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Sly Comments

Author:	Emory Schley	Created:	10/4/2006 3:15 PM
Readers are invited to comment on any of the items or discussion seen below, or any matter of concern here in Beautiful Marion County!

Creating effective but hard-to-break passwords can be quite easy
	By Emory Schley on 4/30/2007 1:01 AM

In today’s world, especially with all the Internet accessing going on, an important element of our everyday lives is becoming ever more so, and that element is a password. We have passwords for ATM accounts, passwords for on-line access to banking services, passwords to subscription Websites, passwords for on-line purchases, passwords for e-mail and passwords for just about anything else you’d like to keep reasonably private. I was becoming so overwhelmed with passwords at one point, that I threatened to hire a secretary just to keep up with them. But doing that was really not practical (besides, I couldn’t afford it. Secretaries probably make more than I do). So I decided to tussle with the situation for ...

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But the crystal ball sure is pretty!
	By Emory Schley on 4/29/2007 5:52 AM

I have a little crystal ball, a small globe that’s as clear as fresh spring water. It’s a cute little thing, but although I can find no fault with its structure, it STILL doesn’t seem to work very well. As I understand the process, a crystal ball is supposed to allow you to glimpse, at least briefly, into the future, and thereby to ascertain whatever the Fates may have in store. This has always seemed like a pretty decent idea to me, and one that I would love to put to work. However, this pretty little doo-dad, despite its rather elegant good looks, just seems to fail miserably at its intended purpose. It just never has been able to give me one of those much sought-after glimpses into the future. &n ...

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I've wondered about this for a very long time...
	By Emory Schley on 4/28/2007 5:44 AM

One of the things that always bothered me about university curricula was all those mandatory courses one has to take that are outside the student’s major course of study. I know a common argument is that all those other classes are necessary to ensure that students have a “well-rounded” education, and can be reasonably conversant in a number of intellectual areas. But, let’s face it – how many times do you ask your doctor what he thinks about ancient Greek pottery? At the rates he’s charging, you almost hesitate to ask him how your own health is doing! Although the argument sounds good, on the surface, I ...

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Cutting through the myth and urban legends
	By Emory Schley on 4/27/2007 5:56 AM

In a print column I wrote yesterday, but which will appear on Saturday, I discuss Internet myths and rumors. There are a number of sites one can visit to check out stories that circulate through e-mail and are endlessly forwarded to everyone in the senders’ address books. The one particular myth I was discussing was the one about Bob Keeshan (Captain Kangaroo) and Lee Marvin, in which Marvin supposedly lauds the guy with the big pockets as “the bravest man I ever knew” for his alleged actions at Iwo Jima in World War II. Only problem is Keeshan was never at Iwo Jima. Neither was Marvin, for that matter. Keeshan did serve in the Marine Corps, as did Marvin, and while Marvin was a bonafide Pacific Theater combat veteran wounded in battle (at Saipan), Keeshan joined the Marine Corps only in the closing days of WWII and never saw combat action, and that was ...

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Space program provides some spectacular sights
	By Emory Schley on 4/26/2007 5:54 AM

Yesterday, we were discussing some of the 3-D photographs of the sun released by NASA. They were taken by the dual STEREO spacecraft now accompanying Earth in its year-long orbit around our star. I hope you’ve sent off for your anaglyph glasses so you can get a look at these pictures for yourself. There are a couple of 3-D video clips you can check out as well. Web addresses where you can find this stuff are listed at the end of yesterday’s blog, in case you’re interested. Our space program has been kind of pokey for the past 10 years or so, and the days of the Space Transport System, or space shuttle are numbered. NASA even now is beginning preliminary work on the next phase of space exploration which will include our return to the moon, and eventually a manned trip to Mars and back. When I was a little kid, I co ...

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Looking at the sun – in depth, and safely!
	By Emory Schley on 4/25/2007 5:50 AM

There are a couple of spacecraft whooshing around out there in the area between us and the sun, taking photos of our star. The two spacecrafts are part of the STEREO program which is an attempt to gather 3-D pictures of that flaming orb which makes all life on Earth possible. Launched together, they separated and took up different paths, one in front of the Earth, and the other trailing behind the Earth. The Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory is the third mission in NASA’s Solar Terrestrial Probes program, according to a NASA Web-site, The two ships are separated by quite a bit of distance, in terrestrial terms, enough to make 3-D imaging of the sun possible. Normally, the two photos in a stereo pair are taken from a distance of just inches apart, mimicking the action of human eyesight, but as distances to the subject increase, so distances between the two photos must also ...

