aubreyturner.org

As I mentioned earlier this week, someone had smashed the mirror on the Bear Creek walking trail at Rufe Snow.  Yesterday evening as I was walking through the area I noticed that the mirror had been replaced. 

I was glad to see it replaced, but that mood was to be short-lived.  Going through there today I saw that the mirror had been smashed again, apparently with a brick (which was on the ground directly below the mirror). 

I’m going to go out on a limb and say it’s probably a group of teenagers hanging out under that bridge, so maybe the crap will stop when school starts next week.  I wonder how much those mirrors are costing us, though.  I’m guessing that two foot diameter convex mirrors aren’t exactly cheap.

The more I think about it the more pissed off I get.  I hate vandals of all stripes.  I see no art in tagging and absolutely no excuse for throwing bricks at anything.

I’d suggest snipers, but some people would accuse me of being insufficiently sensitive to the social plight of the poor youths and their lack of appropriate social outlets… 

I’ve been fiddling around with the Google Maps API for a couple of days.  I got the idea that I could use it to display my DFW gun show listings on a map. 

Displaying a basic Google Map via the API is pretty simple.  You just import their Javascript library (you have to register for an API key for it to work, though) and use the various objects that they provide.  For a simple map, all you need to do is create a <div> in the HTML body of the page and associate the map object with it by name.  The map will take its size and location from the div.  Once you declare the map, you just have to center it on a point (by Lat/Long) to get it to display (I chose a location in Irving, since that’s fairly central to the D/FW area).

The map itself (as noted above) uses Lat/Long to display points and to place markers.  They provide a Geocoder object that allows you to get back a Lat/Long from an address.  Since the Geocoder has to call back to Google to do the lookup, and that can take some time, the interface is asynchronous.  So you have to provide a callback function to get the “point” object back and do something with it.  This function will create a marker with an “InfoWindow” (the little pop-up balloon that Google Maps uses) that contains HTML. 

However, getting to the point where you can create the markers requires a bit of care.  My choice to put my map creation code into an “onload” event caused me some grief at first until it got through my thick skull that I needed to gather all the addresses (and their associated shows) while the page was being created, then do the actual marker creation in the function.  Part of this was caused by the fact that I’m working with EE, where you have to use one of their weblog entry loops to cycle through the entries.  What I ended up doing was to create an array of “address” entries such that each one contained a list of shows for that entry.  As the weblog loop runs, it generates Javascript code that adds new entries to the array.  Finally, once the page is loaded, my other function gets invoked and cycles through the array, invoking the Geocoder, which in turn (eventually) invokes the marker creation function.

Finally, once the last marker is actually created, the code recenters and resizes the map to fit the markers.

The result is something like this:

It’s kind of interesting to watch, since the markers just kind of “pop in” and then the thing recenters/resizes.  Here’s the link.

I’ve been a customer of Dreamhost since April, 2000.  Over those six years I have rarely experienced any significant downtime with them.  Their recent troubles really had me doubting their ability to continue that record, though.  They recently reached a milestone of 300,000 domains served and I couldn’t help but wonder if they were overextending themselves.

I know that Bitter was  very, very unhappy with  Dreamhost and the downtime.  They offered her a free month of hosting, which I suppose is good, but it’s hard to get over being ignored by a hosting company for such a long period.  The cardinal sin of customer service isn’t being unable to solve a problem—it’s keeping your customer in the dark about it.

What was interesting is that I didn’t experience anywhere near the same problems she did.  My sites were up most of the time hers was down.

Anyhow, Dreamhost has put up a detailed rundown of the problems, how they started, and what they’re doing for the future.

I’m starting to get a little concerned about some things I’ve been seeing on the walking trails over the past month or so.  It started with the mirror where the trail goes under Rufe Snow at Bear Creek.  The trail curves there making it impossible to see who’s coming around the bend.  When you combine a narrow trail, the blind curve, and a mix of runners, walkers, bicyclists, and rollerbladers, it’s a recipe for disaster.  The mirror was great for seeing if someone was barrelling towards you on the curve (and for alerting the barreller that people were ahead).  Unfortunately, it appears that some jerk smashed the mirror with a rock.  It started with just the center section, making the mirror difficult, but still somewhat usable.  Yesterday I noticed that the whole thing was gone.

