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I got a reply from one of the Rangers at the Orange County parks department:

Fortunately the firefighters were able to spray fire retardant foam on the majority of the buildings in the canyon, and I am happy to report that the house and outbuildings are still standing. The meadow, as a clearing, provided a good amount of protection, as well. The grounds at Arden look remarkably good.

Minor I know, compared to the massive losses people have experienced down there, but very cool just the same.

I posted about my last visit to Modjeska and I recently updated and tagged some of my images from that trip on Flickr.

I keep saying that the web is a completely different medium and we should not be regurgitating print copy onto it, but rather creating new content specifically for it.

Example: http://www.nytimes.com/ref/us/20070803_BRIDGE_GRAPHIC.html

-30-

A while back I found an old Kodak PhotoCD with some shots from my tour of Kuwait in 1991 (“…in support of Operation Desert Shield/Storm”). I uploaded a few (the ones that didn’t suck) to Flickr.

It’s interesting to look at them now. The images show some light leakage on the edges and scratching from the film plane. I remember carting around the camera (an F3 that I still own) and film (what’s film, Dad?) through the dust and s*** for 4 months. I don’t remember seeing the damage before.

In the spirit of Memorial Day, I thought I’d share.

So I did something I don’t normally do this morning. I read the paper. Now, technically speaking I always read the paper, several in fact. I peruse the RSS feeds from a couple of area papers and occasionally I find a story of interest, but this morning I read the paper paper.

You see yesterday the “news” coming out of Virginia Tech was a mess. One shooter, no two. One shooter was killed, no wait he was captured. One dead, no 20 dead, no 30. One headline I saw was creative: “20 to 30 dead”. My Dad, a rocket scientist, would always explain to me the difference between “accuracy” and “precision”. Well, at least “20 to 30 dead” is accurate.

TV was worse. Bad helicopter video and talking heads who spent most of the day trying to fill airtime with news and information they didn’t have. I couldn’t get Don Henley out of my head. At least we didn’t have Dan Rather decimating classic journalism quotes.

Now, I could have spent all day reading news sites and endlessly refreshing web pages for up-to-the-minute speculation (because that’s what it was at that point, speculation) or I could go on with my day and tomorrow, over my doughnut and Mtn. Dew breakfast (hey, the name is Journo-geek ok?), I could read it all, clearly and concisely, in the paper.

So I did.

You see some guy in some national office did spend all day reading news sites and probably calling contacts and probably collated reports from field reporters and he (or she) put together a 120″ story that ran over the wires to my paper. It was long but full of (hopefully) verified facts. It was a far cry from the guesswork reporting of the day before.

Now I’m informed. I have a better idea what happened. That’s how it’s supposed to work.

We on the web pride ourselves on being able to get the news out fast, just like TV. But sometimes the news requires some thought, some time to see how the pieces all fit, in short some journalism.

So I was IMing with a coworker a few days ago and I wished her a happy Veteran’s Day. The conversation went on a bit and she said “oh and THANKS!”.

You see, I’m a veteran.

I was a little taken aback. I mean I’m not a combat veteran in any real sense. I was a Combat Engineer and technically I did serve a short “combat” tour to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait in the months just after the “first Gulf War” (during which I think our biggest threat was warm sodas and bad music).

Very quickly scenes from my military experience flooded past… some fun, some not so much, some I’m proud of, some I’m not… most of them hard.

Despite the current abomination that is our involvement in Iraq, I still believe whole heartedly in “…to defend the Constitution…” and although I’m “fat and outa shape” today, I will always consider myself a soldier in some small way.

So I wrote back, “Any time”

So I’ve been reading up on Tor, software that allows for anonymous communication over the all-too-public Internet.

Simply put, Tor works by first encrypting your traffic and then routing it thru various and random Tor servers to mask the source… and even the destination if desired.

Why? Well, in a word: freedom. Freedom to speak out against oppression without fear of reprisal as it masks a user’s true source, freedom to read what governments or organizations don’t want you to read as it can circumvent many proxies….

Of course it also means freedom to transfer kiddie porn and communicate with terrorists….

Freedom, is seems, isn’t free.

I would like to run a Tor server, to contribute a little bit to the overall concept of Freedom, which you may recall was once a hallmark of this country. Before I do, I know I’ll need to reconcile the idea that the freedom I help to provide can also be used by folks that I don’t particularly agree with, freedom is funny that way.

So, simple question: what (or who) are the Israelis bombing?

With Hisballah it seems pretty simple, they’re lobbing their missiles at whatever they can hit and with Israeli casualties being so relatively low per rocket attack, it seems that Hisballah can hit the ground pretty successfully. Israeli ground, specifically.

But it’s Israel I’m curious about. They have US-supplied multikajillion dollar smart thingies that can blow a fly off a terrorist’s shoulder from 50 miles away, don’t they? If so then where are all these “civilian” casualties coming from? Are these people really the fabled population-hiding terrorists that the BBC has implied they are? Or were they all just unlucky enough to be standing beside a Hisballah compound or some other such center when a rocket hit?

Or were they just targets of opportunity? The only good Arab is a dead Arab… that sort of thing.

I heard some Lebanese guy on the radio say how the Israelies bombed some mosque in the Beruit suburbs and blew it and a bunch of other houses apart. “There’s no military here,” yelled the guy. Now I know damn well the “bad guys” are fully capable of loading mosques and girl’s schools and whatever else up with weaponry.

So was there military there or not? Where is Anderson Cooper asking the Isreali military “Yo, why’d you blow up that neighborhood?” I’m completly OK with, “Andy, the neighborhood got blown up because that’s where all the Hisballah ordinance landed when we blew it the fuck out of that mosque.”

What I want is old fashoned Journalism, and not the stuff from bloggers either. Take your over-paid, high profile butts and to your job! Either the Israelies are bombing indescriminantly or they’re not. If they are, we should know. If they’re not, we should know.

So while Google’s informal corporate motto may be “Don’t be evil,” I find something, well, evil about this:

• http://images.google.com/images?q=tiananmen
• http://images.google.cn/images?q=tiananmen

Don’t be evil, indeed.

Note: ‘cn’ is the TLD for China

This is America, this isn’t supposed to happen here. BuzzMachine said it best.

Grab your mask and asbestos you can, get ready to run.

So, there’s this naturally occurring asbestos (’NOA’ in the lingo) occuring in “Western El Dorado County”, which by some unfortunate coincidence, happens to be where I live. Now this is quite interesting to me, since asbestos is by all accounts a Bad Thing.

But it’s OK. There’s only a problem “down the hill” in El Dorado Hills. I’m good here…

Continue reading ‘Asbestos for the best of us’ »