The reason I haven’t posted much in the last few days is that I’ve been busy getting some new things online.

In 1982, I started Eskimo North as a single line BBS on a Radio Shack TRS-80 model III with a whole of 48 Kbytes (yes that is KILObytes, not megabytes or gigabytes), and 280 Kbytes of disk. It grew on that platform to about 3 Mbytes of floppy disk and then got moved to a model IV initially with 64 Kbytes of RAM and then later 128 Kbytes of RAM.

In 1985 it was moved to a Unix based Tandy 16B (actually Xenix) and initially 4 lines, expanded to 11 lines with some custom hardware hacks to the machine.

Then in 1991 went to a Sun 3/180 which was very rapidly upgraded to a Sun 3/280, and then Sun 4/280 (which involved changing out CPU boards). Then was supplimented with a Sun 330.

In 1992 Eskimo North was connected to the Internet and started providing Internet services.

Now, in 2006, Eskimo North has just launched a FREE Web based Bulletin Board system returning to our original roots.

Give it a try: http://www.eskimo.com/bbs/

After messing with Gallery for a while, I came to the conclusion that it was painfully slow and the interface was counter-intuitive at best.

CopperMine is another photo gallery which I’ve decided I like much better. It is WAY faster than Gallery and the Interface is a lot more intuitive to me.

Part of the issue I think is these two programs really target different audiences, Gallery appears to be designed for someone who wants to sell images, thus it has a shopping cart and other E-comemrce facilities, whereas CopperMine seems to be geared much more to displaying photographs which was my intent.

I’ll post a link here once I get it all configured and populated with images.

After fixing the problem with PHP, I decided to retry some of the other applications I had tried in the past, one of which was Gallery.

It works now! Yeah!

Shortly I shall have my photos online in an organized fashion.

Eskimo Customers: If you’re looking for gallery software that will work here:

http://gallery.sourceforge.net/

We’ve got a Great Dane sized red Doberman named Draco. He has never been your typical high energy Doberman. I’d guess he sleeps an average of about 20 hours a day.

Recently he got sick. At first he started eating less and I thought well the weather is 90ºF out and he’s not terribly high energy so about the only thing he needs calories for is to keep his body warm. But then he stopped eating dog food altogether.

So $200 worth of lab tests later the vetrinarian diagnoses a kidney and bladder infection, though there is some indications it was also in his sinuses and intestines.

I was not sure he was going to make it through the night before last. Couldn’t get up on his own, then couldn’t get back down.

He is on antibiotics and doing a lot better today. Whatever he picked is nasty stuff. He brought a petrified squirrel home a couple of weeks ago, maybe something from that.

Today he demanded his morning walk and didn’t want to go the short route, been a while since he did that so definitely is getting better.

My viewpoint on this issue is biased by my early experience. After that experience I am convinced we are visited by beings from elsewhere.

My experience had little in common with most reported. Although arrival at the landing location wasn’t of my own volition, entering the craft was. So it wasn’t a complete abduction, nor was it completely voluntary. The beings I encountered were neither grey, reptilian, or tall blond humans with unusually intense deep blue or indigo eyes. The craft was essentially empty. There were no glass tubes with floating embryos. There was no examination table or anal probes.

My experience did have something in common with Whitley Streibers’ experience in that it seemed to involve a state of consciousness that was somewhere between a normal dream and a normal waking state. I had physical evidence when I awoke, clay on my pajama legs where there was none in the area except at the landing site. My experience didn’t involve Whitleys’ evil clowns.

If you take the testimony of others at face value, there must be a number of different alien species visiting us with a number of different agendas using different technologies. One thing all of them seem to share in common is that they all warn us of impending environmental disasters. Perhaps we should pay attention.

If you do a bit of browsing around the Internet, read the stories of various abductees and others that have had more friendly encounters, it becomes apparent that there are several broad groups of species with several agendas.

