Why I quit my first job

The "No" Vote

Earlier today, I posted this on the Twitter:

It provoked a bit of discussion the Facebook comments that ensued, but I think my comments were kind of misinterpreted.

The Yuma Proving Grounds

I'll have to post my "trip diary" later, with stories of almost-speeding-tickets, getting lost, and French Fried Potaters; in the meantime, here are some pictures.

The Yuma Proving Grounds is the U.S. Army's gigantic testing area in the middle of nowhere in Arizona. Near one of the entrances, they have a small display of some of the equipment that has been tested there. Here are some pictures I grabbed this morning:

One of my personal favorites. It looks like the morning in Iraq.

Drumroll please...

It's a...

Click the pic to make it bigger.

Where's the chaos?

Here's an interesting thought in the dawn of a new era of government oversight: how much of a role did all of our 'first-responders' play in the Flight 1549 saga in the Hudson river? Turns out the answer is somewhere between "none" and "they actually got in the way." Butler Shaffer explains:

Upon landing in the river, and with the fate of 160 people in the balance, rescue efforts immediately began. Officials of the FAA, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, New York Mayor Bloomberg, and Senator Hillary Clinton, all descended on the scene to begin helping passengers to safety. No? It didn’t work out that way? But it must have been so. Is it not an integral part of our thinking that social order can be fostered and sustained only by a political system that can plan for responses to troublesome events? Wasn’t this the logic upon which federal, state and city governments acted in New Orleans, following hurricane Katrina? Do we not elect politicians who, in turn, create bureaucracies to make our lives secure?

Initially, the only seen presence of government at the site of the U.S. Airways emergency landing involved police helicopters interfering with rescue efforts by keeping the water around the plane churned up. These helicopters were of value to the state, of course, as a visual symbol of its superintending presence above a scene in which its practical role was nonexistent. Like a president or state governor flying over an area hit by a tornado or flooding, such an aerial presence reinforces the vertically-structured mindset upon which political authority depends. After rescue efforts were substantially completed – with no loss of life – New York and New Jersey police officials arrived (those whom the New Jersey governor incorrectly described as the "first responders").

The real work of rescuing passengers and crew members was left to the sources from which the only genuine social order arises: the spontaneous responses of individuals who began their day with no expectation of participating in the events that will henceforth be high-water marks in their lives. After the airliner came to a stop, one private ferry-boat operator, sensing the danger of the plane’s tail submerging, began pushing up on the tail in an effort to keep it elevated. Other private ferry-boat operators – whose ordinary work involved transporting people between New York and New Jersey – came to the scene in what became a spontaneously organized rescue under the direction of no one in particular. Photos of the area show the plane surrounded by ferryboats on all sides.

[via reason magazine]

The blog is back (again)

Well, after a brief affair with iWeb, I've moved my blog back to Wordpress, but on a different host. (Thanks, Cotton!) All of the old content seems to be here, and everything looks like it's about 1.0 ready. You can go ahead and do things like subscribe to the RSS now, and I'll be finishing a few things here and there in the meantime. Plus, I've got some pretty good posts saved up.

I'm NOT crazy! (At least not about this.)

WARNING: NERD POST AHEAD. POSSIBLE PHYSICS AND/OR BASIC ELECTRICAL THEORY.

Those of you who know me fairly well have heard of my twitchy eyes. If you haven’t, blah blah blah meningitis blah blah smacked my head on the floor blah blah my eyes have a really low frame rate when I move around blah blah torsional nystagmus.

Anyway, one interesting side effect is that I seem to be much more sensitive to lights blinking or changing very quickly. For example, I can almost always pick up the rainbow effect from DLP TVs, even relatively new ones. I’m a lot better at picking up on scan lines on CRTs, and so on. So when I first saw LED Christmas lights on a house in the dark, I could swear they had a 60 Hz flicker to them.

Happy wedding, Kameron and Ashley!

Well, almost 2 weeks later, the pictures are online from Kameron and Ashley’s wedding in Dallas. The ceremony was at SMU’s Perkins Chapel, and the reception was across town at the Aldredge House in Dallas. Here’s the gallery.

My brother, the marathon runner

Contrary to what the picture would suggest, he can’t actually fly, but he came pretty close! Brent ran the Dallas White Rock Marathon this past Saturday. He didn’t walk a step, and he finished the race in just over four hours. We chased him around Dallas thanks to a printed map, an iPhone, and a Suburban. Every time we saw him he looked like he had just started the race. I think I was more tired from walking around afterwards than he was from running the marathon. There are plenty of pictures here. Click through to see a few of my favorites as well.