We all know democracy lost the other day when the FCC gave Rupert Murdoch the go ahead to own every media outlet in the country.
Common Cause has a "write your congressperson" thingy up that you should sign. Not that the Republicans you write will do anything about it.
Also yesterday on NPR's 'All Things Considered', Thomas Hazlett, a former economist at the FCC, and, I might add, a total nutcase, said that free televison should be banished. What was even stranger is he sounded serious. I don't have a lot of time to write this story and try to explain on how many levels just how wrong and stupid this man is, but I owe it to you, the reader, to try.
First, the airwaves are public. I don't care how much 'campaign contributions' to the Republicans and Democrats say otherwise, the radio spectrum belongs to the public.
His entire argument centered around "well, 90% of the population gets their TV from cable or satellite." So what? Last time I checked you could not drive down the street with a cable or satellite dish strapped to the top of your car. I am not saying you should do this, but there are too many situations where receiving TV signals are a matter of life and death. A case in point are the recent tornadoes that ripped through this area. The local TV coverage has been credited with saving many lives during the May 4th storm. I do storm spotting when I can, and have a small portable TV that I carry with me so I can see either the TV station's weather maps. Without information such as this, Mr. Hazlett's plan would be putting too many citizens at risk. Ten percent does not sound like much, but in this past storm it meant that only one person died here in the KC area from the tornadoes vs a number I don't even want to begin to think about had free TV not been available.
The reasons behind free TV go way beyond just warning people about storms.
Oh, and according to Hazlett's web page, he is using a free email account at Yahoo. What a dumbass.
After writing that I got to thinking about some things in addition to my storm spotting scenario. Here in my area it used to be that every time it rained the cable went out because the cable company was beaming the signal over microwave from the receiving station to the head end that served our area. So, no matter what it was doing here at my house, if there was a storm anywhere along that path you got zilch from the cable. The same is true of what happens to satellite during a big storm - I loose sat reception for a while if there is any sort of big cloud between the dish and the sat. My only method of getting a signal from the locals is rabbit ears. If there is any sort of an emergency going on, such as a tornado, I would be left with only one recourse - my local NPR station. For now, that is. Chances are, if Hazlett gets his way that will go away too to turn all the TV and radio channels over to Clear Channel so they can broadcast sports talk and other drivel 24-7.
In pretty big type too. I have a 2003 Prius, and in the section on airbags they describe that the box records all sorts of data about a crash. I don't have the book in front of me at the moment, but it was pretty hard to miss.
I have been using DNSRBLs for a while now. I can say for a fact that in the past 5 months our mail server (75 users) has had 0 legit emails blocked. There were 2 emails blocked by two of our corporate customers because they were running open relays. I count those as legit because clue sticks were applied very fast.
Let's assume that those 2 emails were totally legit. That leaves me with 2 emails that were blocked out of approx 15,000 emails that have gone through this server.
I'm sorry if this guy is dealing with users who are using ISPs/working for companies where the mail admin's obvious job qualification was "I have a computer at home", but I am not going to subject my users to crap email any more than I have to, nor am I going to waste my bandwidth processing messages from con artists.
If this guy does not like it, tough. It is my mail server. I am in charge of it. My users all appreciate not walkin in the office Monday morning and having to sort through 300 emails trying to sell them fake viagra.
One thing I have noticed about a lot of open source stuff is that they all use those horrific Tiger maps. Tiger maps suck. Big time. They are good for just looking at street names, but when you want to use them for anything more than that they are not good at all. For example, the street I live on shows up on the tiger maps as being about 50 feet south of where it really is, and the intersection closest to my house is more than 150 feet off.
But, because tiger maps are free, that is what is used. However, if you want to build your own talking GPS navigation system, using those maps is a bad thing - the routes would be all goofed up.
So, I have been considering doing something like these guys so there could be some way to get decent maps out there for free that will give better results.
However, I see a number of potential problems. First, you can't just turn on a GPS and start recording data. My Magellan 315 starts averaging when you sit still. Get under an obstruction and the data it records is all over the place. After only an hour of sitting you would have somewhere around 100 data points that don't exist. That would be a lot of work for someone to clean up.
