Photographing a Color Run Will Destroy Your Camera Gear–Don’t Do It

Yikes! This color run powder is nasty stuff on camera lenses. Imagine what it must do to your lungs!

If there hasn’t been a Color Run 5k or 10k race near you, there probably will be soon. And with all that color, you certainly want to take some pictures, right? Not with your camera you don’t.

I’m never one to worry much about lens dust, but the color bombs they throw out at Color Runs are different. In the last month my lens rental business has had over 20 lenses and several cameras nearly ruined by these things. For what it’s worth, all of the renters tell us they really weren’t near any of the major ‘color bombs.’

via Photographing a Color Run Will Destroy Your Camera Gear–Don’t Do It.

Obamacare

Stethoscope-2
Fourteen years ago I was a young know-it-all Linux geek working for an incredible employer, Indelible Blue. Once a leading retailer of IBM software and one of the fastest-growing companies in the area, Indelible Blue treated its employees like family. Even as a tiny company, it had on-site day care and some afternoons I could be found roller-blading around the parking lot with the company president. In 1999 it seemed Indelible Blue had a lot going for it.

You can imagine my surprise when a long-time employee, “Phyllis,” suddenly announced she was leaving. Phyllis was with the company right from the start and was an expert in the arcane IBM product known as MQ Series. Phyllis was a great person and her expertise was bringing lots of money to the company so I was baffled why she was leaving.

One rainy afternoon I sought her out as she stepped outside for a smoke break. She tearfully told me a heartbreaking story of how she loved her job and didn’t want to leave it but she had no choice. Her husband was suffering from a life-threatening health problem and Indelible Blue’s insurance coverage had been maxed out. Phyllis had to find another job or lose insurance coverage, which could lead to even worse consequences. A few weeks later she moved on.
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Silence and sound

I’ve mentioned this before, but lately it’s been delightfully quiet around the neighborhood. This is the time of year when indoor and outdoor temperatures match up, meaning the constant drone of air conditioners is pleasingly absent.

You don’t tend to notice the noise until it’s gone. Our world is full of so much constant noise that it can be a shock when it’s suddenly quiet again. I wonder how all this racket affects one’s health.

Color Run sees green, leaves Raleigh seeing red

Color Run in Seattle By Scooter Lowrimore (from Flickr)

Color Run in Seattle By Scooter Lowrimore (from Flickr)


A number of residents of Raleigh’s Historic Oakwood neighborhood were not happy to find their cars were missing from the street Saturday morning. The Color Run, a for-profit road run featuring dyed corn starch packets, had set up for its run through the neighborhood. Unlike most road races, organizers insisted that all the cars be removed from the street, most likely because of the colossal mess the corn starch packets make.

Raleigh Police posted “no parking” notices with as little as 13 hours notice, leaving many residents unprepared. Tow trucks hauled off their cars and stuck them with bills upwards of $150 to get them back. This in addition to the godawfully sticky corn starch that trashed their streets and homes.

Needless to say, residents were livid at their cars being taken and their neighborhood trashed. Council members were summoned and the city has agreed to reimburse residents for their towing charges.

I watched after the run as contractors worked to clear the starchy muck off of Wilmington Street near Polk Street. The contractor used a bleach mixture for this work, pouring this chemical-laden broth into our storm drains for eventual draining into the Neuse River. Nice move. I made a call to the city’s stormwater department when I saw this and begged someone to check it out. The city responded that this was just one of many issues they are collecting about the run.

Several runners question the motives of a for-profit company closing down city streets and using city resources. I watched at the end as a decal-laden Color Run car was loaded onto a tractor trailer that already held about 8 other shiny company vehicles. Apparently business is good!
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Flares over Raleigh

Saturday night at 9:45 PM, Kelly and I were up on the grassy lawn at Red Hat Amphitheater watching Steve Martin and the Steep Canyon Rangers play. Kelly pointed over to the northwest sky, above Dawson Street. Floating through the sky were a half-dozen flickering little balls of amber light. I blinked a few times before deciding they were flares. As the concert went on, the flares continued to march slowly south across the sky. There were well over a dozen of them. I’m sure the 911 center got more than one report of UFOs.

After the concert ended, Raleigh started up its fireworks show from the parking deck behind us. I wondered if the flares had been launched to gauge the air currents, as the flares seemed to have been launched from the direction of Fire Station #1 at Martin and Dawson Streets. I’m not sure why they would need to launch over a dozen of them to do this, though. Why wouldn’t one or two be sufficient? And why launch them well over an hour before the fireworks began?

I think I’ll reach out to my (few) contacts at the fire department to see how the whole process of setting up for fireworks, well … works.

Update 2 Oct 5:53 PM: Raleigh Fire Department says the flares aren’t theirs.