Last week I also noticed that someone has smashed a beer bottle on the concrete retaining wall of the overpass.  This was moderately dangerous, since if you suddenly had to throw yourself out of the way of a speeding cyclist the only place to go was up on the wall (it’s one of those sloping retaining walls you typically see with overpasses).  My dog likes to jump up there and walk around the corner, so I’ve had to be careful to keep her off of it as well.

Also yesterday I had someone yell to me from the edge of the Town Hall parking lot to watch for the glass on the trail.  Someone had smashed what appeared to be a beer bottle on the trail behind Town Hall.  I’m glad of the warning, because the glass was in small pieces.  It wouldn’t have been a problem for me, but I’m sure my dog wouldn’t have fared as well. 

In the 2 1/2 years I’ve been walking the trails, I haven’t seen broken glass or this kind of blatant vandalism until now.  I hope this isn’t the start of a trend.  Maybe when the kids go back to school next week things will return to normal.

I’m about ready to strangle Christine Cook over her obnoxious “Christmas in July” commercials for Sleep Experts.  Just a year ago, I would have only been annoyed by her.  The year before that I wouldn’t have given it a second thought.  But it’s her own damn fault, along with the rest of her compatriots in the retail business.

I’m so fed up after the extra-super-extended Christmas season we endured starting last October that I just can’t handle any more right now.

At the rate the damn retailers are going, we’ll be getting Christmas sales starting in January if they think they can get away with it.

I came across a site that tracks all flights that are currently in the air.  Every one of those dots represents an airplane over the United States.

You can also get local air traffic for some of the major U.S. cities, such as the Dallas area:

That’s a lot of dots.  All of which have to be kept from touching…

I sent out an announcement to the DFW Gunshow list about some updates I’d made and someone replied to ask if the current demolition of Big Town Mall would affect the exhibition hall.  I haven’t found anything definite yet, but it appears to just affect the mall.  The exhibition hall and the farmer’s market are separate buildings located on the outskirts of the mall.

What amazed me was that while I was looking up information about Big Town in Google I came across a Wikipedia entry for it.  It really floored me that someone would go through the trouble to write up an entry about Big Town Mall of all things.  Even more amazing is that there is a Wikipedia project to document dead malls and that there is a website, Deadmalls.com, that tracks defunct malls.

J.R. Labbe’s recent post about Chris Bell’s silly campaign ads reminded me to write about the other thing about them that bothers me.  He seems to be one of those people who bellyache about “standardized tests” in public schools.  He says something to the effect of how Texas should be preparing children for college, rather than teaching them to take a standardized test. 

Oh?  You mean the same colleges that require standardized tests for admission?

I’m not a fan of public education, but as long as a) it’s compulsory, and b) I have to pay for it, then I’m going to demand accountability.  This means that there has to be a way to measure whether students are learning the required subjects.  The only objective way to do this is through some kind of standardized test, administered by an outside agency. 

Opposition to testing, especially from people in the education field, always gets my antennae twitching.  I can’t help but wonder what they have to hide, or why they’re so afraid of being held accountable for the results of their work.  Out here in the real world, we’re always held accountable for the results of our work, so I have absolutely zero sympathy for teachers and educrats in this regard.

I also hear complaints about “teaching to the test.”  This also gets my attention, albeit in a negative fashion.  Here’s why:  If the teachers are teaching the material, and the students are learning it, then the test should be a simple matter.  If students have to be extensively coached on the specific test questions or topics, then that actually says to me that the test is doing part of its job.  Namely, it’s ferreting out bad teaching practices (and/or bad students).  Any coaching situation is one where we’ve identified a failure in the learning process.  If the education establishment was really interested in learning (instead of extorting more and more money out of us), it would use the test to do continuous process improvement.  But perhaps that’s too much like the private sector for them.  We wouldn’t want to pollute the art of teaching with hard-nosed real-world processes.

