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 →

The other end of larceny

My recent Hechinger post brought to mind one other tale worth sharing, one I didn’t know how to weave into the rest of my narrative.

One of the part-tome guys who worked at the store was much like me: a clean-cut middle class young man. He was the son of an IBMer and probably never wanted for much growing up. He was pretty friendly and though he worked in a different department we would always say hi to each other.

Then one night my image of him changed completely. We were at a party thrown by one of our coworkers. I took him up on his offer to check out the stereo in his red Mustang. Seeing how impressed I was, he offered to get me one just like it for $50.

What, I said? He then casually explained that he knew some people who could get him “hot” stereos and radar detectors and could hook me up if I wanted.
Continue reading →

Chugging through things

I haven’t done much blogging lately, which is usually (but not always) a sign that things have gotten busy for me. Such is the case this time around. At $WORK, I have been asked to pitch in for a sick coworker who’s out for the week. This entails learning the stuff he does from the ground up, and that has kept me busy. On the other hand, time at work flies by when I’m deep into solving a problem. I don’t consider being busy to be a bad thing.

Outside of work, there is also a round of meetings coming up. I’ve been planning my CAC meetings like normal but there was also a weekend Parks and Rec meeting. Tonight I had the Mordecai board meeting and next week it’s RCAC and the Parks Board. Then the following Monday I conduct my East CAC meeting. While it’s fun to get stuff done, I have to say that the holiday break spoiled me a bit. It was nice to relax for a change and spend some time with the family. Still, it’s all good.

Next up for my “Where I’ve Worked” series is my stint in the Navy. I have to admit I’m a bit intimidated at the thought of having to distill four years of twenty-four-hours-a-day-seven-days-a-week Navy life into a post, or two. The old ad campaign is true: the Navy isn’t just a job, it’s an adventure. It will probably take me a few weeks to hammer out a post on it. Stay tuned.

Google threatens to leave China, quits filtering results

I read this morning that Google is threatening to pull out of China in response to what Google says are coordinated attacks against the email accounts of human rights activists. Google has also stopped filtering search results to users of its Chinese site. Word of the changes has apparently spread quickly among Chinese Internet users, many of whom see this as a positive move.

I’ve lost count of how many Internet attacks my website has received from computers in China. It is almost impossible to say for sure who is responsible for the attacks. It could be government-sponsored or it could be independent Chinese hackers. It could also be foreign attackers taking advantage of the language barrier and lazy system administrators who don’t keep their computers patched. If those attacks seem to target activists, however, that becomes a powerful “smoking gun” for implicating the Chinese government.

Some Chinese say this will hurt Chinese Internet users. Personally, I found the so-called Great Firewall of China to be quite porous. I suspect savvy Net users in China will have little problem steering to their favorite Internet sites, regardless of what Google and the Chinese government do.