General-purpose musings
There are 781 posts filed in Musings (this is page 55 of 79).
Just after the kids went to bed tonight we had a southbound CSX train work its way down our track. Knowing my backyard train watching chances will soon be over, I hopped up from the living room for one more pass. As I watched from the warm moonlit deck, I saw the train driver wait until he was past our yard before he throttled up again.
The crew was tiptoeing through our neighborhood. Seeing that kinda choked me up.
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Laurence Lovette, the 17-year-old accused of murdering Eve Carson, appeared in Durham court today to be arraigned for the murder of Duke Student Abhijit Mahato.
According to the N&O, Durham District Court Judge Craig Brown “chided the media, saying they were focusing on the case because one of the victims was a young, white woman. Black crime victims, he said, don’t get nearly as much attention.”
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So squeaky-clean former NY Governor Eliot Spitzer got caught in some hanky panky. Spitzer, his squeaky-clean image now, uh, less than squeaky clean, did the right thing: he owned up to it, and stepped down.
Politicians and sex. Same old story, right? But what I find to be the big story here is the way Spitzer and others were caught: with financial tracking software, some of it possibly made by Cary’s SAS Institute.
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Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink touts the wisdom of trusting one’s split-second decisions. As Hallie and I passed our new neighborhood this morning I can affirm this wisdom. Before I even saw our new house for the first time the deal was already done. I just knew when we turned onto our new street that this was where we would live.
With this in mind, I’ve decided that it is not necessarily a good sign when prospective homebuyers take their time viewing the house. While they may linger out of habit, in less than two minutes they should know if this is their new home. They may not know if this isn’t their new home (the two are not the same), but if its right they will know in an instant.
That’s all it takes: an instant. Anything longer and you’re just talking yourself into it.
Britain’s Prince Harry served with the British Army in Afghanistan for 10 weeks until yesterday, when the Drudge Report broke ranks against a media embargo and announced his whereabouts. While I am a fan of freedom of speech, I think its a shame Harry had to be outed when all he wanted was to serve anonymously, or as anonymously as a prince can get. Having the location of a high-profile person trumpeted all over the world is not good for operational security, not just for him but his company as well.
Heck of a job, Drudgie.
We’re in the phase where the house has to be ready to be shown at a moment’s notice. I was hoping we’d be out of this phase by now but we haven’t been as fortunate as we’d hoped. The first couple we saw opted not to make an offer: spooked by the railroad tracks. Since their friends live a stone’s throw away and they don’t seem to mind, I wonder how they reached that conclusion.
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Long ago when I first became a sales engineer and frequently spoke with the public, the marketing director offered to send me to “media school” to polish my PR skills. I wouldn’t look like a deer in the headlights when the camera lights clicked on. The company imploded not long afterward and I never made it to “school.” I could’ve used those skills last week.
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I picked up a couple new episodes of Popular Mechanics for Kids, the outstanding science TV show for kids. Boy, kids TV shows have come a long way since I was a kid.
Then again, there were some exceptional shows, ones that stand the test of time. These are the ones that didn’t talk down to their audience, though the audience wasn’t always kids. The Flintstones, for instance, aired in prime time for an adult audience. The Flintstones would’ve been nowhere if Bugs Bunny and other Looney Tunes characters hadn’t blazed a trail almost thirty years prior with cartoons created for grown-up moviegoers and characters patterned after the Marx Brothers, among others.
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Its a Diver Down night, that classic Van Halen album from 1982.
I distinctly remember being a middle-schooler out past my bedtime, returning from a school-related dinner at Applegate’s Landing, which is what passed for a fancy restaurant in Columbia, SC. Probably a chorus-related thing, now that I think about it. A few students and I were being driven by my friend’s mother in her BMW 320i. The muggy night air was blowing through the sunroof and this album was playing on the stereo.
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A sophisticated U.S. spy satellite is deorbiting out of control. The Bush administration announced its plans to shoot down the satellite with a ship-fired missile, ostensibly because of fears its rocket fuel would poison anyone coming in contact with it.
Riiiiiight. It would be the first time ever the Bush administration paid a whit to the environment. The satellite is likely to have a fiery reentry, so it would follow that any remaining rocket fuel would burn with it. The real reason for the shootdown is to keep the terrists from discovering the bird’s secret capabilities.
Plus, it will make a really cool bang.
