arabs, and their heirs who divised the metric system, stuck to counting on their fingers. Apparently the Summerian decided that teams of three (10 finger and ten toes person) worked better.

Just to keep the AVDP/Imperial divide stirred, the US standarized the inch to 25.4 mm exactly. This still has its drawbacks I had a bureaucrat who tried to insist that we had made a mistake. The standard form devised by bureaucrats and would-be desk jockeys wanted both AVDP and Metric figures for certain things recorded in the field. They apparently had assumed they needed to check field scientist's arithmetic, and had discovered our metric areas were wrong. Their area estimates however were achieved by trying converting a square meter area to square feet using a linear conversion factor. When this was pointed out, there was a deafening silence, followed by an "oh." No apology or "my mistake." Note there that the "area" we turned in was a metric estimate. People and their preferences are _always_ more of a problem than any particular measurement system.

Native Americans urge Apache Software Foundation to ditch name

Re: Bit ridiculous

Truly. "Apache" probably derives, through Spanish, from a label (Zuni?) for the "Dineh" - the people called "Apaches" and related "Navajo." The Zuni label designated the Navajo, or Apache as "enemies." Etymologies tend to drift with time. The Navajo, who, like the Apache, are Athabascan speakers are said _now_ to acquired the appellation from Spanish adaptation of a word from another indigenous group. But many moons ago, my anthropology instructor indicated that "Navajo" was derived from "Navaja." A navaja is a Spanish folding knife, with a very impressive pedigree reaching back to Rome. The professor claimed the Spanish had referred to the Navajo as "throat cutters." Take your pick.

BOFH: Selling the boss on a crypto startup

Re: Gaaaah “US English”

". . . Simplified English . . ."

Not really. Just simplified English speakers. Consider the hell of being in third grade, living in California, having relatives who spell "coloured" "colored" and others that spell it vice versa. You learn to use the dictionary very young, and argue with the teacher about spelling work as "labor" or "labour," and with the dictionary you prove to the teacher that both are accepted spellings. But the teacher doesn't like smart ass little nine year olds, and you spend more time writing sentences on the chalk board than any one else in history.

BOFH: Would I lie to you, Boss?

Re: items of falsehood detection

With the BOFH as the EE, the voltage would be higher.

BOFH: Tech helps HR investigate the Boss's devices

Re: Inspirational!

I don't think I ever worked at a company big enough to have an HR. Mostly you dealt with a "boss" who tried to wear as many hats as he could and fumble through things that his staff could easily have done for him. I'll never forget the mid-'90s virus battle we fought. It ended when we discovered he had been "checking security" using a program on a bootable floppy he brought back from Israel. Some one there told him it was a critical aspect of computer security to check the computers in the office weekly, and handed him the "tool" to do it. I personally used a large tin snips to convert it into trash.

BOFH: Where do you think you are going with that toner cartridge?

Re: Too Often...

Not to mention that when we install Linux and configure it, quite often we also need to tell the printer that, no, we use US Letter, not A4. All too often a newb will unwarily jump from installation to printing only to discover that the printed material is clipped at the left and right margins, but there's lots of room for notes at the bottom.

Re: Too Often...

US legal is still used for real estate documents and automobile purchase and contracts. I've long wonder how it became a standard. Another vanished standard was a paper required by US military and government which was an odd size slightly smaller than US letter, around 8-in. by 11, or 10.5. The US Forest Service even had manilla folders sized for it, and occasional government contracts would specify the format this was up into the late 1970s and early '80s. I believe it was referred to as US Government "letter" paper.

Re: Too Often...

Space ... someone will want the space to store something actually useful. So, what happens is that instead of storing the mostly useless cable in a leaky shed, critical boxes of ducuments are selected by someone in charge of "space." The critical documents are ruined by damp, while the nice shiny cable that could be converted into garrottes remains there, safe and mostly useless.

BOFH: You drive me crazy... and I can't help myself

Re: Genius

You haven't heard about what happened in the server room? Such a tragedy!

