SAIA FASSISILA, pastor of the United Methodist Church in San Mateo, dreaded his options when his kidneys failed two years ago.

Either he stayed hooked up — three times a week, four hours a session — to a large machine that cleaned his blood, or he'd die. Although he'd taken medication for years to control his high blood pressure, in his case that wasn't enough to stop the condition from damaging his kidneys.

"I had no choice," Fassisila said. When doctors sent him from his bed at Stanford Hospital directly to a dialysis clinic to clear his blood of the accumulated metabolic byproducts, excess nutrients and water were close to killing him, since his kidneys could no longer eliminate them.

"I was given a second chance in life with dialysis," said Fassisila, 48, who was born and raised in Tonga.

Computer interaction gets some humanity

We are a network of excellence, so our main goal was to create a viable and sustainable community for HCI research, explains Benoit Michel, manager of the SIMILAR project. That covers a broad range of areas human-to-human interaction via a computer, or straightforward human-computer interaction, or one person interacting with many others, supported by a computer, or many people interacting together.

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Election Madness

The formulation of a culture of acceptance of the old and second hand. I do not suggest that any one leader do this. It takes a group of well known and respected people to lay out and direct the plan. Keep it simple and rally the citizens. Do you have the guts Nader and Zinn?

Bamboo houseplant requires little care

Question: I was just given a bamboo plant and do not know how to take care of it. Your help would be greatly appreciated.Answer: Bamboo - also known as Lucky Bamboo - is a popular houseplant often given as a gift to bestow good fortune, according to Chinese tradition. It's also a component of feng shui principles. Technically, these houseplants - usually several stalks tied together with string or ribbon - aren't bamboos at all. They're Dracaena sanderiana, relatives of the lily and native to West Africa. They go by the common name bamboo for reasons unknown.Bamboo is an easy houseplant to grow, and it requires little care. Just remove the string to keep it from choking the plant as it grows, and be sure it gets plenty of indirect sunlight. Direct sunlight cancause yellowing ofthe stalks.If your plant came in a pot filled with tiny pebbles, simply replenish the water as it evaporates, keeping it at about an inch from the base of the stalks.