Check It Out

Links to cool places or things.

There are 1,530 posts filed in Check It Out (this is page 97 of 153).

Weather is here, wish you were beautiful


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Futzing around with Google Maps this morning, I noticed that the Mount Weather doomsday facility hadn’t been reviewed yet using Google Places. So I had a little fun writing a review:

I sheltered here during the Armageddon and would never do it again! The cots were way too hard, the rations were somewhat tasteless, my room had NO windows, and it was next to impossible to get the generals’ attention when the sheets and towels needed changing. What you see in the brochure doesn’t match the actual experience. Take my advice: the next time the world ends, steer clear of Mount Weather! Go with a Hampton Inn or similar chain. You’ll be glad you did!

“Force Quit” Yourself to Get Your Sleep Schedule Back

I suppose some people need this.

It’s easy enough to decide to go to bed strictly at a certain time, but actually doing it is another story. We often get carried away in the late hours of the night, trying to knock off just a few more things we wanted to do, whether it’s for work or fun. The next day, we’re tired and filled with regret yet we don’t stop. If this sounds like you, it’s time to start “force quitting” yourself at the end of the day. Here’s how.

via “Force Quit” Yourself to Get Your Sleep Schedule Back on Track and Avoid Another Day of Fatigue.

Why Young Americans Are Driving So Much Less Than Their Parents

More about the shift away from driving.

“Unfortunately for car companies,” Jordan Weissmann noted at TheAtlantic.com a couple weeks back, “today’s teens and twenty-somethings don’t seem all that interested in buying a set of wheels. They’re not even particularly keen on driving.”

Now a major new report from Benjamin Davis and Tony Dutzik at the Frontier Group and Phineas Baxandall, at the U.S. PIRG Education Fund, documents this unprecedented trend across a wide variety of indicators.

Their two big findings about young people and driving:

The average annual number of vehicle miles traveled by young people (16 to 34-year-olds) in the U.S. decreased by 23 percent between 2001 and 2009, falling from 10,300 miles per capita to just 7,900 miles per capita in 2009.

The share of 14 to 34-year-olds without a driver’s license increased by 5 percentage points, rising from 21 percent in 2000 to 26 percent in 2010, according to the Federal Highway Administration.

via Why Young Americans Are Driving So Much Less Than Their Parents – Commute – The Atlantic Cities.

Is Traffic Making Us Lonely?

One nation, on the road, indivisible.

This month’s Atlantic cover story, “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?,” has contributed to an ongoing national debate over whether Americans are more socially isolated than ever before, and whether our dependence on electronic communications is keeping us from forming meaningful social ties.

But a generation ago — long before the invention of social media — a man named Donald Appleyard was investigating how automotive traffic isolates us from one another and diminishes our human connections.

via Is Traffic Making Us Lonely? – Commute – The Atlantic Cities.

Ting – a different mobile phone provider


Frustrated by the glacial pace of Virgin Mobile to add newer phones to it’s prepaid service, a friend alerted me to a new phone provider called Ting. Ting was started by Tucows, the first company to bring competitive pricing to domain registrations, so I have high hopes Ting can shake up the telecom world.

Ting offers pay-for-what-you-use pricing plans. If you don’t use the minutes or data you signed up for, Ting credits your account. You have very finite control over how your plan looks as well, choosing very specific amounts of minutes, texts, and data you think you’ll use.

Ting also offers tethering with its phones, allowing you to share your phone’s Internet service with up to 5 computers. Ting also supports power users and seems open to allowing its subscribers to extend their phones’ functionality.

Overall, Ting looks to be setting itself up to make some waves in the mobile phone provider market. I hope to purchase one of Ting’s phones soon and give their service a test drive.

RTP seeks to be more inviting for smaller companies

RTP seemed like a great idea 60 years ago but the tide has turned against the idea of putting job centers in the boonies. The younger workers (you know, the ones graduating from the schools that put the triangle in “Research Triangle Park”) don’t want to own cars. They want to work where they live. They want to work in a dynamic environment, not one with “large amounts of green space.” Collaboration with others spurs new ideas, not navel-gazing in green pastures (or former pastures, as is the case with RTP).

Skyrocketing gas prices and different priorities among today’s younger workforce are what dooms RTP. Yes, RTP could survive if it can become a place where one can not just work but also live and play, but it’s an uphill battle that RTP cannot win. Durham and Raleigh are light years ahead of RTP in this regard and that’s where the job growth will go.

Two years ago, concerned about competition from other research parks within the state and around the globe, RTP hired a New York urban design firm to update its master plan for the first time since the park was formed in 1959.

Since then, the urgency has also heightened as new competitors – Durham’s American Tobacco Campus and N.C. State University’s Centennial Campus, to name two – have attracted numerous start-ups.

The park, meanwhile, has been hurt by appearing to be content to be a suburban, isolated campus environment, said Joel Marcus, CEO of Alexandria Real Estate Equities, a California company that has been in the park since 1998 and today owns nearly a million square feet of lab space in RTP.

“That’s really not today’s world,” he said.

via RTP seeks to be more inviting for smaller companies, quick innovation – Economy – NewsObserver.com.

Time to update the City of Raleigh flag?

Leo Suarez of the Raleigh Connoisseur has some similar thoughts on Raleigh’s flag that I’ve had. I think the time might be ripe to update the city flag and get something we can all be proud to fly!

In other cities, the flag is a sense of pride. Chicago and Washington DC have great flags and if you’re lucky, you may find citizens with tattoos of it. (anyone in Raleigh can claim having this?)

In 2004, the North American Vexillological Association did a survey against 150 US city flags. Respondents answered on a 0 to 10 scale on what they thought were a well designed flags. We ranked 56 on that list, highest North Carolina city by the way, so flag design may not be a huge feather in our cap.

Still, I want to ask this question; Why are there so few Raleigh flags around town?

via The Raleigh Connoisseur (April 25, 2012) – The City of Raleigh Flag.

High-Tech Border Checks Will Blow Spies’ Cover

Wired has an absolutely fascinating story about how the U.S.’s border security paranoia has unwittingly made it very difficult for spies to use false identities. With biometric checking in effect, the days of a spy entering a country on a false passport are quickly coming to an end.

The increasing deployment of iris scanners and biometric passports at worldwide airports, hotels and business headquarters, designed to catch terrorists and criminals, are playing havoc with operations that require CIA spies to travel under false identities.

Busy spy crossroads such as Dubai, Jordan, India and many E.U. points of entry are employing iris scanners to link eyeballs irrevocably to a particular name. Likewise, the increasing use of biometric passports, which are embedded with microchips containing a person’s face, sex, fingerprints, date and place of birth, and other personal data, are increasingly replacing the old paper ones. For a clandestine field operative, flying under a false name could be a one-way ticket to a headquarters desk, since they’re irrevocably chained to whatever name and passport they used.

“If you go to one of those countries under an alias, you can’t go again under another name,” explains a career spook, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he remains an agency consultant. ”So it’s a one-time thing — one and done. The biometric data on your passport, and maybe your iris, too, has been linked forever to whatever name was on your passport the first time. You can’t show up again under a different name with the same data.”

via CIA’s Secret Fear: High-Tech Border Checks Will Blow Spies’ Cover | Danger Room | Wired.com.