Category: News

The Charlotte Observer newspaper recently ran a story about local radio personality and author Sheri Lynch. Lynch and her family purchased a 4,000-square-foot home in Charlotte’s Myers Park neighborhood back in 2006, and the Observer article was all about the trials and tribulations of the family’s renovation of the house. At the end of the article, the author posts a quick list of Sheri’s favorite places to hunt for bargains in the Charlotte area… one of which is Lisa’s work! Sheri says:

For more great deals on high end furniture, accessories, fabric, you name it: A. Hoke Ltd. 725 S. Cedar St., 704-358-0277. “(It’s) a very fancy to-the-trade interior design company that periodically throws open their doors to the public for a scary-good sale,” Sheri says. “This is a mailing list you want to get on.”

How cool is that, huh? And not only is my honey “the glue that holds the company together” (my phrase), guess who does their IT work? Yep – Belmont PC!

Hi Folks! I’m still looking for my muse, so enjoy some news whilst my writer’s block continues…

It looks like Morrissey is suing British music magazine NME for some comments he “allegedly” made. Moz was quoted as saying “Although I don’t have anything against people from other countries, the higher the influx into England the more the British identity disappears. So the price is enormous. If you travel to Germany, it’s still absolutely Germany. If you travel to Sweden, it still has a Swedish identity. But travel to England and you have no idea where you are”. Tim Jonze, the freelance journalist that interviewed Morrissey, claimed to be “offended” by the comments, but published them anyway. NME published a follow-up interview; in it, Morrissey dusts off the old “taken out of context” chesnut, but doesn’t deny making the comments.

The freedom-fighters at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) published a study this week that shows that Comcast does, in fact, tamper with Bittorrent traffic. Read all about it here at Ars Technica. As to what “Bittorrent tampering” is, and why you should care, wait until next week when I publish a gigantic rant about the topic. It’ll be worth the wait, I promise!

This news is a bit old, but funny nevertheless: it seems that U.S. Air somehow never had a New Mexico liquor license. The airline realized its mistake after it was fined by the state for “over-serving” a passenger that drove himself home from the airport and killed a family of five in the process. The airline applied for, and received, a temporary license while it began the process of applying for a permanent one.  But then another U.S. Air passenger was arrested for DUI – once again from drinks served in-flight. This, along with a third incident in which New Mexico liquor board members observed U.S. Air employees giving an obviously intoxicated man more alcohol, has led to U.S. Air’s liquor license being denied by the state. So, for the time being, alcohol is verboten on any U.S. Air flights coming from, or going to, New Mexico. Good job, guys!

Lastly, have you heard about the bracelet and the chicken? It seems that one Aaron Giles grew up in Fairmont, Minnesota, but often played with his siblings at his grandparent’s farm in nearby Sherburn. One day, when he was 4 or 5, he lost an ID bracelet that had his name and address on it. He never found it, and just wrote it off as something lost forever. His grandparents eventually passed away. Their barn was torn down and much of the barn’s wood was saved to build a new barn in the town of Elmore, around 45 miles away. Back in September Giles, now 31, received something in the mail… the ID bracelet! Theories abound, but the best guess is that Aaron’s bracelet somehow ended up getting trapped in the barn’s infrastructure. It survived the trip to Elmore and became part of the new barn. A chicken subsequently found and swallowed the bracelet – seeing as it was found in the guts of a chicken that had just been slaughtered. Olson Locker, the butcher that slaughtered the chicken, asked old-timers his native Fairmont about the Giles family and was eventually able to track down Aaron’s father in Scottsdale, Arizona. Aaron’s dad gave Locker his son’s address in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and the boy and his bracelet were reunited… after 25 years and one chicken’s belly!

Do you use Verizon Wireless? If you do, you might not want to upgrade your phone any time soon. It seems that all new cell phones sold by Verizon make a loud, obnoxious alarm sound when you dial 911. Imagine this: you’re home alone one night, and suddenly you hear what sounds like someone trying to break in. A few moments later, you hear what sounds like someone walking around downstairs. You reach for the cell phone on your nightstand… press 9-1-1-SEND and suddenly your phone goes

“WHOOP-WHOOP-WHOOP-WHOOP-WHOOP-WHOOP”

This all came to light recently thanks to a woman in Austin, Texas named Carol (she refused to use her last name in the news story). Carol owns some land in Austin, and decided to check on it one day. When she arrived, she saw signs of vandalism. Fearing that the vandals might still be in the area, she reached for her new Verizon G’zOne phone, dialed 911 and… “WHOOP-WHOOP-WHOOP-WHOOP”.

