Thank you for continuing to afford me the opportunity to enlist your participation in my idiosyncratic version of reality for the past three years. It continues to be its own reward; I hope my kind readers continue to be stimulated, challenged, entertained, edified, outraged here. What do I want for a birthday present? Your suggestions about improvements you would like to see in FmH — either content or performance.

With respect to the latter, I know several people wrote me with pleasure about better loading and less browser choking when I temporarily resorted to a simpler template. You were probably disappointed when I reverted to my original design when Blogger was fixed and I was able to update again. You may recall that someone was kind enough to make an attempt several months ago at rewriting my template with CSS layout control without tables. This made a big difference in how fast FmH loads, but unfortunately we couldn’t iron out the bugs under some browsers. I do intend, sometime I have time, to have another stab at this problem. Hopefully, there’s enough here to continue to put up with the frustrations.

While I’m not looking for fame and fortune in the blogosphere, I do wonder why my referrer count tells me that readership of FmH has been plateaued at around 400 visits a day for the longest time. I know I should find a way to ask this question to the rest of the world which is not reading FmH instead of asking you, but I would welcome any thoughts as to why I seem to have hit such a ‘glass ceiling’ in readership. [And is that more like 400 people checking in once a day; 20 of you looking at FmH twenty times a day; or several thousand of you reading less than a few times a week?]

“A war against Iraq could kill half a million people, warns a new report by medical experts – and most would be civilians.

The report claims as many as 260,000 could die in the conflict and its three-month aftermath, with a further 200,000 at risk in the longer term from famine and disease. A civil war in Iraq could add another 20,000 deaths.

Collateral Damage is being published on Tuesday in 14 countries and has been compiled by Medact, an organisation of British health professionals. It comes as the Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, is deciding how to respond to a series of deadlines on weapons inspections imposed by the United Nations.” New Scientist

Ananova

‘PALM BEACH COUNTY, Fla. — A jury awarded the widow of teacher Barry Grunow $1.2 million from a gun distributor Thursday.

Pam Grunow’s lawsuit accused Valor Corp of distributing a gun that was “unsafe, defective and lacked features that would have prevented a minor from using it.” ‘

“The number of organized hacking syndicates targeting financial institutions around the world is growing at a disturbingly fast rate. And so is the number of banks willing to pay these high-tech extortionists hush money to protect their reputations, according to a security expert at The World Bank.” ComputerWorld

William Safire wants you to know that, ‘If the Homeland Security Act is not amended before passage, here is what will happen to you:

Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend — all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as “a virtual, centralized grand database.”

To this computerized dossier on your private life from commercial sources, add every piece of information that government has about you — passport application, driver’s license and bridge toll records, judicial and divorce records, complaints from nosy neighbors to the F.B.I., your lifetime paper trail plus the latest hidden camera surveillance — and you have the supersnoop’s dream: a “Total Information Awareness” about every U.S. citizen.

This is not some far-out Orwellian scenario. It is what will happen to your personal freedom in the next few weeks if John Poindexter gets the unprecedented power he seeks.’ NY Times op-ed