Active day

Wow, what a day! It started off with a lazy start. After breakfast I spent time upgrading our home’s main Linux fileserver. This was followed by some family basketball practice.

After basketball practice, I headed over to attend the first anniversary celebration of the St. Monica Teen Center, a center where magic takes place in Southeast Raleigh. It was good to chat with folks there and to see how proud those kids are to have that center.

After the St. Monica party, I grabbed lunch before heading out the door for Travis’s basketball game. The Salvation Army was short on referees today so I was “volunteered” to referee the game (along with a coach from the other team). The teams played a good game and I had fun with it, too.
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Facebook files for $5 billion IPO

Facebook filed for a $5 billion IPO today in what will likely be a wildly successful stock market debut.

I laughed when I recalled my post from five years ago in which I thought the idea of Facebook being worth $15 billion was crazy. That was before I got hooked on it, of course (along with about 800 million other people). Now $15 billion sounds like too little.

I’ve been astonished at the role Facebook has played in the recent revolutions around the world. It will be interesting to see how the company grows from here.

Cheap Thoughts: Time for Car 2.0?

Google's driverless car


As I was driving on the I-40 interstate the other day, I noticed how of the 12 feet of concrete devoted to a travel lane, the typical car or truck only touches two, one-foot-wide strips where the tires are. What a waste of the other 10 feet of concrete.

It made me realize how little the car has changed since it was first introduced. Oh, sure, plenty of progress has been made to the inside of the car, but what about the rest of what it takes to make a car go: the infrastructure? There are so many things we could be doing with cars but haven’t yet tried.

Why do we still build roads? All that impervious, land-hogging, surface, and only a fraction of it is useful to any vehicle. Well, the Romans did it, some might say, but thats because stones were all they had.
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Sports pic of the year?

Ethan Hyman - ehyman@newsobserver.com - N.C. State Ethan Hyman - ehyman@newsobserver.com - N.C. State's Mark Gottfried can't believe a foul was called on the Wolfpack during the second half of N.C. State's 61-60 loss to Virginia on Saturday in Raleigh.


I love this photo Ethan Hyman of the News and Observer took of N.C. State basketball coach Mark Gottfried reacting to a foul call during yesterday’s loss to Virginia. In capturing Coach Gottfried’s acrobatics, Ethan’s photo conveyed the thrilling nature of ACC basketball in a nutshell.

Nice work, Ethan!

LNC in the news

Leadership North Carolina got a brief mention from WRAL today when news spread that Governor Perdue will not run for reelection. Now-declared gubernatorial candidate Lt. Governor Walter Dalton was scheduled to speak at today’s LNC forum but canceled upon news of Perdue’s decision.

I Tweeted earlier that Dalton wasn’t there and I wonder if WRAL used my Tweet as its source. Anyway, the mention was here in an earlier revision of this story:

Lt. Gov. Walter Dalton canceled a Thursday morning appearance at the Leadership North Carolina Forum in Raleigh after news of Perdue’s plans spread. He was supposed to speak on the state’s transportation planning and policy.

The LNC mention was posted long enough for me to show it to Kelly. Dalton later convened a press conference and formally announced, after which the LNC reference was removed.

Unqualified Progress Energy workers caused fluke mishap at nuclear plant

Yikes! I’m not going to sleep so soundly tonight knowing that Progress Energy’s Shearon Harris nuclear plant is nearby and its hapless crews can’t bolt a reactor lid properly.

Makes me wonder why the NRC is still so chummy with utilities.

Emphasis mine:

Nine of the 12 workers who performed the reactor vessel assembly were not qualified. Some received “just-in-time” (i.e., last minute) training before the Fall 2011 refueling outage, but not specifically in stud tensioning.

The workers didn’t know how to read the instrumentation and torqued the reactor vessel lid’s studs at 1,300 pounds per square inch instead of 13,000 psi. In other words, there were off by one zero, and screwed the studs at 1/10th the required pressure.

Some the bolts were left so loose they could be turned by hand, the NRC said. Others turned easily with a wrench.

via .biz – Unqualified Progress Energy workers caused fluke mishap at nuclear plant | newsobserver.com blogs.

Leadership North Carolina Forum

Leadership North Carolina Forum

I spent the day today at the Fifth Annual Leadership North Carolina Forum. While the panels and speakers were fascinating and informative, what captivated me the most was watching my lovely and talented wife while she was working. Kelly held herself with grace and aplomb, seeming so comfortable conducting the question and answer sessions with a roomful of hundreds of participants. I smiled as I thought about just how quickly she got up to speed in doing what she’s doing, yet you’d never know it from how confident she seems.

I’ve known for 14 years how special Kelly is. Now everyone knows it, too.