Not a fan of the #occupy movement. Yesterday at #OccupyPhilly, they decided to block the Market Street Bridge. While most of them dispersed when the cops started getting out the handcuffs, about 24 of them decided to lock arms and continue blocking traffic. This made me wonder whether you get a 24 for 1 taser deal when you taser one of a group of 24 hippies locking arms. I don’t know, but if the experiment was tried, I’d like to know the results.
I grew up in a working class area where a lot of folks didn’t end up going to college. Those that did generally tended to either go to a few years at Delaware County Community, or if they were into a four year university, to Penn State. It was with a bit of surprise that my high school guidance counselor reacted with when I informed him I did not want to apply there.
I applied to only two schools. University of Delaware, and Drexel University. I was accepted at both. I went to Drexel and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering. My guidance counselors were telling me it was foolish not at least applying to Penn State. I went to a football crazy high school, and I considered the fact that Drexel did not field a football team to be a plus.
I keep thinking back to the guidance counselor’s advice, and wondering “Who’s the fool now?” I feel bad for the folks carrying Penn State degrees into the job market now. While if I were the hiring manager, I wouldn’t hold it against anyone, this scandal has been more than embarrassing. Hopefully the school will recover, and learn something from it. Jonathan Adler pointed out:
The cowardice of some was no doubt motivated by a sincere desire to protect the reputation of the university and its football program; to preserve the house that JoePa built. And yet, as I noted yesterday, the failure to take immediate action has, in fact, done more to tarnish the PSU football program and Paterno’s legacy than would have a determined effort to protect children from the predator in their midst. It may even hit the university’s credit rating. Placing the welfare of the football program ahead of the Sandusky’s victims protected neither.
Had Nixon been forthcoming about Watergate, and fired those responsible, rather than attempting to cover it up, it’s likely his presidency would have survived. I’ve never seen a case of covering up something wrong ultimately paying off. If the sin is big enough, people will eventually find out. When they do, the backlash is going to be severe.
If EU economic policy were a soap opera–and apparently, it is–Greece would be the sultry, irresponsible beauty in a tumultuous love-hate relationship with rigid, authoritarian Germany. Â Obviously after years of tumultuous breakups and teary reunions, this is the season finale where he finally beats the hell out of her during a screaming fight over thier impending bankruptcy, and in despair, she drives both of them, and his prize Volkswagen, off a cliff.
She doesn’t see how this will end well. I don’t either. I never quite understood why the Germans would want to be in a monetary union with basket cases like Spain, Greece and Italy to begin with.
The Occupy Charlotte statement from their consensus group kicking out a member is an eerie reminder of a classic Twilight Zone episode – “The Obsolete Man.”
We the people of Occupy Charlotte and the General Assembly thereof, wish it to be hereby known that Thomas C. Shope has been exiled from the Occupy Charlotte movement and is to no longer be used as a source for communication and/or donations. He has been separated from this organization due to his consistent and willful actions against the will of the people and the decisions of the General Assembly. Any and all communications to the media and any donations from the people that support us, are to be made and accepted by and from the members of the occupation at 600 E. Trade Street in Charlotte, NC.
At least one person came on to question this decision since it doesn’t seem very inclusive or 99%-ty. Their response came right out of the Twilight Zone. I’m not kidding. All I could hear is the opening from “The Obsolete Man” playing in my head as I read through their declaration. When people question the decision or the statement, the response from the organizers is that they need to move on, there’s nothing else to see here. There may be legitimate issues with the guy, but their manner of “kicking him off the island” is beyond creepy.
Specs suggest a Cessna 310G shouldn’t be able to fly to Hawaii. I’m guessing there must be some kind of spare fuel system you can rig up to essentially turn the thing into a flying gas tank. I guess it’s cheaper to fly the plane than to ship it, but I’m also guessing that particular fact wasn’t countered with the high probability of having to ditch the plane in the drink if, despite all your modifications, you’re still really tight on fuel and maybe had a bit more headwind than you accounted for starting out.
