Mark Turner

Amber Alert

It’s not every day that I awake to find police cars and news media in the neighborhood, fortunately. It was because there was an amber alert in our neighborhood, with a 15-year-old girl reported missing early this morning. While the news was at first certainly distressing (especially since I’m acquainted with the family), when I realized who was missing I was almost certain there was no abduction.

It started just after midnight this morning. According to the 911 tape which was released later today, the girl’s mother got texts that indicated her daughter was in mortal danger. The search by police began soon after (followed by the media stake-out). Police put up crime-scene tape around the home and blocked off the road in front of the house, steering the media away from the home.
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Road Rage

I rediscovered this gem today.

Catatonia
Road Rage

If all you’ve got to do today is find peace of mind
Come round you can take a piece of mine
And if all you’ve got to do today is hesitate
Come here, you can leave it late with me

You could be taking it easy on yourself
You should be making it easy on yourself
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Rat Snake or Copperhead, How To Tell the Difference?

A great page on properly identifying copperheads from rat snakes.

It is startling to walk into the chicken coop and come face to face with a large rat snake though, especially since they often look very much like a dangerous copperhead. How does one decide which is which?

Rat snakes are not poisonous. They will bite when startled or threatened and the bite looks very much like a human bite on the skin. It lacks the two distinct fang marks of a poisonous snake. While it does hurt it is not going to make you sick. Just wash the area carefully with soap and water and watch for signs of infection as you would with any other wound.

via Rat Snake or Copperhead, How To Tell the Difference.

Skating on Thin Ice

Seems I’m not the only one who has grown tired of John Edwards’s publicity-hound ways. Carter Wrenn of Talking About Politics quotes Will Patton, who nails it.

… but then old Will Patton raised an even tougher question, saying, If I was prosecuting this case I’d only ask John Edwards one question: If you wanted was to keep your affair a secret from your wife why on earth did you run for President?

Richard thought that over and said: He might not testify.

Mr. Patton snorted, You couldn’t keep that fellow off the witness stand with a shotgun.

Sad but true.

via Skating on Thin Ice > Talking About Politics.

International intrigue in Raleigh

A story ran in March that caught my eye but didn’t seem to catch the full attention of the press. Federal officers from the U.S. Department of Commerce raided the offices of Law Enforcement Associates in Raleigh, charging the company with unlawfully exporting a sophisticated surveillance vehicle to Morocco.

The company, on whose board the former House majority leader Tony Rand once served as chairman, has been in trouble before. In 2005, founder John Carrington was charged with illegally exporting police equipment to China. He paid an $850,000 fine and agreed not to export anything for five years. Except Carrington couldn’t resist and got in trouble two years later for violating the ban again.

What’s up with this company? Is this another Blackwater in our own backyard? Are these sophisticated, Big Brother-ish tools being used against Middle Eastern democracy protesters? Was China using its “police equipment” to crush dissent? What’s the story here?

John Edwards

John Edwards in 2004

The federal prosecutors who are pursuing campaign finance charges against John Edwards better do whatever they can to make sure I’m not selected as a juror. I would tear them apart. It’s not that I’m a fan of Edwards: far from it, actually. I would be hopping mad at being forced to defend him.

Look, Edwards is a phony. He’s always been a phony. Though it’s true he could work a crowd like a rock star, I wasn’t impressed with him when I met him in 2004 (I misjudged his being “tired” for being bored). He became a “champion of the poor” while chilling in his posh mansion in Chapel Hill. He cheated on his dying wife and lied about it. Did the money he got from a donor friend and used to cover up his cheating rise to the level of cheating campaign finance laws? Hardly. Edwards may be a self-centered scumbag but I can easily see him doing the very same thing, finding a rich friend like Bunny Melon to paper over his infidelity, whether or not he was campaigning. It’s not like he was buying votes with the money.
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Emergency Management’s pCom unit


At tonight’s Rise Up Raleigh benefit concert there was a number of emergency vehicles parked out for the public to see. I spent some time talking with Raleigh Fire Department Battalion Chief Frank McLaurin about the state’s new mobile command post for disaster communications. The unit consists of a truck with desks, video, computers, and phone, towing a pCom satellite communications trailer.

Frank told me the pCom can provide 16 VoIP channels off of its self-aiming satellite dish. The trailer also provides 10kw of generator power, air-conditioned racks for networking gear and radio repeaters, and a 41 foot pneumatic tower for radio antennas, lights, or cameras. Oh, and an air compressor is included to raise the tower and also to provide compressed air for tools. It’s a pretty sweet setup!

Frank told me the state has owned it since August and has been building out the truck since then. He says the truck worked its first disaster during the April tornado, where it provided electricity and communications at the city’s Keeter fire training center in south Raleigh: one of the areas hit hard by the tornado.
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Facebook and open source

Watching the movie The Social Network gave me an appreciation for the open source mindset that guided Facebook’s creation. During the scenes where Mark Zuckerberg is creating the first application that would become Facebook, I chuckled at all the actual open source and Linux terminology that was used. It wasn’t the typical made-up Hollywood technical mumbo-jumbo the actors were spouting: it was the real stuff. The movie didn’t take shortcuts and I was impressed.

Outside the fiction of the film, Facebook truly does value open source. Their platform is built on open source tools and the company shares bugfixes and enhancements back to the projects it relies upon. I consider the Facebook platform a prime example of how open source software is up to the challenge of the most demanding websites.

Upon installing some perl modules the other day, I noticed one of the CPAN mirrors was hosted at a Facebook domain. That’s when I found Facebook’s open source portal page, detailing the open source tools they use and the public mirrors that they host.

I admire Facebook for its commitment to open source.

Raleigh CityCamp

This weekend brings Raleigh’s first CityCamp. Raleigh CityCamp is an “unconference” where the agenda is decided on the participants: and everyone is a participant. It’s a giant brainstorming session about how government can be made more efficient using technology.

In an unconference, everyone is expected to contribute ideas and perspectives. There is no “audience” per se. What you as a participant get out of it is exactly what you put into it. It’s one of the few events where you never go home disappointed: because you help set the agenda.

I was involved in some of the initial planning for Raleigh CityCamp but soon had to dial back my time. Many of the planning meetings took place when I was away at other meetings. Also, my daughter’s birthday is Saturday, taking me out of the running for most of that day’s discussions.

I did volunteer to sit on a panel regarding the “government” view, joining Raleigh’s CIO, North Carolina’s CIO, and other experts. I’ll be bringing the layman’s point of view, obviously!

Local blogs

I was searching through the MT.Net archives tonight, trying to find the name of the service that sorted blogs based on their location. Turns out I found it, or where it used to be, anyway: Local Feeds. It used GeoURL meta tags to mark your blog so that you could easily find blogs in your area. It was a pretty useful service when I first found it seven years ago.

Wow. That’s a long time.

Anyhow, Local Feeds is defunct now, which is a shame. The reason I love Facebook so much is because I like knowing what’s going on in the area. I check Twitter often, for the same reason. Problem with Twitter is that I don’t get enough depth from it. I guess the same applies to Facebook: there’s only so much that one can fit into a status update.

I would like to see someone revive the blog geotagging idea and provide folks with a location-based blog search. I think it would fill a gap that the status-update services just can’t provide. Anyone out there want to take this up?