I sometimes get a bit overeager when it comes to high-tech toys, even if they are justifiable ones. A recent example is the At Home cable modem service. I’m finally getting it installed on Friday. I’ve wanted cable modem or DSL service since the first time I surfed via a T-1 line. There is just no going back once you’ve experienced that kind of thing. Plus, I spend so much time online that it’s going to be a major contributor to increased efficiency and a better bottom line.

But mostly it’s just plain fun.

It literally was not available on my block until this week. I’ve been calling the friendly folks of “At Home” for months, asking when it would be available. First it was “late 1997″, then “early 1998″, then “mid July”. I called August 1st and was told it “it will be available in late July, sir… er, well… hmmm. Let me check on this again. Please hold…”

I’ve called these people so many times that they don’t even have to look me up on their maps. As soon as they answer the phone I just ask for an update on node IR-46. I know their network as well as they do. Only I don’t need a map. Sad, huh? I really don’t feel like a guy who has nothing better to do. Hmm. You know, I wonder what I’m going to do with all this bandwidth. It’ll be great for multimedia, but the time I really needed it was about 2 years ago, when Netscape and Microsoft were coming out with new versions of their respective browsers every other week. I bet they’ll wire my neighborhood just to get me off their backs.

“… sir? Yes, it’ll definitely be available soon. Sorry, that’s all the information I have available.”

At Home uses the coax for bidirectional transfer of information, whereas some lousy cable modem schemes actually use a traditional modem for outgoing data. Talk about cheesy. That kind of setup would seriously interfere with the many legitimate, tax-deductible, profit-generating, Third World-saving tasks I plan on using my cable modem for. Heady stuff like network games of Doom II, spamming those who continue to bombard me with humor e-mail or obscenely sized attachments (please don’t read anything into that, people), or downloading the sum of all human knowledge and history to see if it’ll fit on my hard drive.

In the absence of the new toy, however, I’ve been getting my butt out of this seat and into another kind of seat. What kind, you ask? Let’s just say it cruises at about 120 knots two miles above the ground.

Tomorrow is the fifty-third anniversary of the dropping of an atomic bomb on Nagasaki by an American B-29 bomber.

Today I was browsing CNN.com as I often do, and I came upon a story about an annual remembrance service which is held in Nagasaki’s Peace Park. First off, I have to say CNN is one of the best web sites on the net. I have probably learned more from reading articles on their site and following links from CNN.com than I did during four years of college. That may be a testament to how great CNN is, or how bad my alma mater is. Perhaps both.

Anyway, I followed one of the “Related Links” from that article to a site built in 1995-96 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the bombing. It’s simply called “Remembering Nagasaki”, and I must have spent two hours looking at it. Almost everyone who survived Nagasaki has since died or is suffering greatly from residual effects of the nuclear blast (or, if nothing else, the fact that they are aging), so it’s hard to get a first hand living account from a survivor.

Enter “Remembering Nagasaki”. The day after the blast happened, a Japanese Army photographer named Yosuke Yamahata started taking pictures of what was left. His photographs can be found on this site, and are no less powerful than the words of a Holocaust survivor I heard at the Museum of Tolerance.

Today we tend to be a bit desensitized to violence, especially on-screen violence. But these were real people, not actors. Speaking of actors, the site contains a lot of feedback from internet users from 1995-96 about the bombing, and I was surprised to see the recurring references to the TV movie The Day After and how it opened their eyes to the devastating potential of The Bomb.

I remember seeing The Day After, a film about a U.S.-Soviet nuclear war and the aftermath, the first time it aired on television. I must have been about thirteen years old. I was home alone that night, and it scared the heck out of me. Remember, this was 1984 or so–the absolute pinnacle of the Cold War. The Berlin Wall was still up, glasnost and peristroika were nyet, and thousands of nuclear ballistic missiles were pointed at the U.S. and U.S.S.R.

Today there is no way to add your own thoughts to the “Remembering Nagasaki” site. It has been frozen in the state it was in on the 50th anniversary of the bombing. So I decided to add my thought on the subject here.

