Merci is a phenomenal photographer. Her selection of photos from our Mexico trip are here!

And on Flickr! Merci's photos - My Photos. Subtle differnet photo styles... fun to compare!

I've been bad about posting pics from trips lately, but here's some cool ones from the new year's Mexico road trip. We went up to Guadalajara then to Lake Chapala, the largest lake in Mexico. It's sort of a "Tahoe" type place, minus the snow, where a lot of people (Americans and Canadians in particular) have gone to retire. It's really quiet and really beautiful.

Anyway, it's also been a local catalyst for environmental action. Much like Mono Lake and the Aral Sea, industrial and urban water diversions have massively shrunk the lake from its normal levels, increasing the concentration of pollutants and wreaking havoc on the fishing industry. Introduction of the non-native water hyacinth has complicated matters as the devious plant is known to cover half the lake from time to time in a massive green carpet of un-navigable matter. It's also really shallow (about 15 feet), so many people feared the lake was literally on the verge of death.

Have a look at these Google Earth photos (click for full size). You will see the towns of Chapala and Ajijic, their respective piers, high and dry, and in the case of Ajijic, what appears to be a racetrack carved into what was once lake-bottom - indicating the assumed permanence of the dry condition.

THE TOWN OF CHAPALA:

THE TOWN OF AJIJIC:

I don't know when those satelites flew by, but this is what we saw a few weeks ago:

Has anyone EVER sent a "numeric page"? Since 1985? There is nothing that makes me quake with fury more than having someone's cell phone chatter on for an eternity beyond that person's indended outgoing message. I cannot think of one time, nor can anyone I know, where the computer voiced "post message" has had any utility whatsoever other than to chew up your time and sanity. "For! more! options! press 5!" ... what options? I just want to leave a message! like the good old days, when the thing just beeped and you started talking!

Now I need to listed to the computer tell me about all the idiotic things I can do other than just start talking. It's madness. A classic example of information overkill, the scourge of our times.

Some cellphone companies let you skip the whole thing by pressing "1", which, if standard, would be a godsend, but you never know what company you're dealing with and sometimes pressing "1" forces you to listen to the whole thing over again, or even hangs up with an insipid dismissal: "One! Is not a recognized option! Good Bye!" I quiver with helplessness knowing there is nothing whatsoever I can do but wait...wait....wait....

The only thing I can think of - this is all a conspiracy to burn more minutes. Who wants to start a class action lawsuit for the benefit of us all? At the very least, there ought to be a way to force your message to spare people the agony of listening to the robot... but alas, we must suffer.

(I wrote about this before, but having stumbled upon the Everyday Hogwash website, I decided to revisit this horrible issue in hopes of having it printed there)

When I first discoverd Firefox I was ecstatic, and I still am. It is clearly a superior web browser to Internet Explorer, and pretty much anything else, except, perhaps, Safari. But Mozilla's other open source projects, while clearly filled with good intent and backed by the brilliance of a multitude of developers far more talented than I am, are so filled with bugs that I am slowly starting to run away from them. Thunderbird has been hanging. Both FF and Thunderbird sometims stall for 5-10 seconds. The Mozillla Calendar (sunbird) is completely uselss because it does not run within either application and therefor has to be launched separately which I never think to do. I hate to say it but Outlook is the way to go when it comes to organizational software and email clients.

Anyway, the main source of my ire today is N|Vu - an open source webpage editing client sorta like dreamweaver. Basically it dosn't work. It stalls out after a while and won't save changes or close documents. I have no idea why this is the case, but I do not have the patience to figure out why, nor should I. Software should not be released that has this many bugs. It's a pity that it's come to this, but that's that.