Pleiadians or Nordics are a tall blond people with deep-blue or indigo eyed. They are described as being beautiful. They arrive via “beamships” and have a particular fondness for a one-armed Swiss farmer by the name of Billy Meier. More recently they’ve been slightly less selective with respect to whom they share their wisdom. They warn of impending environmental disasters and the need for spiritual growth. They appear to be emotionally hypersensitive, empathetic, and spiritually evolved.

Greys are usually three and a half to four and a half feet tall. They have giant black insect eyes, a small or absent nose, a small mouth, anywhere from between 4-7 digits, and a nasty penchant for anal probes.

Greys are involved in a program designed to produce a hybrid of their race and ours. They tend to abduct along family lines. If you’re a frequent abductee, the odds are good that your parents were and your children will be.

Greys have the capability to manipulating human consciousness. They are able to immobilize, force sleep, erase memories, and plant screen memories. Most abductees only become aware of their experience through the phenomena of missing time and with the help of hypnotic regression.

Greys extract human-grey hybrid fetuses from the wombs of women they’ve implanted with alien seed and grow them to term in glass tubes with some sort of fluid and fetal life support system. They seem to be devoid of normal human emotions and any hint of spirituality.

Reptilians are large creatures, often seven feet tall. They are green and have eyes with a yellow vertical iris. They are the galaxies sex predators. They seem to have no real function in life except to come to earth and rape or seduce earth women. The reports are often similar to the story of Brians mothers’ rape at the hands of a Roman in the Monty Python film, “The Life of Brian”. “Was it rape?”, “At first.” Once you’ve had reptilians nothing else will satisfy.

Reptilians have been reported to shape-shift and appear human. They are reported to flash back to reptilian form when stressed or threatened. It has been suggested that many of our political leaders are in fact reptilians in disguise. Reptilian-human sex always involves male reptilians and female humans. I’ve heard no reports of female reptilians. They are occasionally reported working with the greys. The greys are subservient to the reptilians.

Greys are usually reported as being 3-1/2 to 4-1/2 feet tall but occasionally tall versions are reported as being up to seven or eight feet. They have between four and seven fingers. They may have small noses or only breathing holes. They may have small ears or only holes in the side of their heads. Their eyes may be black with compound lenses like a bug, or they may have multiple eyelids with the inner eyelid being black but a normal but large eye behind that eyelid. Some abductees report greys with human like genetils, other reports say they are sexless. Some greys manipulate human consciousness through mental effort, others require devices.

Reptilians and Nordics or Pleiadians are less varied. Reptilians are always described as male sex maniacs, Pleiadians always spiritually advanced and benevolent. Pleiadians or Nordics get their name from their star system of origin, The Pleiades, or their resemblance to Nordic people.

Reptilians are extremely malevolent, Greys vary between malevolence and neutrality, Pleiadians are always benevolent. All warn us of impending environmental disasters. All differ from the creatures in my experience. I have found no similar descriptions on the Internet.

I speculate that the greys aren’t from where but from when. Our descendents, they know about coming environmental disasters because their ancestors recorded them. Greys are from four and a half billion years into the future. Earth has been scorched by the red giant sun. The oceans have boiled dry. Greys moved to distant planets or moons with comfortable temperatures. They can not survive further into the future because the Sun, now a red giant, is becoming unstable. Greys large eyes allow them to see in their infrared illuminated environment.

Possessing the capability of time travel, they go back to when the Sun was a hydrogen burning main sequence star. This would establish a new timeline different from their own in which they could continue to evolve for billions of years. Poorly equipped for today’s environment, they are creating a hybrid race to carry on. Greys interest in genetically compatible ancestors account for the tendency for abductions to occur along family lines.

Will they need us once their hybrid race is perfected? Greys come from a different timeline. They are not directly descended from us, rather from our parallels in a parallel universe. Our survival may not be relevant. They may want to keep their direct ancestors around as genetic stock for future manipulations.

What happens when a primitive race encounters a more technologically advanced race? In our historical experience it is not pretty for the less advanced race. But there is no exact precedent. The American Indians were not our ancestors or even parallel equivalents.

