April 2012

There were 33 posts published in April 2012 (this is page 2 of 4).

Improv Everywhere’s Raleigh MP3 Experiment

IMG_0487

I happened to see in Friday’s paper that there would be one of Improv Everywhere’s MP3 Experiments happening in Raleigh as part of the grand opening of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences’s Nature Research Center (NRC). I pitched it to Kelly, who agreed that the kids would have a blast with this. So, we hopped on our bike and rode downtown to join the fun.

The instructions were on the Improv Everywhere website and boiled down to this:

  1. Download the “Raleigh MP3 Experiment” MP3 onto your music player.
  2. Synchronize your watch.
  3. Wear a red, blue, green, or yellow shirt.
  4. Be near the designated area before 6 PM.
  5. At exactly 6 PM, start playing the MP3 and follow the instructions.

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Perdue makes emergency landing at RDU

So, uh, tell me again why our governor took the state jet to Greensboro, a city an hour’s drive from Raleigh even without a highway patrol escort? Does she have a clue about how much jet fuel costs nowadays? Is this good stewardship of our tax dollars?

Gov. Perdue’s plane made a safe emergency landing at Raleigh-Durham International airport this afternoon after a plane malfunction, her spokeswoman said Friday. No one was injured.Her plane was on the way to make to make a job expansion announcement when her plane exhibited unusual vibrations in connection with the retraction of the landing gear, and a decision was made to return to RDU, according to Chris Mackey, her press secretary.

via Perdue makes emergency landing at RDU | newsobserver.com projects.

Update: Here’s a state auditor report on the state aircraft operations, undertaken by then-state auditor Ralph Campbell, Jr. in 2005.

Update 2: My friend Warren has pointed out that Greensboro is closer to a 90 minute drive from Raleigh. Guess I’ll cut our governor some slack after all.

David Parker must go

I watched the press conference by North Carolina Democratic Party chairman David Parker yesterday and thought it was surreal. I’ve read all the speculation swirling around the claims of alleged sexual harrassment by former executive director Jay Parmley and was quite shocked by it. I’ve tried to keep an open mind about it all but Parker’s defense of it just didn’t add up.

How can Parker say he “didn’t supervise” the staff and also claim that he witnessed the alleged incidents and deemed them completely innocent? Which is it? Parker has a point about the sworn EEOC statement being different than the December letter, but at some point the excuses he has to make to justify the alleged incidents become a bit too heavy to stand up to scrutiny. Grown men do not pretend to hit each other in the crotch.

I don’t know exactly what may or may not have happened between staffer Adriadn Ortega and Jay Parmley, but I do know that to believe Parker’s explanation of them requires a huge leap of faith. Also, Parker’s claim that he doesn’t know where the settlement money came from either shows he is an aloof, out-of-touch leader at best or a liar at worst. Either way, yesterday’s press conference did little to convince me he should stay.

Parker should resign immediately for the sake of the party.

Progress to investigate utility pole vandalism

Another missing grounding wire

I reached out to a contact I have at Progress Energy about the thefts of copper wiring from my neighborhood’s utility poles. Marty Clayton, Community Relations Manager, called me back today and told me the utility has had other reports of this crime and would send someone out to evaluate the damage in my area. He said these thieves are taking their lives into their own hands with these thefts, going so far as to break into live substations.

I spent some time today before and after work, tagging some of the damaged poles with red marker tape. I’m finding that about one out of every two poles I check has its copper missing, and some of the missing pieces are only two feet long.

Why would someone put themselves and surrounding neighbors at risk just to steal five bucks of metal? I just don’t get it.

Google redirected me to Lithuania?

I was surfing the Internets at work today, searching for info on solar panels. I put in a phone number for a Google search and got four results. Clicking on the first one, I expected to see the contact page of Westinghouse Solar. Instead I got redirected to the following URL:

http://39008.peachtreepropainters.info/url?sa=X&source=web&cd=1&ved=0IrIEbA43&url=http://www.westinghousesolar.com/index.php/contact-us&ei=2ZEufKTL5qizrI2OzlM08Z21oQ==&usg=z-CCthkp93j-2o-7wI1SJZ&sig2=yIZHjyHJ17arcqFVojVX4B

Now, I know Google usually tracks which search results I click on, and hides this tracking using Javascript. That’s been the case for years and I’m used to it. However, I’m stumped as to why the above URL says 39008.peachtreepropainters.info instead of www.google.com. The IP address for 39008.peachetreepropainters.info routes to Lithuania:
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Copper thieves targeting Raleigh utility poles

This pole on Edmund Street is not protected against shorts and lightning due to a clipped grounding wire (lower left).


