Smoking linked to ALS in women but not men

This came up in my news alert. It sounds pretty thin, but I'm passing it along anyway.

Am. J. Epidemiol. -- Abstracts: Weisskopf et al. 160 (1): 26

They have 11 years of data to work with, and 621 people in the set. I don't know enough statistics to know if that's good enough, but I know that the fact that ALS is so rare makes it harder to study.

Bye bye babies.

We've given away the baby hamsters. The first went to a man who was going to surprise a five-year-old boy with it. The second went to a family with a two-year-old.

We had a debate at the last minute about whether to give away the baby or the mother, but we stuck with the original plan. The baby was really docile. We'd take it out of the cage, and it would walk slowly around, not in a hurry to get away. Its mother acts more like attempted escape.

At less than seven weeks old, the children seem nearly full grown. There's still a noticeable difference between mom and child, but it's hard to see without picking them up. The baby has longer fur, and all the fluff makes it look bigger.

I'm sad to see them go. It was fun watching them grow, and I feel like we raised them even though we really just watched.

A good way to advertise.

I got some Reese's Peanut Butter Cups from the vending machine. When I opened them up, there's that little stiff paper holder that they put in there (I guess) to keep the cups from being mangled in transit. It's always been white, but this one is advertising their new product. "NOW AVAILABLE!" it says, "White Chocolate Reese's."

I think that's a good way to advertise. This normally blank surface catches my attention because it suddenly has something on it, and it's apropos because I'm a current customer, clearly interested in peanut butter cups.

Unfortunately, you can't do it often. Once customers get used to seeing a message there, they'll ignore it. Still, I thought this was a good way to get the word out about a variant on something I already like.

The Old Kyle.

My stepfather likes to retell jokes, frequently bad jokes. I eventually figured out that the entertainment value in a bad joke is not in the hearing but in the telling. The funny part is the strained groans from the listeners.

Anyway, I've had this exchange with him a few times.

Him: What? The old Kyle would never do something like that!

Me: The old Kyle was a lot younger than the new Kyle.

Somehow this dual meaning of "old" keeps entertaining me.

From PC to Mac

My wife's 600MHz Dell with Windows 98 has been destroying itself for maybe a year. Last week we got her a Mac laptop and spent a few days transferring things from a computer that crashed painfully and frequently.

The biggest pain came from moving email. The worst part is that the transfer was Microsoft-to-Microsoft, and it was still painful. We started with contacts organized into folders and email organized into lots of folders.

To move the mail, I set up an IMAP server on a local Linux box and used that to transfer mail folder-by-folder. I used a trick on the Linux end to create the 70+ folders in mass, but I still had to create them each individually on the Mac end. I transferred them one-by-one on both computers.

Contacts never really went well. Regardless of what I selected, the export would always give just the contacts in the top level folder. I wound up putting all the organized contacts into the top level and moving them that way. They'll have to be separated out again on the other end.

There are still some wrinkles to iron out, but the Mac has been doing very well since we got it. One thing that took me a while to notice is that the thing has no fans. It runs cool enough naturally that it doesn't need gross temperature regulation. It reminds me of those jokes I used to make about the original Pentium's natural state being self-incineration.

Scientists test growth factors in fight against brain diseases

This came from my news alert:

Scientists test growth factors in fight against brain diseases

The article is about several different treatments. It starts out with some broad text that talks about all of them. It then has sections on individual ailments.

There's a treatment for ALS listed that may extend life by 25%. The patient they talked to who's in the trial and has ALS has had ALS for a year and a half and still lives by herself. She has trouble speaking and using one hand. I wish my mom were doing that well.

Antispam off the deep end.

I was glancing through my incoming mail log (which caused a maildrop bug) when I noticed an obvious automatic response, but different from most that I see.

Date: 25 Jun 2004 13:42:36 -0400
To: cfelacoliwg@toehold.com
From: "CDD AntiSpam Enforcement" <spamcop@cdd.com>
Subject: SPAM MESSAGES WITH OUR DOMAIN NAME

The mail with the Subject line, "[SPAM 11.11] Re[7]:", was sent by a spammer with forged return headers, from/to your network. You are likely recieving this message as a result of the Non-delivery response.

The CDD Network, does NOT send spam and all parties forging CDD addresses will be held liable for defaming our organization.

I read this and thought, "what good is that?"

