LibreOffice...latest version

     LibreOffice is a free and open source office suite developed by The Document Foundation. It was forked from OpenOffice.org in 2010, which was an open-sourced version of the earlier StarOffice. I have been using this program now for a couple of years and so far don't have a single complaint. 
     LibreOffice takes the place of Microsoft Office which will set you back well over $100. The LibreOffice suite comprises programs for word processing, spreadsheets, slideshows, drawings, databases, and composing mathematical formula. It is available in 110 languages. AND...it's compatible with any document created in Office. For example, you can save and/or load in any of the following word documents in these formats: .odt, .ott, .fodt, .uot, .docx, .xml, .doc, .dot, .xml, .html, .rtf, .txt, .docx. If you need help it is very well documented. 
     LibreOffice uses the international ISO/IEC standard OpenDocument file format as its native format to save documents for all of its applications, but perhaps more importantly, it supports all major competing office suite applications (proprietary and open source). LibreOffice is also compatible with other major office suites, including Microsoft Office.
     LibreOffice is available for a variety of computing platforms including Microsoft Windows, OS X (10.8 or newer), and Linux (including a LibreOffice Viewer for Android. If you're a math person, it has an application designed for creating and editing mathematical formulas. These formulas can be incorporated into other documents in the LibreOffice suite, such as those created by Writer or Calc, by embedding the formulas into the document. The database program is similar to Microsoft Access. 
     A wide assortment of templates are available for download, too. Take a look at the list of what's available: Accounting, Agenda, Arts,Book, Brochure/Pamphlet, Budget, Business, Calendar, Card, Resume, CD/DVD, Certificate, Checkbook, Christmas, Computer, Conferences, E-book, Education, Academia, Elementary/Secondary School, Envelope, Fax, Genealogy, Grocery, Invoice, Labels, Letter, Magazine, Media, Medical, Memo, Music, Newsletter, Notes, Paper, Presentation, Recipe, Science, Sports, Timeline, Timesheet, Trades, To Do List and Writer. 
     IMPRESSIVE.

The Fascinating Donkey

     
     Donkeys are among the most fascinating members of the horse-like family. We usually think of donkeys as pack animals or being ridden, but they also make gentle, loving pets, especially for children and the elderly. They are also used as stable companions for horses, and when pastured with sheep and goats donkeys will protect them from attack by dogs and coyotes...guard donkeys! 
     Like zebras and mules, donkeys are different from horses. You'd pretty much have to be familiar with horses to notice a lot of donkey characteristics, but one thing you can's mist is donkeys have big ears. Donkeys come in a variety of sizes from the Miniature Mediterranean (under 36 inches) to the Mammoth Jackstock (14 hands and up). The rare French Poitou donkey ( there are fewer than 200 purebred left in the world today) is characterized by it’s huge head and ears, and very thick, shaggy, curled black coat, can stand 14 to 15 hands high. (There are.) The types of donkeys Donkeys are classified by their size: 36.01-48", Standard; 48.01" to 54 (jennets) or 56 (jacks), Large Standard; and 54/56" and over, Mammoth Stock. They often live for 25 or more years. 
     Donkeys can be used just like horses with a saddle and in harness, but donkeys are more laid back and self-preserving in nature than horses and this can sometimes cause problems and it explains why they are often perceived as being stubborn. They try not to do anything that they perceive as being dangerous or unpleasant to themselves. Thus, sometimes they refuse to do as directed by humans. 
     It is this 'looking out for Number 1' attitude that makes donkeys great guard animals -- a donkey gelding or jennet can watch over an entire herd of cattle, sheep or goats because of their natural aversion to predators. Their large ears give them an acute sense of hearing and they can bite and kick with both their front and back legs and that, along with their keen sense of danger and self-preservation makes them excellent guard animals. Dogs and donkeys don't usually mix well, so they are especially useful in when it comes to discouraging attacks by animals like wolves. Because of their natural dislike of canines they have to be trained to leave the house or farm dog alone.  

All About Donkeys   
Fun Donkey Facts

The Invisible Gorilla Blog

     This Blog hasn't been updated since 2012 which is too bad because it's got some interesting articles:

• How experts recall chess positions 
• New guide to writing and revising 
• Ghost busters parapsychology, and the first study of inattentional blindness 
• Think video games make you smarter? Not so fast… 
• Harry Potter and the Illusion of Potential 

….and more.

