swodniW screws with your search engine. And time for an ugrade for Dad.

July 7, 2009 – 12:56 pm

One more reason not to use swodniW: apparently, if you use the swodniW Search Service (which I assume is part of Vista) and your default search site is set to Google, the search service will apparently try to change the default site to Bing or Bling or whatever that search thing Microsoft built is called.

This conclusion was arrived at by the author of this helpful article on preventing this horrid crime. God, does the sinister creepiness of this outfit ever end?

On an unrelated note, I spent the long weekend on Long Island and, as is often the case, I was asked by my Dad to examine something on his computer. I built this box for him a few years ago, and it’s humming along nicely, running Windows 2000. His main use of the system is Internet browsing, checking e-mail, creating the occasional document for church or his doctor, and examining and burning photos. I installed all the Windows versions of the FOSS apps, such as Firefox, OpenOffice and the GIMP.

Anyway, he was lamenting the time it was taking for Firefox to load, so I took a look at things. Everything seemed to be working fine, but Firefox was taking a while to fire up. He had 3.0.11 installed, along with a bunch of those useless tool bars from Yahoo! and AVG. I decided to do an upgrade to 3.5, which went fine, but the load time was still sluggish. I had to remind myself of how much RAM I had shoved in this thing when I built it.

Oops. Only ~500 MB. Half a gig. Lame. Shame on me.

I explained to him that the feature-richness of newer versions of his apps requires more memory, and I promised to boost him up to 2 GB when I visited next time.

I took a peek at his hard disk while I was sniffing around…wow, he had 88% of an 80 GB drive available (which was huge when I built the box). So I told him I was going to set up a Linux distro on the machine for him the next time I visited. What the hell, right? He has the disk space and will have plenty of RAM when I do the upgrade to 2 GB. His needs are pretty modest: Internet access, e-mail (which he does on the web anyway), some photo apps, a decent word processor and maybe a spreadsheet. He’s already using OpenOffice for the latter two items. He uses the GIMP already and there are a bunch of great photo apps for quick access and review – my personal favorite is Gwenview – and for CD burning and other needs, he’ll have everything he will need.

Of course, I’ll set it up with a dual-boot arrangement so he can go back and forth as he likes. I’m hoping he’ll like Linux enough to stick with it.

Now, to decide which distro to install…

By joe | Posted in Linux, Open Source, swodniW | Comments (0)

No, he wasn’t.

July 7, 2009 – 5:40 am

Quote in a news story today about the late Michael Jackson, whose “memorial service” will be held in Los Angeles today with the hopes that he might rise from the dead due to all the love:

“There was no one else like Michael Jackson. He was Elvis, the Rolling Stones, Sinatra and the Bealtes [sic] all rolled into one.” – Stacy Brown, author of “Michael Jackson: The Man Behind the Mask”, while defending Jackson from comments by Congressman Peter King (R-NY)

I’m sorry, but I cannot accept this level of hyperbole. I’m sorry that dude is dead and I agree that he was a unique man, but this is too much. Great artist, talented human being, tremendous impact on popular music, crossed all boundaries, made MTV famous, blah, blah, blah.

But “Elvis, the Rolling Stones, Sinatra and the Bealtes Beatles, all rolled into one”?

No, he wasn’t.

By joe | Posted in Media and other Fun | Comments (0)

Easy Tweaks (Back to Slack, part 2)

June 25, 2009 – 3:47 pm

One of the reasons Slackware isn’t for the casual user is that it frequently requires some hands-on configuration in order for it to do what the user wants. People installing it for the first time are usually shocked when they reboot the system and find themselves dropped to a command prompt. No GUI, no KDE, no GNOME – just a black screen with a command prompt showing the default host name “darkstar.”

I’m going to discuss a couple of things I did during this installation that might be helpful for others perhaps trying Slackware out for the first time. Some of these things are a bit new to me, too, so this will serve as my notes for the next time I have to do this.

