EncRoached

The training course test was pretty much a non-event...a few multiple choice questions, a few vague short-answer questions about which I feel reasonably sanguine. I finished it in about a half hour, conversed with the other members of my group for about twenty minutes, then headed back home.

I look around my apartment and feel more than a little disgusted. There are roaches here. Roaches by the dozens. I can open my desk drawer and watch a dozen of the little boogers scurrying away into its recesses. Tiny ones, animate dots that crawl all over the place. Small ones, like miniature animate watermelon seeds. Big fat ones, some (females, I guess) with long gourd-like tails sticking out from under their wings. There are a lot of them--more of them than can be explained by just the general messiness of my room. From the way they swarm on the sidewalk outside in the summer, I'm convinced that this is just a bad neighborhood for them. My guess is that they've gotten into the walls where not even spraying can get them out.

It's so awful...I've gotten to where I keep my toothbrush in a sealed ziplock bag just so I can be sure the roaches don't crawl on it when I'm not looking. Any glasses of water have to be covered; food is kept in the fridge or sealed, unopened containers. I'm reasonably certain they're crawling through my silverware drawers and flatware cabinets, but I just try not to think about it.

I'd like to get my room cleaned up so I can set off some bug-bombs, maybe at least retard them for another couple months, 'til after the freeze kills them outside, but therein lies another difficulty. There's just too darned much stuff in my room. I try to box some stuff up and send it back to my room at the parents' farm for storage, but it's a losing battle; I'm not ruthless enough, I always think, "I haven't needed that in the last two years, but what if I get rid of it and then need it right afterward?" I just don't have the willpower to start cleaning and stick to it until it's done--even just doing the laundry is a major undertaking. I can sometimes get my brothers to help me, but they're not much help in the long run--they invariably just clean up for a couple of hours until it's halfway done, then leave. And the room just messes up again. I'm about to that point of desperation where I consider seeing if I can hire someone from a maid or cleaning service for just a few hours...someone I can pay to see the job through until it's done.

I'm so sick and tired of living in a messy room, and seeing roaches and roach leavings everywhere. But I feel so helpless...what can I do?

Big Brother is Watching You(r Hard Drive for Those Nasty Pirated MP3s)!

Anybody notice what the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America)'s been up to lately? Some pretty scary (and offensive) stuff.

They've been trying get an amendment attached to unrelated legislation, indemnifying them from incidental damages caused by hacking or other computer intrusions "that are reasonably intended to impede or prevent" electronic piracy. That in itself is bad enough, but what they were trying to tack it onto was the PATRIOT anti-terrorist bill.

Elsewhere, the RIAA has been coming up with a plan to fight MP3 trading services by feeding them a barrage of false transfer requests--what is known in Internet parlance as a "denial of service attack".

The hubris I see here is incredible. The RIAA is essentially trying to legislate its constituent companies the right to attack peoples' personal computers, just because they might be trading "pirated" MP3s. Isn't it funny that when individual people do that to companies' computers, they get thrown in jail? What's more, they're trying to do it by taking advantage of a tragedy that claimed the lives of 6,000 Americans. Do they honestly think they're going to get away with this? And we're not even getting into the issue of how it is not possible to tell whether an MP3 on someone's hard drive is illegal or not just by looking at the hard drive.

Copyright law no longer protects what it's supposed to or serves the interests it's supposed to. Our rights have been eroded over the decades by the big money interests who have vested interests in seeing that nothing reaches the public domain. Taken individually, some of the things they're doing seem strange or offensive; when you put them together, they add up to some outrages. America, the land of the free, where a foreign programmer can be arrested by the FBI because of a program he wrote in his native land. And it's only getting worse...