Design Fixation

     Any time we are faced with a situation requiring a solution we want to go with the first thing that comes to mind and often it's hard to get past that first thought or impression and consider other options or solutions. Our first idea may not be the best one, but we fixate on it. 
     This phenomenon is called design fixation, or being being set in our ways, or it could be the result of tunnel vision. And one I often heard in the business world, we've always done it this way. The result is we are blind to alternatives. 
     One of the biggest factors in design fixation is the desire to copy old ways because they have worked in the past or because we are familiar with the techniques involved. As a result we can easily ignore better solutions or, possibly, nuances that make this particular situation different. Once we get fixated on an idea that we think is best our main concern is proving that it is, indeed, the best solution. 
     One big problem in the business world is that time is money and so anything that takes research and development or delays production is unacceptable. Another reason is that mistakes happen and/or things don't work out as expected and when that happens somebody has to take the blame. Nobody wants to have a finger pointed at them and be told it's their fault. The simple solution then is to not take risks, you won’ and be creative. 
     I've had customers who have insisted that faulty or inferior designs be produced simply because it was their idea and they wanted what they wanted...no arguments. Sometimes no amount of convincing worked. 
    Sometimes, you don't know how bad your idea is until you put it into practice! Again, if it fails we're back to the same old problem...time and money was wasted and guess who gets the blame. No need to risk that, we think. 
     Some interesting papers on this phenomenon can be found on the Design Society webpage HERE. 

A Step Beyond to Overcome Design Fixation – an MIT paper 
11 Ways to Think Outside the Box – an informative article from Life Hack 
On the other hand….One of the most popular, enduring and misguided cliches of the last few years has been to “think outside the box.” A Forbes Magazine article.
Doing things “The Old Fashioned Way” No Longer Works

6 Reasons People Won't Change
How To Handle That Person Who Won’t Change
Ten Keys to Handling Unreasonable & Difficult People
Don't Try to Reason with Unreasonable People

QGIS - a Free Mapping Program

     QGIS is a free open-source and user friendly desktop geographic information system application that provides data viewing, editing, and analysis.  As a free software application under the GNU GPL, it can be freely modified to perform different or more specialized tasks. 
     What it does is, it allows users to create maps with many layers using different map projections. Maps can be assembled in different formats and for different uses. QGIS allows maps to be composed of raster or vector layers. 
     The program has a lot of documentation in English but some documents, such as the user guide, are also available in other languages.

Cenotes

     Cenote Angelita or Little Angel is a hidden underwater river in in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula and is one of the most amazing places on earth.  There appears to be rivers flowing under the water. The rivers are actually an illusion due to a phenomenon called a halocline where waters with different levels of salinity form into layers because of a variation in density. 
     Cenote Angelita is comprised of fresh water until about 29 meters when it switches to a 1-meter layer of hydrogen sulfide, after which the entire cave bottom is filled with saltwater from 30 to 60 meters deep. So what appears as a river is actually a dense layer of saltwater resting at the bottom of a cave. 
     Cenote (pronounced, say-no-tay) is a natural sinkhole resulting from the collapse of limestone bedrock that exposes groundwater underneath.  Especially associated with the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico, cenotes were sometimes used by the ancient Maya for sacrificial offerings. 

     Cenote water is often very clear, as the water comes from rain water filtering slowly through the ground, and therefore contains very little suspended particulate matter. The groundwater flow rate within a cenote may be very slow.  In many cases, cenotes are areas where sections of cave roof have collapsed revealing an underlying cave system, and the water flow rates may be much faster: up to 10 kilometers (6 mi) per day. 
     Cenotes around the world attract cave divers who have documented extensive flooded cave systems through them, some of which have been explored for lengths of 100 km (62 mi) or more. Cenotes are formed by dissolution of rock and the resulting subsurface void, which may or may not be linked to an active cave system, and the subsequent structural collapse. Rock that falls into the water below is slowly removed by further dissolution, creating space for more collapse blocks. The rate of collapse increases during periods when the water table is below the ceiling of the void, since the rock ceiling is no longer buoyantly supported by the water in the void. 
     The Yucatán Peninsula contains a vast coastal aquifer system, which is typically density-stratified. The infiltrating rainwater floats on top of higher-density saline water. intruding from the coastal margins. The whole system is one that is land-locked but connected to an ocean. 
     Where a cenote, or the flooded cave to which it is an opening, provides deep enough access into the aquifer, the interface between the fresh and saline water may be reached. The density interface between the fresh and saline waters is a halocline, which means a sharp change in salt concentration over a small change in depth. Mixing of the fresh and saline water results in a blurry swirling effect caused by refraction between the different densities of fresh and saline waters. 
     In the Yucatán Peninsula the cenote depth is 10 to 20 m (33 to 66 ft) below the water table at the coast, and 50 to 100 m (160 to 330 ft) below the water table in the middle of the peninsula, with saline water underlying the whole of the peninsula.
     In 2001–2002 expeditions in the Yucatan discovered three human skeletons; one of them was carbon-dated to be 13,600 years old. In March 2008, a dive team members of the Proyecto Espeleológico de Tulum and Global Underwater Explorers dive team, at a depth of 57 m (187 ft) located the remains of a mastodon as well as at 43 m (141 ft) a human skull that might be the oldest evidence of early man in the region. 
     The Yucatán Peninsula has almost no rivers and only a few lakes, and those are often marshy. The mny cenotes are the only perennial source of potable water and have long been the principal sources of water in much of the Yucatán Peninsula. 
     Major Maya settlements required access to adequate water supplies, and therefore cities were built around these natural wells. Some cenotes also played an important role in Maya rites. Believing that these pools were gateways to the afterlife, the Maya sometimes threw valuable items into them. The discovery of golden sacrificial artifacts in some cenotes led to the archaeological exploration of most cenotes in the first part of the 20th century. An American diplomat began dredging the Sacred Cenote there in 1904. He discovered human skeletons and sacrificial objects confirming a local legend, the Cult of the Cenote, involving human sacrifice to the rain god Chaac by ritual casting of victims and objects into the cenote. 
    More information as well as some eerie photos can be seen at the following sites.

