Someone gave me a great idea yesterday. We were talking about finances: one thing that I'm completely and utterly rubbish at organising. The person in question knows that I pay Psycho's rent as well as my own, but that I also cannot afford to buy my apartment. Parisian prices are high and my place is pretty big.
"Why don't you buy a smaller apartment and put Psycho in it?" she says. "At least then you'd be paying two rents, but getting an apartment for one of them instead of throwing the money away."
Genius.
Here in France, there's also a law that makes buying a 'secondary residence' cheaper if one agrees to rent it out for ten years. Since Psycho would effectively be renting my secondary place (i.e. I don't live in it), I could benefit from said regulations.
Since this would involve Psycho having to move, I spent a while on the phone with her last night, discussing the details. She had a few obvious questions, but was really quite pleased with the idea: everybody wins, when it comes down to it.
She wins because she would have a place of her own pretty much guaranteed: I'm very unlikely to suddenly decide to throw her out so I can sell the place or rent it to someone else. She would gain an understanding landlord (me) and would retain her independence.
I win because I stop throwing money away for one of the apartments. I have capital for a later, bigger investment for my own place. I'd also get back the deposit on Psycho's place - twelve months of rent is a lot of cash and would pay for renovations on an apartment of my own.
So now I'm house-hunting. Well, not really: I'm starting to think about it. I need to speak to the bank to see how much I can borrow in practical terms and to look into how it all works over here in France. Psycho's the one actually out house-hunting, but then she's always enthusiastic about that.
Anyone got a 200-square-metre apartment in a really nice area that they want to sell for a couple of thousand euros?
Unemployment is a bitch. It's one of the most depressing, fatiguing and utterly soul-destroying things that can happen, especially when it lasts too long. Personally, I've been lucky: by taking sometimes-crappy jobs, working in bars or filling my time as best I could with freelance computer stuff, I've never been out of work for more than six months at a time.
Psycho, on the other hand, is not so lucky. Being a clinical psychologist, work is scarce and given her somewhat lacklustre approach to sticking with crappy jobs, she's been effectively unemployed for a couple of years. Since I'm such a nice guy (read sucker), I support her while she tries to find something good to dig her teeth into.
Just recently, however, she's started on a new tack: she wants to go back to being a student. There is good reason for this, since French bureaucracy demands a different diploma for virtually every style of psychological work. She wants to get some more qualifications, basically grabbing pieces of paper that say she can do things of a lesser intensity than the clinical stuff she is entirely capable of handling.
The downside? Guess who she wants to support her for two or three more years...
It's Monday morning, I'm half-dead and traffic was bad. Apparently it snowed out to the west of Paris this morning, so there's 30km of traffic jams on the way into the city. Thank goodness I live in the centre and head outwards! On the other hand, Psycho's grandmother is in a clinic at the moment (she's old) and we wanted to visit her this week... to the west of Paris... ack!
I'm going through the rituals here: coffee first, voicemail second, email third. As you are all aware, email is a big deal for me. My preferred method of communication, I receive anything from 500 to 1,500 messages a day: it can be a bit of a pain, especially when so much of it is spam, so I rely quite heavily on filtering (yes, I need more space for rules on the damned Exchange server, you administrator people!) and spam detection.
This morning's Backweb news from the BBC included this wonderful piece about Silly Billy Gates, who boldly states that "Spam will soon be a thing of the past". Seeing that just made me sigh, particularly coming from someone who, quite obviously, has no clue about spam. Let's look, for example, at the way Hotmail and Outlook 2003 filtering is set up: sender address filtering. Golly, gosh and gee! That's possibly the most inefficient and ineffective method that we're aware of as users! Excellent choice!
Here's some extra little quotes from Silly Billy, along with a bit of personal commentary (of course):
"Lots of mail you get is from people on your contact list. So what's the problem? Strangers!"
Filtering email on the sender's address is, of course, the best way to reduce your spam reception to almost zero: maintaining the list of acceptable addresses, however, is a total bitch and consumes vast quantities of time. It also opens us all up to virus writers who will know to aim at the address book as the best source of spam 'reply-to' entries. Duh.
"Does the e-mail say it's about 'enlargement' - that might be spam."
