I hope all of you had a wonderful and calorific holiday season, and that every one of you made your New Year resolutions early enough so you could beat the last minute rush. I’m also sure all of you were able to weigh a few pounds less than what you used to when you entered the holiday season a few days before Turkey Day. I did! I had a pretty good idea what the outcome was going to be, so I was prepared early on. I had a few lead bricks hidden away in my slacks pocket when I weighed in before the holidays. And I came out clean at the final weigh in. I bet none of you thought about that! Well, may be next year. Since unleaded seems to be the theme these days, and if you can’t find lead bricks for that or other reasons, ordinary mud bricks would do just the same. I also hope that all of you were able to find some quality time (whatever that means…) to get away from it all and relax and reflect, so we can confidently philosophize on some of the age old questions which kept on eluding human curiosity, such as…, What came first? Egg or eggnog? Or was it the chicken or the egg? Did chicken really come before eggnog? Or was it Trent or Strom that came first? And while we are on the subject, who’s on first, and what in the world is a nog? Is it some kind of abbreviated version for “NO Good”? If it is so, isn’t it synonymous to Trent Lott? Assuming that someone knows what the nog is, and how it affects one’s metabolic process, the next question is whether it has an independent existence without its embryonic companion. My Microsoft spell checker says it doesn’t, but I don’t trust Bill Gates enough to believe that. I need more evidence.

What else is there to philosophize about? I think the ancient Greeks had their hands on pretty much everything, and didn’t really leave much for amateurs like us. But I’m sure we can lay our hands on something if we look hard enough. For example, take the case of the famous Humpty-Dumpty. First of all, what in the world is a humpty-dumpty? Fruit, nut or vegetable? Is it one single entity? The hyphenated name tells me that it might have been some kind of a hybrid, which could even explain its eventual fate, but that’s not where we are trying to go with this. It may be true that humpty-dumpty may have sat on a wall, and at some point in its life cycle, even had a great fall and broken itself into a zillion pieces. We also know that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put humpty-dumpty together again…, God knows they tried! May be the king was incompetent, and dumb as dumpty itself! That’s all fine and dandy; we know all that. But did anyone think of the obvious? How about recycling humpty-dumpty?

Speaking of humpties and dumpties, I’m totally ticked off when my computer tells me that it doesn’t have enough memory. To me, that’s a whole lot of bologna (baloney?). I venture to say that my computer has selective or random memory. If it doesn’t have enough memory, how does it remember some of the totally useless stuff such as the user name of the Information Services (IS) guy, who logged on to my computer and loaded a whole bunch of gigabite-eating garbage software on it after I was gone for the day?! As if that was not enough, why does it automatically download all the programs that come into it via the all knowing and all seeing Internet after barking at me a dumb question like, “A new program is about to load; do you want it to be loaded now or NOW?” Some choice, that was! As far as I can judge, my computer is like the proverbial alley cat, which comes into my house through the window (Windows 98, as is the case here) just to take a (giga) bite of the cat food, after which it goes out again and socializes with all the rest of the world wide felines (wwf)! And on those rare occasions when I want it to retrieve something, it gives me this lousy Alzheimer’s (sub?) routine! I think I need to throw that thing out the window (so to speak) and do an upgrade… The bottom line is that I can’t win! It’s a giga rip off!

But that’s not what I’m worried about. My real problem, however, is when my computer tells me that I have performed an illegal operation, and that the program will be shut down. That ticks me off big time! What illegal operation?! How fast was I going, officer? My only consolation is that the machine stops just short of telling me that I will be arrested by Cyber police and sent to Cyber jail. And while we are on the subject, what do we know about Cyberspace? I always wondered where this much-talked about “space” is located. Whenever I hear expressions like, "Your file resides somewhere in Cyber space", "Your email is lost somewhere in Cyber space", or “The server sent it, we’ve got proof of that; but what happens to it after that in Cyber space, we have no control…", I was getting more and more frustrated and curious. Any ideas, folks? Help me with this one. Please…

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