The other problem I see is really related to participation. It's one thing if you are in a small town with 50 or so streets in it - you would probably be more apt to get your town fully mapped. However, living in the Big City, I only really travel a few streets during a typical month - mainly highways and interstates, with the occassional side street. Since the ways I travel always have a ton of traffic on them, that means most everyone else goes that way too - probably including a good number of people who might be participating in such a project as well.
Bullshit. I used the POS v1.0 the day it came out when I worked for RS during college. It NEVER required a customer name and address, contrary to what you may have been told by the clueless employee running the register.
It was a very simple matter of hitting Enter a few times and getting off the name/address lines.
The only time the system ever required a name/address was when you bought an extended warranty or if you returned a product.
I totally agree. However, I am far from arrogant. As I probably should have noted, I did the whole "give out free tech support" thing for about 15 years. Unfortunately, as others have noted, there are a lot of real lamers out there that take and take and take and never do anything in return. I can give you plenty of examples on this.
For instance, one of my friends has a pick up truck. Guess how many people he helped move? Let's just say a lot - easily on the order of 20 people one year. Now, I will give you one guess as to how many helped him when he moved. If your guess is 2 (myself and one other guy), then you are correct.
Unfortunately there are just too many people out there that will take advantage of goodwill from others. Those are the people that piss me off, and I am willing to bet that the rest of the posters who posted the same type of comments I did feel the same. After a while it gets very tiring.
"They created the abortion of an OS, so let them support it." Those are the exact words I use.
This is my thinking on the matter:
If I go do the job that MS tech support is supposed to be doing, I am, in fact, donating to them. Why should I do that? They have money and resources and time. They are not paying me to answer questions. So, why should I spend my time and energy?
Now, I am not talking about fixing stuff at work. I am talking about fixing other people's computers.
I first took this stance a few years ago at a family get together. Suddenly it was "let's ask Randy all our Windows questions." On the way home it dawned on me what an entirely shitty evening I had because I got to solve everyone's problems for free. I fixed their problems and got nothing in return.
What really took the cake though was this friend of a friend whose computer I got roped into fixing. While I am sitting there trying to fix a sound card problem and get the 10 different copies of Netscape off the machine (yes, she had 10 copies of Netscape) the lady says to me, "well, my son says there is nothing wrong with the sound card drivers." I looked her square in the eye and said "Who's your son?" Then I got up and promptly left. I wasn't charging the lady any money, but the last thing in the world I want is some car mechanic son of hers telling me how to do my job.
I now provide support for only two people - my mom and my dad. That's it. If someone asks me for help I tell them I charge $100/hour billable in 15 minute increments. Unless they are running Linux, then I do it for free.
One final story: I had this one chucklehead I used to work with call me up at work one day and ask some dumb Windows question - it was something like "Why do I get a blue screen?" My answer - "That's Windows!" He proceeds to tell me how Windows is really popular and that when he worked for some company on the help desk (like this guy could help anyone) he came to that conclusion because he got 100 calls for Windows support vs one call for Mac support. To which I replied, "Well, maybe that's because Windows is so shitty it needs that many support calls." He hung up pretty quick.
Sorry, but what are you guys smoking? Yes, I know it is a historic site, but we are not talking about needing a 300 foot tower with a 80 meter log periodic on top of it.
Stealth antennas are easy to build and are VERY effective. I don't know what the buildings you want to network look like, but I bet there are plenty of antenna hiding places.
I have built antennas for years for ham radio and it is not all that hard to disguise the things so that you would even have a hard time seeing them from a foot away. This 2.4 GHz stuff is even easier to disguise since the antennas are only going to be a few inches long.
By my caluculation, for a 1/4 wave dipole at 2.4 GHz, you are going to need a approximately 3.125 cm of wire. I think that would be next to impossible to NOT hide!