Although only touched on here (excuse the pun), this is almost definitely the way to go, it seems. Email content is the thing that best determines that it's spam. It's also the most difficult thing to work with, due to the complexities and multitude of possible languages, sentence structure, the inclusion of images and so on. Mr. Bill, on the other hand, believes such filtering will "not be the magic solution".
More promising, according to him, were "human challenges". This is the idea of forcing the computer sending the email to do a simple computation or the user to solve a puzzle (?!).
"That's easy for a machine sending a few e-mails, but gets very difficult and expensive for a computer sending lots of spam," Mr Gates said.
Uh, yes, it would. And when one considers that the PC sending the mail probably does one computation to send to an email list that's defined on the server, what machine is going to end up doing the mass of the work? That's right: the ISP's mail server. So the spammer just clicks once and off goes the email: every user with that ISP suffers the consequences. Smart move. Duh.
However, Silly Billy has his capitalist brain cells working on this one: he predicts that spam can be killed through the electronic equivalent of a stamp. The idea is to force the sender of an email to pay a fee when it is rejected as spam. This sounds like a really good idea, particularly for the ISPs who can charge their users extra and make some cash.
My question is: who's going to do the digging to find out where the spam really came from? I mean, I get plenty of spams from myself, yet they're not from me at all: the reply address has been munged. I don't particularly want to receive 40,000 demands for cash (or to be automatically charged on my credit card for spamming) when some asshole uses my email address on his spam. This means a lot of work for the network guys, to find out who is really responsible, then more work for their ISP to prove they were responsible, then even more work for the ISP's legal department to try to force the user to pay. That's an awful lot of work.
"Microsoft is pursuing all three approaches, and spam will soon be a thing of the past," Mr Gates asserted.
I have a solution: Microsoft HumanFilter®. A personal assistant in a box. What could be better than a human brain filtering your spam for you? Alternatively, just get out of the spam arena, Silly Billy. Leave it to the professionals who have been working on it for years and aren't in it for the money.
I've been a little quiet the last couple of days because I'm overworked. The company which employs me is renowned for getting a lot out of their salaried staff (well in excess of $500,000 of revenue for every one of us, I believe), but I'd never really thought about it very much before.
This week, I had a bit of a management invasion: my direct boss - a lovely lady who leaves me to my own devices, provided the work gets done - wanted me to fill in my six-month performance review documentation (don't even think of going there, Scary Ross) and Big Big Boss™ visited.
The performance review was really quite an eye-opener. Since the last one in August, the number of things I am doing has doubled. Literally. I knew I was doing a lot, but seeing it on virtual paper was a surprise. Still, the half-year bonus should be good, in that case!
As for the Big Big Boss™, he wanted to meet each of us individually. He's a surprisingly normal person: no use of buzzwords, he listens, he gives his opinion... not at all the standard upper-management bod. Of course, he has that 'poker face' where one has no clue what he's thinking until he says it, but for me that just means I don't know if he's lying (as opposed to my normal assumptions for most managers). It was nice to have the opportunity to express that I was enjoying myself as always, but to point out that I refuse to be a manager, so stop trying to make me one!
Phew. Got that off my chest.
P.S. Almost forgot: Flowerhead's moved... and still no sign of Jackie.
Listening to Yahoo!'s LAUNCHcast radio - which is free and surprisingly good - I heard a quite appalling advertisement for their personals service. Since I'm a twisted, cynical old bugger, I thought I would drop in on their pages and have a look at what's (or rather, "who's") there, mostly to laugh at the way people describe themselves.
A couple of examples:
"I am an out going intelligent girl who enjoys the company of others. I have a great sense of humour and enjoys a great laugh! A man with a great sense of humour is truely attractive in a man. In addition, intelligence is important, but do you have common sense? If you do contact me! P.S boys don't forget to attach your profile!!!!!!"
Basically, this one's saying "Despite considering myself intelligent, I can't write properly." Insisting so heavily on intelligence indicates she's going to be an absolute nightmare and have a serious problem with anyone smarter than her, and the age-old "a sense of humour is attractive" thing is just an attempt to cover the fact that she wants to go out with a Brad Pitt look-alike.