Cenote Angelita 
Caves and Sink Holes 
Go Cave Diving With Steve Bogaerts

The Greatest Toy...Ever!

     Once upon a time a fellow named Alfred C. Gilbert, an Olympic gold medalist in the pole vault, patented and sold the Erector Set by his company, The Mysto Manufacturing Company of New Haven, Connecticut in 1913. 
     In 1911 Gilbert was riding a train when he saw a section of track was being electrified and steel girders were erected to carry the power lines and that's what inspired him to invent the toy. Gilbert was also a magician and manufactured magic tricks and sets through his Mysto Manufacturing Company. 
     In 1916, the company was reorganized as the A.C. Gilbert Company. The Erector sets were loaded with pulleys, gears, strips of metal of every description with holes, nuts and bolts and they came with a windup or electric motor. You could build anything you could imagine! Trucks, steam shovels, Ferris wheels or all kinds of Rube Goldberg contraptions...the possibilities were endless. The great thing was, after you built something, you could take it apart and build something else. Gilbert marketed his product as a rival to Meccano, but they got the last laugh; they eventually bought the Erector line and the toy is still being marketed.

     The first Erector set was called "The Erector / Structural Steel and Electro-Mechanical Builder" and was touted as being “Educational, Instructive and Amusing". In 1914, the name was changed to "The Mysto Erector, The Toy That Resembles Structural Steel". After reorganization in 1916, the set was renamed "Gilbert Erector, The Toy Like Structural Steel". In 1924 the toy was overhauled and included over 70 parts. Through 1932 it was sold in wood boxes then from 1933 through 1962 they were sold in steel boxes. If you were really lucky, as I was one Christmas, you got TWO sets!! 
     Gilbert died in 1961 and the company went into decline and the toy was redesigned using plastic parts, but they were no longer competitive with the realistic scale plastic models coming onto the market. The A.C. Gilbert Company filed bankruptcy in 1967. The Gabriel company of Lancaster, Pennsylvania bought the "Erector" name and continued to market the redesigned system. Sales were slow and in the 1980s the trademark "Erector" was acquired by Ideal Toys and then Tyco Toys. "Meccano" (of France) has owned the "Erector" brand since the year 2000. The present day sets by Meccano don't seem as good as the old Erector Sets though because all I could find were sets to make models of one specific item.

     Walmart sells Meccano sets and I see the electric crane set costs $200 which seems pricey for a kid's toy. The present day sets by Meccano don't seem as good as the old Erector Sets though because all I could find were sets to make models of one specific item. I am not sure of the price in the mid-1950s, but in the 1940s Erector sets cost $3-12. That translates to about $40-160 in today's currency. These days it appears that if it's not some kind of electronic gadget with a lot of buttons you can push and can be used while in a sitting position, kids aren't interested. Check out Girders and Gears.

