Mark Turner

Engine 1792 makes it home

NCDOT Engine 1792

I found out today that the NCDOT’s Amtrak Engine 1792 made it back to Raleigh. It and the coaches involved in Thursday morning’s collision in Mebane were sitting back in the NCDOT yard this afternoon. Travis and I snapped photographs from outside of the yard gate.

From the reader-submitted photographs taken at the scene the damage looked worse than it did in person. We were seeing the right side of the power unit (the side that didn’t burn) but from what we saw it looked salvageable. It was sitting on its own trucks, so the frame may not have been bent after all – at least to the extent that I thought.
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Stopping the leak vs. siphoning it

I find it telling that BP’s efforts to stem the massive Deepwater Horizon leak seem to be focused on siphoning the oil from the ruptured well rather than capping the well. BP’s priority seems to be getting the oil, not stopping it.

Also, NPR reported today that, based on analysis of BP’s video of the leak, the flow rate of the leak is closer to 70,000 barrels per day: far higher than initial official estimates. In 1989, the Exxon Valdez dumped 250,000 barrels of oil into Alaska’s Price William Sound. The BP/Deepwater Horizon disaster is pouring an Exxon Valdez-sized amount of oil into the Gulf every four days.

I’m sure glad my kids have gotten to see the Gulf before this disaster because they’ll probably have kids by the time it’s cleaned up. If ever.

Amtrak’s Piedmont hits truck, derails

NCDOT's Engine 1792, The City of Raleigh

This morning, the Amtrak Piedmont train hit a flatbed truck that was stuck on the tracks in Mebane. No one was killed but a dozen people were taken to the hospital with cuts and bruises. The locomotive, number 1792, was heavily damaged and caught fire immediately after the collision.

This particular Amtrak train, the Piedmont, is run in part by the State of North Carolina, and the train carries the state’s red, white, and blue livery. The locomotives are quite distinctive. I saw the photographs of the damaged train and recalled that I’d taken some shots around the NCDOT’s Raleigh yard a few years ago.

Above is my photograph of the 1792 in better days. It was being overhauled at the time to rejoin the other locomotives in Carolinian and Piedmont service. I don’t know if the engine can be repaired but it couldn’t come at a worse time for the state’s passenger rail service: the state is adding mid-day service in June.

NCDOT's Gray Squirrel

Here’s also a picture of the Gray Squirrel passenger coach. The Gray Squirrel wound up on top of the errant tractor-trailer, so it will likely be out of service for a while, too.

Be sure to read the chatter about the crash on the Train Orders site.

[Update: 1:48 PM Friday ] More railfan speculation on Trains.com.

A special walk home

I met Kelly and the kids at Hallie’s school to hear an update from the teacher on Hallie’s progress. I left smiling when her teacher called her “phenomenal,” but little did I know I wasn’t done with hearing good things. I decided to forgo hitching a ride home with Kelly in the van in keeping with my carpooling experiment today and opted instead to walk the 1/2 mile home. Travis decided to join me, so together we walked up the hill back to our house.

As we walked, we chatted about lots of things. He wanted to hold my hand and so we walked up the hill hand-in-hand. As the conversation continued, he said something that made me remark “that wouldn’t be my favorite thing.”

“You know what’s my favorite thing?” he asked as we kept walking. “My love for you.”

All I could say was “awwww” and returned the compliment. It was so sweet to hear but as I thought about it later I only appreciated it more. Travis will often tell someone he loves them but it’s rare that he offers it the way that he did.

His hand in mine, the pleasant walk, and words that would make any father proud: it doesn’t get much better than this.

Carpooling

A few months ago a new guy named Rob started as a contractor in my department at work. I discovered later that he lives a half-mile away from me, so it got me thinking about carpooling with him instead of driving myself every day. I mean, if you can’t make carpooling work when you both work in the same department and live within walking distance of each other, you can’t make any carpooling work. So, we discussed it yesterday and decided that today we would carpool.

How did it go? Outstanding! Rob met me right on time and we breezed through morning traffic, arriving early in fact. I never missed my car at work today, and when it became time to go home we both left our desks at the same time. It couldn’t have gone any easier.

I enjoy my job but the biggest headache is the commute. If I can continue to carpool, it will make my commute a lot more interesting and I might save a few bucks, too. Pretty good deal!

Sensitive ears

As I blogged about before, I used to be a part-time recording engineer. It was a blessing and a curse. The blessing was that I learned some cool things about music production. The curse is that now I can’t help but notice when a song is mixed wrong. Maybe a microphone is too hot, or a vocal is too loud, but I notice and it makes me cringe.

As a photographer I know that little things can make a big difference in a photograph. The same applies to music. Once I learned what to listen for I can’t help but notice the mistakes.

Lybian jet crashes

An Afriqiyah Airlines jet from Johannesburg crashed during landing at the Tripoli airport today, killing 92 people and leaving an 11-year-old boy as the sole survivor. While it’s early in the investigation, with an 8-month-old plane, an otherwise-sterling safety record, and clear conditions at the time of the crash, I’m betting the pilots simply forgot to check their fuel.

System administration by the book

I browsed the computer book section of my local Borders this weekend, looking for something that might make me a better system administrator. Among all the books for applications ranging from web tools, programming languages, and others there was a noticeable lack of books showing how to manage the systems that run these applications. The only book I saw that came close to this was a book devoted to Ubuntu server administration.

Good system administration does not come by accident, it comes by many accidents! It takes years of experience dealing with the headaches that computers can cause before one finds their sysadmin sweet spot. While it takes most of us many years to gain that knowledge, it would be nice if a few books were available that would condense this hard-earned wisdom into helpful advice, independent of the actual platforms involved (bookstores seem to love to group their books based on a popular, high-profile name. System administration, as a concept and philosophy, does not lend itself to this kind of packaging).
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Greenway ride to lunch

Today Kelly wanted to take advantage of the beautiful Mother’s Day weather to ride our bikes someplace for lunch. We opted for the Quizno’s sub place on Six Forks Road. Rather than pile our bikes in the van and haul them to the greenway, this time we let our kids ride with us through the neighborhood to the greenway.

It worked like a champ! We got to Quizno’s within 30 minutes and greatly enjoyed the novelty of getting there without a car. We enjoyed a fun lunch on the restaurant deck before moseying over to Borders to browse books. Then it was back home via the greenway. Easy! The kids didn’t even balk at the long, slow climb up Dennis Avenue: the home stretch.
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The compelled certificate creation attack

My friend Jeff has alerted me to a large hole in the SSL encryption problem: that of the compelled certificate creation attack.

Here’s how it works: your web browser comes pre-programmed to trust a number of certificate authorities. A certificate authority is an organization which vouches for an SSL-certificate being presented by a website. An SSL-certificate is designed to positively identify that a website you’re connecting to is who it says it is.

A national government intent on spying could compel one of these certificate authorities (call it ABC Certificates) to create an imposter SSL certificate (for, say, bankofamerica.com) and bless it with ABC Certificates’s stamp of approval. Because your browser trusts ABC Certificates, it will happily trust this fake certificate from bankofamerica.com. The evil national government could then surreptitiously intercept all traffic bound for the real bankofamerica.com and point it to its fake website so as to collect information. Or, it could surreptitiously insert a proxy into the SSL data stream and capture packets, with you or your browser being none the wiser.

You can read the findings of the two Indiana University researchers, Christopher Soghoian and Sid Stamm, here [PDF] on Cryptome.Org. You can also read the discussion of the vulnerability here (scroll to lower 2/3rds of the transcript).