For the record, this is all being done on a Hewlett-Packard Pavilion DV6000 laptop. The system has 2 GB RAM, an Intel Core Duo processor (1.84Ghz), 120 GB hard disk (user replaced), a 15.4″ WXGA screen, and an Intel chipset for video, Ethernet, wireless and sound.

Pre-Install Setup: This laptop is the frequent subject of my Linux experiments, so I have multiple partitions available for operating system installations. Currently, the drive is cut into three 20 GB system partitions, one 4 GB swap partition, one 15 GB partition for “home” directories, and a 35 GB partition for general storage. In addition, I have a small boot partition that stores the GRUB boot loader. That partition is mounted by all my systems, and it’s where GRUB executable and configuration files are installed. Essentially, the system boots that tiny partition, and it’s from there that I select the system I wish to run. I intentionally set this up this way, in order to have complete control over the boot process.

I added this partition to the mount table during the Slackware installation, so it would be available immediately once I had everything in place. All that’s required is to go to that mount and edit the menu.lst file to add the new Slackware partition to the menu.

Installation: after booting the Slackware CD, I just let it rip, pretty much. I formatted the installation partition, selected the other partitions to mount, and told it to just install everything. Twenty minutes later, file unpacking was complete and the installer script paused for me to do the basic system configuration.

I did something different time: I skipped configuring networking. I was not plugged into an Ethernet network, and I knew that using the wireless adapter out-of-the-box was probably not in play. The last time I did a Slackware install, I learned about a terrific tool called wicd, a network manager for Linux that makes connecting really easy. The tool is included on the Slackware CD/DVD in the “extra” directory. The user has the choice of using the default networking tools or adding wicd to assist after the fact. The wicd README file on the DVD offers the following suggestion:

Results have varied, but you will probably need/want to remove any references to interfaces from /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf – in other words, make that file look as if netconfig has never been run.

“/etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf” references the Slackware configuration file that holds all the information about the system’s network interfaces. This file is usually configured by hand or by using the Slackware netconfig tool. The tool tries to detect the network adapters and add the correct entries in the file. Those experienced with Slackware know that while this works very well with Ethernet adapters, wireless configuration can be…to put it kindly…tricky. Since wicd is supposed to ease this burden, I decided to not do a network configuration during the install. This would leave the network rc.inet1.conf file alone, allowing wicd to figure everything out.

Another thing I didn’t configure during the post-file-install session was lilo. Since I use grub (in the screwy way I mentioned above), there’s no need for me to install a boot loader with Slackware. Slackware wants to use lilo by default, and this is probably fine for most people doing a single install on a bare drive. Grub is available for Slackware, and like wicd, a package can be found in the “extra” directory on the install media. Having used grub for a long time, I find it far more flexible. YMMV. Nevertheless, it’s a moot point here. I’ll just edit my current GRUB config file when I’m done.

Once the basic installation was finished, I rebooted, logged into my Kubuntu Hardy setup and edited the grub menu.lst file to add the Slackware partition. Then I rebooted to see if Slack would work. As expected, it came right up and dropped me right to the “darkstar” command prompt.

The first thing I wanted to do was see how a GUI looked and whether the video would need any tweaking (which I was certain it would). I logged in as root (no personal account yet) and entered the “startx” command at the prompt, which loads the default GUI. In a moment I was looking at the KDE 3.5 desktop. The video was set to 1024×768 (the laptop does 1280×800 max by default). That was also my only option when I looked at the Display configuration tool in the KDE Control Center.

Luckily, Slackware makes this pretty easy to fix, at least on laptops.

Back in the “old” days of Linux before all things were auto-configured, you had to get your mitts dirty editing the X Windows configuration file. You frequently had to dig into the specifications for your monitor or video card to get things like the vertical and horizontal refresh rates correct. This was critical; entering values that were out of your monitor’s range could damage it forever.

