I always get excited when a new NASA mission comes around, and 3:51 PM EDT tomorrow is the scheduled launch of STS-114, Space Shuttle Discovery. It is of course a milestone for NASA to be launching its first shuttle since Columbia, but I find each launch to be pretty amazing in its own right. As a geek, I can appreciate (read: drool over) the incredible technological complexities that go into making it happen. As a science fiction fan and observer of human evolution, I can appreciate the role that space exploration plays in inspiring and pushing our strange existence on this puny little planet to new heights. I have fond memories of a family vacation when we toured the Kennedy Space Center, and just the physical enormity of the undertaking left an impression, not to mention the impacts of its successes and failures.
Continue reading "Good luck, Discovery"
Year: 2005
If you read through my weblog, you might get the impression that I find joy in whining and complaining about the poor customer service practices of companies I deal with. Really, I tend to be a pretty positive person, and don't go out looking to pick people/places/things apart just for fun. But sometimes I just gotta share.
So there's a local cable internet provider, which I won't identify here by name, that I wish had better Insight into its own local network operations. Based on my experience, they have downtime / problems and my connection goes down when any of the following occur:
Continue reading "Whiny insights about local cable internet provider"
It excites me much more than it should that I've found him after all these years: Ashton Smith. You know, the guy. The guy with the voice. The guy with the voice that narrates over almost every movie trailer, commercial, television show promo, and network news teaser that we see/hear. I didn't think it was possible that it was all the same guy, but it is. Ashton instills solemnity and foreboding into every word he speaks. And yet, he has the tender inflection that can make us rush out to spend money anticipating the best love stories of summer films. Ashton, send me a CD of your greatest hits! Better yet, do my voicemail greeting?
A few bits and pieces: I've recently returned from a great vacation. I took some of my time off to explore a few Richmond-area touristy type things that I haven't gotten to see yet, including a thorough tour of the Wayne County Historical Museum. They have quite an impressive collection, and I learned a lot I didn't know about this community. As a result I had one of those great moments of cosmic unity: I'd enjoyed reading about the history of the Wayne Corporation which was headquartered here in town. On Thursday, I was in North Carolina climbing onto a converted school bus for a whitewater rafting trip with the Nantahala Outdoor Center and thought to look at the bus's manufacturer label, and sure enough, it said "Wayne - Richmond, Indiana". Cool! (BTW, if you're ever looking for an awesome place to vacation in western NC, check out Earthshine Mountain Lodge - amazing place, people, and food.) And just a few months ago I was touring the Lincoln Park Conservatory in Chicago, and noticed that the metal winches used to open and close the glass panels were labeled "Quaker City Steel Works - Richmond, Indiana." Wowsers - this place really made a name for itself. Speaking of Chicago, I did several other museum tours there this time around, including a nice walkthrough of the Adler Planetarium (though the show "Stars of the Pharaohs" was minimally fascinating) and the Chicago Historical Society's exhibit Without Sanctuary, a visual history of lynching in America. The images of communities - men, women, children - laughing and smiling as they gathered to celebrate death were indescribably haunting. And finally, to end on a note of humor, if you haven't already, check out the June 22, 2056 edition of The Onion - hilarious.
I've been doing more and more public speaking over the last few years, and find that it's something I enjoy immensely. There was a time when I was younger when I considered a "career" in it (as a minister, even), despite my introverted nature and the nervous shakes I'd always get right before beginning a talk. I'm still introverted and I still get the shakes once in a while, but I really appreciate opportunities to be a part of group learning and educational sessions, especially when I have something valuable to contribute and/or unique ways of contributing it. Lately I've been getting some good feedback on my approach to these opportunities and my ability to engage an audience; I've also found more and more sessions that fit well with other projects I'm pursuing. So, I've created a page on this site about speaking opportunities and requests, in hopes that it will lead to more of these. If you're involved with a group or event that might benefit from this kind of contribution, please let me know!
