By request, a picture from the road:

I’m such a geek that I’m filing entries from the road. I found a little coffee shop in Dauphin Island, AL with good coffee and an Internet connection. For those of you looking for spring vacations with a beach but without a lot of Spring Break craziness, Dauphin Island seems to fit the bill (at least that’s my impression after all of one day.) Lots of young families here — which was my goal. We’re with my buddy, his wife, and his 20 month old child. (My boy is 19 months, so it really works out.) I’ve gotta say, a *lot* of Christian radio on in Nashville Saturday morning at 1 a.m. or whatever it was. Just couldn’t help thinking, “o.k., you’re Christians, I get it! Now play some music.” But, if that’s what the market there wants, so be it. I just flipped over to my XM radio and listened to the Blues.

Blogging may be a bit slow to non-existent for the next few days depending on my proximity to Internet access and my desire to put down the beer and leave the beach long enough to post blog entries.

I’m getting a little tired of my Comcast broadband. They’ve apparently been having problems with their DNS servers. I think last night was the 3rd night in a week that my service was effectively useless. Think they’ll give me a refund? Hehehe. I wouldn’t be quite as disgruntled if I hadn’t switched from my sufficiently fast and usually reliable DSL connection in favor of Comcast. Hopefully this is just a blip for them and they’ll get things together soon. The outages have been in the evening and really cut into my blogging time.

Looks like Pope John Paul II died today. I sure hope there is something in the Sunday papers about it. (That’s a joke, son.)

I’m not Catholic, but for some reason find the Papacy interesting. So, as the Pope’s failing health and anticipation of his death and succession of a new Pope feed the 24 hour news cycle for another couple of turns, I find an article in the New Zealand Herald entitled How to Pick a New Pope.

120 Cardinals are sequestered in the Sistine Chapel beginning no earlier than 15 days and no later than 20 days after the Papacy becomes vacant either through death or resignation. Two ballots are taken each morning and two ballots each night. A Pope must be selected by a vote of 2/3 + 1 — 81 of the 120 votes. Elaborate tallying procedures are described.

According to the article, top contenders to succeed John Paul II are:

Dionigi Tettamanzi, 71, Italy – the Archbishop of Milan, is the frontrunner. Tettamanzi is a pastor and an intellectual and as someone close to John Paul II, insiders say he he represents continuity, but with new ideas. Tettamanzi can count on the support of Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, who heads the bishops’ congregation, and Camillo Ruini, head of the Italian Church. He’s also close to Opus Dei, the ultraconservative Catholic group.

Francis Arinze 73, Nigeria – Archbishop Emeritus of Onitsha, Nigeria, pro-president of the secretariat for Non-Christians. In 2002, after serving as the head of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, he was named the head of the Congregation for Divine Worship and Discipline of Sacraments. Arinze is a conservative who takes a hardline position on abortion and contraception and denounces homosexuality.

Christoph Schonborn, 60, Austria – Archbishop of Vienna. Schonborn is titled aristocracy related to every European royal family. Also a brilliant theologian with sensitivity to the Christian East, orthodoxy and Eastern bloc Catholics.

But his relatively young age and that he comes from the German camp could work against him.

Angelo Scola, 64, Italy – the Patriarch of Venice. A scholar and a moderate, Scola is likely to have the backing of Opus Dei.

Severino Poletto, 72, Italy – the Archbishop of Turin. Poletto was named Bishop of Asti last year. His prospects derive from his spiritual and pastoral qualities and his links to Vatican secretary of state, Angelo Sodano.

The article does mention that Latin Americans make up more than 50% of all Catholics and, therefore, mentions a Honduran and a Brazilian possibility.

New Scientist 13 things that do not make sense:

1. The placebo effect.
2. The horizon problem.
3. Ultra-energetic cosmic rays.
4. Belfast homeopathy results.
5. Dark matter.
6. Viking’s methane.
7. Tetraneutrons.
8. The Pioneer anomaly.
9. Dark energy.
10. The Kuiper cliff.
11. The Wow signal.
12. Not-so-constant constants.
13. Cold fusion.

This page was loading slowly for me for the past couple of days. My best guess is that it has something to do with the number of entries being displayed. So, I cut it back to displaying entries for the past 15 days. Prior entries are available in the archives, month-by-month. We’ll see if this helps any.

The Lafayette J&C is reporting that Lafayette Attorney, Larry O’Connell has died. We lost a good person in Larry O’Connell. I had the opportunity to work with him on several occasions. He was always very upbeat and a pleasure to talk to — even if I didn’t agree with his legal opinions. (That had more to do with him trying to a good job representing his clients who came to him with tough, hard to defend cases than any real disagreement, I suspect.) He was only 57 and had been fighting with health problems for at least the past couple of years. It looked like he was on the mend up until several months ago. Then he took a turn for the worse I guess and never quite recovered. God speed, Larry.

Just upgraded to Movable Type 3.15. from 3.12. Apparently 3.14 alleviated some server load problems caused by comment spam and 3.15 fixes a vulnerability in the mail sending packages. Looks like there was no 3.13.