John Edwards

John Edwards in 2004

The federal prosecutors who are pursuing campaign finance charges against John Edwards better do whatever they can to make sure I’m not selected as a juror. I would tear them apart. It’s not that I’m a fan of Edwards: far from it, actually. I would be hopping mad at being forced to defend him.

Look, Edwards is a phony. He’s always been a phony. Though it’s true he could work a crowd like a rock star, I wasn’t impressed with him when I met him in 2004 (I misjudged his being “tired” for being bored). He became a “champion of the poor” while chilling in his posh mansion in Chapel Hill. He cheated on his dying wife and lied about it. Did the money he got from a donor friend and used to cover up his cheating rise to the level of cheating campaign finance laws? Hardly. Edwards may be a self-centered scumbag but I can easily see him doing the very same thing, finding a rich friend like Bunny Melon to paper over his infidelity, whether or not he was campaigning. It’s not like he was buying votes with the money.
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Emergency Management’s pCom unit


At tonight’s Rise Up Raleigh benefit concert there was a number of emergency vehicles parked out for the public to see. I spent some time talking with Raleigh Fire Department Battalion Chief Frank McLaurin about the state’s new mobile command post for disaster communications. The unit consists of a truck with desks, video, computers, and phone, towing a pCom satellite communications trailer.

Frank told me the pCom can provide 16 VoIP channels off of its self-aiming satellite dish. The trailer also provides 10kw of generator power, air-conditioned racks for networking gear and radio repeaters, and a 41 foot pneumatic tower for radio antennas, lights, or cameras. Oh, and an air compressor is included to raise the tower and also to provide compressed air for tools. It’s a pretty sweet setup!

Frank told me the state has owned it since August and has been building out the truck since then. He says the truck worked its first disaster during the April tornado, where it provided electricity and communications at the city’s Keeter fire training center in south Raleigh: one of the areas hit hard by the tornado.
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Facebook and open source

Watching the movie The Social Network gave me an appreciation for the open source mindset that guided Facebook’s creation. During the scenes where Mark Zuckerberg is creating the first application that would become Facebook, I chuckled at all the actual open source and Linux terminology that was used. It wasn’t the typical made-up Hollywood technical mumbo-jumbo the actors were spouting: it was the real stuff. The movie didn’t take shortcuts and I was impressed.

Outside the fiction of the film, Facebook truly does value open source. Their platform is built on open source tools and the company shares bugfixes and enhancements back to the projects it relies upon. I consider the Facebook platform a prime example of how open source software is up to the challenge of the most demanding websites.

Upon installing some perl modules the other day, I noticed one of the CPAN mirrors was hosted at a Facebook domain. That’s when I found Facebook’s open source portal page, detailing the open source tools they use and the public mirrors that they host.

I admire Facebook for its commitment to open source.

Raleigh CityCamp

This weekend brings Raleigh’s first CityCamp. Raleigh CityCamp is an “unconference” where the agenda is decided on the participants: and everyone is a participant. It’s a giant brainstorming session about how government can be made more efficient using technology.

In an unconference, everyone is expected to contribute ideas and perspectives. There is no “audience” per se. What you as a participant get out of it is exactly what you put into it. It’s one of the few events where you never go home disappointed: because you help set the agenda.

I was involved in some of the initial planning for Raleigh CityCamp but soon had to dial back my time. Many of the planning meetings took place when I was away at other meetings. Also, my daughter’s birthday is Saturday, taking me out of the running for most of that day’s discussions.

I did volunteer to sit on a panel regarding the “government” view, joining Raleigh’s CIO, North Carolina’s CIO, and other experts. I’ll be bringing the layman’s point of view, obviously!

Local blogs

I was searching through the MT.Net archives tonight, trying to find the name of the service that sorted blogs based on their location. Turns out I found it, or where it used to be, anyway: Local Feeds. It used GeoURL meta tags to mark your blog so that you could easily find blogs in your area. It was a pretty useful service when I first found it seven years ago.

Wow. That’s a long time.

Anyhow, Local Feeds is defunct now, which is a shame. The reason I love Facebook so much is because I like knowing what’s going on in the area. I check Twitter often, for the same reason. Problem with Twitter is that I don’t get enough depth from it. I guess the same applies to Facebook: there’s only so much that one can fit into a status update.

I would like to see someone revive the blog geotagging idea and provide folks with a location-based blog search. I think it would fill a gap that the status-update services just can’t provide. Anyone out there want to take this up?