Here is the submission I made just as the story got posted:
Sprint has just announced their 3G stuff. Looks pretty sweet, and the prices look to be a heck of a lot better than that ION thing they tried. Compared to the Palm VII service, the 3G pretty much kills that right off as well. Also, be sure to check out the pretty pictures of the phones.
The phones look pretty cool, though there is nothing really new now that I go back and look at previous/. stories about things like the Treo.
The pricing is set to start at $50 and go up to $115/month. Not great, but not bad either. They are saying most people will do the $80/mo plan which gives you a few megabytes of data. Still not great. Though it is still cheaper than what Palm/Blackberry want.
Why? He obviously does not use Linux. Just look at his picture! What Linux user out there is gonna be caught dead wearing a white shirt and a tie? Okay, maybe to a wedding/funeral, but that's it.
He also went off and shaved and combed his hair for his picture.
I want it so I can be watching TV and check my email without having to get off my ass and walk the 20 steps to the computer room. Plus, how often are you sitting at the TV and think to yourself, "I really need to remember to look this up on the web when I get a chance.." then go off and forget about it. Hell, I do it all the time.
In reading some of the comments here, I get the disturbing feeling that what most of us learned in science classes was "How to blow stuff up real good!"
I never had any chemistry classes, but I don't think a day went by in our electronics class when someone did not catch something on fire. My favorite was the day we hooked a 2N2222 randomly up to 120v and watched it light up. Since it only lasted a few milliseconds we decided to liquid cool the sucker.
So, we wired one up, put heat shrink tubing around it, dunked it in a glass of water, and let the current flow. That dude lasted about 25 seconds before all the smoke was let out.
But nothing beats the day I was at my friend Tom's. We were in his lab in his basement and were just goofing around with something on an o-scope. He was rummaging around in the closet for something and ran across some great big 1000V capacitors that came out of some HV power supply. These things were huge. Tom slapped it down on the desk, hooked it up to a power supply, and proceeded to charge it up. I was talking to someone on Tom's 2m ham rig and was watching out of the corner of my eye as he started to throw stuff across the terminals. An aluminum can got two big holes blown in it. a paperclip blew in half. Needless to say what he was doing was causing loads of interferance and I could only get a few words of what I was listening to. I asked the other station to repeat.
Then the interferance really started - though it was not due to the spark gap transmitter that was just a few feet away. It was because of me laughing. Tom got the idea to drop a piece of aluminum foil across the cap and it stuck to the terminals. He reached down to pull the tin foil off and burned his hand, yelled "damn! that's hot!" then picked up the cap and tossed it back in the closet. I was laughing so hard I had to sign off cause I could not talk for about 5 minutes.
What is a national ID card good for? What is it going to prevent? Will it prevent a guy from walking into a bank and holding it up? No. Would it prevent what happened one month ago? Definitely not, based on all the safeguards the perps passed right on through.
Guess I should just say it now - Ellison and McNealy are nothing more than opportunists who are taking advantage of a bad situation in order to pump up their stock prices.
Shouldn't your main goals be security and stablity, especially with stuff like they are proposing here? Security is next to last and stability is not even listed. Instead the first goal is easy distribution.
This reminds me of MS Press' book Code Complete. All the way through it they harp about stability and design and useablity, then they go off and release some of the buggiest code this side of my first ZX81 programs.
I was in your country when the guy went crazy down in Hobart. My entire trip changed that day. I was in Adelaide at the time.
Had the Hobart tradegdy happened in the US, it would have had maybe 4 minutes on the news, everyone would have said "That's horrible," and then the news would have been right on to their next 'skiing squirrell' story.
But not you guys. I was touched by the grief everyone showed - even when I was what, 600 miles away from Hobart? Everyone had the same look that my office coworkers and I had today - one of shock. Even at the end of the week when I got on the plane to head home the populace was still in a state of mourning. I could tell it really bothered your nation.
I honestly still can't believe that what I saw on TV not 12 hours ago really happened. Yes, I sat there and watched. Yes I read the news. No, it has not sunk in yet. On the news today a guy who had made it out of the WTC said, "This is Die Hard movie."