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Looking out for each other
	By Emory Schley on 4/24/2007 6:09 AM

I don’t claim to be the world’s greatest driver, or even close, but I have been driving for almost 50 years now, and fortunately, I have never been involved in an accident that I caused. A few years ago, a lady ran into the back of my vehicle while I was stopped at a traffic light, and I will admit to getting three traffic tickets in almost 50 years behind the wheel, but I feel one of those really wasn’t my fault. I’d like to think my driving record is probably pretty good. Not a world’s record, or even close, but pretty good nonetheless. I don’t feel like I’m normally an excessive danger to the public when I slide behind a steering wheel. There have been several incidents where I probably should have been involved in a collision due to my own personal negligence, but fortunately the other driv ...

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An endless stream of cheap entertainment – and more!
	By Emory Schley on 4/23/2007 6:43 AM

Day before yesterday, a Friday, I took the day off from work because I had a medical procedure performed which pretty much took up the entire day. Yes, it did involve anesthesia. After I awoke from the drugs, my wife drove me to a restaurant where we ate, then we continued on home. I watched TV for a short while, then decided to take a nap. I still felt somewhat uneasy, from the effects of the anesthesia, I guess. About an hour later, I awoke. My wife had suggested we go to the flea market Saturday morning, a trip we make about every three months or so, and I agreed. But Friday evening, I started experiencing some mild symptoms I had been warned about at the clinic. So I told my better half I’d make a final decision about the flea market trip on Saturday morning, and whether we went or not would depend on how I felt.

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Feeling tired all the time? Maybe there's an easy fix!
	By Emory Schley on 4/22/2007 7:06 AM

I had gotten to a point in my life where I was tired all the time. Sleeping more didn’t seem to help as much as it should have. I ascribed this condition to the fact that I was just getting older, and no part of my body was working like it did when I was younger, which seemed more or less reasonable to me. Then my wife, an asthma patient, went to her doctor a couple of years back, and he detected something that made him refer her to a sleep specialist. She spent the night in one of those sleep laboratories that seem to be popping up all over the place lately. The results of her night in the sleep lab indicated she was suffering from sleep apnea, a condition in which you awaken dozens, perhaps hundreds of times each night, due to lack of oxygen. The body, for whatever reason, just stops breathing as deepl ...

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Fueling the old creative fires takes a bit of practice
	By Emory Schley on 4/21/2007 5:49 AM

People sometimes ask me how I come up with so many different subjects to write about. The plain and simple answer is: I really don’t know. Years ago, when I first was assigned the responsibility of writing a weekly column, I tussled with that problem of what to write about for quite some time. You could come up with a few ideas here and there, but you sit down to make a list of them, and pretty soon, you start repeating the same column ideas. The trick, I guess, is to somehow break yourself out of that mental rut. You’ve probably heard the old story that if you place a man in an unknown, featureless landscape (like a desert) without benefit of compass or any other direction-finding device, he will eventually sta ...

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To diet or not to diet; that is the question
	By Emory Schley on 4/20/2007 5:48 AM

The pills I take each morning to ward off first one affliction, then another, seem to be great enough in quantity to qualify as an extra meal each day, and whenever I pass by a mirror, or build up enough courage to step on the scale, then one might reasonably think those pills contained at least enough calories to equal another meal each day. I kind of wish the federal government would require nutrition labels on prescriptions because I’m almost certain the pills must contain quite a few calories. My proof for such a position literally stares me in the face while gazing at any mirror. How else could I explain all those excess pounds? Calorie-free pills could remedy that situation. Sounds like an idea whose time has come – to me anyway. With all the research dollars expended each year in this country on far less mundane pursuits, I think this o ...

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It all seems to happen in a blur
	By Emory Schley on 4/19/2007 6:08 AM

Do you ever have the feeling that Life is just going by too fast – and that you’re having to trot at a fairly agonizing pace just to keep up? Or that your lungs are burning and near bursting with the effort? Legs cramping up? I’ve long had that feeling, and it’s one of those fundamental emotions that seems to stretch down into the very depths of my being. It doesn’t seem to matter what I do, I just never seem to quite catch up with all the stuff that conspires to overwhelm my days with tasks to do. There are columns to write, blogs to muse upon, phone calls to return, e-mails to process, doctors’ appointments, bills to make out and mail off, groceries to pick up on the way home, ...

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It can't get much simpler than an old-fashioned crystal radio
	By Emory Schley on 4/18/2007 5:55 AM

Some years ago, I bought a book on crystal radios. The book was a re-print of one published 50 years or so ago. I wasn’t all that interested in crystal radios because that technology is obviously so obsolete that most people today have probably never even heard of crystal radios. Even many of those who have heard the term may be unsure of what a crystal radio is. So, here’s a stab at trying to explain it: Imagine a radio that works without any external power whatsoever – you don’t have to plug it in, and you NEVER have to buy a battery for it, because there’s no battery slot! By the way, it doesn’t have a hand-crank either, as some emergency radios do. It is powered by the radio signal itself (which is an electromagnetic wave which “couples” into the radio’s circuitry).

