Entries from September 2005The Posts You Asked For

Maybe it’s just me, but it strikes me that, if you’re looking for a mascot for the water and sewer department, choosing one that’s narrow, tubular, and brown might not be the best idea.
The folks at the Western Virginia Water Authority apparently didn’t share my apprehension.

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No, it’s not what you think. Meet Piper [...]

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Here’s the overall winner of the Visions of Science Photographic Awards, shot by David McCarthy. Do you know what it is?

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For the answer, click and drag your mouse over the hidden text below.
-> A grain of salt and a peppercorn.

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I got a neat toy delivered today, courtesy of the folks at Dymo. Dymo, as you might realize, makes label makers — turn the knob, click the letter, repeat, then tear off your embossed sticky label. You’ve probably used one.
So why did Dymo see fit to send me one? Because it’s not just a label [...]

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A friend asked me about a house for sale in the Roanoke area, wanting to know about the neighborhood. Not knowing off-hand where the address was, I clicked on the “Map and Directions” button of the Realtor.com listing.
Here’s what I got. Useful, huh?

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“We spent a lot of years putting cameras where people didn’t know they were, and I didn’t have a problem with that.”
–Former CIA director Robert Gates responding to a question about how he felt about putting cameras on public streets

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I mean, the Mac users.
Desperate, as always, to find fault with anything that isn’t unabashedly pro-Mac, the folks at Mac Daily News have complained about my USAToday piece that dares — dares! — to say the iPod has competition.
And like good little lemmings, MDN readers start sending me nasty notes based on the comments [...]

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Mac users don’t seem to realize that I wasn’t reviewing the iPod. I was simply using it as an example of a quality product. As usual, though, they’re freaking out.

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Oh, my.

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I was sitting in a seminar today on how newspapers need to keep themselves relevant. One of the things that came up is the idea of a paper providing “conversational currency” to people — things to talk about at the water cooler.
Online news sources certainly do a lot of things that newspapers can

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One of the big problems I have with lots of surveys is that the people taking them are doling out bullshit. Come on, if you ask people what they look for online, what percentage is actually going to say “porn”?
Everyone reads those magazines for the articles. Everyone is interested in the environment. Everyone reads at [...]

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The photo below of one Kimi Reynolds, Katrina refugee, has been in lots of papers — the face of despair.
Hopefully not too much despair, though. Ms. Reynolds was, apparently, able to get out of danger with several pairs of brand-new sneakers I’m sure she just purchased.
If you look closely, you can see the tags [...]

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The federal government is now trying to stop press access to New Orleans.

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From Scientific American, October 2001, comes “Drowning New Orleans” which begins:
A major hurricane could swamp New Orleans under 20 feet of water, killing thousands. Human activities along the Mississippi River have dramatically increased the risk, and now only massive reengineering of southeastern Louisiana can save the city
And from National Geographic, October 2004, comes “Gone [...]

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I installed an update for PerfectDisk, the excellent defragmenter I use. When it was done, it popped up a message listing what was new.
Among them:
What’s new in PerfectDisk build 7.00.042
* Corrected a bug in the boot time defragmentation. PerfectDisk records the current time on shutdown and compares it to the system time at reboot. On [...]

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FEMA director Mike Brown is showing himself over and over to be utterly and completely clueless and incompetent. His total lack of information and inability to take any kind of timely, effective action is indicative of the federal government as a whole.
If there’s ever a disaster — natural or man-made — I think it’s clear [...]

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Via the Survival of New Orleans blog comes these comments from “Bigfoot,” a life-long N.O. resident, made on Thursday, Sept. 1:
Three days ago, police and national guard troops told citizens to head toward the Crescent City Connection Bridge to await transportation out of the area. The citizens trekked over to the Convention Center and waited [...]

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I listened to an NPR reporter absolutely take down Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff.
Chertoff had insisted, on the air, that the people at the New Orleans convention center were not in desperate straits, and that food and water was coming in.
When the NPR anchor told him that a reporter had just said [...]

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Gas station owners are evil, price-gouging thugs, right? After all, they raised prices in the middle of the day — charging more for what was already in their tanks!
Not so fast. Yes, some stations jump the gun a little on raising the prices. But they aren’t getting rich.
Gas stations typically make a few cents per [...]

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Holed up in New Orleans, a blogger is posting about what’s going on in New Orleans.
Not pleasant reading. And scary, scary stuff when you realize that this was a test of how the Department of Homeland Security should handle a major disaster.
New Orleans had days of warning, and look what happened. Now we know that [...]

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