The local media jumped on the story (read all about it here; watch the video on that page to hear the actual sound the phone makes when you dial 911). Verizon admitted that all of their new phones make an alarm when 911 is dialed. In fact, Verizon blamed an FCC regulation called “Section 255 of the Telecommunications Code” for the alarm. The FCC has said that that regulation – which requires cellular providers to offer phones that notify the customer when dialing 911 – does not require an audible alarm. In fact, an FCC spokerperson said that “[t]he Commission has not implemented any rules pursuant to Section 255 that would require the use of any tones concerning 911 calls”.

No more news has come of this yet. As of “press time”, all new Verizon phones still make that alarm sound, and the end user still cannot disable the alarm. I’m guessing that Verizon will push out a firmware update the will make the alarm optional… but that’s just a guess. I’ll keep up with this story and let you know what the dealio is…

Remember the 80s band Midnight Oil? Peter Garrett – the band’s lead singer – has long been an “environmental activist” in his native Australia, and now he can put his money where his mouth is: incoming Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd has appointed Garrett as Australia’s “environmental minister”.

This is kind of neat: a new free web service called PrinterAnywhere lets you (or your friends, colleagues, etc.) print documents over the Internet! Let’s say that you often need to print reports from a particular program at work. For whatever reason, you can’t install this program on your home computer, so if you want to read a report at home you have to print it at work and remember to take it home with you. With PrinterAnywhere you only need to sign up for a free account, install their software (which shares your printer) and print it from your work computer… and it’ll print on your home printer! This could be a godsend for people that work from home, or for small companies that have several offices but lack an IT budget to connect them all via VPN. A bit of a warning though: print jobs are held in a queue on PrinerAnywhere’s website… so your home computer doesn’t need to be on all the time; as soon as you boot your PC, the software connects to the Internet and downloads the print jobs. This might squick-out the security-minded types out there.

A lot of European luxury goods makers are in trouble as of late. It seems that top-shelf names like Gucci and Prada are outsourcing much of their production to China. In some cases, the posh companies are importing goods that are 3/4 complete and doing “just enough” work on them in Italy to be allowed to legally put “Made in Italy” labels on them. In other instances, they’re stamping the “Made in China” label in the most inconspicuous place possible (like at the bottom of a purse’s inside pocket), or are stamping it in black ink on black leather. Some of these companies are even brazenly removing the “Made in China” tags and replacing them with “Made in Italy” ones. And believe it or not, some of these companies are even importing illegal Chinese workers to do the work for them: the Tuscan town of Prato – long the center of Italian leathermaking – now has Europe’s second largest Chinese population after Paris. That’s right: there are more Chinese people in a tiny Tuscan town you’ve probably never head of then there are in London, Berlin or Madrid.

Ever heard of Zug.com? It’s another one of those “Internet humor” sites, but Zug is also known for the pranks their users play on people. One of the “Zugsters” – John Hargrave – got sick and tired of hearing the credit card pitch that U.S. Air announces over the loudspeaker on every U.S. Air flight… so he called the company’s marketing guy at 5am – to pitch his own credit card! Read all about it here; be sure to read page 3 of the prank, which has a complete transcript of the call – you’ll bust a gut laughing!

OK, so I’m still not in the mood to write anything. And with Thanksgiving coming up, I’ll be busy with other stuff any way. So… let’s do the news!!!

As you might have heard by now, the Saudi government has sentenced a rape victim to 200 lashes and six months in jail. Let me repeat: a 19 year-old Saudi girl was gang raped… and now she’s getting 200 lashes and six months in jail. Our “friends” the Saudis explain it thusly: the girl was initially sentenced to 90 lashes for “being in the car of an unrelated male at the time of the rape”, which is a crime in the wonderfully enlightened world of Sharia law. But her sentence was extended to 200 lashes and six months in jail after the victim “attempt[ed] to aggravate and influence the judiciary through the media”. Wow! With “friends” like these, who needs enemies?

I’m taking this story with a grain of salt, but, if true, it displays the true sickness of these Islamic nutcases: as you might have hard, former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto returned to her country last month. There have been several attempts on her life since she returned, but the worst was a bomb that killed 170 people. Now reports are coming in that that bomb was strapped to a 1 year-old infant! From The Australian:

Meanwhile, horrifying new details emerged last night of the attempt by suicide bombers to kill Ms Bhutto on her return home from exile last month.

Investigators from Ms Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party said yesterday they believed the bomb, which killed 170 people and left hundreds more wounded, was strapped to a one-year-old child carried by its jihadist father.

They said the suicide bomber tried repeatedly to carry the baby to Ms Bhutto’s vehicle as she drove in a late-night cavalcade through the streets of Karachi.