I released this message from purgatory so I could reply to it. I was hoping I might convince the fine folks at cdd.com that such an automatic reply is fairly useless. Truthfully, what I wrote was irate and not very productive. Still, I was hoping someone might read it and have second thoughts.

A reply came back 13 seconds later. It said, in part, 'The mail with the Subject line, "[SPAM 03.82] Re: SPAM MESSAGES WITH OUR DOMAIN NAME", was sent by a spammer...'

Putting cash into an ATM

I've heard that it's a bad idea to put cash into an ATM. The reasoning is that a bank employee could take the cash from the envelope. Then the bank claims that you made an error during the deposit, and you become a victim of theft.

This morning I called my bank to ask about this. The answers I got were good answers, but I couldn't tell how seriously the question was considered. It sounded more like an answer from faith, an answer given to make the customer feel better.

I presented the scenario, and the first response was, "that has never happened" (emphasis theirs).

I said, "I believe that," but what keeps it from happening? What if there is a discrepancy between the number I enter at the ATM and the value counted by the bank? They said I wouldn't lose anything. My account would be credited the full amount. Also, the employee would be terminated.

That's reassuring also, but I pressed on. How do you tell the difference between employee theft and a customer who enters the wrong amount at the ATM? Can you distinguish fraud and error? They said that everything is monitored. The ATMs are monitored and the employees who empty the ATM's envelopes are under surveillance at all times.

That's what I thought before I made the call. I thanked them for their time.

Afterward I wondered how long the surveillance tapes are kept, and what the resolution is on them. Can someone watching the recording distinguish a $20 bill and a $10 bill? I don't know, but I'm not too worried about it. As my bank's representatives said, if it's a concern, go to a live teller.

A metaphor for intellectual creations.

Adam Kessel talks about Ray Bradbury talking about Michael Moore. That's not what I thought was interesting, though. What I found interesting was this bit about intellectual property:

Fundamentally, though, it's not about money, it's about control. One of the points John Zorn makes repeatedly in the documentary A Bookshelf On Top Of The Sky is that you can't control a work of art you've created. It's not really "yours" any more than a child you create is "yours." You have all these ideas about what you want your child to be and what you want your child to do, but it takes on a life of its own and you just have to let it go.

Emphasis mine. This is exactly right. "My" daughter is "mine" only to the point that I had a hand in creating her. Where she goes and what she does is not entirely under my control. As she gets older, her fate is more and more out of my hands.

Likewise, I put words out on a web site, and they're no longer under my control. Like manure dropped in the forest, I can't tell what will grow from them. It might be weeds or trees or merely moss. Hopefully in the long run, the forest is a better place for it. I can hope, and I can try to have an influence, but it's ultimately out of my hands.

Identifying bad responses.

Earlier I talked about using bad bounce messages to combat spam, but I didn't talk about how to detect the bad bounces in the first place.

The way I'm doing this relies on TMDA. Every message I send has a dated address as the envelope sender. This is the address that errors (bounces) are supposed to go to, so I know that any legitimate mailer daemon response will come to a dated address.

Given that fact, I can safely filter any daemon message that's not to a dated address.

Note that the same rule takes care of misfired challenges from other TMDA users. TMDA's challenges look a lot like bounce messages. I wish that it were true of other auto-responses. In spite of the simplicity of the above, the actual rules I use to discard auto-responses are convoluted. I wind up getting junk responses from sales@example.com, people on vacation, and the abuse departments of ISPs.

I have SpamAssassin in the pipe too, and it can't tell an unsolicited response from a legitimate message. The only way I can tell the difference myself is by recalling that I never emailed the person responding.

This is a big problem I have with content filters. A lot of my unwanted email consists of legitimate responses to illegitimate mail. I can't expect a pure content filter to tell the difference. SpamAssassin is really good at identifying spam, but it can't help with the unwanted email that's not spam.

Another pet to entertain our dogs.

While at Dad's place this weekend, my pet-loving daughter spotted the bunny out by the garage and wanted to pet it. She asked politely, and we all gathered around as they brought an albino rabbit out of the cage.

She's the most docile rabbit I've ever seen. She just sat there in the grass while we petted and chatted. She munched. After a while she started to wander around but didn't make a break for it.

Vanilla was raised by a teacher in a class full of children. She's used to people. After seeing how sweet this bunny is and hearing that she's available to take home, we decided fairly easily that we'd have her.

The dogs haven't quite gotten over the hamsters yet. Now there's this rabbit!