Standardized testing is NOT going away.  Not as long as people like me are dragged into the situation by having to pay for public education.  As an underwriter of this enterprise, I’m going to demand accountability.  So, teachers and educrats, it’s time for you to make your peace with testing and get back to the business of teaching.  I’m tired of listening to the bellyaching.

There’s been a stink recently about the problems with garbage collection in Keller.  It seems that some areas weren’t getting their garbage picked up until the next day.  There were some angry people who complained about all the garbage that was collecting on the street.  It spawned an article in the paper and several letters to the editor.  Some of which were from enviro-nuts who berated the residents who complained for generating too much garbage and not recycling.  It must be nice to be omniscient enough to know the exact habits and activities of all the people in that neighborhood in order to determine that people were above their “garbage quota.”  I certainly know that there are a lot of people who recycle quite a bit of stuff, as some of it always manages to end up in my yard on Fridays¹. 

It’s happened in my neighborhood a couple of times now, with yesterday being just the latest example (they finally came at about 8:30 this morning).  I don’t get too bothered by it, since I usually put my garbage in a well-sealed rolling can.  The only thing about it that bothers me is that if I can manage to drag my zombie ass out there early in the morning to put out the garbage, then they should hold up their end of the bargain and come pick the crap up (it’s not like they have a contract or anything</sarcasm> ).  But that’s only a minor annoyance.  What really annoys me is that the garbage collectors have a habit of throwing my garbage can willy-nilly halfway across the street, where it becomes a hazard to vehicular navigation. 

¹  I’m just about fed up with the recycling program and I’m leaning towards just throwing it all in the regular trash collection.  The program costs extra each month and while they give you two bins for free, the lids are “optional” for a cost of $6.00 each.  I’m careful now to make sure my bins are well-packed to make sure nothing blows away.  But I think we’d all be better served if the lids were included. 

And on that note, I’d like to say something to last Friday’s good samaritan who left the “Zep” hair clog remover bottle on my mailbox post:  I’m sure you thought it a great way to point out my negligence in leaving trash out, but I’m sorry to have to tell you that it wasn’t mine.  Like many other things that I get the joy of throwing away for others, my yard seems to be the place where this crap lands.  Someone down the street has a problem with securing their garbage and recycling and I end up with their stuff about every other Friday.

One of these days I’m going to have to take the time to walk down the block to see where this crap is coming from.

This situation has got to be one of the most egregious examples of bean-counting bureaucratic thinking I’ve seen in a while.

You could be on a secret government database or watch list for simply taking a picture on an airplane. Some federal air marshals say they’re reporting your actions to meet a quota, even though some top officials deny it.

The air marshals, whose identities are being concealed, told 7NEWS that they’re required to submit at least one report a month. If they don’t, there’s no raise, no bonus, no awards and no special assignments.

“Innocent passengers are being entered into an international intelligence database as suspicious persons, acting in a suspicious manner on an aircraft … and they did nothing wrong,” said one federal air marshal.

These unknowing passengers who are doing nothing wrong are landing in a secret government document called a Surveillance Detection Report, or SDR. Air marshals told 7NEWS that managers in Las Vegas created and continue to maintain this potentially dangerous quota system.

Whomever decided this was a good idea needs to be dragged off and shot.  Air marshalls are supposed to be there to stop trouble if it should start.  I can understand the purpose of this “SDR” system, but I absolutely cannot understand the rationale behind generating at least one such report per month. 

But then the mind of a bureaucrat is a nasty, vile place.  Check out this bit:

A second management memo, also dated July 2004, said, “There may come an occasion when you just don’t see anything out of the ordinary for a month at a time, but I’m sure that if you are looking for it, you’ll see something.”

Sounds like management wants the air marshalls to just make crap up if there’s nothing happening.  That is absolutely, positively, wrong.  Especially as it means that innocent people get put on a secret list without any knowledge of why or how it happened and for having done nothing wrong other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

To borrow a phrase:  Bureaucrat.  Rope.  Tree.  Some assembly required.