BOFH: The vengeance bus is coming, and everybody's jumping. An Xmas bonus hits me…

Re: He'll learn

The first BOFH I ever read mentioned redirecting a doctoral dissertation to /dev/null IIRC. I worked at a company with absolutely no reason to deal with the more intricate details of computers, networks, servers and such. Then the "boss" got a wild hair up an orifice and decided to diversify, become an ISP. Briefly I and my co-workers were drafted to help as "support" staff, hell desk and such. Then he brought in a young Goth to manage the ISP side of things, and another to support him. The young Goth decided that all computers in the office were HIS domain, regardless of the needs of the rest of the business's other side, which, as I said had nothing whatsoever to do with ISP trivia. But I and a colleague HAD installed the peer to peer network, before the Boss had his brainstorm. Our would be IT manager would lock the rest of the office out of access to the print server for no good reason when he left for the night. It was NT, but we had a floppy disk that could reboot it to useability for its intended purpose - printing. He would rage about the instability that would ensue. NT didn't like the by pass trick. Finally, he quit, calling out "harassment" as the reason, since he received no respect for his decisions regarding the Print Server. Even the Boss pointed out that there were others that needed the printers. His understudy moved up, and after actually talking with us about what was "wrong" with the print server, nearly died laughing, and directed me to the early BOFH pieces.

Don't touch that dial – the new guy just closed the application that no one is meant to close

Re: the words "DO NOT CLOSE DOWN THIS APPLICATION"

Dunning-Krueger is with us more than Darwin sadly.

BOFH: Pass the sugar, Asmodeus, and let the meeting of the Fellowship of Bastards … commence

Re: Kickstarter

Or walk in front of a speeding bicyclist.

Not too bright, are you? Your laptop, I mean... Not you

Re: Floppy solution

My favorite misdeed of all was to write a script called by the autoexec file that blanked the screen and then started a count down in very large numbers. I added it to the office manager's system. She screamed and ran out the door when it popped up. She was a firm believer that the world would be ending RSN at the time.

Re: Ah, a first time user

There are still text editors for Linux and Unix that use the Wordstar key combinations. I use joe as a quick text editor, and it uses many of the combinations of Wordstar.

Floppy solution

In an office I worked at in the early '90s, the machines we used were DOS systems. As such, they employed an autoexec.bat file to configure things as the system finally reached usability. It was considered a good joke to set the text color to black or similar little pranks by editing the batch file. We kept a bootable floppy on hand with edlin on it to correct any "edits" to the file.

Revealed: Perfect timings for creation of exemplary full English breakfast

Frozen hash browns - I am shocked

The best way to do hash browns is to take a smallish potato, ideally a little less than fist sized, maybe lady fist sized. You wash it, make sure it as no bad spots, and grate it coarsely. In a 10-inch (25 cm) pan pour in about 1/8 - 1/16 the inch (3 - 1.5 mm) of oil - it has to completely cover the pan bottom, Start it heating at medium heat. When the oil starts shimmering scatter the grated potato in the hot oil all over the bottom of the pan so the potato layer is as thin as you can get it. Maybe press with a spatula to get the layer thin. Salt it liberally (less of course you are sodium limited, in which case you shouldn't even be reading this). There should be bits of the pan bottom visible or the pan is too small, or the potato is too big. Let it cook for about three to four minutes and check to see if the bottom is browning. The entire mass should lift like a large potato chip. If it does, flip and let the other side have its day in the heat - well not a day, but until the sizzling diminishes. Turn the pan lower - say a bit below medium, let potato cruise a bit, but don't burn it. Lift it out and place on a plate at least as big as the disk of hash browns. It should be crisp, dark golden brown, and well salted. Add black pepper here if you like it. Pop three eggs in the pan and cook how you like them. Slid them on top of the potatos along with any bacon and/or sausage. Being American I don't really worry about mushrooms or tomatoes. You'll get various people saying you should par boil the potato, or wring the moisture out of the freshly grated potato, and these steps might please some, but they aren't nessary in a big enough pan with enough oil.

