Odd Lots

[jeff_duntemann]

• Christmas is now officially over for most of the world-especially the commercial part of the world, for which it ended about noon yesterday-but over here we celebrate Christmas for a considerable while longer, generally until January 6. Our tree has stopped taking up water, so it may need to come down sooner than that, but our hard-won Lionel layout will remain at least that long, and we have pfeffernuss cookies, bourbon egg nog, and other goodies that may last longer still. (I don't wolf down cookies like I used to, and a little bourbon goes a long, long way with me.)
• There is another nuclear waste car in the Lionel canon: The 6805 Atomic Waste Disposal Car (see above) which was sold in 1958-59, and worked with a small crane that I haven't found a good photo of yet. The little containers had red lights inside them, and when the batteries were fresh would glow ominously as they spun around the Christmas tree.
• Among the many gifts that Carol gave me yesterday, the best is probably a shredder that shreds CDs and credit cards as well as paper. I have a stack of old backup CDs awaiting proper destruction, and the device will be most useful.
• If you haven't already read it, I recommend Frederick Forsyth's The Shepherd, especially if you're into military aviation. Pete Albrecht gave me a copy for Christmas two years ago, and you can read it in an hour. I had not heard of the odd De Havilland Vampire fighter/bomber before reading it, and I now have a very good feel for what a fighter pilot's lot was like in peacetime 1957. It's a Christmas novella that some call a ghost story, but that's not quite fair; some heroes just don't allow little things like death to get in the way of their missions.
• Wired has an intriguing article about the effects of high-tech gadgetry on the housing market. Demand for existing (and especially older) houses is down in part because people really want home theater rooms and CAT5E in all the walls.
• If one of you Linux gurus could recommend a hard drive cloning utility running under Linux that would allow me to make a bit-copy of a hard drive (including the MBR) to a second blank drive, I would appreciate it, especially if it's free software.