Dates, My Eee PC, cats, eye checkup

Remembering Dates

While teaching one of my English students, I got flustered when I couldn't remember when email got started. This spurred me on to produce the table below. I suppose with everything "on the web" we really don't need to remember these things, but it's good to be reminded.

About half of these dates come from a book "1001 Inventions that changed the world" from the Taipei City Public Library, the other half comes from Wikipedia entries. I started after 1950 because I was born in 1950, many of the entries are of importance to me(and may be not so much for others.) Most of these dates are the first usage, invention, first available ...not necessarily when the invention came into wide spread use, but at least the date is a lower bound on when the technology became available.

(I remember in the first campaign against Obama, it came out that John McCain didn't know how to use email and liked casino gambling. Thank God(if there is a God) that he never became president of the most powerful country in the free world. That he has been a senator from Arizona for 26 years speaks volumes about Arizona.)

((Now that the Republican Party no longer has a black man to run against, where are all the racists in the US going to cast their votes?.))

My Eee PC

This past week, my ASUS Eee PC netbook died. It was a tough cookie for almost 4 years and made 7 trips with me across the Pacific Ocean. It was unique, in that it had no hard disk, only 8GB and 20GB internal memory drives. That amount of storage wouldn't be enough for that fat, clumsy, slow oaf called windows, but it was enough for all my C/C++/Arduino/Processing programming on Ubuntu Linux.

My eyes will probably never go back to the small screen of a net book(let alone an android phone, ... ) From now on, I'll be into desktops and big flat screen monitors.


Audio Books

This time in Taiwan, Florence and I have been listening to a lot of audio books from the Seattle Public Library. It's easy to download the books and play them when we are both working on the computers.
Recently we've listen to 2 books by Jonathan Franzen, "Freedom" and "Discomfort Zone" both were very good. Franzen is a bird watcher and is no friend of nonhouse cats.

Maybe by coincidence, this story appeared in the China Post today:


Friendly felines are really natural born killers: US study

By Laura Zuckerman, Reuters
January 31, 2013, 12:06 am TWN

Reuters--Think of cats as cute purring bundles of fur? Think again. A new study says free-roaming kitties are
serious killers. Such cats are a leading cause of deaths of birds and small mammals in the United States, with pet and ownerless cats blamed for killing up to 3.7 billion birds and as many as 20.7 billion other animals each year, government scientists said in a study released on Tuesday.

Ownerless cats, including barn cats, strays and feral colonies, are behind the vast majority of bird and mammal deaths, according to the study, “The impact of free-ranging cats on wildlife in the United States,” published Tuesday in the online journal Nature Communications.

The study is the first to compile and systematically analyze rates of cat predation. It suggests cats cause
“substantially greater wildlife mortality than previously thought,” and are likely the single greatest source of
mortality linked to human settlement for U.S. birds and mammals.

The findings by researchers with the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the U.S. Fish and
Wildlife Service show the bulk of birds killed by cats in the United States — excluding Alaska and Hawaii — were native species such as robins, finches and chickadees.

Cats largely prey on non-native mice and rats in densely populated urban areas where native wildlife is scarce, the research shows.

By contrast, cats in suburban and rural areas kill mostly native mice, shrews, voles, squirrels and rabbits,
according to the study authored by Peter Marra and Scott Loss of the Smithsonian and Tom Will of the Fish and Wildlife Service's Division of Migratory Birds.

Domestic cats, introduced globally by humans, are considered among the 100 worst nonnative invasive species in the world yet control of the creatures has not been widely addressed by local, state and federal governments, the study shows.


My Eyes


Today I had a 1 month checkup after my last laser treatment for detached retina. The doctor said the retinas are attached and the treatment was a success. I knew that, but my eyes are still not as good as this summer. Part of the problem is that I now need cataract surgery and part of it is that the eyes still need time to recover from the laser treatment for detached retina. And my prescription glasses are way out of wack from where my eyes are now.


So on March 8th I will get cataract surgery on my left eye which is the worst of the two. Then maybe I'll get new glasses when I return to the US. And then I will have cataract surgery on the right eye when I return to Taiwan in the Fall.


I can now read a newspaper without glasses, but I need binoculars to read street signs that are maybe 30 feet away. Luckily, I know Taipei pretty well.