"I’ve been told that I’m very attractive but yet sadly enough I’m still waiting for my sweetheart - my prince charming.....is not that I’m choosy but is just that I want to be in the right man’s arms. I believe in true love and I know someday I will find it......and we will have a beautiful life together..... I have travel quite a fair bit searching for my true love, I’m disappointed but I’m not going to give it up. Hope someone out there can complete my search and my soul.....let me know if you can help..... ’) My darling should be full of love and life. He should be amazing yet someone down to earth, mature, independent and genuinely commitment to me forever. I’m looking for someone loving & caring with whom I would be very please to spend my entire life with, someone that I’m proud to regard as my partner, someone who will be my best friend, I trust and respect - certainly some who will promise to keep me happy in a lasting relationship!! Please do me a favor, if you find him, tell him I’m waiting for him...... "
A wonderful piece of text. This one clearly announces "I want to marry someone who's perfect. If you're perfect, contact me and I'll let you look after me, pay for everything (emotionally and financially) and be my slave for the rest of your life." She obviously watches far too many daytime soaps. Being a spoilt little princess, you will note that there is nothing about what she's offering in her introduction: she just wants to take and assumes that her mere presence in your life will be exchange enough.
So I started thinking about how I would describe myself if I were to post an ad on one of these sites, in the style they expect. Then I wondered how different it would be if I posted the truth.
"Outgoing, dynamic, fun-loving, ambitious male seeks intelligent, charming woman to share romantic evenings, wild weekends and perhaps the rest of eternity. I am kind and generous, faithful, financially secure, reasonably good-looking, smart and funny, energetic: a real modern gentleman. You are intelligent, independent and have a smile to light up the room."
Of course, that's nowhere near the truth. In reality, my personal ad should read more along the lines of this:
"Male computer geek seeks like other. I am kind, generous, faithful, smart, not horribly ugly, reasonably funny, can be romantic and am otherwise as dull as dishwater. I enjoy evenings in front of the PC or watching a good film with a pizza delivered to the door. I am boring: I hate travel, going out and pretending to have fun with pseudo-friends who just want to manipulate me into expending energy on making their lives better because they're too lazy to do it themselves. I will happily spend hours listening to you, discussing life, but I refuse to answer to your every whim and treat you like a spoilt little princess. You are breathtakingly intelligent and independent, a modern woman who believes in true equality. You are not psychotic, schizophrenic, pathetically fragile or horrendously complicated and do not live your life from crisis to crisis, expecting someone else to take responsibility for solving your problems. You aren't necessarily pretty, but you don't look like a walrus on a bad hair day."
Yup. Guess who's still single?
Once again, Agony Uncle Spike is in demand. Today's request comes from one Adam who posted on the Stubborn Nerd entry.
"I have a pc with a pent.3 and win 2000. I just picked up a dell lattitude with a pentium 1 and win 98.....is there any way possible i could switch the processor to the laptop and possibly my win 2000 also....I dont have the 2000 disk anymore."
First off, he at least had the sense to post on an entry that had something to do with PCs - absolutely nothing to do with what he's asking, but at least it's vaguely the right area.
Ignoring for the moment the blindingly bad typing, spelling, syntax and grammar in the comment (it'd be too easy to ridicule that), here's the response:
Dear Adam,
Thank you for sending me a request for help via the comments option on my blog, despite the fact that said blog has absolutely nothing to do with offering free technical support to imbeciles who happen to find it. It's good to see that adolescent narcissism continues unabated online.
I'm pleased you thought that my post about low-level formatting a hard disk had something to do with your own problems of switching processors between PCs and reinstalling your (presumably pirated) copy of Windows 2000. This indication of your technical prowess saved me the effort of worrying about repercussions once I decided to ridicule you.
I'm sorry to say that I will be unable to offer you any help for a number of reasons, which I will outline here. I'll try to use small words so you can understand:
1. I don't care what you want to do with your PCs.
2. I don't care that you no longer have your Windows 2000 CD.
3. I do not offer help to people via this blog.
4. You obviously found that entry via some Google search or something and are not a regular reader.
5. If you had bothered to look further, you would know I wouldn't help.
6. I'm a computer professional: you're not offering me money for my skills.
I trust your attempts at destroying two PCs will be fruitful or if not, that you will at least be able to remove yourself from the gene pool in the process.
Uncle Spike
Man, what a weekend. I finally found out what has been causing all the troubles on my main PC at home: the weird BSoDs with 'unknown hard error' reports, the 'Kernel stack overflow' errors and everything. So what was it and how did I find out?