When Jimmy Carter ran for the presidency, one of his campaign promises was to reveal to us the truth behind the UFO phenomena. President Carter was sincere and honest. If it were possible for him to reveal the truth behind the UFO phenomena without placing us in great peril, he would have done so. President Carter did push through the Freedom of Information Act, through which we are able to ascertain that a genuine and massive UFO coverup exists.

A caller to the Coast to Coast radio program told a story about an encounter with President Carter at a book signing some eight years after his term in office. The caller asked the former president why he did not keep his promise and reveal the truth behind UFO’s. Jimmy Carter had no response except to place his hands to his face and weep. If our government is unwilling to share the news, it’s because it’s bad. For a man of President Carters’ stature to break down like that, the truth has to be extremely terrible.

Greys by all accounts are not spiritually enlightened. Look at what unenlightened Caucasians did to the Native American when we came to this country. The difference in technological capability is even greater between the greys and ourselves.

Tales of heavily guarded underground military bases, where aliens and humans work side by side, indicate our government is working with the Greys. If the aliens do intend to replace us, they will do so after their hybrid race is perfected. If we wish to stop them the time to act is now. Dwindling abduction reports suggest that they are nearing completion. Sightings of saucer shaped crafts have been replaced by sightings of gigantic triangular crafts. Smaller craft are appropriate for research and reconnaissance. Larger craft are appropriate for transport, perhaps large numbers of little grey men, or human-grey hybrids.

Perhaps all is not lost. I can’t believe the Pleiadians would just stand by and let them do their evil deeds without warning us but still warn us of impending environmental disaster. Perhaps they will intervene on our behalf.

Reptilians are one piece of the puzzle which does not fit. Reptilians act as supervisors of the greys when they’re not having sex with earth women. What is their role?

Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute wrote an article which describes in brief what will happen when a candidate signal is received. It does leave out some of the verification tests, but you will note in this article that when it looks like a real signal, the astronomer will then call his buddies elsewhere in the world and have them verify. As the article states, “The process will take several days.”

This is the major flaw in existing SETI protocols. The chance alignment of transmitting and receiving antennas will not remain for “several days”. No increase in receiver sensitivity, the number of channels, or signal to noise ratio, will resolve this issue.

What SETI needs is some way to verify, close to instantly, the reception of a signal at multiple locations around the planet. This requires international co-operation which is in short supply. International rape and pillaging seems to be the rule of the day. Without resolving this issue, SETI will not detect alien signals.

I took this photography from my back yard through a small tree with the moon illuminating some clouds in the background. This was taken with a Mamiya DTL1000 camera and Kodak Gold film (prior to the change to Royal Gold). No real relationship to the topic at hand.

I was thinking today about my earliest childhood memories. I am unusual in that I remember things from very early on.

My earliest memory was when I was three days old. I was adopted and my adoptive mother brought me home. She had a spider monkey in a cage down in the laundry room that she got rid of, at the advice of the family doctor, but it was there for a day or two after I was adopted.

My mother brought me down into the laundry room. That monkey in the cage defecated. I remember it was runny and I was repulsed by it. This seems a strange reaction for a baby that messes his own diapers to have. I guess I was a three day old hypocrite.

It has been suggested that the reason I remembered this was because of the trauma associated with being separated from my birth mother after three days. Being born three days earlier would have been more traumatic, however, I have no memory of birth.

My next earliest memory is of being in the living room with my mother. I not able to walk or talk. I was able to pull myself into an upright position using the couch. I was not tall enough to climb on to it. I could climb up on the part that supported the cushions and get in between the cushions and that part. My mother would always put me back down on the floor when I did.

Being put back down on the floor, after making so much effort, was frustrating. I was not able to speak my frustration. I could understand at least some things people said. This seems to be the opposite of how I’ve learned languages as an adult where it has been easier to learn to speak than to comprehend.

The worlds fair was in Seattle in 1962. I was not quite four years old. I was born November 4th, 1958. We went to the fair and there was still a lot of construction in progress . The construction seemed ominous and threatening.

The part of the fair I remember the most was the Science Center. Today it’s just a ghost of what it used to be. At that time the entire building complex was used for science related displays which included a planetarium. The planetarium has been converted into a laser light show.