Today, especially with LCD screens, most monitors work on a specific set of standards regarding resolution and refresh rates. Most Linux distros can not only detect the video hardware in the system properly, but they can usually figure out how to get the display rigged up properly with a simple hardware poll.

Slackware has a tool for this called xorgconfig. If the video on your system is mangled up or not utilizing the available resolutions, shutting down X and running the command as root from a terminal will very likely make things right. The tool won’t figure out compositioning or any of the fancy eye candy you get on other distros. This is Slack…you’ll have to roll your own. But when I ran xorgconfig and restarted X, the resolution was just what it should have been, a nice clean 1280×800.

Now, to get the system to load the GUI up at startup, you need to edit one file. As root, you have to open the file /etc/inittab, and look for these lines right near the beginning:

# Default runlevel. (Do not set to 0 or 6)
id:3:initdefault:

This means that Slackware is running in multiuser mode with no GUI. To make the default GUI start, the “3″ has to be changed to a “4″. I normally add the entire line with a “4″ and comment out the other line, like this:

# Default runlevel. (Do not set to 0 or 6)
#id:3:initdefault:
id:4:initdefault:

This allows me to drop back to a command-line init whenever I want by just changing one character. Once I rebooted, the system came up, displayed the login manager and after logging in, I was at the KDE desktop.

The next thing I needed to get running was wireless on the network card. That’s coming up in the next post.

By joe | Posted in Linux | Comments (0)

The sound of money being vacuumed from your wallets.

June 25, 2009 – 3:29 pm

According to this Information Week article, Microsoft has set the prices for the coming release of Windows 7. For you “home” users (translation: your version is crippled in some way), it will run you two hundred bucks for a new copy and $119 for an “upgrade.”
“Professional” (not crippled quite as much) and “Ultimate” versions are $299 and $319, with upgrades at $199 and $219 respectively.

Boy, that’s an awful lot of jack to replace an operating system that itself isn’t worth shit.

The really hilarious thing about this is that people are going to stampede to this when it’s released, as though they won’t be able to hand their dough over fast enough.

Think about it for a moment folks: you can get a perfectly good operating system, in 32 and 64-bit versions, that will do nearly everything you can do on Windows, at ZERO cost. Nothing. Nada. The time it takes to download and install it is your only cost. No, I suppose it doesn’t work that well for you Windows gamers, but you lamers are in a minority anyway. I’m talking to folks who wish to do something productive with their computers.

Suckers.

By joe | Posted in swodniW | Comments (0)

Why “DRM” stand for “dumbass repressive morons.”

June 22, 2009 – 9:24 am

Digital rights management (DRM), when used as a tool to protect artists and copyrighted content, is a massive joke. You all know what DRM is, especially if you use multimedia services on your computer, mp3 player or other magic device. DRM is implemented in a variety of ways. For example, if you use a Zune music player (why you would do this is a mystery to me) and you sync up with the Zune service to listen to online music, DRM defines how many times you can download and listen to the tracks you like, or whether or not you can copy and hear those tracks on other devices. For this, you are charged actual money.

I read a couple of DRM nightmares posted on this link at Slashdot this morning; these should be useful if your considering the purchase of an Amazon Kindle or a Microsoft Zune.

If you’re scratching your head after reading these tales of woe, consider this analogy. Imagine for a moment that you’re a fan of classic literature, and you purchase a copy of “Pride and Prejudice” from Amazon…in book form. You receive the book, read and enjoy it, and place it on your bookshelf when you’re finished. Now, you go back a year later to grab a book to bring on vacation, and you decide to read Austen again. Now, imagine you’re sitting by the pool, you open your book, and someone wearing an Amazon blazer walks up to you and demands the book from you. You see, you only purchased it for a single reading, and since you already read it once, it’s now time to give it back. That’s DRM in hardcopy.

Jane Austen doesn’t get a dime, does she?

For some reason, I feel like laughing.

