Through each game, basketball players carry stats on their shots, assists, and fouls. There are contests held for free-throw shooting, there are dunking contests. Why aren’t there any foul contests? Players could take their best shot at each other and whomever has the most egregious foul wins. Maybe they could make it pay-per-view.
My night did not last long, though. It was too quiet and my urge to put my neighborhood back to right was too strong. I reluctantly left my bed and wandered through a dark home, wondering what I would do without any electricity or daylight.
I ate a breakfast of two cold mini-bagels and cream cheese, with an orange. The fridge temperature was about 50 degrees but I didn’t feel brave enough to get the other items from it. I picked up the paper from the driveway and mulled what to do next. A few neighbors stopped to chat after the sun had come up and we traded stories and tips. I got word that our power would be out for another three days. Turning down a “coffee run” offer, I gathered my gloves and new wheelbarrow and made a decision to go back to Longview to help clear trees.
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Boy, that doesn’t happen every day. A huge tornado roared through the Triangle yesterday, leaving a path of destruction across Wake County. Skywarn spotters reported that the Lowe’s hardware store in Apex was smashed. Other reports told of brick buildings on South Saunders Street being busted. Downtown, there are streetlights out everywhere and trees blocking many streets on the east part of town. Here at home, I’m fortunate nothing happened to our home but we’ve been without power since about 3:45 PM yesterday. I’ve been keeping the dog company while Kelly and the kids are in Virginia for a few days.
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I salute the late Mr. Breuing. What an amazing life he lived – all 114 years of it!
Walter Breuning, the world’s oldest man and second-oldest person, died Thursday. He was 114.
Breuning was born Sept. 21, 1896, in Melrose, Minn., and spent his early years in De Smet, S.D. That first decade of the 1900s was literally a dark age for his family. They had no electricity or running water. A bath for young Walter would require his mother to fetch water from the well outside and heat it on the coal-burning stove.
I got the chance to take the kids to school this morning. After I gave each of the kids a hug and walked them to the door, I was thrilled to watch them give each other a hug before they went to their own classrooms.
Now, if that’s not a great way to start the day, I don’t know what is!
Motor mount
I mounted the motor to the pole, attached the dish to it, and began fiddling. And fiddling. And fiddling some more. I just couldn’t get the receiver to work. The motor needed to be pointed directly south and I worked a long time to get it correct. It didn’t help that I had my TV and receiver all the way inside while I worked. Though I had a “satellite beeper” device which makes a tone when it detects a satellite, I couldn’t get the receiver to do what I wanted.
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This guy deserves a real medal of some sort. I’m stunned that he ever pulled this off.
A Chinese national who said he was the “supreme commander” of a made-up Army unit orchestrated an elaborate scheme that attracted recruits and their money with the promise that it was a path to U.S. citizenship, authorities allege.
Yupeng Deng, who is accused of raking in hundreds of dollars from his recruits, is set to be arraigned Wednesday on more than a dozen charges.
Los Angeles County prosecutors said Deng, also known as David Deng, recruited 100 other Chinese nationals, primarily in Asian enclaves in the San Gabriel Valley, to join the “U.S. Army/Military Special Forces Reserve unit,” then gave them phony U.S. Army uniforms and military ID cards.
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Update 10:09 AM: Read the press release from the LA County DA’s office.
Satellite dish
For my latest birthday, I decided to get a little more serious into this hobby. I found a Craigslist ad from a local guy who was selling his satellite gear. For about $75, I bought three DVB receivers, a dish, and an LNB. I took the parts home, scratched my head, and wondered if I had the knowledge to put it all together into something that worked. It turns out I did!
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I oppose discrimination in any form, but the story of gay UNC student Quinn Matney getting branded by an unknown assailant sounds mighty fishy to me. There are just too many holes in it. I’m reminded of the 2008 Ashley Todd case, where the victim admitted making it all up.
Quinn Matney was having trouble sleeping.
As the freshman took a walk on South Campus at about 3 a.m. on April 4, he said he ran into an acquaintance on the Craige Residence Hall footbridge. As the two spoke, a man sitting at a nearby picnic table stood up and grabbed him by the wrist, he said.
“Here’s a taste of hell you f—-ing fag,” Matney remembered the man saying.
The man branded Matney, who is gay, on the left wrist with an unidentified object, causing third- and fourth-degree burns that damaged three nerves and a tendon, leaving the freshman with no feeling in his thumb and limited mobility in his index finger, he said.
Matney said he tried to pull away — but the man didn’t let go until he received a hard punch to the face.
Update 3:30 PM: Matney was interviewed by the Durham Herald-Sun 7 months ago on his first day at UNC-CH, when Chancellor Thorp visited him and other students moving in.
Update 9:19 PM: Officials now say Matney made the whole thing up.
Why is it whenever I think up something cool to create, Steve Wozniak’s already beaten me to it?
This is from his open letter to the FCC defending Net Neutrality. Like me, Woz knows the value of open networks.
In the earliest days of satellite TV to homes, you would buy a receiver and pay a fee to get all the common cable channels. I had a large family (two adults, six kids) and felt like making every room a lot easier to wire for TV. Rather than place a satellite receiver in each room, I’d provide all the common channels on a normal cable, like cable companies do. In my garage, I set up three racks of satellite receivers. I paid for one receiver to access CNN. I paid for another to access TNT. I paid for others to access HBO and other such networks. I had about 30 or 40 channels done this way. I had modulators to put each of these channels onto standard cable TV channels on one cable, which was distributed throughout my home. I could buy any TV I liked and plug it in anywhere in the home and it immediately watch everything without having to install another satellite receiver in that room. I literally had my own cable TV ‘company’ in the garage, which I called Woz TV, except that I even kept signals in stereo, a quality step that virtually every cable company skipped.
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