Fortunately the folks I know in NYC are in different parts of LI. Have heard from them all. Before I got calls, however, it was kind of tense for a few hours.
And don't worry about the cell phone. I leave mine at home half the time, or leave it under the front seat of my car, or someplace else. It is always on, and the batteries spend more time without a charge than with.
FORT WORTH, Texas ? American Airlines confirmed today that it lost two aircraft in tragic incidents this morning. American said the flights were Flight 11, a Boeing 767 en route from Boston to Los Angeles with 81 passengers, nine flight attendants and two pilots; and Flight 77, a Boeing 757 operating from Washington Dulles to Los Angeles with 58 passengers, four flight attendants and two pilots.
Because of the heightened security due to the nature of today?s events, American said it is working closely with U.S. government authorities and will not release more information at this time.
The government has shut down the entire air traffic system in the United States. American, TWA and American Eagle will not operate.
"We are horrified by these tragic events," said Donald J. Carty, chairman and CEO of American Airlines. "Our thoughts and prayers go out to the families of all involved."
Media calls should be directed to the FBI. Customers who wish to receive information about relatives should call American?s response number at 1-800-245-0999.
Updated information about this morning's incident in New York will be available here as soon as it is verified. Check back frequently and refresh your browser often to make sure you have the most current information.
Nippon Hobbies is located in California and imports a lot of these cool Japanese toys, including the Epoch cars. My quick glance over the stuff put 'em at $110 each.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's what I wrote in my blog the other day:
3 9
http://randyrathbun.org/archives/000539.html#0005
We all know democracy lost the other day when the FCC gave Rupert Murdoch the go ahead to own every media outlet in the country.
Common Cause has a "write your congressperson" thingy up that you should sign. Not that the Republicans you write will do anything about it.
Also yesterday on NPR's 'All Things Considered', Thomas Hazlett, a former economist at the FCC, and, I might add, a total nutcase, said that free televison should be banished. What was even stranger is he sounded serious. I don't have a lot of time to write this story and try to explain on how many levels just how wrong and stupid this man is, but I owe it to you, the reader, to try.
First, the airwaves are public. I don't care how much 'campaign contributions' to the Republicans and Democrats say otherwise, the radio spectrum belongs to the public.
His entire argument centered around "well, 90% of the population gets their TV from cable or satellite." So what? Last time I checked you could not drive down the street with a cable or satellite dish strapped to the top of your car. I am not saying you should do this, but there are too many situations where receiving TV signals are a matter of life and death. A case in point are the recent tornadoes that ripped through this area. The local TV coverage has been credited with saving many lives during the May 4th storm. I do storm spotting when I can, and have a small portable TV that I carry with me so I can see either the TV station's weather maps. Without information such as this, Mr. Hazlett's plan would be putting too many citizens at risk. Ten percent does not sound like much, but in this past storm it meant that only one person died here in the KC area from the tornadoes vs a number I don't even want to begin to think about had free TV not been available.
The reasons behind free TV go way beyond just warning people about storms.
Oh, and according to Hazlett's web page, he is using a free email account at Yahoo. What a dumbass.
After writing that I got to thinking about some things in addition to my storm spotting scenario. Here in my area it used to be that every time it rained the cable went out because the cable company was beaming the signal over microwave from the receiving station to the head end that served our area. So, no matter what it was doing here at my house, if there was a storm anywhere along that path you got zilch from the cable. The same is true of what happens to satellite during a big storm - I loose sat reception for a while if there is any sort of big cloud between the dish and the sat. My only method of getting a signal from the locals is rabbit ears. If there is any sort of an emergency going on, such as a tornado, I would be left with only one recourse - my local NPR station. For now, that is. Chances are, if Hazlett gets his way that will go away too to turn all the TV and radio channels over to Clear Channel so they can broadcast sports talk and other drivel 24-7.
Hazlett is typical "big business rules" scum.
