Wednesday, February 18, 2015

MAN ARRESTED FOR FEEDNG CATS!

I do not have all the details on this Internet posting.

According to the photo that came with this piece of the unsettling news, a squeaky clean 76-year old gentleman in the picture was in jail for feeding cats.  And one of the animal welfare groups is helping him fighting the laws.

It looks like this is another case of a good intention turned terribly wrong.  There must be a  good intention behind such a law that forbids citizen taking care of homeless animals, most likely the stray dogs and cats.  To me using the jaws of the laws to thaw the kindness of the other is not the "right"  solution.  Perhaps thousands of dollars needed to enforce the law can be spent on better care of the animals which  are currently  under the government's care.

We all know both private and tax dollar-funded animals shelters are inundated with thousands of lost and sick animals.  Based on what I saw on how some of the strays were handled, I think some of them would be better off remaining in the neighborhood to fend for themselves.  Furthermore, because the animal shelters are so crowed, I see nothing wrong when the public, like this senior citizen, took  the task in his own hands  to care for the neighborhood strays.  -  Ayee

Sunday, February 8, 2015

To Keep the Slate Clean

New Year again brought me spring fever. I, like many other years, decided to de-clutter a bit. This year the first item on my bucket list was a used computer that I bought from my former work place. The computer with an operating system dated back to the early 90's did not have the latest bells and whistles. But it continued providing me with reliable services for several years. It also survived our moves to two new neighborhoods. Maybe it is for nostalgic reasons that I did not recycle it right away when I was given a new desk-top. Instead of recycling the old one I had, I stowed it away under my computer desk as a foot-warmer. Since it did not in any way take up extra storage space, I had left the old computer there until just a few days ago.

And there was another personal reason why I was not in the hurry to recycle this dated machine: 

Because I did not know how to empty the thousands of bytes and bits of information that I had saved in my computer’s hard drive.
I also do not know if it had actually happened to people who had given away their old computers or other smart gadgets without the due care, and became victims of identity-theft I did, however, hear someone enlisted a hammer to render their old machines useless. Since I do not like to smash things, and was not able to find help in books, for many years, I had passively waited for my Eureka moment. But that moment never come.
Luckily, once again my dear family members came to my rescue. And with a simple command* and a few strokes, my old computer became squeaky clean and ready to be recycled at our friendly neighborhood store. - Ayee
*In my case, I used "format c: " to do the job.