PopSci decides Internet comments are “bad for science.” That’s lazy and wrong.

Slate’s Will Oremus has a nice counterpoint to Popular Science’s recent decision to disallow comments on its web stories.

Now, I get as annoyed as the next right-thinking person when Internet commenters misconstrue scientific research—let alone when they regale me with tales of their aunt’s third cousin who makes $73 an hour working from home. But I couldn’t help but notice an almost religious zeal in LaBarre’s framing of her magazine’s mission. Spreading the word of science? Undermining bedrock scientific doctrine? Substitute “Christianity” for “science” and “Christian” for “scientific” in those two phrases and perhaps you’ll see what makes me uncomfortable here. These aren’t the words of a scientist. They’re the words of an evangelist.

via Future Tense.

Was Goldsboro’s Broken Arrow more broken than announced?

As I mentioned before, I have become captivated by the 1961 Goldsboro B-52 crash which resulted in two thermonuclear weapons being dropped in Faro, NC field. This Broken Arrow incident was in the news when a declassified document was released claiming one switch stopped an enormous nuclear detonation (is there any other kind?) from obliterating eastern North Carolina.

My concern when first learning about this incident was that just a flimsy switch protected the first bomb. After reading multiple interviews with Jack ReVelle, it seems the first bomb wasn’t the worry at all. The second bomb has been the one shrouded in mystery and ReVelle’s interviews seem to indicate that this bomb was always the concern.
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Bringing the jobs of yesterday to Raleigh

Mary_Ann-Jobs_of_Tomorrow-small

This made me laugh. I got this campaign postcard in the mail from my city councilor friend, Mary-Ann. It says she’s “bringing the jobs of tomorrow to Raleigh today.”

Well, not quite. While Mary-Ann has certainly worked hard to promote innovation and entrepreneurship in Raleigh, these jobs won’t be “computer programmer” jobs because that job title fell out of favor about two decades ago. Nowadays the wizards who do this work are called “software developers” or, even more commonly, “software engineers.” And good luck trying to find even these titles in a newspaper’s help wanted section, because no one puts job listings in newspapers anymore. Geeks go to LinkedIn, Monster.com, CareerBuilder, Indeed, or Craigslist to find jobs now.

Aside from these quibbles, though, I do applaud Mary-Ann for her work in helping increase the geek population in Raleigh. Geeks make everything better!

N&O endorsements

Today’s N&O listed its endorsements for city council. While I agree with most of them, I have to wonder how the N&O could fail to endorse incumbent councilor Randy Stagner.

Randy has worked very hard as a councilor. He may be the one most likely to show up at a meeting, whether it be a community meeting or otherwise. As the Parks board liaison for the past two years, Randy has showed up more frequently to Parks board meetings than any other city council liaison I can recall since I began serving. He takes his work very seriously.

One of his passions is transportation issues, passion for which we are in desperate need of here. He is a cyclist who frequents our greenways. He also spearheaded the creation of the Greenway Volunteers program, putting over 70 citizen volunteers to work monitoring our greenways. This program was his initiative, and it has helped Raleigh avoid the kind of crime that sometimes occurs on Durham’s American Tobacco Trail.

Randy also took up the issue of Sandy Forks Road, a District A street that’s long been in truly abysmal shape. Through his efforts, bond money is being secured to give this road the attention it has long needed.

Randy’s not beholden to special interests. He’s a retired Army colonel who has a lifetime of public service experience. Has he made a few rookie mistakes? Certainly, but overall he’s done a fine job and deserves another term.

On the other hand, Randy’s opponent is an attorney for real estate developers. He has a poor grasp of the issues, whether it be the city’s Unified Development Ordinance, how the parks system works, and other issues. His service on the council while working his day job would almost certainly be a conflict of interest. In short, he would be a train wreck. How the paper’s editorial board could give him the nod is beyond me. I worry that Colin Campbells’ less-than-stellar reporting has tainted their judgment.

Election? What election?

On my way to work this morning, I was startled to see election signs along Wade Avenue, signs urging passage of the transportation bond. There’s no reason I should’ve been startled, since Raleigh’s municipal election is less than two weeks away, not to mention our family went to a political fundraiser for the mayor last night. But I was startled, and it occurred to me that the reason I was startled is that I’ve seen precious few political signs this election cycle.

Is it voter apathy? Is it because so many incumbents are returning to city council? Is there no drama in this election? You can certainly find signs in the yards of all the true believer, hard-core followers of politics but the other 90% of people don’t seem to be flying the political flag this year. At least for the municipal elections.

I don’t think I can recall a city election that’s been this quiet in all the years I’ve lived in Raleigh. It’s odd.