I’ve always wanted to have off for Columbus Day, so I could know what it feels like to be a federal worker. Well, now I finally have a Columbus Day off for the first time since I was in college. I’d be more thrilled if the circumstances were different, but I’ll take what I can get these days.
UPDATE: Quick Columbus day trivia. Columbus Day is something celebrated more among Italian-Americans than many other ethic groups. Philadelphia, traditionally having a largish Italian population, renamed a road in the city to Columbus Boulevard. I still call it Delaware Avenue.
When I was in college, I was a member and pseudo-leader of a group called the DUsers, which was actually the first Mac user group in the country, founded at Drexel University in 1984. There are other groups that will also claim to be the first, but they are blasphemers with no evidence to back up their claim. My friend Jason, who has occasionally co-blogged on here, wrote a Shareware game for the old black and white Macs, and last I heard still had a check from Steve Wozniak somewhere, who apparently thought his game was pretty cool and decided to pay for it. The DUsers were absorbed into another student group a number of years ago, and I don’t know what’s happened to them since. I also don’t know what happened to a lot of our vintage archival material.
Once being a Mac user went from being Geek to Chic, a lot of the old user groups died out, and while the Apple community has gained substantially, it has lost something in becoming the “in” thing. I was part of the community when Apple was getting steamrolled by Microsoft, and being an Mac aficionado was something a bit odd, rather than stylish. It is in that spirit I share this with you. It is classic Steve Jobs. Cordial, and at the same time arrogant, but also speaking the brutal truth:
For those of us who were Mac users during the days of John Scully, Michael Spindler, and Gil Amelio, what could also be charitably referred to as “the dark years,” it’s hard to imagine what Apple will be like, once again, without Steve Jobs at the helm. Does Tim Cook have the minerals? We shall see. Google is a much tougher competitor than Microsoft ever was, and operating systems, at this point, are easily commoditized.
Those of us that have been around the Apple world for a while might remember that before Apple bought NeXT back in 1996, it was also rumored to be flirting with Be Inc, maker of the BeBox, which ran BeOS. Be was lead by Jean-Louis Gassee, who was probably every bit Job’s equal when it came to personality. Gassee was once famously, and humorously quoted as saying:
“For God’s sake, don’t compare us to NeXT. We want to be a better tool for developers, not to be tasteful. We don’t cost $10,000. We have a floppy drive. We do not defecate on developers.”
Of course, Apple ultimately bought NeXT, rather than BeOS, and Steve Jobs proceeded to rearrange the Apple board, and orchestrate his return to the helm. How different of a world it would be today if instead of bringing back Steve Jobs with Apple’s acquisition of NeXT, they had bought Be Inc, and with it Jean-Louis Gassee?
So the socialists (commies, hippies, moonbats, anarchists, and everyone else) have taken over New York – or at least they keep trying to do it. I don’t really have much to add in the way of commentary on the protests, but I did find some amusement in their officially posted daily schedule.
It would appear to be a whole lotta nothing. Great. Keep doing nothing, and you can stay out of my life.
But, their list of priorities in “working groups” is a little disturbing. Let’s zoom in.
They have made an “arts & culture” committee a higher priority than sanitation. This is why these people cannot win. They consider having an arts culture more important than taking care of their shit.
UPDATE From Sebastian: For some reason, it reminds me distinctly of this:
Looks like there was a crash with some spectator fatalities at the Reno Air Races. A P-51 Mustang piloted by a 74-year old experienced stunt pilot. You can see some video here of the crash. Years ago people generally accepted that sometimes accidents just happen, and it’s not anybody’s fault, nor was it some grave oversight. That is, unfortunately, not the world we live in today. A bunch of people can’t just be randomly maimed or killed. It has to be someone’s fault, and you can bet our federal overseers reaction to this will take away just a little bit more freedom. You already hear people questioning why a 74-year old was allowed to fly a plane.
