Check It Out

Links to cool places or things.

There are 1,530 posts filed in Check It Out (this is page 128 of 153).

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:
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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.

Car smashes into New Hope Valley train

new-hope-valley-crash-20090607-small

My friend Bryan Johnson took his family for a ride on today’s excursion run of the New Hope Valley Railway and got some unexpected excitement. A station wagon smashed into the side of the train as the train approached the station.

As Bryan pointed out, the New Hope Valley is a big yellow train moving about 5 MPH across a crossing marked with bells and flashing red lights. We’re not talking about the Acela or Union Pacific Big Boy roaring out of nowhere at 80 MPH.

Check out picture one and picture two of the accident scene.

Update: 9 Jun 2009: Passenger Matt Cooley got a video of the crash. Thanks, Matt!

Raleigh talks about car-sharing

After I just blogged about the need for a car-sharing program here in Raleigh, Triangle Transit announces a forum to discuss just that. Coincidence? I think not.

See the announcement below.

(h/t Urban Planet, by way of Bob Geary)

Triangle Transit, in cooperation with the City of Raleigh and the Downtown Raleigh Alliance, invite you to join us for an exploratory, interactive discussion about car-sharing potential in downtown Raleigh.

Thursday, June 18, 2009
1:00 p.m. – 2:30 p.m.
At the Raleigh Urban Design Center
(light refreshments will be served)
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