Easy. My primary hard drive failed.
Losing a disk is always a bit of a cow, but I'd never had a primary fail before. It's distinctly unpleasant, to put it mildly: not only will the PC not start (since the OS is dead and gone), but all user settings and whatever data was on the disk is pretty much lost, too. When the primary HDD is 60Gb in size, that's a bitch.
For once, however, I got lucky. Back when I ordered Psycho's PC kit, I picked up an 80Gb drive as a spare, that I put in the secondary. Of course, it was a little bit chock-full of crap, since I'd been using it as non-critical storage. Thanks to the wonder of PowerQuest's Partition Magic, I was able to collect the spare space on the drive's two partitions and create a new, third partition at the start of the disk. At 12Gb, it would be big enough to hold the OS.
Once that was done, I switched the HDDs between the two machines and could set up the new disk on the main PC. Thankfully, I keep a Ghost image of my primary PC's OS partition, so once I had reinstalled WinXP (three times, since I'm an idiot and got it wrong the first two), it was a simple matter of restoring the image and all is well again. Of course, "simple" matters aren't necessarily quick, so I ended up getting to bed at around 3 a.m. on Sunday morning, albeit with a working main PC.
As for the old disk, it doesn't seem to want to spin up. It's a bit of a shame, since it had 50Gb of useful data on it: occasionally, however, the secondary PC will detect it and I can pull stuff off. Yesterday I was able to recuperate about two thirds of the data on there (and finding space for it is not easy when you've suddenly lost 50Gb of storage!). Here's hoping I can get the rest.
Still, the up-side of the failure is pretty good: I now have a fully-functional and not-at-all-dodgy main drive in the main PC, a clean installation and also a quite astoundingly clean bathroom (since I had nothing better to do than clean while the PCs were working on repairs!). I may even be able to find a little money next month to replace the dead drive in the secondary PC, since it'll be 6-month-bonus time.
P.S. Jackie's back! Woop! Woop!
I've said it before and I'll say it again: I'm a loony magnet. This is, unfortunately, quite a common thing for anyone who is a Nice Guy™. Look around you at all the spoiled princesses and see who they're with - almost undoubtedly some long-suffering saint of a guy who was completely ignored for ages by Ms. Twisted ("he's a nice guy" = "wouldn't sleep with him in a million years"), finally convinced her to go out with him and will now spend the rest of his life being her manservant.
Any of you who've visited regularly know I despise the whole idea of hating men that is such a trendy thing at the moment amongst psychotic "feminists" (quotes included because they're not real feminists). Society continues to encourage everybody - and particularly women - to blame anyone else for their problems, rather than just accepting responsibility and learning from it.
So what does this have to do with me being a loony magnet? Well, just the other day I arrived at Psycho's place and found her neighbour outside in the rain, smoking a cigarette. She's a lady of (probably) about my age - a little older - with a daughter who's about to head into The Nightmare That Is Adolescence. Her bloke doesn't seem to be home much, so she raises her kid mostly on her own: I think he has some job that involves a heck of a lot of travel or something.
Seeing her there, I said hello and joked that she'd locked herself out. We get along fine, so I knew I could invite her up to Psycho's if she was locked out, until someone with a key arrived. Apparently, she'd had a barney¹ with her daughter and had absented herself to calm down. She mumbled something about it being easier for a man to maintain order and we both got into the lift together.
Arriving outside our destinations, she opened her door and invited me in for a moment. Being polite, I figured it'd be nice to actually see her flat and to properly meet her, her daughter and her two cats that keep trying to invade Biscotte's domain.² As we entered the flat, she called out to her daughter:
"Cynthia, there's a man here who'd like to speak to you."
At this point, my brain basically said "WHAT?!" - I had no idea why she was calling her daughter or what she thought I wanted to say to her. Then it suddenly dawned on me: she wanted me to do a sort of surrogate father thing and tell her daughter to calm down and 'do what mum says'. Loony magnet.
This goes to show how little the neighbour (Benedicte) actually knows about me. First off, I'm Mr. Logical: if she wants me to step into an argument, I'm going to want to hear both sides, separately and privately, and make my own decision about who's right. Secondly, I have immense respect for the rights of individuals: I am not going to tell someone else's child what to do unless it's in the street and they're being blatantly offensive in the absence of their own parents.