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The "keys" to the Kingdom: Reading, the most basic skill
	By Emory Schley on 4/17/2007 5:48 AM

The wonders of the world patiently wait for a certain class of individuals in our society. I suppose you could roughly divide the world’s citizenry into two camps: Those who can read, and those who cannot. Those in the former category have the world at their fingertips, while those in the latter probably never realize just how much they are missing out on. When our children were growing up, I of course wanted them to learn history, arithmetic, how to write and spell correctly, and all the rest, but we always tried to place a very special emphasis on encouraging our children to read. They both had library cards by the time they were 7 or 8 years old. & ...

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These days, all our "servants" speak binary
	By Emory Schley on 4/16/2007 7:36 AM

The other day, several of us were sitting around discussing the enormous impact computers have made on our lives. The number of industries that have been transformed by computers is truly astounding. I suspect eventually computers will have exercised an even greater impact on our lives than the wheel ever did. When is the last time you saw a typewriter? A manual watch or an escapement-type clock? A carburetor? A tape recorder? A movie camera (not a video camera, but one that uses film), even still cameras that use film are beginning to become obsolescent, a darkroom, a photo enlarger, a phonograph, a slide rule, an adding machine, a manual cash register, and you could add hundreds, if not thousands of more items to that list, if you took the time to compile it. All these ite ...

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Growing old gracefully easier said than done
	By Emory Schley on 4/15/2007 7:47 AM

As I find myself getting older, I can’t help but notice that tasks I once was able to perform effortlessly now require an increasing amount of exertion on my part. Whenever I engage in some strenuous routine, I find that I very quickly get to the point where I am huffing and puffing for breath. It takes just seconds of effort, rather than the minutes it once took to arrive at that state. Putting on a pair of socks is now much more of an ordeal than it used to be. Of course, part of the problem is the “spare tire” I’ve been wearing around my waist for a number of years. It certainly hasn’t sprung any “leaks” yet. In fact, I think someone’s been surreptitiously pumping ever more air into ...

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An old mystery – finally solved
	By Emory Schley on 4/14/2007 5:44 AM

When I was just a wee little kid, we lived for a time in Orange County, a brief interlude from our time in Miami. We didn’t stay long, just a year, before returning to Dade County, now known as Miami-Dade County. We were living in Winter Garden, a little town not far from Orlando. I was enrolled in elementary school in the second grade. We were about halfway through the school year, when one day the principal came into our classroom, then conferred privately with the teacher for a moment or two. The teacher, whose name I no longer remember, then told two other students to come to the front of the room. I believe their names were Margie and Dan. Then she called me to the front of the room. The principal then told the three ...

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When is a gun not a gun?
	By Emory Schley on 4/13/2007 5:50 AM

Every now and then, I find myself wondering about stuff. Thinking too deeply on various matters has always proven to be somewhat of a problem for me. Sometimes, I’ve been told, it’s best to just not look too closely at some propositions, or practices, or traditions, or whatever. That’s probably truer in certain governmental circles than in life in general. In Army basic training, for example, our sergeants tried to drill into our heads the fact that a rifle is NOT a gun, even though most dictionaries define a gun as a metal tube with various mechanisms attached thereto and from which a projectile is propelled, usually by the explosive reaction of gun powder. That definition always seemed broad enough to me to in ...

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Random events can have far-reaching consequences
	By Emory Schley on 4/12/2007 5:49 AM

Every now and then I find myself wondering what might have happened in my life had any of a number of particular events never occurred. For example, when I was stationed in West Germany back in the 1960s, the tour of duty was three years, but as my time to rotate back to the States started approaching, I decided that I didn’t want to return to the USA just yet. So I turned in the paperwork to voluntarily extend my tour of duty by six months. Another fellow in my platoon found himself in a similar situation, but he decided to extend his tour by one year. He also filled out his paperwork and submitted it. Several months went by before we each received approvals on our tour extensions. Only problem was, I had been approved for the other guy’s one-year extension, and the other guy had been appr ...

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A hope and a prayer for some fame and fortune
	By Emory Schley on 4/11/2007 5:57 AM

I’ve been playing the Florida Lotto since the day of the very first drawing. I used to buy one or two tickets each week back when it was just a weekly event. Then later it went to twice each week. So I played twice each week for awhile before deciding that I was just throwing good money after bad. I didn’t want to quit buying tickets altogether, I just wanted to cut down on the expenses a bit. So I came up with a scheme whereby I would only buy tickets when the jackpot rose to $10 million or more. And that’s the way I’ve been doing it for a number of years now. For a long time, I kept playing the same numbers each week. They were the numbers that represented our birthdays, my wife’s and mine, tha ...

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