If I were a terrorist aiming to wreak havoc on a city, my first target would be the city’s Nextel towers. So many law enforcement officers and first reponders use Nextel because of the incompability of their existing public safety radio systems. Often the firefighters can’t talk directly with the police at the scene. Or the troopers can’t talk to the city police. With Nextel, each can call the other directly. That’s why just about every police officer, firefighter, and federal agent carries a Nextel radio.

Seems like an awful lot of eggs in one basket, though, doesn’t it?
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Today is the winter solstice, the official start of winter as well as the darkest day of the year. From now until summer, the days will get longer (and hopefully warmer).

The winter solstice was celebrated long before Christmas. Read more about the history of this significant day.

One of the Christmas songs of my childhood is Snoopy’s Christmas by the Royal Guardsmen. The Royal Guardsmen were a one-hit wonder of the mid-60’s. I found it interesting reading about their history here.

I came across this interesing account of five times that the U.S. and Soviets nearly accidently started nuclear wars.

I’d heard about some of them, but this one was news to me:

On Nov. 9, 1979, in what Forden calls “the training tape incident,” three command posts showed a massive Soviet nuclear strike headed toward the United States.

American intercontinental ballistic missiles were alerted, jet fighters were scrambled, and an airborne command center – known as the president’s “doomsday plane” – took to the air, although without the president aboard.

When ground-based radars showed no incoming missiles, no counterattack was launched. It was later determined that a training tape simulating a Soviet attack had been mistakenly inserted into the Pentagon’s computer system.

Heh heh. Whoopsie! Just a training tape, guys…

It’s high time we quit playing with the fire that is nuclear weaponry.

After getting bombarded with comment spam lately, I’ve been thinking of countermeasures. I found this interesting discussion about the problem.

At the bottom of this thread is this handy little SQL SQL statement which will close comments, which is the place most of these comment spams get planted.

update node set comment=1 where nid (less than sign) (top node number – 10)

Now I need to find which table contains the top node number so I can automate this process and run it nightly.

I’ve been meaning to weigh on in T. A. leaving the Pack. While he’s got the skills, and the guts to play when he’s injured, he does get injured a lot. And he fumbles at the most inopportune moments.

I know he’s hoping to guard against a potential injury wrecking his chances of joining the NFL, but I think he’s leaving too soon. If he stayed and worked on his ball handling, he’d have a much brighter future with the NFL. I wish him well, though.

Also today, the news that Doc Holliday is jumping ship to Florida. I hope we can still recruit in the post-Doc era. The next few seasons promise to be defining for the future of Wolfpack football.

Today is the sixtieth anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge. The battle lasted more than a month and was one of the most brutal of World War II. American forces, outnumbered and surrounded, fought in bitter cold with few winter supplies, eventually defeating the Germans surrounding them.

My late Uncle Bub was with the 101st Airborne at Bastogne and lived to tell about it (though he rarely did, if ever). I’ll raise a glass to him tonight.