There was a large room with a red circular moving carpeted walk way. There were rear projection screens in the wall to the left. Each was about the size of a 19 inch computer monitor. I had seen normal front screen projection. My parents owned an 8 mm camera and an 8 mm projector. They would project family films on a screen in the living room. I had never seen a rear projection setup. It was pure magic, lighted glowing changing pictures in the wall! The granularity of the glass the image was projected on fascinated me. It was similar to the interference pattern effect you get with a laser hologram.

To the right they had a steam rocket. It was a rocket like something you would see in a bad 60’s sci-fi movie that was on a guiding pole. About once a minute it would launch on a jet of steam. It would slide back down the pole and repeat the stunt a minute or so later.

Those are some of my earliest memories. Use the comments feature to tell me about yours.

First their was the “Wow” signal, and then it seems about once a year someone claims that SETI has discovered an extraterrestrial civilization. These have been real signals detected by SETI but discarded as not originating from an alien civilization. Arguably, the SETI protocol makes this impossible and explains why no confirmed detections have occurred to date.

SETI can only look for carrier waves, it can not detect any signal modulation if that modulation occurs at rates that would be useful for carrying information. If SETI detects a signal from space, determines that it is in fact arriving from deep space, SETI has no effective way to distinguish between a natural signal such as a star atmosphere MASER, and a signal from a distant civilization.

When a signal is detected by SETI, the protocol calls for first pointing the antenna off of it’s present direction. If the signal remains, then it is a signal bleeding in from some earthly origin.

If the signal goes away when the antenna is pointed away, the antenna is then pointed back to it’s original position. If the signal is again present, then at least you know it’s coming from that direction.

You do not yet know if the signal is from deep space or an orbiting satellite. So then you get your buddies elsewhere around the planet to point their antennas at it. If the antennas both receive the signal pointed in exactly the same direction, then you have a signal originating from deep space.

At this point SETI requires that the signal continue to be present the next day. This is test that all of the potential signals that have survived earlier tests, including the “Wow” signal, have failed.

A little radio background explains why it is nearly impossible for a legitimate signal from an alien civilization to pass this test.

In order for a radio signal to arrive from a distant star system and be detectable here on earth, even with huge dish antennas and extremely sensitive receivers, that signal would need to be transmitted with a huge effective radiated power. Practical limits on transmitter power make it essentially impossible for an intelligent civilization to generate enough power without the aid of a high gain antenna.

A high gain antenna increases the power transmitted in a particular direction by not radiating power in other directions. The higher the antenna gain, the narrower the transmitted beam. In order to achieve the necessary gain to transmit a signal to a distant planet, a very high gain narrow beam width antenna must be employed.

In order for a signal to be received here on the Earth, the transmitting antenna on the distant world would have to be aimed precisely at our earth.

The earth rotates and presumably so would the planet of the transmitting civilization. The earth further is orbiting around our Sun, and presumably home planet of the aliens would be orbiting their star. The earth isn’t orbiting our star alone but is part of the earth-moon system and the earth-moon systems’ center of gravity orbits the sun, making the earths motion around the Sun even more complex. The Sun then orbits in our galaxy and bobs up and down in the galactic plain, presumably the same would be true of the distant civilizations’ Sun.

Consequently, while it is possible that rarely the transmitting antenna of an alien civilization and our receiving antenna may point at each other, the odds of that recurring a day later, as required by the SETI protocol, are infinitesimally small. It is my believe that the protocol is therefore flawed.

The only signals from an alien civilization that SETI could hope to detect and confirm, under the requirements of the existing protocols, would be from a civilization intentionally trying to signal us and constantly re-aiming their transmitting antenna to follow the motion of our planet relative to theirs.

I can see one plausible scenario where this could potentially occur but it would seem unlikely. In a decade or two, it is expected that we will have the technology to directly image planets orbiting close star systems and even analyze the spectrum of the light reflected from these distant planets to determine if compounds that tend to indicate the presence of life exist in their atmospheres.