e-cigarettes and Popcorn Lung

     I saw a scare headline on the Internet the other day that screamed e-cigarettes cause popcorn lung.  What was NOT made evident though was that not all do...many, but not all. For people that use e-cigarettes, extreme care must be used when purchasing these products. 
    Bronchiolitis obliterans (aka popcorn lung) is a serious and irreversible condition in which the tiny air sacs in the lungs become scarred. Popcorn lung begins with a cough, wheezing and shortness of breath and usually progresses slowly, but severe symptoms can develop without warning. Other symptoms include fever, weight loss, and night sweats. 
      In 2004, The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported several cases of bronchiolitis obliterans in workers at a microwave popcorn plant in Missouri in 2000. After investigation by the National Institute of Occupation Safety and Health, it was discovered that a flavoring agent, diacetyl, was used to give the popcorn a buttery taste and that inhalation of this flavoring likely contributed to the development of the illness. The disease that results often is associated with cough and shortness of breath, similar to that seen in people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). This condition is irreversible.
     Industrial workers at risk for the disease include nylon-flock workers, workers who spray prints onto textiles, battery workers and workers at plants that use or manufacture flavorings. 
     Microwave popcorn is not the only thing that contains chemical flavorings using diacetyl. A study published in 2015 in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives showed that harmful chemicals associated with popcorn lung are present in many types of flavored e-cigarettes, particularly those with flavors like fruit and candy. Of the 51 flavored e-cigarettes tested diacetyl was found in 39 samples. 
     As a result of a lawsuit in 2007 a heavy consumer of microwaved popcorn was diagnosed with popcorn lung that resulted from smelling the stuff after he consumed microwave popcorn for a decade. The result was he was awarded over 7 million dollars by the jury. Because of that, several corporations removed diacetyl from their products. However, many e-cigarettes, often touted as safer than tobacco cigarettes, may still contain diacetyl.  
     Most of the health concerns about e-cigarettes have focused on nicotine, but there is still a lot of unknown factors. For example, they contain other cancer-causing chemicals such as formaldehyde.  In the e-vapor industry there are more than 500 different brands and that does not include stores that make their own in-house liquids. These vendors are not regulated or monitored for quality control. Until FDA e-cigarette regulations go into effect, anyone can make e-liquid. All you have to do is get a business license, buy liquid nicotine, propylene glycol and flavoring. Then you buy small plastic bottles and labels and just like that, you have a liquid for e-cigarettes that you can sell in your store...all totally unregulated. While there are many e-liquid brands that do not use diacetyl, who knows what other hazards may be discovered as more evidence is uncovered?

New Report Warns of the Dangers of E-Cigarettes 
American Lung Association - e-cigarettes and Lung Health 
The Hidden Dangers of e-cigarettes
What's the Harm in Vapor?

My Turbo PC

     I received a pop-up for this product the other day so decided to investigate it. What I discovered leads me to believe installing it on my laptop may not be a good idea. My Turbo PC is a download product that is supposed to eliminate viruses, spyware and optimize, clean & repair your Windows PC which they claim will help your computer run smoothly. They also offer tech support at a rate of $199 per hour. The simple truth is there is no way this product can repair a computer in any way that any other antivirus software can.

     Further, there have been complaints about them to the Better Business Bureau that they have ignored. As a result the BBB has not accredited them.

     Customers have contacted the company by e-mail, but the e-mails have gone unanswered. There have been issues with obtaining the license key. 3 1/2 hour online waits for tech support have been reported. One customer complained that they were charged $10 for "support" without advance notification nor were they given the $10 discount that is advertised on their website.

     One complaint states that the consumer ordered the program to clean up and speed up her computer and downloaded the program, but it did not work. She e-mailed the company and the company told her the program takes 15 days to take effect. She waited the 15 days and found that the program was not effective. She contacted the business again, who told her to wait 15 days. She finally became frustrated and indicated she was going to contact BBB. No response.

     If you want to clean up your computer CC Cleaner is free and it is endorsed by PC World. CC Cleaner clears out temporary files, cleans the Windows Registry, erases browser histories, etc. CCleaner also intelligently scans for cookies you want to keep, like Google and Yahoo. While it is free you can purchase a priority-support license for $25. Only one warning...it includes the option to install Google Chrome and make it your default browser so you have to uncheck two boxes if you don't want this to happen.

     For anti-virus, my personal choice is Webroot which is the anti-virus of choice of Best Buy. Also, if you need tech support, Best Buy's Geek Squad has, in my experience, been a good deal. Once when I picked up a virus and a few times when I have had some minor technical problems that I didn't know how to deal with I found their online tech support to be very efficient.

     For free anti-virus, the best I have found has been AVG. It's what I use on an old and rarely used desktop that serves mostly as a "backup" computer.

Fun Ride on the Chetco River Bar

This looks like more fun than an amusement park ride! 

 

     Chetco Bay is one of the more safer bays on the Oregon's southern Pacific coast. The Chetco Bar is the area where the deep waters of the Pacific Ocean meet with the shallower waters near the mouth of the river. Most accidents and deaths that occur on coastal bars are from capsizing.
    The Bar may be closed to recreational boats when conditions are hazardous. Failure to comply with the closure may result in voyage termination, and civil and/or criminal penalties. The regulations are enforced by Coast Guard boarding teams. 
    Boats are more likely to capsize when crossing the bar from the ocean because the seas are on the stern and the boater may have less control over the vessel. There are roughly four tides each day in the Pacific Northwest and tidal currents may gain tremendous velocity making it extremely dangerous to get caught on the bar during strong ebb current. Even on days that are relatively calm, fast moving ebb can create bar conditions that are too rough for small craft. The Coast Guard regulates the boat traffic and failing to comply with posted bar restrictions may result in a maximum civil penalty of $25,000.00.