BOFH: I'm so pleased to be on the call, Boss. No, of course this isn't a recording

Re: 90 days

That's because you gave us "soccer" and then started slapping us about it every chance you get.

ASUS baffles customer by telling them thermal pad thickness is proprietary

Warranties

The trouble is that warranties are metered to last just long enough that the warranty expires _before_ you need something repaired. So, the assertion that opening or disassembling things will "void the warranty" is generally an empty threat.

Re: This sounds like ...

Or the normal hell-desk "required" response as indicated by job "training." Basically, "don't fiddle with the hardware. We do not want to deal with a liability suit when you electrocute yourself because you neglected to unplug the device first." Some old tube-driven radios had components that could still knock you cold hours after being turned off and unplugged.

Lessons have not been learned: Microsoft's Modern Comments leave users reaching for the rollback button

Re: "Modern Commenting"

I would like to see a stable word processor that offers the basics that most people would need, which would encompass the basic writing tasks that a single person needs. MS could break out other "tools" like commenting and team composition perhaps. But you would first need to educate the functionally illiterate to genuine writing needs and confuse "comments" with the silliness you run into in "comments" as understood in social media. There's actual work to be done.

Colonial Pipeline was looking to hire cybersecurity manager before ransomware attack shut down operations

Re: Maybe not

The issue with many security systems is that they necessarily implement some form of tighter access control. That has its upsides and downsides. It may very well be more secure to intrusion (physical or electronic), but if the implementation also makes it even slightly more onerous for the users and clients then 1) many users start to look for short cuts, or easier means of achieving an end; and 2) clients conclude the effort is worth less than the reward and start to look elsewhere. So, poorly implemented security measures from the point of view of those who have to deal them. People start writing down "more secure" gibberish passwords that are hard or impossible to memorize except by savants, meaning the "keys" to the kingdom can be on a thumb drive or a slip of paper.

I used to war drive around the city where I live and the unsecured access points were most numerous in state government buildings. I pointed this to a friend who worked for a state agency and was actually responsible helping maintain security, eliminating viruses, trojans, etc. He told me that the biggest problem were work bottle necks, issues such as one printer available to anywhere from ten to some times 50 personnel! Bureaucracies run on paperwork. So people would bring a personal printer, usually run off an unauthorized personal router in order to meet deadlines. Effectively their wireless routers created back doors into secure systems. The security staff were running their legs off suppressing this, but the people committing the acts were also the most productive. So, they might be chewed out by a superior, but you can't shoot the cow and improve milk production.

He said they were continually monitoring this (war driving themselves). There were other security problems as well. He had spent a month chasing a virus source that seemed to skip around town from one building to another, but always within the same unit. The head of said unit was complaining bitterly about this. In desperation my buddy created a board tracking dates of new outbreaks in places previously cleared, sometimes several times. It finally emerged that the very complaining supervisor had been carrying around a 3.5-inch disk from section to section of the unit to "backup work" and "monitor" work progress. The floppy was one from his home (to save the unit budget he said). Ultimately my friend had to physically catch the supervisor inserting the disk into and have him stop while the disk was scanned. Some of the unit sections affected had physical access limitations that required authorization before a person could physically enter the building or suite. So the problem was the fellow with the boss of the unit.

Tesla Autopilot is a lot dumber than CEO Musk claims, says Cali DMV after speaking to the software's boss

Re:10X

Seriously? Even 2X would be a very significant improvement. Why set your bar that high?

Re: uneasy about any level of automation

This is the point that really should be looked. Are Teslas as presently sold as safe as a normal, human operated vehicle or not. There's a lot of fuss when a Tesla is in an accident, but mile per mile, just what are the accident rates perTesla vs say a Lexus? All this personality jabber is just that, and irrelevant to what is really at stake. What Musk says is irrelevant. What does the actual data say?