We're hoping that eventually the dogs can get used to the rabbit to the point where we can have them both loose in the same room together with a chaperone. Rabbits can be litter trained, and the rumor is that this one is already. Hamsters can be litter trained too, BTW, but I doubt we'll let them run wild in the living room.

Heat from above.

Dad has a pool at his place, which we visited on Sunday. While I was enjoying the warm water with my warm daughter, I was getting warmed over by a mass of incandescent gas.

I haven't had a sunburn in quite a while. I used to get them all the time, but I had forgotten how quickly it happens. In any case, I'm a demonic shade of red from about the shoulder blades up.

Luckily, after a while, my wife stepped in and slapped some sunblock on me before it got much worse. Even so, it stings.

Burn or no burn, swimming in the pool was really fun, and it was probably the most exercise I've gotten since the last time I was sunburned. My darling daughter is pretty comfortable with some water and a flotation device, and I'm happy about that.

A year of ALS.

Last year on June 20, I found out that my mom has ALS (also known as Lou Gehrig's disease). She'd been diagnosed with it months before, but for various good reasons wanted to wait to tell us. At that time she was having trouble with fine motor movements in her hands, and she lost her balance easily. She still worked and lead a mostly normal life.

This year, on June 19, I found out that my mom has a decision to make about her future health. Her breathing has gotten bad enough that it's time to put in a feeding tube, if they're going to do it. If her breathing gets much worse, they won't be able to do the operation. She still eats just fine if someone is feeding her.

She also should decide soon how much she's willing to use a respirator to keep breathing. At some point, breathing will be possible, but not automatic. It will require her attention. At that point, she'll need something to keep her breathing when she sleeps.

It's been a little over a year with the disease, and it's completely changed how Mom lives. She cannot walk. She can't user her hands. Her husband takes her to the bathroom. She speaks very slowly. When we learned she had it, we also learned that life expectancy after diagnosis is two to five years. A year later, it doesn't look as if another year will pass.

Stop ruining my movies with advertising!

Since getting a TiVo, I've gotten to see a lot more movies. I set it up to record things (often in the middle of the night), and then I can watch them whenever, in as many sittings as necessary. It's also even better than a VCR at skipping commercials.

TBS, however, isn't satisfied with putting commercials only outside the movie. They've decided that when the movie returns from commercial break, they're going to put a commercial inside the movie. They take over a big chunk of the corner of the screen and play their commercial there. TBS isn't the only station to do this, but they've irritated me with it the most.

A movie I watched weeks ago had sound in this commercial. It drowned out the dialog of the show I wanted to hear.

Another movie I watched had its dialog clobbered because it was in subtitles. TBS's ad for some upcoming show blocked out what the bad guy was saying to his evil cohorts.

They probably think this is justice. It's comeuppance for the remote-wielding public. Viewers who watch programming without watching commercials are stealing, after all, so they've had this treatment coming for a long time. Since virtually everyone is a thief, I doubt it bothers TBS that even people who watched the regularly-scheduled commercials are still having their show ruined by the commercials designed to foil commercial avoiders.

It won't be long before every show has a ticker along the bottom of the screen, with a steady stream of advertising. It'll be timed to coincide with the show, so as to leave no doubt about what brand of widget has saved the protagonist from certain doom. It'll be a glorious day for advertising.

Relative speeds of movie dangers.

Boing Boing posted "Could you outrun a crossbow bolt? How about a 747?" linking to "The Reality of Running Away from Stuff" which lists the relative speeds of various dangers found in movies. I found this interesting because I watched "Behind Enemy Lines" last night. In it, a super hornet spends quite a while avoiding a surface to air missile (SAM).

To be fair, the movie did depict the missile as faster than the aircraft, but it was a close enough race to make it tense. According to the page, the missile is more than twice the speed of the F-15 Eagle. I looked up both aircraft and came up with different numbers, however.

The F-15's advertised speed is Mach 2.5+ (1,875 mph, 838.2 m/s), but the reality page says 715 m/s. The F/A-18 is listed as Mach 1.8+, which comes to about 612 m/s. The SAM (1180 m/s) catches up to both of these easily. Still, I wonder where the other numbers came from.

Near-death on the tollway.

On a three-lane highway, sometimes the middle lane is empty, and cars from either side both try to get into it at once. I see it happen more than any other near-accident, usually in front of me. Today, I was one of the cars. It's a little frightening, but we didn't really get that close to a wreck.

