Multiple blog posts in one day? Goodness gracious!
Most Chicagoans will hear about this sooner or later, but for my vast nationwide audience…
A 14 year old boy was arrested over the weekend for impersonating a police officer. That’s not the incredible part. . . what’s incredible is that he showed up at a police station and reported for duty. They assigned him a locker and put him out on patrol with a real officer.
The boy, who has been charged as a juvenile for impersonating an officer, walked into the Grand Crossing District station, 7040 S. Cottage Grove Ave., dressed in a Chicago police uniform, police spokeswoman Monique Bond said. The boy, who reported for duty about 1:30 p.m., partnered with another police officer for about five hours.
The police spokesperson (whom I mistrust from her days as the mouthpiece of my archnemesis, the CTA) claimed he “did not write tickets” and there was “no information to indicate that he [was] ever behind the wheel.” However, a CPD blogger’s report conflicts with that statement:
He signs out a radio and jumps in with the female officer and away they go. They handle a traffic accident and when she realizes he doesn’t have a ticket book they go back into the station and he signs one out.
Away they go again. This time he asks if he can drive and she lets him. They write a few tickets and finish their tour.
Interesting new wireless technology, with a stupid name. It’s a very high speed wireless protocol (375 megabits per second) with very limited range (one inch or less). Link is to a video demo from CES. From David Pogue.
Here’s an oldie-but-goodie (though I don’t recall having seen the video before) that came up at game night, while playing Mag Blast. I’m sharing it here so you all can get it stuck in your head too.
In part 2 of my 1461 part series, I will address… nothing. There isn’t really a series. That was a joke, carried over from yesterday.
Speaking of jokes, here is a set of fake patch notes for the US Democracy Server, a play on World of Warcraft patch notes. Being the WoW geek that I am, I found this rather amusing.
The whole thing is worth a read, but here are a couple favorites:
President
Leadership: Will now scale properly to national crises. Intelligence was not being properly applied.
A bug has been fixed that allowed the President to ignore the effects of debuffs applied by the Legislative classes.
Vice President
The Vice President has been correctly reclassified as a pet.
The Vice President will no longer aggro on friendly targets. This bug was identified with Ranged Attacks and the Head Shot ability.
A rendering bug was affecting the Vice President’s visibility, making him virtually invisible to the rest of the server. This has been addressed.
Homeland Security
Homeland Security Advisory System: We have identified a bug in this system that prevents the threat level from dropping below Elevated (Yellow). The code for Guarded (Blue) and Low (Green) has been commented out. We are testing the fix and hope to have it in by the next patch.
Item: Large Bottle of Water is incorrectly generating threat with TSA Agents when held in inventory. We are looking into the issue.
Welcome to my part 1 in my 1461 part series* on Barack Obama’s first term!
Some would argue that yesterday was Day 1 of the Obama presidency. That position has some merit, but a) it was only a half day and b) it’s kind of like the first day of school. . . you don’t really do anything of substance. So I’m calling today Day 1.
Has he fixed everything yet? It couldn’t be that hard, right? Let’s check in…
The Dow regained most of what it lost yesterday. Well, that wasn’t really his doing…
Hillary Clinton got confirmed as SecState by a vote of 94-2 (the nays were cast by Jim DeMint, R-SC and David Vitter, R-LA).
“establish[ed] what he said was a new standard of greater government openness”
ordered a halt to pending war crimes trials at Gitmo while he reviews the handling of terror suspects (he actually did that last night. . . not bad!)
Sounds like a decent start, I guess. If “fixing our problems” (I’m going to be deliberately vague on this) is a cross-country drive, then President Obama is packing his bags. Hey, that’s important. You need clean clothes and toothpaste for a trip like that. It’s hard to respect a President with dirty, rumpled clothes and bad breath and spinach in his teeth. Tomorrow he’ll probably check the tire pressure and the anti-freeze and blinker fluid. It’ll take awhile before he can actually get on the road, and who knows how bad traffic is going to be? He might even get lost, or go antiquing, or spend too much time at a Waffle House or. . . oh I’m on a tangent.
