Gotcha!

The other day, when I looked out of the window, there were three cats and a fox sitting in a line across the meadow, all staring intently at mouse holes.
Of course, when I opened the window to photograph the scene, the fox got nervous and wandered off.

I managed to take these pics of him (making presumptions again).



Today I spied him at another mouse hole.
I am incapable of opening windows silently, it would seem, so when I opened the window to photograph, he (or she, as the case may be) trotted off a few paces, turned to see what the noise had been, then sat down and watched me for a while before leaving the scene:




Now it is chasing crows!
Rabies?

What did you do with your weekend?
I wanted to offer you a new panorama or two.
As it turned out, I did something entirely different ...

Adobe recently decided to update their so-called Creative Suite.
The thing that bugged me was not the price (believe me; extortionate), but the fact that they have thrown out GoLive - the software I've used to build web sites with for the past few years - and replaced it with Dreamweaver, which they acquired from Macromedia in their last take over.

Well o.k. I'm always ready to learn something new and Adobe states that GoLive sites can be opened in Dreamweaver.
So I opened my 'other' site, wich was due to be brought up to date any way.
I shan't complain about the fact that everything in DW is different - of course it is!
Some things I like, some things will take some getting used to.
What Adobe didn't tell us, though, is that if you convert a site and then add rollovers (those images or buttons that alter their appearance when you move your mouse over them) to pages that already contained rollovers, all rollovers cease to function ...

As 90% of my pages use rollovers 90% of my web site no longer worked!
Thank you Adobe!
I enjoyed rebuilding my web site this weekend.
And just for your information I used GoLive to do it.
I'll try your new software when I'm in a better mood!

For those of you who are interested in the results, the site now looks like this.
It has grown a few more panoramas.

The Swiss opened a new railway tunnel this week. The third longest in the world.

The Lötschberg-Tunnel is 34.6 Km long, which leaves it 15.87 Km shorter than the Channel-Tunnel and 19.27 Km shorter than the Sei-kan-Tunnel in Japan.
Strangely the Swiss also have the third longest road tunnel too - the St.Gotthard-Tunnel which is 16.92 Km long. The longest being the Laerdal-Tunnel in Norway with 24.5 Km.

Today, Saturday 16.06.2007, the public can ride backwards and forwards through the Lötschberg-Tunnel by train. It will be opened for general service in December 2007.
The tunnel was tested intensively as of December 2006 at speeds of up to 280 Kmh. Passenger trains will be scheduled to use the tunnel beginning in August so I presume 'open for general service' means the inclusion of goods-trains ...

The opening of the tunnel means good news for anyone who needs to travel from Germany to Milan or vice-versa - it will reduce their journey by a whole hour!
It is considered to be the safest railway tunnel in the world.

Some interesting facts:
The tunnel is 34.577 Km long, the whole system is 88.1 Km but only 57 Km of tracks have been laid?
If you take a stroll along the tunnel, you should be able to count 133 video cameras, 3200 fire alarms, 2500 emergency lights, 437 telephones but only 6 ventilators.
By the time the tunnel is completed it will have cost somewhere around 4.3 billion Swiss Francs, which is just 1.1 billion more than the original calculation.
They ran into unexpected geological formations along the way ...
... Oh, look! A mountain!!

Fed up of coming in third - on June 1, 2007, 103.672 Km or 67.6% of the total of 153.5 Km of tunnels, galleries and passages of the Gotthard Base Tunnel, had been excavated. When completed, the Gotthard Base Tunnel will be the longest in the world with 57.072 Km!

Yesterday I won $500,000.00!

Really, it's true, they wrote to tell me!!
Yesterday I received a mail from the Japanes Lottery to inform me, that I had won the above sum in a lottery and would I please phone to confirm, that I was really me and to inform them where I wanted the Toyota, which just happened to be part of the winnings, shipped to!

Well, of course, you can imagine how excited I was, especially as I have to pay last years income tax soon, and was wondering where the money should come from. Just imagine! My mail address was picked out by a computer, from 2,5000,000 other mail addresses and mine won! Of course, I reached for the phone immediately ...
... you bet I did!

First, they can't even spell 'Japanese'! There were two or three further spelling mistakes and a couple of wrong tenses.
Well - just to give them the benefit of the doubt, you can't just go around distrusting the 'Toyota Claiming Security Agency' (all capitalised) I sent a copy of the mail to Scam-O-Matic at www.joewein.net - Imagine my disappointment, when they informed me of twenty good reasons, why I hadn't won after all!

* The sender address of that email has been used in a known fraud before.
* An email address listed inside this email has been used in a known fraud before.
* The following fake company names, fake addresses, non-existent institutions/documents or other details have appeared in scams before:
• "toyota car international promotion program"
• "toyota fortune lotto"
• "toyota claiming security agency"
• "www.luckyjapan.com"
* This email looks like a fake lottery scam. Consider the following facts about real lotteries:
1. They do not notify winners by email.
2. You can not win without first buying a lottery ticket.
3. They do not randomly select email addresses to award prizes to.
4. They do not use free email accounts (Yahoo, Hotmail, etc) to communicate with you.
5. They do not tell you to call a mobile phone number.
6. They do not tell you to keep your winnings secret.
7. They will never ask a winner to pay any fees to receive a prize!
* The following phrases should put you on alert:
• "claim agent" (real lotteries do not use a "claim agent" / "fiduciary agent")
• "claims agent" (real lotteries do not use a "claim agent" / "fiduciary agent")
* This email lists mobile phone numbers.
• +8613711016724 (China, prepaid mobile phone) (Why would Toyota use a Mobile Phone Number in China?)
And so on, and so on ...

Spoil sports!

Over three thousand dead were honoured by bloggers around the world yesterday.
The site that did the co-ordination is down today - due to overload, I presume.

I read many of the tributes yesterday and today. The personal nature of these tributes, takes me a lot closer to 11/09/2001 (it will take more than a terrorist to convert me to the American date system) than I have ever been before and I feel like crying.

Five years ago today I discovered that my colleagues were sitting around the television in the media-room at work.
There was something amiss in New York.
When I asked what was happening they told me about some terrorist attacks.
My first reaction was "Yes, I just finished reading the book!" (John Grisham - The Brethren) Then I realised, that they were serious.

Sitting there watching the news and reflecting on the presidential elections of 2000, I couldn't help but draw further parallels to the novel.
Then, when the towers collapsed, I remarked, that it looked more like a well-planned demolition, than an attack.

Recently there was a documentary on German Television 'Loose Change' putting forward a conspiracy theory that is too close to Grisham's novel for comfort.
I hope, for the sake of America and for the sake of all those who tragically lost their lives five years ago, that the theory - however plausible it seems - is wrong!