What really bothered me was when I had another lane-change problem later in my trip. I'm driving in the center lane, passing someone on my right, when that car tries to change lanes into me. I swerved into the (thankfully empty) left lane. If you see Illinois license plate "NFL NUT" on the road, watch out!

Either one of these wouldn't have been worth talking about. The fact that I had two of these in one trip worried me. I guess these random events are bound to double up eventually, but it still is giving me the creeps.

Using bad bounce messages to combat spam.

Postfix documentation calls what I'm talking about "backscatter." Before I found that, I said spammers were forging my domain on their outgoing junk, and I'd get the replies. I get a lot of backscatter because my domain accepts mail for any user name and directs it all to me.

In the first two weeks of June, my filter identified 71,220 of these critters, which is 5,087 per day. They're all the result of someone forging my domain on an email.

I could drop them all, but I don't. I use them to populate my own DNSBL. Sometimes the responding mailer daemon will include the original headers of the message that triggered the response. In that case, I can see where the email originated. For instance, here's one:

Received: from bbc.com ([218.128.244.106]) by sanction.DATEM with Microsoft SMTPSVC(5.0.2195.6713);

         Tue, 15 Jun 2004 22:27:24 -0800

Date: Wed, 16 Jun 2004 06:28:07 +0000

From: store0@toehold.com

Return-Path: store0@toehold.com

Based on that, I know that the computer that claimed to be bbc.com (218.128.244.106) forged my address on its outgoing mail. It's probably a flesh-eating, soul-stealing, spam-spewing zombie. I add that IP to my list of IPs that I don't like very much.

Each IP in my list has a date attached, which I set to the current date every time that IP brings itself to my attention. This way I can expire them off the list when they stop misbehaving (or merely leave me alone).

In general, I think IP black lists are bad. The above isn't the only (automated) way that I add IPs to my list, and I have no doubt that there are addresses on it that do not deserve to be. Even bounce messages technically contain data from untrusted sources. There's no way to know that those "Received" headers are valid!

I use the list only as another data point when SpamAssassin is evaluating incoming mail. Having an entry on this list will not block anything; it just makes it look worse.

Will code for contributions.

A side project of the moment is hashcash-sendmail, which is a generic sendmail wrapper to add hashcash to outgoing mail. I wrote it because I personally wanted something like it. A few folks on the hashcash mailing list are using it, and that's a thrill.

What really made my day a while back was that someone sent me a patch for my little project. He had an idea for a feature that he wanted, and he implemented it himself. That's just awesome!

Security theater

The most recent Crypto-Gram linked to a conversation between Bruce Schneier and Bruce Sterling. It's a lot of rehash of ideas I've seen Schneier discuss before. If you haven't been privy to the previous hashings, this rehash may be interesting. My favorite quote: "Pigs kill more people annually than sharks." This is the kind of thing I had in mind when compared West Nile virus to driving.

One thing mentioned is "security theater." Security theater is when something is done to give the appearance of security even though it does not improve security. With that in mind, I want to talk about my last trip to California.

On my way back to Chicago, I went through security at LAX. After taking off my shoes and belt and emptying my pockets into the ravenous X-ray conveyor belt, they decided to look in my carry-on bag. I had some candle holders in there, and I guess they looked odd on the screen.

After rooting in the bag a little, the guy found the boxes the things were packed in. He guessed they were wine glasses, and I agreed with him. They didn't even check what they really were! Not only could they have been something else, they didn't even make me come up with my own lie--it was supplied for me.

Witnessing my hesitant response (I couldn't remember what they really were), the other security guy says, "sounds like you didn't pack them." I told them my wife had packed them.

Satisfied, they left me to put my personal belongings back in their places. They left me with two of the metal detector wands they use. I looked around. The wands (with my bag) were behind a small shield, plenty large enough to keep anyone from seeing what I was doing with the stuff on the table (i.e., the wands). Behind me were some other
security folk who could have seen what I was doing, but their attention was elsewhere.

Would anyone notice if I sabotaged one of these things?

I left them alone. I'm sure if I'd taken too long to "replace my pocket items," there would have been suspicion, but a prepared attacker could probably muddle up the security wands in the time allowed. If I'd been a prankster I could have superglued them to the table easily.

This reminds me of when I took a studio tour at NBC a while back. They had a walk-through metal detector. The trouble is, when it went off, the guy would use the wand to identify what he thought was the culprit without making sure in any systematic way. For example, a woman walked through, and it beeped. He said, "it's probably your belt buckle." He held the wand to her belt, and it beeped. He was satisfied, but she could have had a gun somewhere.