So basically I found myself in this completely unbelievable situation, floundering wildly and refusing to side with anybody. Both Cynthia and myself must have looked horribly uncomfortable (I know she did!) while Benedicte blathered on about calming down and so on. Eventually, the situation ended and I left, dazed and wondering what the hell just happened. The next time I bump into Cynthia, I shall excuse myself: I had no idea that her mother wanted me to be the judge, jury and executioner.
Truly bizarre. Once again, Loony Magnet Theory proves itself to be the governing force of my life.
¹ Translation for the non-Brits: barney = argument, generally a big one.
² Caramel is the worst: male and quite large, he's even come into Psycho's apartment and had to be chased off by Biscotte. It got to a point last summer where I was tempted to bring the significantly larger, tougher and brutish Pie 'Oh' Pah over to ensure Caramel stayed away. The second, Canelle, is much smaller and less interested in invasion.
Uh-oh. Looks like Jackie's going down again... and I have no doubt she'll slap me verbally for the innuendo! She's been having terrible troubles with her site since switching to PHP - mostly caused, it seems, by a crappy slow ISP. Bummer. Hope it all comes back up (pun intended) soon, milady!
Reading the news for once, I happened across this item about the United States' intention to rekindle the space program. Strangely, only yesterday I was watching The Disclosure Project's executive briefing video, in which a lady exec from one of the big aerospace/space tech companies stated her fears for the militarisation of space. When the same government who expresses going to war as "It's Hammer time!" has a desire "to ensure U.S. military dominance in space, especially in the wake of China's first manned space flight last year", I just hope there's no intelligent life out there.
Quite apart from the fact that it would be such a terrible shame to take all the bad things about humanity and push them out into the void (although pushing certain humans into the void without space suits could, of course, be tempting), I don't understand the belligerent attitude. I don't really want to see my home city (or planet) disappear under a plasma bomb just because Billy Joe-Bob thinks he's a patriot, has an itchy trigger finger and thought the Asgard Mothership "looked like one o'them thar Commies."
Speaking of space, I've been watching a lot of UFO-related stuff recently: there's no particular reason, it all just came along at the same time. Some of it is very interesting. Some of it borders on the insane.
The first one I sat through was the "Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?" show that tries to show all the inconsistencies in the moon landing film, photographs, technology and so on. It's an interesting, if lightweight, piece of television: there are, indeed, many oddities in the photos, film and technology at first glance. Unfortunately, this was a Fox TV broadcast, which means it was full of stupidity, over-dramatisation, bad science and one-sided opinions. There's a rather excellent (if a little ranty) page here that gives the other side of the argument.
The second - and best so far seen - was SciFi's "UFO Invasion at Rendlesham". An unfortunate choice of name, to be honest, but US television does have an overwhelming desire to be dramatic. This was a much better show, not least because it covers events that happened during my lifetime and less than two hours' drive from where I lived in the UK! The presentation's much better, too, being quite simply a lot of people talking about the event and not even attempting pretence of showing both sides of the argument. Regardless of what one personally believes, this one is interesting.
Finally, I sat through the Disclosure Project's executive briefing video. Two hours of it. This is basically a long string of interview snippets (note: I always hate seeing editing in interviews, as it's too easy to cut bits out and change the meaning). Starting out quite simple, with accounts of UFO sightings and odd things happening, things get a little bizarre towards the end. Bizarre as in "there's an alien base on the dark side of the moon" and "I've met aliens lots of times" bizarre. Still, it makes for interesting viewing.
Of course, all this begs the question "Do you believe in UFOs?"
This is, in itself, a stupid question. Of course I do: anything that's flying and unidentified is a UFO. The more pertinent question would be to ask what I think they are, not whether they exist. In a way, I'd love for there to be aliens, to be other life in the universe. Obviously, it'd be nice if they were friendly. On the other hand, I'd just like to know what they are: whether they're military ships, alien vessels, illusions or weather balloons. It'd also be nice if the technology could be shared for something more constructive than military uses.
Well, it's back to the orifice today... er, "office", I mean. It's strange to think I have been on holiday for over ten days, particularly when one considers that I actually had about four days of relaxation. The rest of the time was spent dragging my sorry ass through a bout of 'flu, which is not very much fun. It was real 'flu, too - not just a bad cold that is made to sound more dramatic by using the wrong word. Pounding headaches, back pain, coughing so hard that I had to bend double to try to keep my lungs inside my rib cage... the whole deal. Icky.