There may be alien civilizations around relatively nearby stars with this technological capability and they may have imaged our planet, performed a spectroscopic analysis and determined that there is likely to be life on this planet. In order to determine whether or not a technological civilization exists here they may have decided to intentionally transmit a signal that a technological civilization would understand was intentionally directed at them and then await a reply from us. That’s about the only plausible scenario under which SETI could receive a signal that it could confirm under it’s own protocol.

I believe it is likely that many of these alien candidate signals that failed the repeatability test were in fact alien signals that we received as the result of a chance alignment of their transmitting antenna and our receiving antenna.

So I think that it is very probable that the “Wow” signal, the signal now being reported by Steven Greer of the Disclosure Project, another signal received in 2004, I think it is probable that these are in fact of alien origin. But with current technology we will not be able to find out, unless one of our respective civilizations had developed faster than light capability and visits.

It’s hot today, at least for Shoreline, 90ºF out. Yea, I know for some parts of the country that’s a cold snap but for here, where it’s usually overcast and 55ºF, that’s hot!

This brings up a question, anybody know how to make the degrees symbol, the little ‘o’ that is up high, with a PC keyboard? On my Sun keyboard, I’d hit ?+0 and get that symbol but that doesn’t work on the PC keyboard.

The Ninja Pirate answered this question, [ALT]+1+6+7 = º, but for some reason I can’t add comments to this post now, Blogger says it can’t find this blog, yet, I can edit posts.

If I had my way I’d be at the beach taking pictures of the scenery, I’m sure it’s good now. But I’m too broke to waste gas right now. If anybody has any brilliant income ideas you want to share?

I run an ISP, it’s been slow, probably a combination of bad economy and people out enjoying the sun instead of using their computers, which is what I’d really rather be doing.

The pictures in this post are all pictures I have taken. You can see a bigger version by clicking on the picture in the blog. If you would like to use any of these you have my permission provided credit is given and the URL of my home page, http://www.eskimo.com/~nanook, is included in the credits.

Summer of 1996 at Alki beach in West Seattle, a decade ago, 35 mm Mamiya DTL1000 camera two 2x barlows stacked in front of a 500 mm lens to yield an effective focal length of 2000 mm with a lot of chromatic aberration which actually lent this picture a soft look that I liked given the subject material.

I took this picture near the end of the summer of 2004 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada at an XLR8 show at the Pacific Northwest Exhibition with the Minolta DiMage Z1 that GoodGuys / Compusa is holding hostage for more than a year now. XLR8 is like a dance troupe / circus act set to popular music. When we first saw XLR8 (pronounced Accelerate) several years prior, they had their own band that did really good covers, but in 2004 they only used recorded music which took a lot from the atmosphere.

This was also part of XLR8’s act. These pictures are grainy because the lighting inside is dim.

I have this trick I use for getting pictures in low light which I call “digital push processing”. Set the shutter speed for the slowest possible without too much blurring, and then set the film speed to the highest rating and the lens aperture all the way open.

When the light is insufficient for normal exposure at the selected shutter speed,
this will create a dark under exposed image.

A histogram shows all of the pixels near the dark end of the spectrum. I use photo manipulation software to stretch that out over the normal dynamic range from dark to light. The resulting photo is grainy, but it makes it possible to capture images that otherwise would be impossible.

With 35 mm, I have shot Konica 3200 ASA color print film. The results I get with digital using the above technique is superior to what I can get with the Konica 3200 ASA film.

This isn’t to take too much away from the show, it was fun to watch live and in person. If you are in the Vancouver BC Canada area near the end of the summer and like big fairs, the PNE is one to go to, and these shows are free.

Vancouver BC is a beautiful city and if I could figure out a way to pull of the financials of moving there and living there I would. Here is a shot of the mountains to the north taken from the balcony of a Red Robin restaurant there. How can you beat a backdrop like that?

I have many interests and this blog will jump around from topic to topic as a consequence.

However, I do have one fairly central concern, and that is with the future and sustainability of our planet and civilization. To allow information regarding this a central place without interruption by unrelated topics, I have created a blog specific to this topic. It is called:

Future Sustainable Living

Please visit it. I invite and welcome your comments.