London Terror Attack

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Yikes.

  • CNET: At least 45 die in London blasts

    Witnesses saw the top ripped off a double-decker bus near Russell Square close to King’s Cross train terminal, and three more apparently coordinated explosions caused carnage on packed subway trains as Londoners made their way to work.

    Security sources told Reuters there were fatalities at all four bomb sites, and Sky Television said at least 45 people had been killed. A further 150 were seriously wounded, and hospital staff said some were unlikely to survive.

    “I was on the bus,” said one dazed passenger. “I looked round and the seats behind me were gone.”

    “You could see bodies on the road outside,” said another eyewitness, Peter Gordon. “There was smoke everywhere. It was carnage.”

  • CNN: London bombs kill at least 33

    Paddick said the first explosion had come at 8:51 a.m. BST (O351 ET) near Liverpool Street, Aldgate and Aldgate East Underground stations, where seven were confirmed dead.

    At 8:56 a.m. there was a second explosion on a Piccadilly Line train near Kings Cross and Russell Square tube stations, where 21 were confirmed dead.

    At 9:17 a.m. there was an explosion on a train traveling into Edgware Road station, affecting two other trains, with five confirmed dead.

    At 9:47a.m there was an explosion on a bus at Upper Woburn Place near Tavistock Square. Fatalities have been confirmed, but the number is unknown at this stage.

    There were 700-900 people on each of the affected trains at the time, he added.

  • Flickr: Photos tagged with ‘london’, London Bomb Blasts Pool, London Explosions Pool

  • Metroblogging London and Londonist are both covering events.

  • The Guardian’s coverage.

She struggled to what?

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  1. Kottke seems to be resurrecting an old meme. Evidence:

  1. I got curious how many other people had participated in the meme, and did a Google Search for one sentence in the post.

  2. Google returned 162 hits.

  3. However — and this is what made all this funny to me — Google also suggested that maybe that wasn’t really what I wanted to search for. Maybe I really wanted to search for the phrase, “She still had the training wheels on as she wobbled and struggled to paddle.“

  4. It’s amazing how different the results are when you change one little letter.

Technical Difficulties

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It’s entirely possible that some of you may have tried to leave a comment here in the past few days and gotten an error message instead. Turns out that there’s currently a nasty little conflict between Movable Type and CPanel (a webserver administration package) that’s hitting me.

If you are experiencing intermittent “500 Server Errors” while using Movable Type and are using MySQL for your database, we are aware of the cause of the prblem: a nightly CPanel update of a buggy version of the DBI and DBD::MySQL drivers. See this post on the Professional Network Weblog for more details.

The MT engineering team has been actively working with developer to help him rectify the problem. We apologize for any inconvenience and will keep you up to date on our progress as well as post here when the problem is solved.

Until that’s fixed, things may be a little tweaky around here. Unfortunately, it’s hitting me, too — I’ve got my next mix ready to Podcast, but I haven’t been able to get MT to rebuild and actually display it yet. I’m not even sure if this post is going to make it up immediately.

In any case, the problem is known, and — I hope — will be rectified as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience!

Podcast 04: Mission Accomplished

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The fourth of my old collection of mix sessions that I’m putting up for download and podcast. This one starts a few that move away from the “Difficult Listening Hour” series to explore some other ideas I had running through my head. It’s shorter, not quite half an hour long, and has something of a ‘spy music’ theme.

Standard disclaimer: All the mixes I’m posting were mixed ‘live’ — running a Pioneer dual CD mixer directly into my computer and recording straight to .mp3 — and have had no post-mix editing done in the computer. As such, they’re not flawless, but they’re not bad, either, if I do say so myself.

Here’s the link: Mission Accomplished (27m 41s, 31.69Mb). Tracks included are:

  1. Adam Clayton & Larry Mullen ‘Mission Impossible (Junior’s Hard/Intro)’
  2. Propellerheads ‘On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’
  3. Moby ‘James Bond Theme (Hot Tracks)’
  4. Propellerheads ‘Spy Break’
  5. Adam Clayton & Larry Mullen ‘Mission Impossible (Junior’s Hard)’

You dirty pedophile…

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I was having a good day wandering around Myrtle Edwards Park for the Fourth of Jul-Ivar’s festivities until someone sicced the security goons on me. Apparently a parent had decided that since I was taking pictures of kids playing in the surf at one of the small beach areas, I was some creepy scumbag who had to be brought to heel.

One security guy came up to me and pulled me aside, telling me that there had been complaints that I was taking pictures of children.

“Were you taking pictures of children?”

Well, yeah, I had been, along with quite a few other things. Knowing this was a battle I wasn’t about to win, I offered to delete the photos.

“Can I see your camera?”

I pulled up the picture display and scrolled to the most recent shots. Sure enough, there was the damning evidence — pictures of fully-clothed children, playing in the surf on a public beach during a public festival. He keyed his intercom and called another security guard over to look at the shots.

The two of them flipped through the shots, shaking their heads. Obviously, I was Bad People and had to be Brought Under Control. After watching me delete all the offending photos from my camera, they explained to me that while they couldn’t really prevent me from taking pictures, they would certainly be keeping an eye on me if I chose to remain in the area. “We’ll be watching you.”