By joe | Posted in Hardware, Media and other Fun | Comments (0)

Back to Slack

June 19, 2009 – 11:58 am

Long time, no see.

I decided to reinstall Slackware on an empty laptop partition last night. Actually, the partition wasn’t empty; I installed Kubuntu Jaunty (9.04) on it a few weeks ago, but failed to fall in love with it. I experienced some difficulty with KDE 4.2…not using it, but just in learning to like it. I kept returning to my trusty Kubuntu Hardy (8.04) build because I felt more comfortable using it.

In recent days, I’ve been stricken (again) by the “set-it-up-the-way-I-want” bug, and for me, that’s always meant Slackware. Slack was one of the first distros I ever used…well, it was actually one of the first distros ever, back in the day where maybe four of five distros/versions of Linux actually existed. During my years working a various Navy organizations, I used Slack to build web servers, firewalls, mail gateways, DNS servers and just about any other device you could think of that required a solid network operating system.

Over time, especially as I began working away from home and came to rely on my laptop, I steered away from Slackware, mostly because of how impressive I found some of the “consumer”-oriented distros like Ubuntu. I wanted to run something with a familiar GUI, something I could just install and run. After much experimentation, Kubuntu was my choice. The software update capabilities of the recent distros, and especially the Ubuntu family, is what I found most compelling. Having come from a world of keeping up with patches and upgrades manually, it was nice to just wait until the little “updates available” icon popped up on the taskbar. A couple of mouse clicks, the package manager did it’s job, and all was right with the world. I loved the way the new distros just installed and worked with a minimum of tweaking.

Recently, little things began to annoy me.

Example: on my current Hardy setup, I use Firefox. There have been some recent updates to the browser, and I know that the Ubuntu maintainers have tweaked the browser to optimally work in their distro.

One day, I went to my credit union’s website to pay some bills. The credit union has the page set up with an iframe; what one sees in the lower frame is determined by the menu above the frame. I clicked the link for the online bill-payer application, a link which should have opened in the frame. Instead of the bill-payer, the site’s home page opened in the frame instead. I banged on the link a couple of times, cleared the cache, did all the usual stuff. No joy.

I copied the link for the bill-payer app to the clipboard. I opened a new tab and pasted the link in. The bill-payer page opened right up. But in the frame, it kept returning me to the home page. This was something new, and it annoyed me.

I tried it in Konqueror. Everything worked fine. The next day at the office, I tried it in both IE 7 and Firefox 3.0.6 on swodniW. Worked fine. Tried it again that night on Firefox (3.0.10 was the version, I believe) in Kubuntu 8.04. Still broken.

Then there was KDE 4.2 in Kubuntu Jaunty. There are a couple of apps in KDE that I use frequently. One is Adept, which is, of course, a Kubuntu-specific application. in KDE 3, it had an easy-to-use interface that enabled the user to do everything from one main panel. You could customize filters and views to see specific things, but it started with everything visible. After you added repositories and updated the database, you could potentially view a list of thousands of available applications, and filter through them just by typing a few letters in the search field. The application would immediately begin filtering based on what you typed.

Well, someone decided to change Adept around in KDE 4.2. A lot. Options I sought on menus were no longer there. Something seemed wrong with the search features, and applications were now divided into categories. Searches didn’t seem to work as well; I would enter a word or term, knowing I should see something as a result, but nothing ever appeared. There now seemed to be three different Adept windows that showed different views, none of which made any sense to me. Using Adept was simple in 3.5. In 4.2, it became an annoyance. I don’t like being annoyed.

Other applications also had significant changes made. I suppose griping about these changes is a bit silly, since I’m the first one to support software improvement and the benefits it brings. I suppose what I was experiencing were similar to frustrations people feel when they move from one platform to another…like from swodniW to Linux. Everyone who uses KDE knew these changes were coming. Unfortunately, they arrived after some significant fits and starts in the early versions of KDE 4. Having held the new release at arms’ length, I was a bit stunned to see how significant the changes were when I did finally try 4.2.

