Note: This is a journal entry — it was written on paper or on my computer, then transferred to my website, maybe years later.

Four people have died, and twelve others are infected with either inhaled or cutaneous anthrax.  They discovered anthrax spores at a postal-equipment repair facility in Indianapolis, and now they’ve also found spores at a post office in Kansas City, MO.  They’ve also found some letters that seem to match the ones sent to Senator Daschle, Tom Brokaw etc… they were postmarked from Indianapolis, before the Sept. 11th attacks.  Don’t know what all this means, but the general consensus seems to be that the anthrax is coming from somewhere in the U.S.  I hope they figure this shit out before it gets to fucking Chicago!!!  If it hasn’t already.

I just transferred all my journal entries — or the past year or so anyway — from that MS Word document to what I’m using now, which is KeyNote.  Yup, I settled on something new to manage my notes.  (This is what, the third or fourth method I’ve used to store my journal?) KeyNote offers Blowfish encryption, which is good, I guess… I’m no expert but I think it’s better than whatever Word uses.  Security through obscurity?  Anyway, it’s an open-source program and totally free.  It lets you store rich-text files and lets you import/export them pretty easily.  I can include my pictures, though it doesn’t let me use the same formatting tricks that Word does, like being able to embed an HTML-style table or whatever.  Or, maybe I’ll figure out how to get it to let me do that later!  In addition to regular memo-style notes, it also stores info in tree form, which is great for all my miscellaneous sticky-notes and whatevers.  You can use the encryption or not, and every database is kept to one little file so it doesn’t clutter up your hard drive with all its entries and sub-entries.

The other program I almost went with is called TreePad. I need to keep an eye on this, because it really seems a little more powerful than KeyNote, with the exception of the fact that it WON’T let you password-protect your info, much less encrypt it.  It says on the progress-report on their website that that’s one of the main new features they want to implement, sooo… as soon as they do, I might try it out again.  I have noticed a problem with KeyNote in that sometimes it doesn’t seem to want to copy text for me, from one place to another.  It will CUT but it won’t COPY.  Strange… maybe it’s just a bug in the way WinXP deals with rich-text, I dunno.  But, the main feature that makes me jealous of TreePad is that it’s REALLY good about exporting info in HTML form.  I could use it to crank out a mini-website, and transfer that to my PalmPilot for viewing in iSilo.  That would be hot!  At the moment I don’t really have an easy way to turn an RTF file into an HTML file, need to find a tool that will do that for me.