Today is the 49th anniversary of the Test Baker atomic explosion of Operation Crossroads, which took place on the Bikini Atoll in the Pacific. Operation Crossroads consisted of two atomic blasts, one airborne and one undersea, and was designed to measure the effects of a nuclear blast on various targets.

The bombs were of the Fat Man design, the same as the one dropped over Nagasaki. Test Able, the airborne blast, took place 1 July 1946 and was a partial success, as the bomb was dropped in the wrong place. Test Baker, the undersea blast, took place 25 July 1946, obliterating several target ships nearby and rendering dozens more irradiated beyond salvage. Some of those ships were historically significant to the second world war.

Plenty of information’s on the web about Operation Crossroads. Watch the Internet Archive’s footage of Operation Crossroads.

Dell has conned Winston-Salem into paying for the land of its already taxpayer-financed PC factory. That makes it a total of $284 million dollars that you and I, the citizens and taxpayers of North Carolina, have ponied up for this swindle.

The UK website The Guardian has had some fun with this, posting pictures to show what $7 million of land can buy you. Is it any wonder why the rest of the world is laughing at us?

Insane. Absolutely insane. I’m all for creating jobs, but this is ridiculous. I hope the lawsuit succeeds in bringing this madness to an end.

Actor James Doohan, most famous for his role as Scotty on Star Trek, has died. He was 85. Doohan had quite a life, even before Star Trek, with military service at D-Day in the Canadian Armed Forces.

As Scotty, Doohan became the idol of aspiring geeks everywhere. His portrayal of the Enterprise’s chief engineer launched a thousand tech careers.

Godspeed, Jimmy.

We’ve been going through a dry spell in Raleigh for quite a while. It seems like weeks that my rain gauge has sat at one number. The new yard has taken a real beating from the heat and lack of rain.

Thus yesterday evening, I was thrilled to see lightning lighting up the sky to the north. A storm was approaching! I settled myself down on the front porch to watch it creep up on us.

And creep it did. With no front to push it around, it moved very slowly towards us, with a spectacular lightning show all the way. Kelly soon joined me on the porch, and I pointed out a well-defined cloud that was moving towards us.

Before the cloud got to us, its shape seemed to dissolve. The long-lived storm cell had nearly played itself out, but not before dumping a good inch of much-needed rain on us. It made for quite a show. I sat in the flashing shadows next to Kelly, a big grin on my face.

I went to a two-hour presentation Saturday regarding Raleigh’s community television studio, also known as Raleigh Television Network. Cable administrator Michael Williams was introduced, as well as Carlos Bastilla, the studio engineer. The meeting was very informative and exciting.

Raleigh’s $1.8 million studio is by far the most advanced community television studio out there. As Williams put it, “we’re not just on the cutting edge here, we’re on the bleeding edge” (no pun intended in reference to my previous finger-cutting post). Raleigh is so out front, its driving the software developemt at Crispin, the software devlopers of the ingress/egress suite.

Steps were outlined for how a citizen can put programs on the air. Course dates have yet to be announced, but some will be starting next month. I could conceivably put content on the air as early as today if I wanted, though it would have to be content I either edited myself or got somewhere else. No one gets to play with the new equipment until they get trained: no exceptions.

One of the most exciting things I heard is the addition of a mobile studio, with a full suite of studio equipment in the back. It is for use of staff only at this point, but it may be possible in the future to farm it out to community producers (with staff accompanying).

I look forward to having some fun with this high-tech digital studio.

I spent the morning yesterdy working in the ttic, instlling n ttic fn to help keep the ttic cool. I’d done n wesome job, with ll the cbles netly stpled nd everything.

But I couldn’t leve well enough lone. I hd to go bck nd djust the thermostt.

I wnted to test the irflow to see how it ws working. I mde the mistke of using my hnd for this. Unfortuntely, between blncing on the rfters, the drkness, nd my ineptitude, my hnd got too close to the blde.

Thwck! I blinked s blood splttered cross my chest. Uh, Houston, we hve problem.