I suppose what I’ve discovered about myself is that, as I get older, I’m a bit more resistant to change than I used to be. For some, the change from swodniW to Linux or even a Mac is a pretty hefty adjustment. I’ve been using KDE for so long that I’ve come to rely on certain things being a certain way. I’m willing to accept some changes, but slowly and when I’m ready. I reckon I’m just not ready. Yet.

Fortunately, using Linux provides one with many choices. I don’t have to use Kubuntu. I don’t have to use KDE if I don’t want. I can use a plain, simple window manager like Fluxbox of Xfce, and still run the KDE apps I want, because the dependencies they require are all available already. For example, I love the web development IDE called Quanta Plus. That app has become a critical wrench in my programming toolbox, and I need it no matter what environment I happen to be using. I can load all the required KDE dependencies along with the KDE development package and get a fully-working Quanta (with network support, which is really important for me), all the time running in whatever desktop world I favor at the moment.

I decided yesterday to take another crack at Slackware on the laptop. The DVD ISO file downloaded via Bittorrent yesterday while I was at work. I burned the image last night, rebooted to the DVD and off I went. I would normally do an “expert” or “menu” Slackware installation since I’m usually selective about what I want to install. But with a 20GB partition available and an “everything” installation that would only use 4 GB, I decided to just throw in the kitchen sink this time. I sat back and relaxed while all the packages were loaded. After the files were all installed, I worked through a few configurations screens and I was ready to go.

I now have the luxury of working through the setup and tweaks slowly, since I can just reboot to my current working Kubuntu setup whenever I need to get something done. I did a few things differently this time as I worked through the configuration, and I’ll address those things in the next post, since this one is getting kind of long a preachy. See you there.

By joe | Posted in Linux | Comments (0)

Shuttle

March 17, 2009 – 6:10 am


Space shuttle launch.

Kelly and I were visiting her sister’s home with other family on Sunday night, enjoying the beautiful early spring weather in north Florida. The grill was off and we had all just finished our burgers and steak when someone yelled “Look!” There, off to the southeast, was the shuttle Discovery lifting off from Kennedy Space Center.

Naturally, my high-priced digital SLR was sitting in the closet back in Virginia, so my only recourse was to try to get a shot of the launch using the camera on my G1. I had to act quickly, and the photo was taken through the screen of the lanai over their patio.

If you click on the image to see the full size version, you’ll see the small dot of light which is the actual shuttle, a couple of inches to the upper left of where the contrail appears to fade away. This was just a moment before the solid rocket boosters were ejected from the craft into the ocean. We could clearly see them separate as two small dots of light and fall towards the water.

To put this in perspective, we were approximately 120 miles uprange from the cape as the crow flies, and about 30 miles east of the Atlantic, so this turned out to be a pretty spectacular sight in spite of the distance. This occurred right at dusk, so the sun was well behind the nearby houses and trees, leaving the sky a just-right canvas of blue to see Discovery head to its mission.

Only in America.

By joe | Posted in Everyday Junk | Comments (2)

Y!A question of the day

March 10, 2009 – 7:09 am

I like to hang around in the Computers & Internet section of Yahoo!Answers. I like to help people. I don’t have answers for everything, but I can provide some information when I see something about which I’m knowledgeable.

Like separating wheat from chaff, one often has to browse through a number of goofy or repetitive questions before hitting one that’s shows a modicum of intelligent thought. I can be a wise-ass with some of my responses, especially to the teenagers who ask their questions in geek-speak or text message mode. You know, “f u cn rd ths, u r vry smrt, LOL”.

At least once a day, I come across a question that seems…well, just really stupid. Questions where the answer is so obvious, you have to wonder “what was this person thinking when they asked this?”

Here’s today’s example:

@ key only works when i hold down shift key and 2 key together why?

