There's a special place in hell

Thieves Target Salvation Army, Three Other Dallas Charities

Police are looking for thieves who broke into several Dallas charities over the holiday weekend, including the state headquarters of the Salvation Army on Harry Hines. Detectives do not believe the burglaries were committed by the same people.
Link

Not committed by the same people? Oh, well… that's not so bad, then.

Story at eleven…

Here's one of those headlines that sends you off in an entirely different direction from the story: Mexican Citizen Busted At Border For Crabs.

Out of the loop

Jeepers! Blogspot hasn't deleted this thing yet?

When I recently came up for air and poked my head out of my cubicle, here are a few bits of interesting news that had transpired while I wasn't paying attention:

• Large Hadron Collider. Wait. There's a machine that could create an earth-devouring black hole? How did this happen, and why wasn't I notified??
• Lance Armstrong. Come on, now. You didn't really believe he was going to stay retired, did you? Although part of me suspects this may be a his way of capitalizing on the wave of interest in cancer research, the truth may be that he's just bored and hasn't enjoyed being so much out of the public eye.
• Changes at Dell. Some of this came as no surprise. I've been too lazy to bother changing the IE home page on my work laptop, so I've seen some of the stylish new desktop and laptop designs Dell is coming out with. What bothers me is that the next time I decide to order a new desktop machine, I may not be able to tweak the components like I've done in the past. Then again, by the time I reach that point, I may have decided to just invest in a good dockable laptop or… no. No, I don't think I could ever afford a Mac.
• Chrome. Another browser? Where do I sign? I installed this just the other day and really haven't had much opportunity to play with it, except to take a look at my web sites and verify that they render correctly. My initial impression is that it's a sparse little thing with not much in the way of extraneous buttons and toolbars. But that's Google's style, isn't it? I do kind of like the "incognito" feature, which is a browser window that supposedly doesn't keep track of history or cookies once you shut it down. I guess that could be handy for keeping things tidy on one's work computer.

Meanwhile…

Things are starting to settle down at work. We spent August in a kind of limbo, where we weren't the company we used to be but hadn't gone through legal entity combination and weren't yet the company we were going to be. But now (as of 1 Septemb3r), we are.

Most of administrative hassles involved with getting signed up for benefits, rolling over my 401K, signing up for a dozen or more new network accounts, etc. has been completed. There's still a bit of confusion as we try to figure out the culture of our new masters, and the future directions of some of our projects are still to be decided. But we're getting there.

()wn3d

I guess it's that time of year again. I learned last week that the company that acquired my employer a little over a year ago has itself been acquired. And all that that implies.

Right now, I'm enjoying the rudderless feeling that comes with not knowing whether or not I'm going to be one of the people who receives a job offer from the new owners. I guess I'm not overly concerned, since the buyer keeps saying, “expansion, not consolidation”; but I, along with my mortgage lender, will be a lot happier once I have an offer in hand. Meanwhile, it's like a ghost town around the office as many try to get in under the wire before the acquisition transaction closes and they lose unused vacation carried over from last year.

It's eerie.

The good news, assuming that I get an offer, is that our new owner is a much larger company employing tens of thousands of developers in lots of locations world wide. We're getting very little specific information from them yet, but from the provided FAQs and what we've been able to dig up by googling, it sounds like a positive change. Their dress code is relaxed, they're agreeable to employees working from home a couple days a week, and their medical plan is rumored to be much better than the one we have now. They state in their press release that they're planning to [*gasp*] pour money into our R&D right away, and they even provide educational reimbursement for courses applicable to our jobs. This in contrast to the current company, which was extremely frugal and whose CEO liked to brag that he knew nothing about software development.

I'm cautiously optimistic, although I said the same thing when we were bought this last time. Time will tell, but I have to get that letter offering me continued employment before I can stick around to find out. The letter that will tell me my fate is supposed to arrive around July 17. Fingers and prayer beads crossed.

Roll on...

In 2001, Turtle and I were conducting our long-distance courtship and doing our part to keep TWA in business. A typical visit had me catching a flight to St. Louis on Thursday after work. We'd spend the weekend trying to soak in as much of each other as we could before Turtle dropped me off at the airport and send me back to Texas on Sunday afternoon. It got to be pretty routine, but there was one Sunday at the airport that sticks with me.

I was making my way briskly toward my gate when an athletic-looking young man blew past me in a wheelchair. And then two more, hot on his (w)heels. It was the sort of thing that caught my attention in those early days of getting to know my favorite wheelchair athlete, and I wondered what their story might be. But I didn't have to wonder long. When I arrived at my gate, I found the same three boys and about another half dozen besides, all milling about in wheelchairs and carrying duffel bags on their laps.

A basketball team.

Having put Turtle on a number of flights, I knew the early boarding drill and wasn't at all surprised when the whole pack of them headed down the ramp to board the plane about 15 minutes before the rest of us were called. Eventually, it was my turn to shuffle down the narrow aisle of the plane to my seat. Shuffle a few steps. Wait. Shuffle. Wait. Wait.