I happened to take a glance at the utility poles my dog was peeing on this morning and was aghast to see that many of them were missing their copper grounding wires! I’ve blogged about lightning protection before, and during last summer’s thunderstorm season I had read about how important these grounding wires are to the safety of our homes and the safety of the linemen who work on the electrical gear. Here were a half-dozen poles on this short street that were missing the first six feet of their grounds.

I sent out an email to the neighborhood, urging folks to call in any other broken poles they saw. While I didn’t hear back from my neighbors, I did check the poles on Glascock as I drove to the grocery store this afternoon and saw many poles in the same sad condition.

I don’t know when these thefts took place but it makes me angry that some metal-thieving asshat is jeopardizing the safety of my family just to make a few measly bucks. If lightning hits a utility pole within a few blocks, my home could burn down because of these missing grounding wires.

This is a serious safety issue and there’s no telling how hard Raleigh has been hit. I’m hoping these get discovered before people find out the hard way that their homes are sitting ducks for lightning.

(As pure coincidence, WRAL ran a story today about these utility pole copper thefts occurring in Wayne county.)

Discovery’s final flight

Nasa HQ


I found out only this morning that the space shuttle Discovery would be making its final “flight” today, strapped to the back of its 747 Shuttle Carrier Aircraft for delivery to the Smithsonian’s Udvar-Hazy Center at Dulles Airport. I quickly tuned in the NASA channels on my FTA satellite and soon I saw the shuttle appear on the horizon.

Then something unexpected happened. Watching the shuttle and its carrier pass low over Dulles gave me chills. I did not expect to be so moved by this aging spaceship taking its victory lap, but I was. Suddenly I was a 12 year old kid again, cheering as the very first shuttle, Columbia, made its maiden flight. The thought occurred to me, am I watching the end of manned spaceflight?
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Engagement anniversary

It was 14 years ago that Kelly and I got engaged.

You see, some men really do win the lottery.

The tornadoes, one year after

Raleigh Tornado, 16 April 2011

It was a year ago this past Saturday, 16 April 2011, when the deadly EF3 tornadoes roared through Raleigh, damaging over a thousand homes and killing three people. While the lives lost can never be replaced, the homes are returning to normal. The East Raleigh neighborhood of Lockwood held a celebration of the anniversary on North King Charles St this past weekend.

I never posted all of my photos from that devastating day last year, so here’s a link to my Picasa album documenting the damage only minutes after it occurred.

Also, check out the Google Maps satellite imagery of the neighborhood, showing before and after photos. It will be a long while until these neighborhoods regain their leafy shelter.

High-Tech Border Checks Will Blow Spies’ Cover

Wired has an absolutely fascinating story about how the U.S.’s border security paranoia has unwittingly made it very difficult for spies to use false identities. With biometric checking in effect, the days of a spy entering a country on a false passport are quickly coming to an end.

The increasing deployment of iris scanners and biometric passports at worldwide airports, hotels and business headquarters, designed to catch terrorists and criminals, are playing havoc with operations that require CIA spies to travel under false identities.

Busy spy crossroads such as Dubai, Jordan, India and many E.U. points of entry are employing iris scanners to link eyeballs irrevocably to a particular name. Likewise, the increasing use of biometric passports, which are embedded with microchips containing a person’s face, sex, fingerprints, date and place of birth, and other personal data, are increasingly replacing the old paper ones. For a clandestine field operative, flying under a false name could be a one-way ticket to a headquarters desk, since they’re irrevocably chained to whatever name and passport they used.

“If you go to one of those countries under an alias, you can’t go again under another name,” explains a career spook, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he remains an agency consultant. ”So it’s a one-time thing — one and done. The biometric data on your passport, and maybe your iris, too, has been linked forever to whatever name was on your passport the first time. You can’t show up again under a different name with the same data.”

via CIA’s Secret Fear: High-Tech Border Checks Will Blow Spies’ Cover | Danger Room | Wired.com.