I won’t even insult you with an answer. Just look down at your keyboard. See if you can figure this out.

By joe | Posted in Everyday Junk | Comments (4)

What a feeling…

March 6, 2009 – 8:02 am

Have you ever experienced the moment you first climb into your first new car? You grip the steering wheel for the first time, run your hands along the upholstery or the dashboard, as you inhale that unique new car smell. That’s a nice feeling, isn’t it?

I recently took a look at my 2-year-old HP DV6000 laptop and realized the keyboard looked extremely nasty

Yuck.

Many of the keys had become worn and streaked with…something. I have to assume that it’s skin oils and other residues from my fingers left behind after two years of hard use. I don’t know if they coated the keys with something, but they were getting pretty worn from constant touching. The space bar looked exceptionally crappy…there’s an area of grime that extended from the left end of the key to about the middle, where a “bald” spot began and extended to the right end of the key. That “bald” spot was the area where my thumb would hit the space bar over and over as I punched out my thoughts on my old blog or hacked away at some code.

Then there is the tab key scar.

Cigar + key = this

One afternoon last summer, I was sitting outside my “work” home in Virginia, smoking a cigar and using the laptop, probably wasting time playing online poker. I recall that I accidentally knocked the burning end of the cigar against the side of the ashtray, and some hot embers worked loose, one falling toward my lap and landing on the tab key. The result was a small pock mark on the key, a tiny hole burned into the right side with some melted plastic that had rapidly bubbled up around it,

I was angry at myself for my carelessness and the damage I did to the tab key, but grateful after realizing that this burning ember could have landed on me instead. I was wearing shorts, too. I silently praised my brave laptop keyboard for taking the arrow for me.

I decided last week that I had enough of the grungy, scarred keyboard and bought a replacement. I found a dealer on eBay that carried replacements for about $18, with free shipping. Not a bad deal to cosmetically upgrade the most frequently-used component on the system.

The trick to replacing a laptop keyboard is, of course, knowing how to remove it and being very patient. Having sufficient light nearby is mandatory, as is a small cup or container into which one places the tiny screws one has to remove from the laptop’s case. On the DV6000, one must first remove three screws under the battery, which loosens a trim cover just above the keyboard. This cover has the LEDs for some media controls and the system’s power button.

The keyboard extraction requires the removal of three screws. Two are also in the battery chamber (one is hidden in a corner) and the third is under the access panel leading to the system’s memory modules. All three are marked, but if you have eyesight like mine, that light (and eyeglasses) comes in handy.

The final obstacle is the removal and replacement of the keyboard panels. The hassle with this seemingly simple task is the reconnection of the ribbon cable that sends the key press signals to the system. I appreciate that the designers of these devices attempt to keep the weight down, but the use of these flimsy connectors and the difficult-to-negotiate plastic grips that hold them in place is something I’d be willing to sacrifice weight-wise for a better connection system. As it turns out, my attempt to install the ribbon cable wasn’t successful on the first try, and half the keys didn’t respond when I powered things up. Patiently, I reopened everything to find that the ribbon was hanging halfway out of the connector. Securing it took a little coordination of all my fingers, but I eventually inserted and buttoned it down properly, and all is now well.

By the way, props to Hewlett-Packard for making maintenance manuals for their laptops available on line. Knowing where everything is located and how to do this properly makes it a lot easier.

Sweet.

Now, the keyboard feels like that first day, when I excitedly unwrapped the plastic bags, removed the shipping foam molds and saw the laptop for the first time. The keys are smooth and clean again, and nice to touch. I considered getting a new laptop recently…this one is two years old and “obsolete” by some standards.

But now I think I’ll keep her around for a bit.

By joe | Posted in Hardware | Comments (4)

tech + politics ~= idiocy

March 5, 2009 – 2:19 pm

I make no secret of my conservatism. But I sometimes wonder if my political party is made up of a collection of dolts. I don’t expect every Republican congressperson to be as knowledgeable about technology as people like me, but use a little logic, for Christ’s sake.