In pretty big type too. I have a 2003 Prius, and in the section on airbags they describe that the box records all sorts of data about a crash. I don't have the book in front of me at the moment, but it was pretty hard to miss.
You guys got any more room?
Take a look at this old story. Remember what MS's response was (and still is)? Don't receive emails that start with 'begin '.
If that does not say heaps I don't know what does.
I have been using DNSRBLs for a while now. I can say for a fact that in the past 5 months our mail server (75 users) has had 0 legit emails blocked. There were 2 emails blocked by two of our corporate customers because they were running open relays. I count those as legit because clue sticks were applied very fast.
Let's assume that those 2 emails were totally legit. That leaves me with 2 emails that were blocked out of approx 15,000 emails that have gone through this server.
I'm sorry if this guy is dealing with users who are using ISPs/working for companies where the mail admin's obvious job qualification was "I have a computer at home", but I am not going to subject my users to crap email any more than I have to, nor am I going to waste my bandwidth processing messages from con artists.
If this guy does not like it, tough. It is my mail server. I am in charge of it. My users all appreciate not walkin in the office Monday morning and having to sort through 300 emails trying to sell them fake viagra.
One thing I have noticed about a lot of open source stuff is that they all use those horrific Tiger maps. Tiger maps suck. Big time. They are good for just looking at street names, but when you want to use them for anything more than that they are not good at all. For example, the street I live on shows up on the tiger maps as being about 50 feet south of where it really is, and the intersection closest to my house is more than 150 feet off.
But, because tiger maps are free, that is what is used. However, if you want to build your own talking GPS navigation system, using those maps is a bad thing - the routes would be all goofed up.
So, I have been considering doing something like these guys so there could be some way to get decent maps out there for free that will give better results.
However, I see a number of potential problems. First, you can't just turn on a GPS and start recording data. My Magellan 315 starts averaging when you sit still. Get under an obstruction and the data it records is all over the place. After only an hour of sitting you would have somewhere around 100 data points that don't exist. That would be a lot of work for someone to clean up.
The other problem I see is really related to participation. It's one thing if you are in a small town with 50 or so streets in it - you would probably be more apt to get your town fully mapped. However, living in the Big City, I only really travel a few streets during a typical month - mainly highways and interstates, with the occassional side street. Since the ways I travel always have a ton of traffic on them, that means most everyone else goes that way too - probably including a good number of people who might be participating in such a project as well.
Bullshit. I used the POS v1.0 the day it came out when I worked for RS during college. It NEVER required a customer name and address, contrary to what you may have been told by the clueless employee running the register.
It was a very simple matter of hitting Enter a few times and getting off the name/address lines.
The only time the system ever required a name/address was when you bought an extended warranty or if you returned a product.
I totally agree. However, I am far from arrogant. As I probably should have noted, I did the whole "give out free tech support" thing for about 15 years. Unfortunately, as others have noted, there are a lot of real lamers out there that take and take and take and never do anything in return. I can give you plenty of examples on this.
For instance, one of my friends has a pick up truck. Guess how many people he helped move? Let's just say a lot - easily on the order of 20 people one year. Now, I will give you one guess as to how many helped him when he moved. If your guess is 2 (myself and one other guy), then you are correct.
Unfortunately there are just too many people out there that will take advantage of goodwill from others. Those are the people that piss me off, and I am willing to bet that the rest of the posters who posted the same type of comments I did feel the same. After a while it gets very tiring.
"They created the abortion of an OS, so let them support it." Those are the exact words I use.
This is my thinking on the matter:
If I go do the job that MS tech support is supposed to be doing, I am, in fact, donating to them. Why should I do that? They have money and resources and time. They are not paying me to answer questions. So, why should I spend my time and energy?
Now, I am not talking about fixing stuff at work. I am talking about fixing other people's computers.
I first took this stance a few years ago at a family get together. Suddenly it was "let's ask Randy all our Windows questions." On the way home it dawned on me what an entirely shitty evening I had because I got to solve everyone's problems for free. I fixed their problems and got nothing in return.