That being quite the mood-killer, I figured it was best just to leave.

Now, before anyone accuses me of being too self-righteous, what bugs me the most isn’t that some parent might have been a little alarmed about some strange man taking pictures of their kid. What annoys me is the “guilty until proven innocent” mentality that prompted them to run to security instead of approaching me and either asking what I was doing or, if I’d taken any shots of their kid, to delete them. The same mentality that made the security personnel treat me as if in their minds, I was there for the sole purpose of taking pictures of children to go home and masturbate to (regardless of the many other shots of landscapes, water, Mt. Ranier, the Seattle skyline, and the tripod slung over my shoulder for fireworks shots later on in the evening). The same attitude that finished the little interview — after I’d voluntarily deleted all the shots, with them looking over my shoulder — with the warning that, “we’ll be watching you.”

So, I’m back at home. I’ve got a ticket to watch Batman in about half an hour, and then I’ll see if I feel like wandering back down there to try to get some shots of the fireworks or not.

Happy Fourth of July everyone. You know — independence, liberty, freedom, and civil rights and all that.

Tsunami Early Warning System

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(Mom sent this to dad and me, with the following note attached: “My boss’ mailbox was full and I had to remove some items, which means forwarding them to my computer.  This was among them the ones I forwarded.  I thought my guys would appreciate this.”)

After the massive destruction of the south Asia tsunami, the Red Cross has decided to distribute FREE Tsunami Early Warning System/ Earthquake Detectors.

Earthquakes can be dangerous.

Especially at beaches where Tsunamis can occur.

Know the signs to watch for of a nearby earthquake!

Read more

Fanfic

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There’s a short article in Wired today about fanfic, with one bit that jumped out at me…

As befits its beginnings, the genre is planted firmly in pop culture’s nerd division. The films most often given the fanfic treatment – The Matrix, X-Men, and Pirates of the Caribbean – wing straight out of dork central.

Well, chalk me up as a pop-culture nerd living in dork central, as my one — and so far, my only — foray into fanfic so far has been a short piece called ‘Glitch‘…and yes, it’s Matrix-derived.

“This is useless, we’re wasting our time here. Let’s go.” I stood up, letting my chair roll back a couple feet behind me. “Dan?” Dan looked up at me, then nodded, getting up from his chair too.

“I don’t think leaving will be quite as easy as you expect,” said our host. He reached out and pressed the button on his intercom. “Could you come in now, please? We’re having some…difficulties…in our negotiations.” The door to the conference room opened, and the two thugs that had ushered us upstairs came in and took positions in front of the door.

Dan glanced at me and rolled his eyes, then shrugged. We’d had to fight our way out of rooms before — it’s not our preferred exit strategy, but sometimes there just isn’t an option. “You know this is pointless, Rourke,” I said. “You can’t hold us here indefinitely. Even if you tried, we’d already called in to the precinct before coming in here, so when we don’t report in, more police will be on the way.”

Rourke leaned back in his chair, tapping the table with his pen. “Maybe,” he said, “but you don’t play this game as long as I have without taking a few risks when necessary. We have a little time, at least, before your superiors start to get restless. So may I suggest, gentlemen,” — the pen stopped tapping as he leaned forward again — “that you sit back down.”

Okay, while it’s not likely to win any awards, it’s not too shabby, either. Feel free to give it a look if you haven’t seen it before.

Which fireworks display?

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Two out of the past three years, I’ve gone down to Gas Works Park for the annual WaMu Family Fourth fireworks display. However, seeing as how Seattle is blessed with two major fireworks shows, I’m considering switching over to the Fourth of Jul-Ivar’s event at Myrtle Edwards Park.

The biggest reason is simply convenience. Much as I’ve enjoyed the displays at Gas Works in years past, I have to bus out to it from where I live, and trying to get home afterwards can be a nightmare, with buses packed to capacity and traffic slowing to a near standstill.

Myrtle Edwards park, on the other hand, is an easy walk from my apartment, and it’d be far easier for me to get there and then back home afterwards. Besides…fireworks are fireworks, and no matter which park I head to, there should be lots of opportunities for good shots over the course of the day.

Has anyone local to Seattle been to both events (on different years, I’m assuming)? And if so, is there a definite preference for one or the other? Or does anyone have a house atop Queen Anne Hill for me to invade that would let me get a clear view of both? ;)

Office Depot bootlegs

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I stopped by the downtown Seattle Office Depot on lunch to do some coveting, and had to wonder how customers were expected to compare the quality of the various LCD displays when they were all playing a highly-compressed (crappy) video — possibly a VCD — of music videos taken from CMT‘s broadcast stream (complete with a “Ripped by…” banner that popped up every few videos).

I halfway considered saying something to the one employee on duty, but as he could barely manage to grunt a greeting at me as I walked by since he was so engrossed in watching a (highly-illegal) bad quality (overcompressed and the wrong aspect ratio) bootleg of Star Wars Episode III — yeah, the one still in theaters — I didn’t think that it would be worth it.

iTunes “Four Sticks” by Rollins Band from the album Encomium: A Tribute to Led Zeppelin (1995, 3:31).