I found the most acrimonious debate to be over the actual decision to use the bomb. Many people thought it needn’t have been. The war was over, they say. There wasn’t going to be any invasion of Japan. The Japanese were just looking for an excuse to surrender. And the U.S. is nothing but evil anyway. Here is a quote from one person who decried “viewing the decision to drop the bomb through the distorted racist rhetoric”:

“I am not proud to be part of the “America” that unnecessarily dropped two atomic bombs on an already defeated nation, that put Japanese Americans in concentration camps, that denied entry visas to a hundred thousand Jews, effectively killing them all, the country that tried and still tries to turn men into slaves, my country that segregated even the army’s blood plasma during the war so that if an African American soldier was bleeding to death, he would die as “white blood” stood ten feet away from him. I am not proud to be the America that will not admit to its faults, I am not proud of America the lie, America the distorted history textbook, America the damned. I grew up in this country singing “My country tis of thee…sweet land of liberty…of thee I sing.” But my heart was broken when I found that this country is a lie. The bomb was unnecessary. The wonderful Roosevelt put my aunties and uncles in concentration camps because of their race. How could I be happy about that? Only the blind could be proud of this America. Only the blind are glad about the bomb. May I find compassion for the blind.”

There is factual truth to what he writes. The U.S. did deny entry visas to Jews. There were segregated camps where Japanese-Americans were forced to live during the war. It’s easy to sit here fifty years later and Monday-morning-quarterback things. In my own opinion, dropping the bomb was the best way to end the war quickly. That doesn’t mean I think it was anything less than an unspeakable horror. But what about World War II wasn’t?

If one wishes to accuse Truman of placing more value on the lives of Americans that those of the Japanese when making the decision, I would agree. But that was his job. I often wonder, if the Japanese were so badly beaten, why did they not surrender after the first bomb was dropped? I don’t believe Nagasaki was bombed because anyone thought it would be fun. And it’s important to note that much of what we now know about radiation and the long term effects of exposure to atomic energy was not known in 1945. Atomic weapons were still being detonated above ground domestically.

Also, comparing the camps Asian Americans were forced to live in to concentration camps is a non-sequitor. I don’t recall millions of Asian Americans being worked to death or losing their lives to Zyklon gas, starvation, disease, random execution, and inhuman medical experiments within a few short years.

Contrary to the person quoted above, I believe America does admit most of it’s faults. No, not all of them, and not always in the timely fashion I would hope for in Leibnitz’s ‘best of all possible worlds’. But it does happen. I do not believe America “still tries to turn men into slaves”. Men do that to themselves far more often today.

And as for what happened in 1945? I recall the words of General Douglas MacArthur, who, speaking to a joint session of Congress on April 19, 1951, concluded fifty one years of military service with the following words:

“I know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition, as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a means of settling international disputes…. but once war is forced upon us, there is no other alternative than to apply every available means to bring it to a swift end. War’s very object is victory, not prolonged indecision. In war there is no substitute for victory.”

Since I started flying again, all the old dreams about traversing the earth meeting people and experiencing different cultures while not crashing or losing an engine over the Atlantic are back. I hope to one day purchase a single engine aircraft with sufficient range to traverse the ocean make an around-the-world flight.

While it does have a hazardous side, I doubt it would be any more hazardous to my health than attempting to pilot a sailboat around the world. In fact, it’s probably a whole lot safer, seeing how technology has progressed. With a GPS (Global Positioning System), a well maintained aircraft, careful pilotage, redundant systems, and lots of meticulous planning I should be safer over the Atlantic than I was rehearsing in downtown Los Angeles a few months ago.. Although that’s not saying much.

The biggest challenge with a round-the-world flight has nothing to do with the flying. It’s mainly the logistics. We take for granted the ability to obtain fuel at any airport in the U.S. But once you leave this country, it’s hit or miss. Some countries don’t let you fly privately at all. And if they do, the bureacracy and price that’s attached to it can be staggering.

When it comes to flying around the world, nobody did it with more style than Dick Rutan. He and Jeana Yeager flew an odd looking plane called Voyager around the world without refueling. May not sound like much, but it had never been done before and it’s not been done since then. For their amazing feat they were awarded the Presidential Citizen’s Medal, the highest non-military award given by the United States. In addition, Voyager is now housed at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. The around-the-world flight took nine days, and all that time they were stuck inside an aircraft with a cabin no larger than your average bathtub.

Dick’s brother, Burt Rutan, designed a number of pioneering canard-equipped homebuilt planes, including the Long EZ, one of my favorites. It is a composite aircraft with some great aerodynamics. That translates into the ability to fly long distances at fast speeds on very little fuel. Perfect for flying around the world.

