Photography rule number one:

Don't forget to look behind you.

See this National Geographic blog.

(Photograph by Tim Greenleaf)

When we were in South Carolina last week the political and personal problems of Governor Sanford got plenty of attention.

A T-shirt said it nicely:

"South Carolina's 3 Biggest problems:

- Education
- Unemployment
- Argentina."

A local city paper had a picture of the governor with the title "Don't cry for me South Carolina".

"Don't cry for me South Carolina"

When we visited a museum in Washington three months ago I saw the Kindle for the first time in real life. The Kindle is a hand held device for reading books, connected to Amazon's bookstore. I'd like to be able to read books digitally, but $399 is way too expensive and I don't like to be "locked in" to Amazon's bookstore.

I read newspapers on my phone every day. The screen is fairly small, but it's certainly readable and the other day I found out how to read books on my phone as well. I've started reading a classic a few weeks ago, The Brothers Karamazov, and in addition to the hard copy I now have the entire book with me where ever I go.

I installed "Mobipocket" on my laptop and cell phone, and downloaded a free copy of the book from Project Gutenberg. It's free since the copyright on the book has long expired. It works great! Obviously, reading a physical book is still a lot nicer, but if I have some time to kill and my phone with me, I can now continue reading my book.

One of our computers got a virus Thursday night. Of course we have virus scanners and malware scanners, but somehow this one slipped through the cracks. We were able to track down the source of the virus, an infected website.

Our virus scanner (AVG) did not fully protect the computer but it did find the originally infected HTML file. I used the excellent HijackThis tool to manually clean up the resident processes and start-up tasks of the virus.

The symptoms were as typical as they were annoying: errors on Windows start-up ("Services and Controller app encountered a problem and needed to close") and an slow and unstable system. This time something else happened also: Windows would automatically shutdown after a 60 seconds count-down.

I learned this trick: to cancel a pending shutdown run the following command.

shutdown -a

Last weekend we had a great time in Charleston, South Carolina.

We left on Friday morning. It was about 5 hours to get the South Carolina and the journey itself is always enjoyable. With a cup of coffee, open highway and wonderful company driving is a lot of fun.

We arrived around 4.00 pm in Charleston and we found our bed & breakfast quickly. We stayed in "King George IV Inn" that we had booked the night before. A nice bed & breakfast, with a great location. Charleston is a little bit like Savannah, in that everything is withing walking distance. We didn't use the car the whole weekend.

Charleston is a great city, with a lot of night life. The first night we had dinner with a live Dixieland band playing "Up the lazy river" and other hits. It was busy on the street until late at night.

Saturday during the day we visited Fort Sumter, the location of the first shots of the Civil War. The Civil War (1861–1865) is the most bloody war in U.S. history, far exceeding World War II. It was impressive to visit the fort and the museum and read the stories.

On Sunday we went for lunch in High Cotton, a very good restaurant with modern Southern style food. The corn bread and salads were amazing.

We left Charleston around 3.00 pm on Sunday, and decided to get off the highway for a while and instead tour through the country side for an hours. We stopped on the road to pick up some boiled peanuts and fresh fruits. Upon hearing that we're from Durham, North Carolina the salesman commented: "Well, just be careful how you order your barbecue sandwich up there. I love coleslaw, I love barbecue sandwich but I'm from South Carolina and they don't go together on the same piece of bread." During the drive back the car smelled nicely of the cantaloupe.

Our bed & breakfast.

In the room.

The historic part of Charleston is full with small alleys and walkways; it's really similar in style to European cities.

Fort Sumter.

The flag on Fort Sumter, including an old Confederate Flag, old flags of the United States (with less stars than today) and the South Carolina flag. The flag of the United States is the largest of them.

Lots of big cannons and mortars in the fort.

On the evening of the Fourth and the next day we saw dolphins in the harbor. I had never seen dolphins in the wild before.

A Southern belle.

'Rainbow row'.

On Sunday we visited the Battery where there are a lot of big mansions. A few are now museums but most are still in use as residences.

I just upgraded the server to OpenBSD 4.5.

Upgrade was a breeze, as always. I didn't use sysmerge this time, and simply patching worked fine.

Small change in procedure; no reboot into the new kernel was necessary until all userland components were also upgraded.

We're leaving tomorrow morning to Charleston, South Carolina.

Charleston is about 5 hours from Durham and it promises to be a warm weekend in a beautiful Southern city. It looks a little bit like Savannah which we visited a year ago.

Saturday it's Fourth of July and tomorrow is a day off. Independence Day is a great opportunity to celebrate America, a country that has welcomed us with open arms on so many levels.

The owner of this car we saw parked the other day at South Point must not like his or her job very much.

The Dutch national public library has a research service. You can ask them questions, typically about books but also other topics, and they will research the answer for you.

Mieke suggested that I should post a question that has been in my mind for a very long time: to find the author or title of books that I read at school when I was around 11 or 12 years old.

Unfortunately the research service could not answer my question, so it is now published as a hersenkraker (challenging puzzle) on Aladin.bibliotheek.nl:

"Ik zoek een jeugdboekenserie, maar ik weet de titels of auteur niet. Ik las het toen ik zo'n 10 tot 12 jaar oud was, in 1988 - 1990. Het was een spannende serie, met meer dan 1 boek, ik meen ieder geval 4 stuks. Het ging over kinderen die in aanraking met heksen komen. Het verhaal speelde zich veel 's nachts af. Een belangrijk plot element was dat heksen niet over stromend water konden vliegen. Hierdoor konden de hoofdpersonen zich af en toe in veiligheid brengen."

Michael Jackson died this afternoon, sad news.

I have fond memories of a concert he gave in Amsterdam and not just because of the concert, it was a lot of fun.

A great musician.