What do I expect from a studio, though? They buy make-up by the truckload. If it looks like security, that's all that matters. Security is a feeling, after all, and feelings derive from perception more than reality.

Congestion conjecture.

Every morning, the tollway is packed. Exactly when it's packed is fairly consistent, and frequent tollway travelers know when it is. They plan for it. They need to get to their destination at a particular time, and they leave at an appropriate time.

Most people need to get to work at about the same time. Most people need to leave the tollway at about the same time. The rush hour always ends at about the same time. It just evaporates. Everyone jamming the road has gotten where they're going, and they all exit at once. Morning rush hour will always end at the same time.

Morning rush hour will begin progressively earlier. As more people jam the road, people have to leave ever-earlier to get to work at the same time.

Lately my daily commute has stretched to a total of 2.5 hours per day. I don't spend a lot of time thinking about the nature of the congestion, but I do think about it often.

Gator gobbler.

There's a street carnival a couple of suburbs over. They were selling novelties like alligator and fried Snickers bars. I took a bite of the alligator. As advertised, it tastes like chicken. I suppose it could have been chicken for all I know. In any case, I'm hoping that there's not now some gator seeking vengeance.

The hamster in the rye.

After witnessing a tussle between the two caged babies, we decided they each needed their own cage. According to the experts, we have weeks more, but watching them wrestle and make little unhappy noises at each other seemed like our cue to expand the accommodations. We got a smaller version of the first cage, and it's doing fine. I now think that getting the large cage was a bit of a waste in the first place.

When we went to the pet store to get the new cage, my daughter took an interest in the reptiles. She saw a Jackson's chameleon (which did not have horns) and got to touch a leopard gecko. Watching that chameleon's eyes swivel all around is almost as cool as watching my daughter enjoy the chameleon at all.

That night, the hamster in the loaner cage spent the night running on the old squeaky wheel. At around 3:00 in the morning, I got up and disconnected the wheel from the cage so that he couldn't run on it. In the morning, my wife took the wheel out, and in the evening the dogs destroyed it. It was a team effort.

The babies are now larger than mice and looking more like real hamsters. Their bodies are growing into their oversized heads. They're very cute.

Root beer float without the ice cream.

One night I mixed Diet Sprite with some root beer. I forget which brand of root beer it was. I tried to get them in about equal parts, and the result tasted somewhat like a root beer float. If you feel compelled to experiment with this (i.e., different proportions and/or beverages), I'd love to hear the results. Otherwise, just enjoy this tiny retarded recipe.

Brain implants control external machines.

Human subjects play mind games using a net of sensors implanted in their skulls. This is similar to monkeys playing video games, also with implants. I wonder how long it will be before folks with spinal injury will be independent again with one of these surgeries. I suppose the next step might be a powered exoskeleton to move the patient. After that, they'll have the patient's brain wired to their own muscles with an artificial nervous system.

Chinese doctor eases paralysis

This one came up in my news alert, but it's only tangentially related to ALS. A Chinese doctor claims success in easing paralysis. The article has some political discussion because the doctor is using fetal stem cells. There's not much technical detail. The description sounds like it's geared toward folks with spinal injuries.

It's still rockin' XOR to me.

Boing Boing has a post about a program which takes two arbitrary binary files and "munges" them into a third binary file. It can then take any two of those three files and produce the missing file.

It sounds to me like a simple XOR! Moreover, I'm sure I've heard this idea before. I searched a little.

In 2000, Slashdot posted a link to "A method of free speech on the Internet: random pads" which describes using XOR to hide file contents.

In 1995, RISKS-FORUM Digest had a message from Erann Gat titled "The source of semantic content." In it, Erann describes a way to transmit forbidden content using a one-time pad. The resulting thread has interesting discussion.

Erann claims that people using this system would be able to deny that they were propagating forbidden content. Barry Margolin points out, "unless they actually didn't know what the purpose of those random bit streams were, they would be perjuring themselves." David Harpe says, "During the trial, the reconstructed image is all the jury will see, understand or remember. They will fall asleep during the expert witness testimony regarding public key cryptography."

I have two remarks of my own. One is that it's interesting how in nine years "forbidden content" went from pornography to copyrighted works, and it may be about to go back.

The second thing this brings up to me is the nature of computer evidence in court. The police can seize my computer and tell the court that they found on it whatever they want to say. I have no way to prove that the evidence was planted. Of course, this isn't that different from the past. It's not more difficult to plant information on a computer than it is to plant damning paper.

