Live-CD's are boot CD's with a twist: they comprise a host of programs and even offer you to go on-line and surf the web. When you would like to test a Linux distro just download its .iso, burn it on a CD/DVD and restart into it. Easier said than done? If you are using Linux already, try 'K3b' to burn such a CD/DVD with one click. The interesting fact is, that Linux allows you to 'build' your personal distro like a box of Lego blocks. Although the standard Live-CD's come with a rich selection of pre-installed programs, you might want to change themes and settings, add more software, adjust certain parameters to your liking. You did that and are happy with it. Then one day a disaster happens, causing the loss of a hard drive. No complete backup had been made. Your data is gone, but also your operating system with all programs and personal settings. All gone! What about making a personal distro with all your latest settings, programs and data as to prevent such scenarios? And, why not share your distro with friends...?

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I am not sure whether we should be glad with the discovery by hackers of incredible emails and documents on e-mail servers at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) in Norwich, England. The illegally accessed material clearly and convincingly indicates a conspiracy by a group of so-called 'global warming experts' in order to influence political and public opinion. This by means of falsifying scientific data, debunking expert's criticism, influencing peer reviews in scientific magazines and scare mongering using 'tricks'. Names of some participants in this scam appear well-known: James Hansen, NASA; Stephen Schneider, confident of Al Gore and Michael Mann, inventor of the 'Hockey Stick' temperature graphs. What has surfaced could damage all related sciences, not only meteorology or climatology - pseudo-sciences for their dependency on random facts and nearly complete lack of understanding the cosmic correlations. It seems that, for money and prestige, one gladly sells his soul to the devil: politics. Climates are always changing and did so for the past 5 billion years, nothing new here. Global warming has occurred many times before, last time 1.000 years ago with temperatures considerably higher than today's. Nothing new here as well. Fact however is, that since 1998 global temperatures are going down. The Sun, provider of energy to our weather-machine, still is hibernating. The reverse from what is claimed by alarmists is true: we are heading for a period (some say 60 years, others longer) of colder weather, a new Ice Age perhaps. The role the media play is of interest. They appear as promotors of the global warming hoax. Will their role change now this hoax has been exposed? What about public opinion and what about the responsibility of politicians when continuing their scare mongering? What about the quality of leadership that was so brilliantly 'tricked'? How glad can we be about possibly 'corrupted' sciences for whom money seems more important than truth-finding, still begging for more subsidies? Who will be inclined to pay their bills?

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...or is it Windows 7 on XP? I ran into this remarkable question when my son tried to run our ISDN internet connection. It can't be run under Windows 7. Next we ended up in a mess probing USB sticks and SSD card solutions, WLAN, Ethernet and router settings that various drivers on Windows 7 tried to access, troubles with 32-bit software for a 64-bit computer and more. When trucking through Europe he uses WiFi connections, but due to our terrain we only can use wired ISDN. There (still) isn't coverage for wireless devices where we live, so we are electro-smog free as well. It's not like the happy few 'big cities' here with hi-speed WiFi. For not so mysterious reasons his dual-booting Ubuntu 9.04 (that I must upgrade for him) had not the slightest problem to connect everything. Using this detour we downloaded Windows-software that could be stored in the common Windows folders on his hard drive. We gave up spending time on these well-known problems, considering to remove and replace things by some virtual Windows OS version. Or should we use Windows 7 virtualisation for XP that Microsoft itself offers? Or simply run both XP and Windows 7 from Sun's VirtualBox under Linux? Our preferred option. What a hassle to play some games...

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