Now, of course, I must dive into all the backed-up crap here on my desk. Unsurprisingly, the massive flood of email that awaited me this morning must be dealt with first, then the various voice mails. Thankfully, I have only one of the latter. The email is the biggest job: imagine anywhere between 500 and 1,500 messages per day unanswered during 10 days' holiday and you have the starting point. Thank goodness I have a decent spam filter.
I also have to fill in a whole bunch of official forms now that the French bureaucracy has finally given me a Social Security number (only took them 15 months). The company gives full medical cover, so I filled in those forms. Then there was the one in case of accidents, the one in case I die and a couple of others that they needed. This country's red tape brigade is severely demented.
It's raining this morning, too, which does wonders for lifting the mood. Driving to work after a couple of weeks away from the wheel was a bit of an adventure, particularly with the added water. It's still throwing down now.
I should get back to work.
Happened across this site today, which has some excellent 'adverts' for the Mad Monkey's upcoming election campaign. Since the site is opposed to him and the judge of the 'winner' will be Michael Moore, I think you can imagine what sort of advertisements we're talking about...
And my absence? Well, I'm supposed to be having a holiday this week. Unfortunately, of course, I never get a proper holiday: I've had the 'flu since Saturday (and yes, the real thing, not just a bad cold) and Psycho has been a right royal pain in the butt all week. So much for time off.
Could someone please tell me where on this site there is a message inviting all and sundry to bother me with their problems? Apparently there is one, since I keep receiving emails from people I have never met nor spoken to before, asking for advice, solutions and general Agony Uncle crap. If someone could point out the entry that invites such emails, I would be grateful as I can then delete it.
I thought I would post a couple I received this week, so you can see what I mean. Hopefully, this will also act as a deterrent: anyone posting unsolicited, stupid-ass questions will be ridiculed. That is, unless you want to pay me for my time.
This first one was posted on the entry titled Buzzword Bonanza!:
Name: Jessi
Hey! I done my belly button about 2 weeks ago. I know it was stupid and i should've had someone who knew what they wre doing do it. But anyway, I don't think I got enough skin between the holes so it doesn't look as good as some other chick's.(I don't know if that makes scents or not.) But it is also looking like its peeling like dead skin or something. Is that normal?
First off, this has absolutely nothing to do with the subject of that blog entry. Secondly, I presume she is talking about body piercing. Thirdly, it'd be nice if the question was in English instead of some kind of teenage mish-mash of bad typing. What possessed this person to post a question to a random entry in a seemingly randomly chosen blog is beyond me. At a guess, it's the same thing that possessed her to punch holes in her body with absolutely no idea of what she was doing. My advice? Go see a doctor. And a psychiatrist.
Secondly, we have this one, posted to the Stubborn Nerd! entry:
Name: Serbo
I have Windows 2000 on my pc. Originally, I did not set a password to logon; I usually click on "OK" at the logon screen and I am granted access. Unfortunately, one of my kids changed it and created a password; they do not remember the password. I did not even create an administrator password when W2k was installed. At this point, I can only get to the BOIS. I will like to go to the DOS prompt and format my hard drive to start all over. I am having problem with that.
The Operating system doesn't see the boot disk nor CD when I even change the settings in the Bios to boot from floppy or CD. Please show me how to fix or bypass this problem and format my hard drive. Thanks...
At least this one is posted on an entry that has something to do with the subject. It has almost no spelling mistakes, too. Impressive. It does, however, show how computer ownership should be limited to people with an IQ measurable using only integers. The number of people who log in on a shared computer using an unpassworded administrator's account is frightening. My advice? Sell your children and, with the proceeds, invest in some computer courses. Kill two birds with one stone.
Happy new year to you all. This morning brings a completely arbitrary lemming-like desire to believe in resolutions, a new start to life and other similar nonsense. It's also brought a lot of snow here in Paris: I woke up this morning around 10:30 and looked out the window to see whiteness everywhere and a rather disturbing number of large snowflakes drifting down.
It's very pretty. I hate snow.
May 2004 bring much peace, kindness and prosperity as well as much fewer neo-fascist imbeciles running countries, fewer wars and less suffering. Stay safe.