Check It Out

Links to cool places or things.

There are 1,524 posts filed in Check It Out (this is page 127 of 153).

All Michael Jackson, all the time

Ok, so I said my peace about Michael Jackson the day he died, as did almost every other person and media outlet on the planet. Some media outlets have been milking Jackson’s death for all it’s worth.

I was really, really hoping that the News and Observer wouldn’t succumb to infotainment levels and put Michael Jackson’s funeral on the front page. Sadly, the N&O disappointed me againby putting this story on 1A, front and center. This is the biggest story in Raleigh?

Is there anyone out there still practicing real journalism?

Warrenton caboose tour

While we were visiting Kelly’s parents in Virginia we decided to take a bike ride on Warrenton’s greenway path. At the start of the greenway is the Norfolk and Western Railway Caboose 518554, a restored caboose on freshly-laid track where thirty years ago freight trains once served the town. We happened to pass the caboose right as a gentleman appeared to be locking it up, so being the curious sort I asked him what he knew about the caboose.

It turns out the gentleman was Ron Scullin, one of the three main volunteers responsible for obtaining the track and caboose and restoring both to like-new condition. Ron had just finished up with tours of the caboose, which are held once a month, but hearing that we were from out of town, he graciously volunteered to provide a personal tour.
Continue reading →

Raleigh’s Sewer Monster is clump of tubifex worms

OIn our way out of town Wednesday we saw a city sewer inspection team in our neighborhood, inspecting the neighborhood sewer lines with a robot camera. The crew chatted with the kids and me about their robot camera, showed us one of the cameras, and explained how it all worked. The kids loved it and so did I.

Little did I know that video from another robot camera was making waves just then on the Internets. A YouTube video shows what looks like a strange creature living in Raleigh’s sewers. Over half a million viewers have checked out this supposed creature as it lives below Raleigh’s Cameron Village shopping center.

It turns out the “blob” is actually a bunch of tubifex worms, according to the City of Raleigh’s website. Tubifex worms are amazingly hardy creatures.

Moon missions

NASA launched the first lunar mission in over a decade last week. The LRO and LCROSS shared the same rocket launch of June 18th to begin their missions of mapping and probing the moon in support of future lunar missions. Though their missions began the same way, each will end quite differently. LRO go into lunar orbit, producing high-resolution maps for use as potential landing spots. LCROSS will have a more abrupt finish: slamming kamikaze-style into a dark lunar crater in hopes of kicking up signs of water ice.

The missions are due to reach the moon tomorrow morning at 5:43 AM EDT. If you’d like to follow along, you can check out NASA’s moon mission blog.

Pinwale: The NSA’s email collection system

The New York Times has details about the NSA’s new email collection system named Pinwale which has been used to collect not only foreign email conversations but domestic ones, too.

As a former cryptographer, this seriously disturbs me. As I said before, it used to be that the folks at the NSA took their responsibility to protect Americans and their privacy seriously. It’s a shame that that’s apparently changed.

UNC-TV has bumpy DTV transition

Before last Friday’s DTV transition, when all analog TV signals were switched off in favor of digital ones, We used to receive the digital signals from Chapel Hill’s WUNC-TV Channel 4.1 like a cannon, thanks to our attic’s mega-huge Yagi antenna being pointed right at the tower. All that changed during Friday’s transition, however. The stations changed their channels’ frequencies as part of the move and UNC-TV mysteriously disappeared from all of my TVs.

Bits and pieces of information filtered out of UNC-TV. This was posted on the unctv.org website on Sunday:
Continue reading →

Being paid for your work is a perk?

Laura Leslie from WUNC’s Isaac Hunter’s Tavern brings up the same question I had about the N&O’s story about state employee comp time: when did it become a perk to be paid for your work?

Says Leslie:

… comp time is mostly given in lieu of overtime to employees who aren’t eligible for the latter. And one reason employees are earning so much of it is because staffing in many departments is thinner than it’s been for years. When there’s more work to do and fewer people to do it, employees end up working extra hours to complete what needs to be done. Last time I checked federal labor laws, a one-to-one trade for overtime worked is not a “perk.”

Seems like a big hole in the N&O’s argument and one that should’ve been considered before running the story.