I would have rather gotten into any plane piloted by that 74-year old than I would an Airbus flown by an Air France Crew. Sometimes planes crash, and it’s not anybody’s fault.
UPDATE: Already happened before, in 2008. Who would have guessed that racing high-powered aircraft like the P-51 Mustang at speeds up to 500mph in the weeds is a bit inherently dangerous?
I don’t have much to say about the anniversary of 9/11, except it’s one of those moments you remember exactly what you were doing. Ten years ago I had just started a job at an exciting new biotech start-up the past June. I was driving to work on a Tuesday morning, which I remember was a really pleasant morning. I tuned in the local news station for the traffic. About as I approached the on-ramp for Route 30 in Downingtown, which is where I lived at the time, the first plane hit the North Tower. No one knew, at the time, it was a terrorist attack. I remember from history that a small plane once struck the Empire State building in foul weather. But how did this happen? It’s a completely clear day. Not a cloud in the sky.
As the news story wears on during my commute, news reports a second plane has hit the South Tower. Well, if the first place was an accident, there’s no way two planes can accidentally run into an individual tower. This has to be deliberate. This is really worrisome. I know people who work in that tower. I know it can hold the population of a small city, and that it’s nearly impossible to fight fires in building that high.
I was at work by the time the plane struck the Pentagon. By now it was obvious to everyone what had happened, and it was pretty apparent who was responsible. Nobody really thought about the possibility of both towers collapsing. A few of us were huddled around a radio in our cafeteria when the first tower collapsed. We immediately went out to tell anyone who wasn’t listening to the radio. We could easily lose more people today than were lost at Antietam today. No one really knew how many people were in the towers. By this time there was talk of a plane crashed in Western Pennsylvania. We were told we could go home. On my way home is when the other tower collapsed.
Once I got home and got the cable news on, is when I saw the replay footage of people throwing themselves out of the burning building before the towers collapsed. No one knew how many people had died. It could be tens of thousands. I spent most of the night watching cable news wondering why we weren’t carpet bombing the shit out of Afghanistan by now. By this time they had grounded all aircraft. I remember my friend Jason was in Arizona on his honeymoon. They had to drive back. Several days with no contrails in the sky was eery. I seem to recall it wasn’t for several days that we had an idea of roughly how many people were killed in the tower. I did not know anyone directly. A relative who worked there hadn’t yet entered the building, and made a quick exit from the WTC subway station.
I spent the next several weeks eager for some paybacks. Call me a primitive Neanderthal, but you don’t come into my country, kill 3000 people, destroy two pieces of precious real-estate, destroy four planes, and disrupt the lives of millions of Americans and not expect our military to come into where you live and kill those responsible, and try to offer to the rest of the people living there a more civilized means for governing themselves. I supported the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. I still think both were the right thing to do. As a nation we have become weary of nation building, and I have too. If the radical Islamists attempt to up the ante post-911, I’m going to be considerably more in the camp of rubble don’t make trouble. We tried to do it the nice way the first time around, and that part of the world can take those lessons or leave them. It’s their choice. But we don’t have the patience, or quite frankly the money, to do it the nice way again.
Not a fan of the #occupy movement. Yesterday at #OccupyPhilly, they decided to block the Market Street Bridge. While most of them dispersed when the cops started getting out the handcuffs, about 24 of them decided to lock arms and continue blocking traffic. This made me wonder whether you get a 24 for 1 taser deal when you taser one of a group of 24 hippies locking arms. I don’t know, but if the experiment was tried, I’d like to know the results.
When I was in college, I was a member and pseudo-leader of a group called the DUsers, which was actually the first Mac user group in the country, founded at Drexel University in 1984. There are other groups that will also claim to be the first, but they are blasphemers with no evidence to back up their claim. My friend Jason, who has occasionally co-blogged on here, wrote a Shareware game for the old black and white Macs, and last I heard still had a check from 