Bill Gates plays Petals Around the Rose

I remember Petals Around the Rose from way back. I don't remember if I solved it or if someone told me how it worked. Either way, I'd forgotten about it when I read about Bill Gates playing Petals Around the Rose. It didn't take me long to remember, but it was still interesting reading about others looking at the problem.

Incara testing on ALS patients sooner

My news alert came up with the confusingly-titled "Incara Announces Adjustment to Phase 1 Clinical Trial of AEOL 10150 to Initiate Safety Studies Directly in Patients With ALS" today. It says, basically, that Incara will start testing its new drug on real ALS patients sooner than they previously thought by a matter of months. The article has some details and a quote from someone who is "more than pleased."

Nigritude Ultramarine

If you're wondering why "Nigritude Ultramarine" might be popping up on your radar (or even in front of your face right now), follow the link. Long story short, it's a contest to see who can get linked through that phrase the most. The link above is basically my "vote" for the winner.

Death of the international lyrics server.

Anyone remember lyrics.ch? Record companies crushed it, claiming copyright. It was a nice one-stop source for lyrics. You could even type in bits of a song that you remembered and have it come up with songs that had those words.

After the dust settled, it came back without the best features. When it showed you a song, it was in some retarded Java applet that wouldn't let you select and copy the text. To the mighty record companies, that smelled like victory.

Now lyrics seem to be spread all over. You can find whatever you want with Google, but there's no one-stop lyrics server. Do the record companies smell what the net is cooking? It's still not quite as good as the old International Lyrics Server, but it's harder for them to stamp out their customers individually.

Hamsters coming of age.

The babies are doing well in their own cage, living without the mother who killed their sibling. Since they're "all grown up," we're more comfortable handling them. They're skittish, hard to keep a hold of, but they're really cute. I love it when they get on the exercise wheel together! It only moves when they cooperate.

We can take Baby out and play with her again too. Now that she's not pregnant, she's more docile and comfortable with us. I really enjoy holding her.

In both cages there's now more food than the weight of the hamsters. I saw one of the babies sleeping in a box of food much larger than it was, and I tried to imagine that. I picture myself sleeping in a hot tub full of cheeseburgers.

Protein Diagnostic Test for ALS and others.

This came up in my news alert. It's a press release that talks a little about a recent developement in ALS diagnosis. These folks have a blood test that can distinguish ALS patients from Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and the the more fortunate control group.

It's important because without something like this, diagnosis takes months.

Another hamster fatality.

I won't go into the gory details, but we're sure the baby hamster was killed. We called the vet hotline again, and they said that infanticide (and cannibalism) is unfortunately very common in hamsters.

We put the two remaining babies together in their own cage. They've been eating solid food, so we're pretty sure they'll be OK in there without their mother. They're about 21 days old, and the vet said that puberty hits the females at about 70 days. So in about seven weeks, we'll need to separate the babies from each other.

Misheard lyrics.

"Crazy" by Seal came up in my random listening. A quick google gave me a page with lyrics. It says, in part:

...Crazy yellow people walking through my head.
One of them's got a gun, to shoot the other one.

But I've always heard that as...

Crazy are the people walking through my head.
One of them's got a gun. Shoot the other one.

It made sense to me! Afterall, t's crazy to shoot the guy who doesn't have the gun.

Along the same lines, The Offspring's "Self Esteem" actually says

Late at night she knocks on my door
Drunk again and looking to score
Now I know I should say no
But that's kind of hard when she's ready to go

I've always heard it as "But it's kind of hard when she's ready to go." I like mine better; it's a nice double entendre.

Total hamster awareness.

The baby hamsters are still a bit squinty-eyed, but I saw all three of them roaming around the cage this morning. I'd been worried about their water intake. I'd seen them eating solid food, but I couldn't tell if they were still nursing as well. If not, they'd need to find the water. The problem is the water bottle is a little high for them to reach. This morning I saw one drinking from it, so I guess they're OK. I also saw a couple try out the exercise wheel. They're kind of clumsy on it, but they got it to move.

I think it's time to call the vet and find out what to do next.

Happy hamster news.

Their little eyes are opening. They're not totally open, but instead of having their eyes closed, it now looks as if they're squinting. I saw one get in the exercise wheel, but the wheel didn't move. They're still smaller than mice (a field mouse, not that Logitech contraption on your desk).