I get the sense that I tend to spend an unusual amount of time exercising my "right" as a consumer to provide feedback to the companies and organizations from which I buy products and services. The general trend in "consumer action" these days when a company is providing poor customer service or substandard products seems to be cursing a bit under one's breath, perhaps having a tense exchange with The Manager, but otherwise letting it go...and usually returning again soon to patronize the same business without a memory of frustrating experiences of the past. Whatever the reason might be for this trend - reduction of our shopping choices, general consumer apathy, or something else - it's exactly what many businesses are counting on from all of us so they can keep their bottom line where they like it. I have a different sense about how we should act in the face of poor service and products.
Continue reading "The Customer Can Always Write"
The Richmond Palladium-Item newspaper seems to have multiple personalities when it comes to characterizing the nature of civil protest. In Friday's editorial, they so nobly say "It's our right to stand up for our beliefs, tell our elected officials we disagree, share our viewpoints with neighbors, family and friends, strive for the betterment of our country as a whole. That right brings with it a responsibility to respect others' ideas, hear out their concerns and try at the very least to understand our differences." The article then proceeds to condemn any protest that violates the law, indicating there is some concept of "vital" and "proper" protest, of which illegal acts are not a part. I suppose, then, that they would have had to condemn the entire U.S. civil rights movement, the actions of fellow journalists who disobey the law to protect sources, and a slew of other "improper" protests throughout the history of our country. (Perhaps they misunderstand that sometimes acting improperly is, unfortunately, the only way to draw attention to a cause, for better or worse.) But surely, then, the above statement means they do support and respect legal and peaceful acts that share viewpoints, encourage dialogue about our beliefs, and work to change our communities for the better, right? Like a written petition, maybe? Apparently not - they would call such actions "misguided" and "desperate" and "an affront to civic fair play", and go on to equate those actions with physical assault.
Wow. If I understand their position correctly as derived from their various published statements, the only kind of disagreement that is proper or fair is no real disagreement at all. It's sad and scary that a local institution that is theoretically so much a part of facilitating free speech and dialogue about the community - even when it involves acts of protest - seems to so manifestly misunderstand those opportunities, and the vehicles available for engaging in them.
The eminent and celebrated E. Thomas Kemp points us to a wonderful and clever use of news aggregation and weblog technologies, Plogress. Using Perl and WordPress, the apparently anonymous administrator has created a site that sucks data out of the Library of Congress and displays a blog of the doings of individual Senators and Representatives. Now I can keep an eye on Mike, Richard, and Evan through my RSS newsreader! I'm sure they all read my blog, right?
Hayden L. Sheaffer, the pilot who is being raked over the coals for his role in flying a Cessna 150 into restricted airspace over Washington D.C. earlier this month, which prompted the scrambling of jets and the evacuation of thousands, noted today that he did in fact try to contact the military on the radio channel they instructed him to use, but that he couldn't get through. In today's issues, the New York Times reports that the Department of Homeland Security acknowledged that Sheaffer was instructed to use a frequency that was not available at the time. What? Huh? Okay, the guy shouldn't have gotten lost in the first place, but the whole incident was fairly ridiculous, and the thought that they might have been blown out of the sky because they were given instructions they couldn't follow is a pretty scary one. When I was flying Cessnas with minimal avionics (far from restricted airspace, mind you), I don't think would've had much of a "plan B" in that case either.
Jason Godesky has an interesting post up about why blogs are in a category all their own when it comes to publishing content online. It's a question I've thought about on occasion, given that I've had a personal website in some form or another since, um, 1994, and that I get indignant once in a while when people jump and scream that the blogging phenomenon is the shiny new thing that levels the playing field. It was the whole frickin Internet thing that was supposed to do that in the first place, people! But Jason has put his finger on some of the specifics about why blogging is different, though I have a few more to add.
Continue reading "Why blogs are different"