So little time...

Work, scouts, soccer, school and sleep are keeping me from writing about all the things I want to write about. More stuff coming soon!

Ike

Well, Hurricane Ike has certainly done a number on Texas, particularly the town of Gilchrist. There was a photo yesterday on The Big Picture, showing a lone house left standing along the coast. The rest had been swept clean. Literally.

Jeff Masters, who runs the excellent Weather Underground weather tracking site, has a post up today showing some more impressive imagery of the destruction of Gilchrist. He also has an explanation of why that little town was hit the hardest.

There are no casualty figures for that town yet, since they can't even find the debris field to look for bodies. They have rescued twenty three folks from the bay who tried to ride it out and survived, there's no telling how many they haven't found yet.

Content Coming. Maybe.

I've been a little busy the past week or so, with no end in sight. I hope to get some new material up soon (it's not a lack of inspiration). Cheers!

New Template

Yeah, I've got a new template here. I discovered last week that my grey on grey template, which I had heavily customized, looked like $%&! on Internet Explorer. Since the majority of the web still uses that steaming pile of code, I figured I had to fix it. Easier said than done. A couple of hours later, I tossed it out the window altogether in favor of a default template that I can customize cleanly.

Ugh. I despise IE.

So watch this space as free time allows me to customize this some more, then I'll port it over to merrickfamily.com

Palin Double Standard?

No one quite puts it like Jon Stewart.

Weekend Fun

We had a nice time this past weekend. Weather was great, got some pool time and my garage cleaned out.

Here's a couple of posts over at MerrickFamily showing off some of the more exciting things we did:

Riding bikes and launching model rockets.

Do no Evil? Chrome's Fine Print is... Odd

Read the fine print of Google's new browser, Chrome. It seems that Google reserves the right to use any material that you post using the browser for their own purposes.

I'm not judging here, but it seems weird to me.

Also worth thinking about - Chrome is open source, so it's not like there are hidden mechanisms to capture that info... is there? This may all be hype over nothing.

The Police Have Themselves an RV

The Sherrif's Department in Richland County, South Carolina, have purchased a new (used) armored personnel carrier for their Special Response Team.

Not a big deal. Lots of departments have armored vehicles for transporting officers on raids, etc. They are great for protecting officers in a high threat environment.

However, what makes this story fascinating is that said Richland County APC has an M2 .50 caliber belt fed machine gun mounted. What in the name of all that is good and holy does a law enforcement agency need with a .50 caliber machine gun? The .50 cal will cause extreme damage to just about anything not armored, and isn't really a 'precise' weapon; it's typically fired by 'walking' the rounds into the target since it lacks sights. Jeez, that's what I want on my street during a raid on a drug house, a deputy literally spraying .50 caliber rounds at a target that said rounds will probably come out the back of!

Here's the media release. And here is another source.

You know you want one of these...

Gun O'Clock. Some people hate their alarm clocks more than others.

Hug a Developer

Everywhere you look, there is a developer in distress...



The video is hilarious, as it applies to just about every aspect of IT that is 'managed' by those who are not in IT.

It was created as a promo video for Devshop, a company that created and hosts a project management tool for software developers.

Google Enters the Browser Wars

Google will be releasing 'Google Chrome', an open source web browser, in the next few days.

Well, this is very interesting to me. As a web app user, I applaud the effort to give me a more stable web platform. As a developer I applaud the effort to give me a more stable web platform.

I hope it works as well as it looks like it works.

A Glancing Blow

The levees held, and it looks likely that New Orleans was spared catastrophic damage and flooding from Gustav. However, the reports from west of NOLA are not looking as rosy. Keep those folks in your thoughts.