Unwanted birthday present

The Supreme Court ruled yesterday that corporations can meddle all they want in elections. This is in spite of the fact that they aren’t real persons and cannot vote. If you had any illusions that your political representative would listen to you rather than the big corporation happily polluting your neighborhood, you can forget about it. Hamilton’s vision for America was at odds with Jefferson’s and now Hamilton’s is firmly in control.

It’s nice to think that America is the land of the free. When you look at it closely, however, you begin to see that the cards are stacked mightily against the individual. As Joe Strummer of The Clash said in the song Know Your Rights:“you have the right to free speech … as long as you’re not dumb enough to actually try it.” That is, you have the right to be counted … as long as Exxon, General Electric, and other corporations are free to count more.
Continue reading →

Good rebate policy


I bought a Samsung Bluetooth headset from Woot.Com last month with a rebate deal that made it practically free. When the headset and its rebate arrived, I saw that the rebate program ended January 15th. Thinking I had plenty of time to fill out the paperwork, I let it slide until about a week days ago.

That’s when I was surprised to read the fine print which said the rebate needed to be mailed within 30 days of purchase. It was now roughly 45 days since I bought it. I filled out the paperwork and mailed it in anyway, taking a chance that it would get honored.

Now, all my previous rebate experience told me that rebate companies use the slightest technicality to avoid honoring a rebate. That saves their clients money. I suppose that’s their right: the fine print is the fine print. Legally speaking, I was no longer entitled to a rebate check.

In spite of my gaffe, it looks like they’re sending me one, anyway! I got an email this morning with a message saying my rebate request is valid! Kudos for Samsung’s rebate fulfillment company, Parago for putting the customer first!

Soon to be spotless

Artist rendering

It’s not every birthday that I’m as excited about losing something as I am getting something, but today is one of those birthdays. I saw the dermatologist today to get the mole on my face looked at after I noticed last month that it had grown a bit. Dr. Burton took a close look at it, declared it safe, and then promptly zapped it right off my face with a hand-held freeze bottle. For fifteen years this Alaska-shaped spot has taken over my temple and a five-minute dermatologist appointment has put an end to it.

It will take about 10 days for the scab to fall off my face, but after that I should be spot-free. Woohoo!

FindToto

A neighbor lost his dog recently and found it using this service called FindToto. You can use FindToto to make thousands of automated calls to your neighborhood, alerting others to your missing pet.

It’s an interesting idea, and one that appeals to me as I’m also working on a neighborhood phone alert system.

Light blogging

Photo by Oleg Volk, www.olegvolk.net

It’s a busy week for me, with many after-hours meetings taking place. Yesterday, I met with the CEO of a local hospital. Tonight I went to an important City Council/Planning Commission meeting. Tomorrow I have my Raleigh CAC meeting. Thursday I have my Parks Board meeting. Few of these allow much blogging time afterwards, and the ones that do don’t leave me much time to rest. I actually fell asleep at 9:30 last night!

It’s all good, though. The work is its own reward, and doing good things for our city and community is something I love doing. It’s energizing to be around people who feel the same way.

Avoiding airport security gridlock

So it seems that today another person in a major airport went someplace he wasn’t allowed and shut down the whole terminal for hours. Jules Paul Bouloute, who just returned from Haiti, walked through an alarmed security door and paralyzed JFK airport. This comes less than two weeks after Chinese student Haisong Jiang walked the wrong way through security and caused the evacuation of the Newark airport.

To me, it doesn’t matter whether these individuals have bad intent, whether they’re incompetent, or whether they just made a dumb mistake. The fact that someone can in five seconds cause six hours of misery and chaos to a terminal full of passengers shows how broken our air travel system truly is.
Continue reading →

Going under again

Last weekend the kids went to a pool party for a friend at Gypsy Divers. The scuba diving school rents out time in a room and its heated pool for birthday parties and the like. I hadn’t planned to get into the pool at first but on a whim I dug up my ancient dive certification card from the training I got back in 1989.

As the kids got ready for the pool, I chatted with staff and asked if it was possible to get some gear on and try diving again. After squinting hard at the hair-covered picture on my dive card, the staff issued me a BC, regulator, and tank, and sent me into the storage room to hunt down flippers, booties (which Kelly found so attractive), and a mask. After a quick, two-minute refresher lesson on all the controls around me and a suggestion to stay near the shallow end at first, I straddled the poolside and slipped into the twelve-foot end.
Continue reading →

Explosive questions

For a few tense days this week, the port of Morehead City, one of the deepest-water ports on the East Coast, threatened to become even deeper when a forklift operator punctured a shipment of Pentaerythritol tetranitrate, or PETN. The accident cleared the city and shut down traffic on major roadways, then kept the port itself closed for additional days while the spill was cleaned up.

The American public became familiar with PETN when a Nigerian would-be suicide bomber failed to ignite the PETN hidden in his underwear while his plane was landing in Detroit. With that incident fresh in everyone’s mind, you would think that many questions would be asked about what this dangerous explosive was doing in Morehead City and where it was going.

Local officials aren’t talking. To its credit, the News and Observer’s editorial staff raised similar questions but doesn’t seem willing to commit the resources it takes to dig out the answers. Where was it bound? How could a forklift operator make such a mistake? And why did it take almost four hours after the spill to shut down U.S. 70 and evacuate the city? Who is responsible? Who will pay for the cleanup efforts?

I hope someone’s willing to get answers on this. As of now it’s still a mystery.

Google’s attacks from China resemble mine

In this morning’s paper was an article from the New York Times with more information on the cyberattack which led Google to reevaluate its business in China.

Among the revelations was this paragraph:

Peering inside that machine, company engineers actually saw evidence of the aftermath of the attacks, not only at Google, but also at at least 33 other companies, including Adobe Systems, Northrop Grumman and Juniper Networks, according to a government consultant who has spoken with the investigators.

Continue reading →