Speaking of flying around the world, Dick Rutan and Mike Melvill (who was also a key player in the success of Voyager) are (or were, I’m not quite sure which) planning just such a flight using Long EZ’s. Their routing was:

• Mojave, California to Jacksonville, Florida
• Jacksonville to Belem, Brazil
• Belem, via the Brazilian coastline, to Rio De Janeiro
• Rio, across the Atlantic to Cape Town, South Africa
• Durban, South Africa to Gillot, Reunion
• Gillot, across the Indian Ocean to Perth, Australia
• Perth to Alice Springs, to Brisbane
• Sidney to Wellington, New Zealand
• New Zealand, across the Pacific Ocean, via Fiji, Tahiti, Easter Island (Isla de Pascua, Chile), then north to Guayaquil, Ecuador
• From Ecuador to the Galapagos Islands
• Galapagos to Mexico City, Mexico
• and finally back to Mojave.

It’s here, it’s here!! Vacation. I can’t believe it. I haven’t had a week-long vacation in years, and boy am I due.

I’m off to a little place a like to call “nowhere”. This is gonna be a local vacation, but it might as well be in the Amazon, because as of now the pager and cellphone are off, the ringers on all the phones are off, the computer is off, and I’m not contacting anyone in the outside world.

The summer of George started today with a visit to Sea World in San Diego. As much as I dislike theme parks, this one is not bad–especially today. The usual summer crowds were nowhere to be found.

The one thing I couldn’t control was the weather, and man was it hot. I slathered SPF 45 sunscreen all over myself and still got burned.

Sea World has a new Florida manatee exhibit. I’d never seen one of these things up close before. They are adorable and ever so gentle. Unfortunately, manatees are also slow moving creatures which live near the surface. And as a result many of them are injured or killed by propeller blades from passing boats. I saw the deep cuts made into the back of one rescued manatee by a prop. It wasn’t pretty. There are only 3,000 of them left on the planet.

But the best part was the “hands on” stuff. Sea World has become much more interactive over the past few years. For example, I spent about 20 minutes petting bat rays. I loved rays–they were so friendly and graceful. The bay ray pool was large enough that they could have avoided the edges (and therefore, any human contact) if they’d wanted to, but they were happy to swim around the perimeter and let dozens of hands pet, rub, scratch, and grab at them. I was struck by how aviary they are–as if at any instant they might zoom out of the water and take flight with those massive wing-like bodies. Under the water the appear somewhat fragile, moving with great economy in perpetual motion through the clear, wavy fluid–but once you lay a hand on them, you realize that you probably couldn’t stop them even if you tried. Their bodies are cartilage surrounded by masses of sheer muscle. If they want to flap their wings, you can grab at them all day, they’ll just keep on movin’. I’m sure Sea World would have considered it to be in poor taste if I’d attempted to smuggle a 40 lb. bat ray out of the park.

One of the most intelligent creatures in the ocean is the dolphin, so I parted with about $10 in exchange for a handful of anchovies to feed them. You don’t have to feed them to pet ‘em–in theory. In reality though, they’re remarkably elusive for an animal with such a people-centric reputation. As long as you have food, you’re their best friend. Once you run out of merchandise, though, they’ve never heard of you.

Come to think of it, that is very human behavior.

One of the dolphins (we named him Grumpy) was hugely obese. I mean, this was the only dolphin I’ve ever seen that had wrinkles and rolls of fat all over his body! True to his name, he wasn’t even friendly while you were feeding him. The World According to Grumpy was this: feed me, but don’t touch me.

The last big interactive exhibit was the seal/sea lion pool. They were a blast! The harbor seals would actually wave at you, turn in circles, and sing for food. I love them–in fact, whenever I’m in San Francisco (which has been every February for the past several years, but that’s a different story) I always make time to visit Pier 39. A rookery of 70 or 80 California sea lions has commandeered part of the dock there. Humans don’t interact with them, but they are plenty entertaining–pushing each other off the docks, playing King of the Hill, and posing for the crowd (actually they’re “thermoregulating” their body temperature, but I’d rather put a human spin on it).

Toward the end of the day I was meandering around the park and though to myself that it would be a dream come true to swim with the dolphins. Just then I saw a sign that said “DOLPHIN INTERACTION PROGRAM — Swim with the dolphins!”

What are the odds?

They have a program that allows normal people to swim with the dolphins and learn about them from their individual trainer. It’s expensive, but I thought it was such a great opportunity! How often in life do you get the chance to live out a dream like that? There were no more sessions available that day, but we got a special dispensation from The Pope of Sea World to come back to the park another day and do it.