The other evening Alisa and I had dinner out. We went to a fancy-ish place and Alisa mentioned feeling pleased that there would likely be no children there (to make her feel guilty for getting out without the kids). Within 5 minutes, a woman with 2 or 3 children was seated in the adjacent booth. Alisa was almost speechless with apoplexy, but I suggested just waiting a few minutes and that things would probably be fine. And they were. About halfway through dinner, the woman nipped over to our booth and offered us a coupon for half-off one of our dinners. She had originally intended to use it herself, but the kids hadn't gotten an entree, so she couldn't use it and wanted to give it to us. That's karma for you.
In my reading about Buddhism years ago, I remember seeing a story about a farmer. One night a storm blows the door off the farmer's barn and his horses run off. The neighbor comes over the following morning and says, "What terrible luck!" and the farmer says, "Well, maybe." The next day the farmer's horses return leading two wild horses back to the farm. The neighbor comes over and says, "What wonderful luck!" and the farmer says, "Well, maybe." The next day the farmer's son is thrown while trying to break the wild horses and gets a broken leg. The neighbor comes over and says, "What terrible luck!" and the farmer says, "Well, maybe." The next day the army comes through and impresses all the young men, except for the farmer's son, who has a broken leg. The neighbor comes over and says, "What wonderful luck!" and the farmer says, "Well, maybe." And on and on and on.
As a scientist, I've always had a problem with this story -- I always imagine it continuing like this
The next day, rising sea levels from global warming innundated the farmer's house and fields. The neighbor comes over and says, "What terrible luck!" and the farmer says, "Well, maybe."
or like this
The next day, a pesticide resistant form of armyworm appears in the farmer's fields and devastates the country's crops. The neighbor comes over and says, "What terrible luck!" and the farmer says, "Well, maybe."
In 
Ishmael, Daniel Quinn contrasts two kinds of societies: Leavers and Takers. He argues that hunter-gatherer societies were organized around the belief that people leave their fate in the hands of the Gods. Takers, he said, believe that they are taking their fate into their own hands by creating a society that changes the earth to ensure that it provides what people need. Throughout the book, Quinn reinterprets cultural myths in a fascinating way which culminates with his story about the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The gods forbade humans from tasting of the tree not because they didn't want people to have this knowledge, but because they couldn't have the knowledge and that tasting of the tree would make them think they did have it even when they didn't.
The next day, after a 5 year crash program, an asteroid on collision course with the earth is nudged into a safe orbit. The neighbor comes over and says, "What wonderful luck!" and the farmer say, "Ain't no luck about it."
They've been making a bunch of changes at the hosting service. Right now, when you try to go to the control panel, it says
we are update your control panel, please email support for you needs
Updates are necessary, but it caused a bunch of stuff to break. The "Tomorrow" buttons in Phil's journal decided that "Tomorrow" was always December 1st, 2002 and I started getting errors from PHPwiki. I downloaded the nightly CVS tarball of phpwiki and uploaded it to the server to try it out. When I set up phpwiki with the hosting service, I found that the ftp service didn't like
some of the filenames, especially among the i18n files, many of which contained entity codes. Happily that's no longer a problem. I did just a bit of testing, but it looks like everythings working OK, so I've swapped the new code into place. Let me know if you see any problems.