Fortuntely, I still hd a left pinky finger. I spent the next three hours t the “urgent cre” office (motto: urgency? Who, us?) getting n x-ry nd four stitches. Luckily for me it wsn’t nerly s bd s it could’ve been.

My finger is ll bndged up now, mking it tough to type certin letters on the keybord. I hope to be typing gin very soon, s well s plying guitr, s mking chords with dmged pinky finger isn’t esy. I could ply men slide guitr now, though!

The morl to this story is: don’t test irflow of metl fns using your hnd. Its pinful nd cn led to ll sorts of problems. Thts tip from me to you.

Is this album really ten years old?
—
Heaven Beside You
Alice In Chains

Be what you wanna be
See what you came to see
Been what you wanna be
I don’t like what I see
Continue reading →

Found out today that one of my favorite online radio stations has made the jump to Sirius satellite radio. Granted, its not your typical online radio station, but Jimmy Buffett’s Radio Margaritaville. Sirius added Radio Margaritaville to its lineup last month.

Jimmy’s like the Oprah of radio: he’s got a media empire (albeit smaller than O’s. Or Martha Stewart, who is also making the move). Jimmy’s got the clout to pitch his radio pet project to Sirius and have them listen.

You can find him on Channel 98. He’s also on the Dish network’s music channels, too. And of course, you can still listen for free on the Internet.

I’d love to get a channel on Sirius. Can a man dream?

Last night was a veritable Murphy’s Law of sleep: everything that could wake us up, did wake us up. First, I stayed up late working through the mound of paperwork that had collected on my desk. Having tamed it, I went to bed. But sleep didn’t come right away. I was wide awake, having eaten a big piece of chocolate earlier in the day.

I closed my eyes and searched for sleep. A few minutes later, Travis woke up sobbing. He wasn’t falling back asleep, so Kelly went in with him.

A minute after that, we heard a horn outside. A train was a mile down the track, alternately inching up the track and idling. It sounded like it was looking at (or for) something. I tuned it out and tried to settle down again.

A car full of teenage girls drove by the front of the house, singing something at the top of their lungs. Great.

As their noise fades away, the train throttles up and finally glides past our house. It breaks tradition of other night trains by leaning heavily on its horn as it approaches Durant. In fact, it blows its horn near-continuously for almost a minute. Dammit!

Kelly leaves Travis, having been unsuccessful in settling him. He wails as we look at each other, deciding what to do. The train, having successfully woken up everyone on our side of Durant, decides to back up and wake up everyone on the other side. It chugs back down the track to its original spot.

So, Kelly and I are wide awake. Travis is wailing, and a train is taunting us just outside. Niiiiiice.

I take a turn comforting Travis. While I missed seeing him before his bedtime, 12:30 in the morning was not a good time for a visit. He didn’t seem to mind, though. Every time I tried to lean him back into my arms to rock him to sleep, he would use his steel-like abdominal muscles to pop back up and stare wide-eyed around the room.

After ten minutes of fruitless backscratching, pacing around, and rocking, I finally put Travis down in his bed and handed him a stuffed animal as I stepped out of the room. When he stopped wailing five minutes later, Kelly and I thought we were home free.

Just as we were beginning to breathe again, along comes Thomas the Tank Engine, making a third low-speed pass up the track. WTF? I suppose after midnight was a good time to break in a new engineer or something. At least this time, they barely touched the horn.

Having heard this all before, I waited and bit and – sure enough – the train came sneaking back down the track, this time with no horn at all. Practicing his stealth moves, perhaps?

The funny thing is that earlier in the day, I had really wanted to see a train pass by. On the way to the TriLUG meeting, I saw crossing gates down as I drove down Atlantic Avenue. I stopped at the old Seaboard train station downtown and waited, hoping the train would pass mere feet from me as I stood at the old passenger platform (trains move very slowly there, so its not as dangerous as it may sound). After ten minutes, I realized the train I thought I was tracking had been heading north. D’oh.