Watts the price?

The News and Observer had a fascinating article today on how Progress Energy trades energy. John Murawski got a glimpse of Progress’s trading department in action as it negotiated electricity transactions worth millions of dollars.

It reminded me of my consulting gig with Weather Predict, a commercial weather forecasting company based in Raleigh. Weather Predict has a number of electric utilities as customers: customers for whom a one degree rise or fall in temperature equates to millions of dollars in fuel costs or savings.

I’ve often wondered how those customers used that information and now I know.

Gutters guarded

Pretty busy day, today.

I spent the morning (and part of the afternoon) frantically putting gutter guards on the gutters of our house. The rush was due to the possible approach of a tropical depression, now flitting around the Atlantic off of North Carolina. So far today the rain has been negligible. But when it does come, the gutters will be ready. Since we’d moved in I’d wanted to get that done.

The best part about today’s work was watching the mosquitoes become confused when their watery nests were no longer available. I’m hopeful those caps will now save us some bug bites.

The wife and kids were at a birthday party while I worked. When they returned, we took one of our cars over to get new tires. Then we spent some time playing in the library before picking up the car from the tire place. Dinner followed, which itself was followed by family game night (the game “Sorry!”). Lots of fun was had by all.

Now its time to dig into my new library book, The Shock Doctrine. Should be entertaining.

Brave? Or Stupid?

Extraordinarily brave or extraordinarily stupid? There’s often a fine line separating the two. At 2:30 this afternoon, a man blurred that line when he robbed the Mechanics and Farmers bank right next to my office.

The M&F bank is tiny place, so small its almost two-dimensional. What it lacks in size it makes up in location, though: it sits right across the street from the Raleigh Times. The Times is a place where patrons fill outside tables all morning and afternoon. There were guaranteed to be a handful of witnesses who could’ve seen the guy. Not only that, but top brass from the Raleigh Police visit so often that its practically a police substation. Cops could’ve been at that bank in ten seconds.

I walked by the bank around 1:30 after meeting the family for lunch at the new Roly Poly. As I passed, a bank employee was on the sidewalk, cellphone to her ear, scolded a couple for parking in the bank parking lot.

The bank is so close it literally shares a wall with my office. I can’t see it from my window, though. Can’t see the sidewalk outside my building either without moving to the window. And though I had my scanner with me I didn’t listen to it all day. Don’t know what good it would’ve done if I’d had.

Ah well. That’s life in the big city, eh?

Mister Rogers

I came home today to see Travis playing in his room. He was in the middle of changing his shirt, putting it carefully on a hanger to hang in his closet.

“Hey, guy,” I asked. “What are you doing?”

“I’m Mister Rogers,” he answered with a serious look on his face.

The kids watch Mister Rogers every day. Its wonderful that he’ll always be with us.

Cashed out

I walked over to the credit union branch today to deposit a check. Right after I finished with the teller, I decided to get some cash from the ATM (though there were no less than four tellers sitting idly by, surfing the web. No kidding, I’m funny like that).

As I swiped my card it dawned on me: I could not remember my PIN.
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Obama’s form-letter response about FISA

I wrote the Barack Obama campaign expressing my displeasure with his flip-flop on the Senate FISA bill. I got the following canned reply in response. Figured I’d post it to save y’all the trouble.

Form letter or not, it doesn’t cut it. Obama says “trust me.” That doesn’t cut it, folks. Not for me. I’ve had enough with having to trust kings.

As a former cryptographer I’m intimately familiar with the safeguards put in place on this activity. They’ve worked well for decades. “Grave threats” are not enough reason to chuck the Bill of Rights, our biggest safeguard of all.
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