FDIC “Your Business Account” scam

Got this scam email purporting to be from the FDIC. Funny how the feds send their email through Ukraine. Folks, be very suspicious about any unsolicited emails, particularly ones that reference your bank account.

Kudos to the FDIC for addressing this scam on their webpage.

Return-Path: acquiescing5863@gmail.com
X-Original-To: Mark Turner
Delivered-To: Mark Turner
Received: from eddy.neusemedia.com (eddy.neusemedia.com [67.217.170.39])
by maestro.markturner.net (Postfix) with ESMTP id CEAE214119
for Mark Turner; Thu, 2 Jun 2011 09:47:01 -0400 (EDT)
X-Received-SPF: neutral (eddy.neusemedia.com: 209.19.62.178 is neither permitted nor denied by domain of gmail.com) client-ip=209.19.62.178; envelope-from=acquiescing5863@gmail.com; helo=remote.usgvmwd.org;
Received: from remote.usgvmwd.org (remote.usgvmwd.org [209.19.62.178])
by eddy.neusemedia.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id E30178AE826
for Mark Turner; Thu, 2 Jun 2011 09:46:57 -0400 (EDT)
Received: from [86.93.221.142] (account easterlyhiru6@gmail.com HELO yyrxuzpt.poaijeowjkovzu.net)
by remote.usgvmwd.org (CommuniGate Pro SMTP 5.2.3)
with ESMTPA id 000646149 for Mark Turner; Thu, 2 Jun 2011 05:47:00 -0800
Date: Thu, 2 Jun 2011 05:47:00 -0800
From: alert@fdic.gov
X-Mailer: The Bat! (v3.51) Home
X-Priority: 3 (Normal)
Message-ID: 4283985778.NY7NS133995951@isplnzolzalejp.eeibmulcjotavug.ua
To: Mark Turner
Subject: FDIC: Your business account

Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) Logo

Dear Business Owner,

We have important news regarding your bank.

Please click here to see further details.

This includes information on the acquiring bank (if applicable), how your accounts and loans are affected, and how vendors can file claims against the receivership
FDIC

Questions for FDIC?
Contact Us

Repair conditioning

This week’s heat wave has taxed our upstairs AC unit to the maximum. I work upstairs every day and became alarmed at the rising temperatures there. The AC was not keeping up with its settings. I didn’t notice this last year but this is the first summer we’ve had our new upstairs office/bedroom, so any cooling issue has become more apparent.

I called up the neighborhood HVAC guy who went through his troubleshooting checklist. Refrigerant was fine, the compressor was fine. The blower coils were fine. Everything looked good. That is, until he checked the bottom of the blower in our attic.
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College and enterpreneurship

I read with interest PayPal co-founderPeter Thiel’s publicity stunt of paying 20 college students $100,000 each to drop out and innovate. He’s got a point when he says:

“Turning people into debt slaves when they’re college students is really not how we end up building a better society,” Thiel says.

Some of the most successful folks I know in the tech industry do not have computer science degrees. Most of them attended college and most have earned degrees, but many of their degrees are in fields other than computer science. In many cases they might as well have skipped college entirely.

I worked with one guy who was so smart it was freaking scary. He could code rings around our degreed developers and yet his formal education ended with high school (and half of that home-schooled). I’ve met enough of these folks that I can say with certainty that college is absolute a waste of time and money for some people.
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Tree crew makes short work of tall pine

My neighbor got a pair of her tall pine trees cut down on Thursday. I broke out my digital video camera to record the process for the second tree. It was fascinating to watch them work, and even more fascinating to watch it again on video.

I sped up the video to 5 times the normal speed to show how the tree guy went about dismantling this pine.

The U.S. Postal Service Nears Collapse – Businessweek

It’s a lonely calling. “Washington is full of Carnegie and Brookings Institutes with people who can tell you every option we have in Egypt or Pakistan,” laments Herr, who has a PhD in anthropology from Columbia University. “Try and find someone who does that on the postal service. There aren’t many.”

Yet Herr finds the USPS fascinating: ubiquitous, relied on, and headed off a cliff. Its trucks are everywhere; few give it a second thought. “It’s one of those things that the public just takes for granted,” he says.”The mailman shows up, drops off the mail, and that’s it.”

via The U.S. Postal Service Nears Collapse – BusinessWeek.