What really took the cake though was this friend of a friend whose computer I got roped into fixing. While I am sitting there trying to fix a sound card problem and get the 10 different copies of Netscape off the machine (yes, she had 10 copies of Netscape) the lady says to me, "well, my son says there is nothing wrong with the sound card drivers." I looked her square in the eye and said "Who's your son?" Then I got up and promptly left. I wasn't charging the lady any money, but the last thing in the world I want is some car mechanic son of hers telling me how to do my job.
I now provide support for only two people - my mom and my dad. That's it. If someone asks me for help I tell them I charge $100/hour billable in 15 minute increments. Unless they are running Linux, then I do it for free.
One final story: I had this one chucklehead I used to work with call me up at work one day and ask some dumb Windows question - it was something like "Why do I get a blue screen?" My answer - "That's Windows!" He proceeds to tell me how Windows is really popular and that when he worked for some company on the help desk (like this guy could help anyone) he came to that conclusion because he got 100 calls for Windows support vs one call for Mac support. To which I replied, "Well, maybe that's because Windows is so shitty it needs that many support calls." He hung up pretty quick.
Why don't we all call up Buckeye Cable and tell them he has uncapped his modem?
Nope. I just got Vision on Monday. Asked three PCS people and all confirmed that vision is seperate from voice.
Sorry, but what are you guys smoking? Yes, I know it is a historic site, but we are not talking about needing a 300 foot tower with a 80 meter log periodic on top of it.
Stealth antennas are easy to build and are VERY effective. I don't know what the buildings you want to network look like, but I bet there are plenty of antenna hiding places.
I have built antennas for years for ham radio and it is not all that hard to disguise the things so that you would even have a hard time seeing them from a foot away. This 2.4 GHz stuff is even easier to disguise since the antennas are only going to be a few inches long.
By my caluculation, for a 1/4 wave dipole at 2.4 GHz, you are going to need a approximately 3.125 cm of wire. I think that would be next to impossible to NOT hide!
Here is the submission I made just as the story got posted:
/. stories about things like the Treo.
Sprint has just announced their 3G stuff. Looks pretty sweet, and the prices look to be a heck of a lot better than that ION thing they tried. Compared to the Palm VII service, the 3G pretty much kills that right off as well. Also, be sure to check out the pretty pictures of the phones.
The phones look pretty cool, though there is nothing really new now that I go back and look at previous
The pricing is set to start at $50 and go up to $115/month. Not great, but not bad either. They are saying most people will do the $80/mo plan which gives you a few megabytes of data. Still not great. Though it is still cheaper than what Palm/Blackberry want.
Why? He obviously does not use Linux. Just look at his picture! What Linux user out there is gonna be caught dead wearing a white shirt and a tie? Okay, maybe to a wedding/funeral, but that's it.
He also went off and shaved and combed his hair for his picture.
The man just ain't right, I tell you!
Just sign up anyone listed in these documents.
That should nip this in the bud in 60 days or so.
I want it so I can be watching TV and check my email without having to get off my ass and walk the 20 steps to the computer room. Plus, how often are you sitting at the TV and think to yourself, "I really need to remember to look this up on the web when I get a chance.." then go off and forget about it. Hell, I do it all the time.
To me this is gonna be cool.
In reading some of the comments here, I get the disturbing feeling that what most of us learned in science classes was "How to blow stuff up real good!"
I never had any chemistry classes, but I don't think a day went by in our electronics class when someone did not catch something on fire. My favorite was the day we hooked a 2N2222 randomly up to 120v and watched it light up. Since it only lasted a few milliseconds we decided to liquid cool the sucker.
So, we wired one up, put heat shrink tubing around it, dunked it in a glass of water, and let the current flow. That dude lasted about 25 seconds before all the smoke was let out.
