Downtown Raleigh at night (courtesy of NCDOT)
This week a new section of the Triangle Expressway (TriEx) opened, leading to Holly Springs and Fuquay Varina. The tolls for a ride on the TriEx are a few bucks each way.
I got to wondering today if one of the attractions for a company locating in RTP is the abundant free parking. Companies might think that amounts to a better deal but then someone has to build bigger roads to serve RTP commuters and someone has to pay for those roads. Up until the TriEx, all of us taxpayers paid for roads. Now those who use the TriEx will pay for it, and those tolls add up.
It seems to me that it’s all around cheaper to locate in an urban setting, where the infrastructure is already equipped to handle things. Sure, no one likes to pay parking fees but what about the time wasted sitting in traffic, and the tolls that accumulate? Aren’t RTP commuters trading their parking fees for tolls and wasted time?
So it looks like the Mayan calendar is going to come up short and the world isn’t going to end today after all. I’m kinda glad.
Isn’t “uninstall” a clumsy word? If there’s an “uninstall,” shouldn’t there be an “outstall” or a “destall,” too?
As promised, today is the day that McClatchy implements paywalls on its newspaper sites, including the News & Observer. While I will most likely always be a newspaper subscriber, I don’t see myself linking to any more N&O online stories because paywalls break links. One of my pet peeves is when sites break links. News sites especially.
In a time when newspapers are seeing their readership flocking to online news sources, McClatchy seems bent on turning them away. Tell me how that makes any sense?
This editorial cartoon from Bruce Beattie of the Daytona Beach News Journal sums up my thoughts exactly.
In addition to the ton of other stuff I got done this weekend, I spent a lot of time getting my gadgets up and running. Last night I’ve stayed up way too late futzing with my new Lenovo laptop, for instance, trying to get Red Hat’s Fedora Linux installed on it. Apparently this is something that’s damn near impossible. It’s taken all (and I mean all) of my considerable Linux skills to make any progress with this.
Lenovo apparently took some shortcuts with its laptop firmware which throws Linux for a loop during an installation. Rather than work around it, Red Hat tends to frown on Lenovo’s broken implementation. They do this in spite of Lenovo being, oh, just the world’s largest PC manufacturer whose North America headquarters is, oh, just fifteen miles away from Red Hat’s headquarters. You’d think these two companies could get it together but you’d apparently be smoking something if you did.
My solution involves hacking Fedora’s installer and learning far more about it than I care to know. I’ll post my working solution once I find it. For now, suffice to say that a if a grizzled Linux veteran like me has this much trouble simply getting Linux set up on a new laptop then it’s no wonder most people don’t want to touch it.
I don’t know if Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is a Buddhist or not but I swear Facebook teaches me more about Buddhism every day.
You see, being politically-minded I enjoyed debating some of my Facebook friends on election issues. It was good fun and I did so with zeal at the time. Now that elections are behind us, I have moved on.
Facebook, on the other hand, apparently has not moved on. I have Facebook friends with whom I’ve traded political comments. for instance, that now appear in my Facebook feed all the time, even though the only thing we’ve seemed to discuss has been our opposing political views. Granted, they’re still my friends and I don’t begrudge anyone for thinking differently from me, but I find it amusing that somewhere in Facebook’s algorithms we’ve become entangled.
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Thinking more of Roger Ebert thoughts about the media’s role in mass murders, I have to agree that he’s right. The media perpetuates this behavior. If the media was more responsible in its coverage there would be less incentive for these mentally ill individuals to kill.
Mass murders are terrorism, plain and simple. A terrorist’s goal is to promote fear. Promoting fear requires the attention of the media. If terror isn’t spread by the media or other means, the terrorist fails.
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Two things happened at Thursday’s Parks board meeting/holiday social. We bid farewell to long-time board member and previous chair Jimmy Thiem, who has served his full six years on the board. It’s been great working with Jimmy and we will certainly miss his parks expertise. I hope we can put him to use on upcoming parks committees like one for Dix Park.
There’s another aspect to Jimmy’s “retirement” from the Parks board that I only realized afterward: I’m now the senior member of the board. This boggles my mind as it seems like only yesterday that I was a fresh-faced newbie on the board. Now I’ve seen all of the previous boardmembers rotate off to be replaced by fresh faces.
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