Punderings

Thanks to the weather gods for our first sunny summer weekend – and happy 4th of July to all who celebrate it. Bonus thanks for the friends who threw a great party this afternoon too! Now must go find my recording of the 1812 Overture to listen to again…

As a souvenir?

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For those not lucky enough to live near the Hub, the latest news on the Boston news scene is that those mean New York Times owners want to shutter our beloved Boston Globe, where the unions want to be able to keep their lifetime jobs.

Yes, perhaps both sides are engaging in a touch of hyperbole. But for all it’s faults, it would still feel odd to end up living in a one-newspaper town after all these years.

So – what’s the latest bet for what the boston.com domain is worth these days?

Comment on Tyson’s blog post and they’ll donate 100lbs of food to the Greater Boston Food Bank. Sweet!

I can’t duck out of this one. I know I’ll get cut down to size, and it’s dangerous to post something like this without enough clearance. September’s sweet singing to the coming college constituents is driving me to dare to dive into the pool over at UniversalHub: Beantown bloggers bet on when the fell fate will befall some incoming buffoon:

When will the first truck be peeled back like a sardine can on Storrow Drive?

Now I think Adamg was fishing for some entries with that title, but it’s a good one, and it’s a good pool to be in. When I think about it, I really look up to those that drive on Storrow – and to those who look up before they drive on Storrow.

In any case, I”ll come out from under my rock and give my prediction: the first stuck Storrow truck of September will not be a U-haul, but will be a major rental companies, and it will happen before 11:30am on this Thursday, as some foolish new freshman is being driven to school by their father. I know it’s a stretch up to believe it’ll be that early, but hey, someone’s gotta go first.

Hey, anyone have a graph of the number of stuck Storrow trucks for the past few years? Or anyone wonder how much the local truck rental places would pay someone to stand by the likely onramps on Saturday to attempt to wave off clueless rental drivers?

Don’t forget to check the websites for updates (especially traffic nightmares) before you make plans in the Boston area’s many July 4th celebrations.

• Useful overall guide on Boston.com
• The formal program and details at the Hatch Shell, the best July4th event evah! (watch out for shahhhks!)
• Specific , including Longfellow Bridge, which is not available to watch the show from.
• Other events near Boston (various museum things, plus many of the individual town displays)
• “Boston Harborfest” is another group organizing events, but their website is so poorly organized I’m not going to subject you to it.
• Our nation’s Vice President will be attending an event in Charlestown at the U.S.S. Constitution, so unless you’re planning a political protest, you’d do best to avoid… um, probably Charlestown, Boston, and East Boston, presuming he’s taking a military flight into Logan and needlessly tying up traffic throughout the city on such a major holiday. Sigh.

Happy weekend!

I was going to make a pastiche of headlines, like “Celtics point at public sector food crisis tension with Obama Squaws”, but I couldn’t make it sound realistic.

Yes, today I was on a business trip, staying at a business hotel, and got my morning business delivery of U Today. That’s USA Today, of course; but the SA is obscured by the ubiquitous business sticker placed there by the hotel staff.

A couple of things struck me about the front page and news section of Today’s USA Today. One is the unusual and unexpected pastiche of stories featured on the front page. The other are the several local references that snuck in throughout the news.

On the cover we have the center page piece about the Egyptian food crisis, with riots over loaves of bread. While this is serious news, the reportage was so dramatic that I was surprised I hadn’t heard much about it before. Admittedly, I rarely read the newspaper, but still, if there regular deaths in riots over food, I thought I would have heard about it somewhere before this.

In other news news, we have public sector hiring, political coverage of Obama dumping his pastor, and a variety of sidebar tidbits. We also have the item about how pressure is mounting to drop the word “squaw” from geographic and other names. While I admit that this could well be seen as a derogatory and offensive word in some circles, I wasn’t quite sure that it was front page news; not at least without some specific event to the story, besides it’s generic coverage of the issue. Did you know there’s a U.S. Board on Geographic Names (Federal), with authority over naming rights, and that they have an Antarctic Committee? I suppose I learned a significant new fact from that.

Still, it was … intellectually disappointing that this was the big news. Generic story on place name changes, and then politics which are merely a politician distancing themselves from something controversial someone else said. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just be respectful with names, and could actually evaluate candidates on who they honestly were?

In any case, I was certainly pleased to see the Celtics, at least to make the appearance, as well as several other local references. They did give a different perspective from an insider’s point of view. For example, our great Commonwealth turns out to be not so great in terms of reporting child deaths from abuse: a D- is a sobering addition to a sobering issue.

But Today’s USA Today believes in the sobriety of our firefighters, in it’s Nationline sidebar about firefighters attending a memorial. I support their hard work and am glad they attended the memorial, but I would have expected the story to mention our local controversy, instead of merely closing with “80 people died in MA due to work-related injuries”. What, a federal probe and the other recent busts doesn’t rate 5 words? We do need our firefighters, since 400 North End customers are still without natural gas, as the per-state news tidbits note.

We also need politicians who are comfortable with themselves. In “The Forum” editorials, an bit about how national governments are using PR firms to combat perceived slights or misquotes by others. The writer points out that this is often seen in countries who have historically uncomfortable governments – who are “candidates uncomfortable in their own skin – sovereign versions of Mitt Romney”. There’s a mouthful, both of truth, as well as a lovely comparison between Mr. Romney and sovereigns, which somehow seems amusing. I know, I know, the only true royalty around here go by the K-name, but it’s all in the attitude of who you think you deserve to be, I guess.

At this point, I just think I deserve to be asleep, so I will apologize, dear reader(s), for not skwering the rest of the nation’s daily paper for you. P.S. Please keep the Pike eastbound clear for Thursday evening’s commute, since I’ll be driving home, and it looks like it’ll be rainy again. Don’t forget: you should probably get out a little early and drive safely in the rain, and remember to leave a little extra time to get home when it’s wet and slippery.

Well, traditional lynx bait might be more along the rodent line, or at least well-designed web pages. But a good enough title for some miscellaneous… er, links.

• Ready to try some Soylent Greens? (HT2LR)
• Or take a ride on some local trolley history? (HT2UH)
• Read the latest on how OOXML is theoretically a ’standard’. Or scrut the inscrutable for more details and source references about the O -[OXML|DF] wars.
• And you can clearly see that I often get lost, and spend most of my time installing new WordPress versions on my ISP’s SSH shell:


server:me:~ > history | awk {'print $2'} | sort | uniq -c | sort -k1 -rn | head
167 ls
97 cd
28 rm
22 wget
22 mv
20 cat
17 unzip
16 tar
15 exit
14 cp

For all 3 of my Universal Hub readers who were just about to drop my RSS feed after seeing all my ApacheCon stuff. No, not their public transport system, silly, their cheesy free newspaper available near their public transport system.

Yes, it’s true, the Metro’s pages clutter the floors of trams, buses, subways, and sidewalks the world over. It almost makes me feel at home. Sniff. But not necessarily a brand I’m proud that the US has exported…

Oddly enough, the bins were mostly empty, although I didn’t see nearly as many pages littering tram seats as I usually do on the T.