What I’m talking about is the decision of a California assemblyman to demand that certain buildings be blurred on satellite images available on open web sites. His reasoning is that making these images available so freely allows terrorists to find and select targets for attack.

I wish to ask Mr. Anderson if he can describe to me not which building on a random satellite image might be a target , but which building would not be a target. Think about it for a moment: why do you think airports haven’t been targeted since the September 11 attacks?

No, it’s not because of the great job the TSA gate police are doing. This is so because terrorists know airports are being more closely watched all over the world. Look at the attacks in Madrid and on the schoolhouse in North Ossetia-Alania in 2004, and in London in 2005. The attackers hit buses, trains and a school…no airports anywhere to be seen.

The point is that no matter what you “blur” in the satellite images, someone with an evil intent will simply select another target – a shopping mall or a Wal-Mart store, a sports facility, a large church or even residential neighborhoods on a Saturday afternoon. So what are the satellite providers supposed to do, blur everything in their images?

Does Mr. Anderson also think that terrorist plotters are dumb? Blurring a building in an image doesn’t do any more than make the blurred portion of the image an obvious target. Since the blurred building can’t be moved, how tough do you think it would be for the terror planner to figure out what the building is by simply examining the surrounding area, streets or terrain? How hard do you think it is to get the geographic coordinates of a specific location and just use Google Maps to pinpoint the exact location?

Naturally, the dumbasses at the New York Times aren’t paying much attention, either. This tidbit was inserted into the story:

That said, Google and Microsoft, and in some cases third-party imagery providers used by these companies, have voluntarily agreed to blur images of certain locations, ranging from the White House to shelters for victims of domestic violence.

Oh, really? I don’t know which one of the geniuses shown on the page wrote this, but once again, they didn’t perform one of the primary requirements of good reporting: verifying their facts.

Allow me to demonstrate:

Click this link. (It will open in a new window).

You will be taken to a Google Maps location. You will see a satellite picture. You can probably figure out what the landmark is on your own, but click the “Show Labels” box anyway. Well, I wonder who might be hanging around in that office you see labeled on the left, near the circular driveway.

So, I guess the providers or Google…uh…forgot to “voluntarily” blur the very important targets shown in this satellite image. You know, the one the Times mentions in the snippet above as being blurred. Looks pretty clear to me.

Oops!

I’d like to make a suggestion to Assemblyman Anderson: while I understand your concern for the safety of the nation, most terrorists could walk up to any shop in Washington, D.C. and buy maps of tourist sites that show them precisely where everything is located. They could take any inbound flight to Reagan National Airport during the daytime and, in all likelihood, will make their approach right over the top of the nation’s capitol, in full view of the monuments, the White House and the Capitol building. If they’re sitting on the opposite side of the plane, the Pentagon is just below them as clear as day. A few snaps with a digital camera and they have all the target images they need.

This morning, I was walking to the building from the north parking lot. To enter, I have to use a foot bridge that carries you over Route 110, past the conference center and into the building. This morning, the approach pattern for runway 15 at Reagan Airport brought aircraft directly over that walkway, pretty much right over the top of the River Entrance.

Here’s the satellite image for the area…zoom in to see the runway and how close it is to the building.

Considering how close the approaching aircraft are to the runway, we got a pretty spectacular view of the underside of the commuter-sized jets that use that approach. One passed over just as I approached the overhang to the building entrance. I could practically smell the grease in the wheel wells.

My second suggestion to Assemblyman Anderson would be for him to pay more attention to his state’s hideous economy, and try to figure out a way to get the state government off the back of the people out there. You know, do something a little more constructive. People are aware of the risks one takes in a free society when that society make its information openly available. Keeping vigilant mitigates that risk.

We can handle it out here, okay?

By joe | Posted in Everyday Junk | Comments (0)