Where did the water go on Mars? Maybe it's right under our noses: Up to 99% may still be in planet's crust

Geomorphology - Mars style

I find it surprising that there is so little discussion of features on Mars that look like dust-covered glaciers, or the other immense elephant in the room, the elevation of the Martian south polar regions. There are many satellite shots of the surface that contain what look like glacial features, but they are dust colored. Yet, no one thinks back to the "melting" of Himalayan glaciers that turned out not to have happened. The glacier surfaces were covered in rock and soil and were not visible as ice. The whole Himalayan ice loss issue had to be scaled back a very long way. There are also photos of events where it appears that an entire stratum is jetting some type of vapour out of a cliff face, accompanied by a land slide. The color, form and spacing indicates a level feature or stratum in the cliff is discharging some form of pressurized gas or vapour, and that discharge triggered the slides. Then, there is the Martian south pole. The planetary surface is higher at the south pole. That should lead to morphologically driven adiabatic cooling and precipitation. If the planet entered an ice age, that pole would grow and rise, the ice itself adding to the adiabatic effect. The long term result could be the fixing of water at the pole, and as the planet chilled, that would be further insulated by CO2 ice.

While Reg readers know the difference between a true hacker and cyber-crook, for everyone else, hacking means illegal activity

Re: Too Far Gone

Ah, but the use examples don't describe the action as an inherently criminal action. That is the issue. They do tend to trivialize the idea, but they don't criminalize it. There's a serious difference.

Ever had a bogus call from someone claiming to be the IRS? A tax scam ringleader just got sent down for 20 years

Re: Who says crime doesn't pay?

The sad part is that these scammed people don't actually try to contact the real IRS, right there in the Government pages or on the internet. They don't know that the IRS doesn't notify anyone by phone of anything. You kind of get the impression that they likely voted for Trump and took Q seriously.

Microsoft says it found 1,000-plus developers' fingerprints on the SolarWinds attack

Re: Oh those Russians!

I could buy perhaps the Chinese as a potential source, but NORK? Really? One of the serious problems that country has is that it discourages talent and merit. The Iranians might be a source, and they have the motives to be. But, on the balance, when you see the similarities to the Ukraine episode, the Russians are easily the best, immediate choice. They are also seriously handicapped by external sanctions that limit their ability to trade. Their agriculture has taken repeated serious hits several years in a row, and last, as a kleptocracy, their PTB are quite unhappy that their money launderer was turfed out of office before he could complete his work. China is in agricultural difficulties too (so's the US as far as that goes), but China is tremendously better off than Russia and has a vast array of legitimate overseas investments that can cover a lot of their short fall. So Russia is number one on the short list.

Trump silenced online: Facebook, Twitter etc balk at insurrection, shut the door after horse bolts and nearly burns down the stable

Re: And - Darwinism in action

Hawley is pond scum and far more dangerous than our soon-to-be ex-mad-man-in-office. He is absolutely cynical. There are a number of Congress creatures that are as bad or worse.

BOFH: Time for the MMOCC. You know, the Massively Moronic Online Christmas Call

Re: Not everybody.

That should read, "(t)he portable ones should be for everyone but admin. T'is the season of Saturnalia.

BOFH: Switch off the building? Great idea, Boss

Re: Parts of it date back to when fire was invented

A couple o decades ago I was working for an "expedition" is Israel. They were excavating a site in the Bet Netopa Valley north of Nazareth. One evening the directors threw a staff and labor party at the site (the "labor" were students who paid for the privilege of experiencing sweat, dust, scorpions, and discovering whether they were allergic to fig tree sap). Toward the end of the evening the cook, a Palestinian Christian, who, with his wife and daughters, produced a very fine meal of grilled meat fresh, various sorts of flat breads baked on site, rice, and fresh vegetables, imbibed a tad to much beer. We got a bonfire going and while waiting for a ride home, the cook tossed a very liberal amount of fuel (gasoline I think) on the fire. After that his wife and children dragged him off. I heard the next morning he couldn't find his eyebrows. Things quieted down and we sat and enjoyed the dark, and the distant thump and flare of artillery shells detonating beyond the mountains on Jordanian (or southern Syrian? border, east of the Jordan Valley and the Sea of Galilee.