“At the point where the bombs exploded, Benazir Bhutto herself saw the man with the child and asked him to come closer so that she could hug or kiss the infant,” investigators were reported as saying. “But someone came in between and a guard felt that the man with the child was not behaving normally. So the child was not allowed to come aboard Benazir’s vehicle.”

Ms Bhutto is said to have told investigators she recalls the face of the man who was carrying the infant. She has asked to see recordings made by television news channels to try to identify the man.

Of course, the Pakistan People’s Party has their own axe to grind, so I’m a little bit suspicious of this story. But politicians have been kissing babies for ages, so it’s possible that this did happen. If it did… well, that’s just sick.

Continue reading “Not in the mood to write…”

Yep, I’m still here… and I’ve got a raging case of writer’s block. I have a couple of ideas going back and forth in my mind, though, so hopefully this instance will go away soon. In the meantime, enjoy these sites and stories:

The BBC is reporting that that scientists are on the cusp of reading brainwaves and translating them into speech. It seems that one Eric Ramsay was left paralyzed after an automobile accident eight years ago. Scientists at Boston University have been scanning the part of Eric’s brain that deals with speech, and they feel that they can accurately guess the sounds Eric is thinking of 80% of the time. The next step is to convert those waves into speech. It’s truly an amazing age, folks!

If you’re in IT, you might enjoy the humor at Worse Than Failure. It’s chock full of real life stories of IT disasters. However, a lot of the stories involve stupid programming (complete with code samples), so if you don’t know JavaScript or C++, the humor might be lost on you.

Papa John’s now accepts orders sent via text message! If you already have a papajohns.com account, just enable the SMS ordering option, then select up to 4 “favorite orders”. When you want to order a pizza, just text FAVx (where x s the favorite order number) to 4PAPA. Check out Papa’s SMS FAQ page for more.

Is anyone else put off by the NFL’s campaign to get NFL Network on basic cable networks? I mean, sure… I signed up for their “NFL Action Network” or whatever they call it, mainly because I want the NFL Network on my cable in the worst possible way. At the same time, I almost have to hold my nose while signing up, since the NFL is a monopoly that has an exclusive agreement with Dish Network to deliver the NFL Sunday Ticket. Pot… kettle… black. ESPN columnist Gregg Easterbrook has a great (if lengthy) article about how the Sunday Ticket came to be. Come to find out, it’s even more complex than what I initially thought. The NFL is the last great “television event” there is, and while most TV shows pull in 8-10 million viewers each week, most NFL games get double that. Advertisers pay huge money for the games, since they know that millions of people from every demographic are watching. Local broadcast networks would lose their minds if Sunday Ticket was available on their local cable network, since that’s millions of advertising dollars down the drain. And the last time Sunday Ticket was up for renewal (and could have jumped to cable), the number of cable customers with digital cable was in the single digits. So even if the NFL wanted Sunday Ticket on cable, most cable operators simply didn’t have the bandwidth to support it back then… unlike now. It’s a fascinating read, although as I said, the article does seem to go on and on…

Here’s a scary (and true!) story for your Halloween: it seems that the University of Delaware is now forcing students to undergo “ideological reeducation”! The university is so brazen about it that it even refers to it as a “treatment for students’ incorrect attitudes and beliefs” in their own materials! It’s so bad that the Foundation for Individual Rights In Education (FIRE) has taken action on it. You can read their press release here, but I’ve excerpted heavily from it below:

Students living in the university’s complexes are required to attend training sessions, floor meetings, and one-on-one meetings with their Resident Assistants (RAs). The RAs who facilitate these meetings have received their own intensive training from the university, including a “diversity facilitation training” session at which RAs were taught, among other things, that “[a] racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality.”

The university suggests that at one-on-one sessions with students, RAs should ask intrusive personal questions such as “When did you discover your sexual identity?” Students who express discomfort with this type of questioning often meet with disapproval from their RAs, who write reports on these one-on-one sessions and deliver these reports to their superiors. One student identified in a write-up as an RA’s “worst” one-on-one session was a young woman who stated that she was tired of having “diversity shoved down her throat.”

At various points in the program, students are also pressured or even required to take actions that outwardly indicate their agreement with the university’s ideology, regardless of their personal beliefs. Such actions include displaying specific door decorations, committing to reduce their ecological footprint by at least 20%, taking action by advocating for an “oppressed” social group, and taking action by advocating for a “sustainable world.”

Wow! I can’t say that this surprises me, really. I could see this coming back when I was in college 12 years ago. The sheer brazenness of it is pretty shocking, though. Oh well – as Orwell himself said:

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”