But nothing beats the day I was at my friend Tom's. We were in his lab in his basement and were just goofing around with something on an o-scope. He was rummaging around in the closet for something and ran across some great big 1000V capacitors that came out of some HV power supply. These things were huge. Tom slapped it down on the desk, hooked it up to a power supply, and proceeded to charge it up. I was talking to someone on Tom's 2m ham rig and was watching out of the corner of my eye as he started to throw stuff across the terminals. An aluminum can got two big holes blown in it. a paperclip blew in half. Needless to say what he was doing was causing loads of interferance and I could only get a few words of what I was listening to. I asked the other station to repeat.
Then the interferance really started - though it was not due to the spark gap transmitter that was just a few feet away. It was because of me laughing. Tom got the idea to drop a piece of aluminum foil across the cap and it stuck to the terminals. He reached down to pull the tin foil off and burned his hand, yelled "damn! that's hot!" then picked up the cap and tossed it back in the closet. I was laughing so hard I had to sign off cause I could not talk for about 5 minutes.
How I wish that had been a Kodak Moment.
why?
What is a national ID card good for? What is it going to prevent? Will it prevent a guy from walking into a bank and holding it up? No. Would it prevent what happened one month ago? Definitely not, based on all the safeguards the perps passed right on through.
Guess I should just say it now - Ellison and McNealy are nothing more than opportunists who are taking advantage of a bad situation in order to pump up their stock prices.
wasn't Englebart's email program limited to only sending email to users of that machine?
Shouldn't your main goals be security and stablity, especially with stuff like they are proposing here? Security is next to last and stability is not even listed. Instead the first goal is easy distribution.
This reminds me of MS Press' book Code Complete. All the way through it they harp about stability and design and useablity, then they go off and release some of the buggiest code this side of my first ZX81 programs.
MS is doomed folks.
I was in your country when the guy went crazy down in Hobart. My entire trip changed that day. I was in Adelaide at the time.
Had the Hobart tradegdy happened in the US, it would have had maybe 4 minutes on the news, everyone would have said "That's horrible," and then the news would have been right on to their next 'skiing squirrell' story.
But not you guys. I was touched by the grief everyone showed - even when I was what, 600 miles away from Hobart? Everyone had the same look that my office coworkers and I had today - one of shock. Even at the end of the week when I got on the plane to head home the populace was still in a state of mourning. I could tell it really bothered your nation.
I honestly still can't believe that what I saw on TV not 12 hours ago really happened. Yes, I sat there and watched. Yes I read the news. No, it has not sunk in yet. On the news today a guy who had made it out of the WTC said, "This is Die Hard movie."
It seems like one to me too.
Fortunately the folks I know in NYC are in different parts of LI. Have heard from them all. Before I got calls, however, it was kind of tense for a few hours.
And don't worry about the cell phone. I leave mine at home half the time, or leave it under the front seat of my car, or someplace else. It is always on, and the batteries spend more time without a charge than with.
Here is what is on their webpage:
AMERICAN CONFIRMS TWO AIRCRAFT LOST
FORT WORTH, Texas ? American Airlines confirmed today that it lost two aircraft in tragic incidents this morning. American said the flights were Flight 11, a Boeing 767 en route from Boston to Los Angeles with 81 passengers, nine flight attendants and two pilots; and Flight 77, a Boeing 757 operating from Washington Dulles to Los Angeles with 58 passengers, four flight attendants and two pilots.
Because of the heightened security due to the nature of today?s events, American said it is working closely with U.S. government authorities and will not release more information at this time.
The government has shut down the entire air traffic system in the United States. American, TWA and American Eagle will not operate.
"We are horrified by these tragic events," said Donald J. Carty, chairman and CEO of American Airlines. "Our thoughts and prayers go out to the families of all involved."
Media calls should be directed to the FBI. Customers who wish to receive information about relatives should call American?s response number at 1-800-245-0999.
Updated information about this morning's incident in New York will be available here as soon as it is verified. Check back frequently and refresh your browser often to make sure you have the most current information.
Nippon Hobbies is located in California and imports a lot of these cool Japanese toys, including the Epoch cars. My quick glance over the stuff put 'em at $110 each.
Any plans on doing this as a kit? (yes, I know - it is surface mount blah blah blah, but some of us like soldering this stuff!)