I like to think that I’m a realistic optimist, or an optimistic realist. My brain is not firing on all cylinders right now (bonus points to me for continuing the automotive metaphor!) for some reason, so I can’t think what the difference might be. But anyway, I have Hope that things are going to Change. I think they will, but it’s going to be a long, slow process (he doesn’t drive a very fast car) and there are going to be problems (it’s not that reliable either). I know that Obama is only human, and there are limits to what he can do. He’s not perfect; he’s going to do some things I disagree with. However, I feel things are going to get better. Really…how can they not?
I am a social networking resister. I do not Myspace. I do not Facebook. I did use friendster. I remember when it was the big social networking site, and everyone cool was on there. But then Myspace came along and friendster became a ghost town. I finally deleted my friendster profile over the weekend. And now Facebook is all the rage, and Myspace is old hat (much like the saying “old hat” is itself rather old hat). How long will that last before the next big thing rolls into town? I don’t know. Maybe Facebook will prove to have more staying power than its numerous predecessors (anyone remember sixdegrees.com?).
I don’t really care. I’m not interested. I have better things to do with my time than update friends and acquaintances on the minutiae of my mundane life. I only post to this blog a few times a month. Why on earth would I want to go on Facebook every day? I have enough time-wasting activities in my life as it is. Why do I need another one? I’ve heard the various arguments and none of them are convincing. I don’t want to connect with people from high school; I hated most of those people. I don’t want to keep track of what everyone I know (with a Facebook account) is up to, and I don’t want to broadcast to them what I’m up to either. If people care enough they can. . . you know. . . talk to me to find out. I sure as hell don’t want people tagging pictures of me for everyone I know to see. And I don’t want people scrawling silly nonsense on my “wall”.
Call me old if you like, but there are plenty of people older than me on Facebook and Myspace (though I still think they are for kids, like Trix). Call me a Luddite, but I very much enjoy technology and new things. Call me a curmudgeon and you might be getting warmer. But I prefer to just call myself a Resister.
Resistance is not futile. Be strong! Just Say No to Facebook!
London, England
Berlin, Germany
Chicago, IL
Boston, MA
Las Vegas, NV
Seattle, WA
Nashville, TN
Puerto Vallarta, Mexico
Fort Atkinson, WI
Sturgeon Bay, WI
Eagle River, WI
What the hell does “Auld Lang Syne” mean anyway? Apparently it’s Scottish, translating literally to “old long since”, or less literally “long long ago”. It’s from some poem written long, long ago, in 1788. If you want to more, check out the Wikipedia entry on it, cause I’m bored with this topic.
Anyway, Happy New Year to all. Let’s hope it’s better than 2008. While I can’t say that last year was terrible for me personally, I can’t say it was all that great either. And it was certainly a very eye-opening year for most of the world. I haven’t been able to bring myself to look at my 401k in months. I think it would be far too depressing.
So now New Years is done, and we enter the long, barren stretch between New Years and Memorial Day. Unless you’re one of the lucky few to get President’s Day or King Day off (I am not) you have a lot of 5-day weeks to look forward to before you get a break. *sigh* I wish someone had had the foresight to distribute holidays a little more equally about the calendar.
Mini-update on my holidays: Christmas was OK. Lots of driving and stuff. Got to see most of my family, which was nice. Nearly everything I got was in some way related to eating or drinking. Hmm… New Years was fun. Enjoyed the party a lot (thanks Jeff and Gregg) and wasn’t too hung over the next day. Saw “Doubt” on New Years Day. It was pretty good. Meryl Streep is an amazing actress. And that’s all I have to say about that.
Fifteen more days to Obama’s inauguration. Fifteen more days of Bush in the White House. The nightmare is almost over!
That’s all for now. I’ll try to post more often in the future.
Multiple blog posts in one day? Goodness gracious!
What the hell does “Auld Lang Syne” mean anyway? Apparently it’s Scottish, translating literally to “old long since”, or less literally “long long ago”. It’s from some poem written long, long ago, in 1788. If you want to more, check out the