I craned my neck to see what was holding up the line. Instead of the usual clueless traveler trying to shove a foot locker into the overhead compartment, the hold up was young man hauling his heavily-braced legs down the aisle and laughing as he harassed a couple teammates already in their seats. A fifty-ish man ahead of me twisted in his seat to scowl at the boy.

“All right, that's enough,” he said firmly. “Find your seat and park it.”

The boy in the braces smiled sheepishly. “Sorry, Coach.”

The line started moving again, and I realized that I had the window seat next to the coach. I paused for a moment, giving him a chance to pull his legs back or half stand to let me by. When he did neither, I glanced down and noticed his wasted legs – at about the same time as he caught me at it.

That's how I met Jim Hayes, coach and founder of the UTA Movin' Mavs wheelchair basketball team.

During the flight, we had a very interesting conversation. He told me about his work with the team and about the tournament they were returning from. I told him about Turtle and her wheelchair racing.

Last evening, I was watching the news and learned that Jim Hayes had passed away this past Saturday, after a brief illness.

This evening, Anna Nicole Smith and Britney Spears were in the news again, and it struck me as very unfair that such shallow, wasted lives seem to get all the attention and that truly worthwhile, inspirational ones go largely unheralded. I know that this posting won't do much to balance the scales; but a little additional recognition for a life well spent is the least I can do for Coach Hayes. If I feel richer, having only spent an hour with him, I can only imagine the impact he must have had on the lives of those who really knew him.

Veteran Removes Illegal Mexican Flag

In Reno, Nevada, a local Veteran may be brought up on charges after cutting down a Mexican flag being flown illegally above the U.S. flag. A local television station had received numerous complaints from residents and went to investigate. When their reporter arrived, the Veteran took the opportunity to make a public statement. He quickly lowered the flags and used his army-issue knife to cut them down, taking possession of the U.S. flag and leaving the Mexican flag where it fell.

The man commented "I'm Jim Brossert and I took this flag down in honor of my country with a knife from the United States army. I'm a veteran, I am not going to see this done to my country. if they want to fight us, then they need to be men, and they need to come and fight us, but I want somebody to fight me for this flag. They're not going to get it back."

Link (Infowars.net)

According to the Infowars article, similar events have been reported in Maywood, CA., Tucson, Arizona, and Jupiter, Florida.

Earlier this year, there was a flap when it was discovered that someone had climbed the broadcast tower of a local conservative talk radio station and planted a Mexican flag there. It took a couple days to get someone to climb up and take it down, during which time the radio station faced fines for the infraction.

Call me reactionary, but I can't help feeling a bit like we're under siege and just too polite to do much about it. Except for Jim Brossert, I mean.

A tip of the hat to Cowtown Patty.

Busy, busy, busy

Lots going on, some of it noteworthy, not much of it particularly entertaining. Still, the company I work for completed its "merger" with the much smaller company that bought us out, and I won't be one of the small number who became redundant. More good news: since the new, combined company is privately held, my outstanding stock options were paid out at a price sufficient to replace much of what I spent on the new car.

Coding, coding, debugging, and more coding. No blogging, but you knew that.

The weather shows signs of finally warming to temperatures that this weenie can ride in, and I've been taking advantage. I have yet to catch a weekend when the temperature hasn't dropped back to winter levels, but it's starting to stay light longer and I've been able to get out for an hour each of the past two nights after work. I take my full-suspension Humvee of a mountain bike because it's more nimble in the neighborhoods, and because its weight and higher rolling resistance give me a harder workout than the 'bent would in the available time.

This evening, as I was finishing up, I rode to the neighborhood Sonic for a toaster bacon cheeseburger. Yes, I probably more than replaced any fat I burned during the ride, but whatever. It was delicious. So, I was sitting at one of the tables, watching the traffic and having my dinner, when a co-ed pack of skate rats rolled up and loudly worked out what they were going to order. A couple of them kept eyeballing me in my lycra clown suit, and as I was getting ready to take off one kid finally decided I was ripe for some cool points with his buds.

"What a huge dork," he announced. He turned to his buds for approval and was rewarded with jeers and laughter.

"Yeah," I said. "These shorts don't leave much to the imagination."

More hoots and laughter. I like to think I scored with that one, but who knows.

Cartoon Network ad campaign bombs

Over the years, I've pretty much stopped tuning in to Cartoon Network. With the exception of South Park, which I'll occasionally watch when Turtle's out of the house, most of their offerings are either insultingly mindless or far too arty and hip for an old fart like me. Or both, maybe.

I stumbled on Aqua Teen Hunger Force once while flipping channels and found it to be pretty stupid (or maybe too hip), so I'll admit I don't really "get" the show. Maybe that's why I can't imagine what the show's creators were thinking when they decided to promote it by planting suspicious black boxes all over Boston and other cities.

"It is outrageous, in a post 9/11 world, that a company would use this type of marketing scheme," Mayor Thomas Menino said. "I am prepared to take any and all legal action against Turner Broadcasting and its affiliates for any and all expenses incurred."

The 1-foot tall signs resembled a circuit board, with protruding wires and batteries. Most depicted a boxy, cartoon character giving passersby the finger — a more obvious sight when darkness fell.

Link (AP, via Yahoo! News)

Nice.

Now playing: Trevor Rabin, Can't Look Away