This is not my HFS

I am watching the Oriole's game on MASN and they put up an ad for "Talk Radio 105.7 WHFS" and as someone who remembers HFS, this is NOT my HFS. Turns out there is a good Wikipedia entry about HFS and it tells the history of a quirky, unique station that "Talk Radio" is not even part of.

So, here is a toast to Aq, Kath, Damien and Bob and Meg at the HFS we all know and love. As they used to say...99.1, HFS.

Rained Out!

Opening Day 2008. Some good baseball being played today. First, the Nationals won their home opener yesterday (Sunday) with a Ryan Zimmerman walk-off home run in the bottom of the ninth, with two outs and a 2-2 ball game. It was a good game. And as much as I dislike the current President of the United States, I thought he was doing a good job as a baseball fan. It took a bit, but he called Chipper Jones' home run like a pro.

Today, the Blue Jays and the Yankees were rained out in New York. Kansas City beat Detroit in eleven and the Mets won. The Orioles and the (do not call them Devil) Rays are just getting started. The Nationals also won the opener in Philadelphia 11-6 so all is pretty good in the world.

Barry Bonds is not playing baseball (do not expect me to feel sorry for him) and there are a whole bunch of new names to learn as the 2008 season gets under way.

Now, why is today not a national holiday? Go Jays, Go Nats!

We cannot work, the power is out.

My job is Information Technology. I am one of those guys who lives behind the locked door and feeds the gerbils enough to keep the data flowing and to make sure you can access that web page (assuming you are allowed to) and get the work of the day done.

So, when the power goes out, it is pretty interesting to watch the reactions. At my current office, a federal building with four discrete power grid access points, we lost one around 8AM today, affecting all the ground level circuits. Those are the ones that PCs and associated gear are plugged into. It also seems to be the circuit that the ventilation and heating systems are connected to as well as some of the loading dock facilities. So we had lights, and toilets and some security systems and phones but we could not work. For the better part of two hours, a large number of people were wandering the halls, some looking lost, some not sure they had ever been in this part of the building before. For two hours, no one could work.

Which brings me to an interesting observation. Many of us have commented on how poorly trained cashier staff is, especially if they have to make change. In today's example, if the power goes out, like it did here, there is no threat to health and welfare, but what exactly are you supposed to do? In the case of my job, I sit around waiting for the power to come back on and then make sure everything restarts correctly. So I get time to read. Fortunately I am the type that has a lot of books, so finding something to read is not a big deal, but more and more, we are becoming a society that reads and relies on information from on-line sources and when those sources go down or are lost, we are at a loss.

As today is Tornado Awareness Day here in Virginia, I want you to think about this. If you lost electricity tomorrow and it was out for several days, what would the impact be? To you. To your family? Could you survive? Are you prepared?

Meanwhile, at TSA Headquarters...

MacBook Air Stumps TSA: The suspiciously thin, port-free laptop sends airport security into a tizzy, until cooler heads prevail. Maybe it's time for some tech briefings at the TSA, no? (Yahoo News)

The web is abuzz this morning about TSA's technical fumble. Now granted, I would not want to buy a MacBook Air, but it would seem that someone at TSA would be responsible for notifying agents about the latest and greatest tech on the market...or at the very least you would think that someone had gone through airport security with one of them by now. Nope. Seems our friends at the TSA are on the job. I will resist the term keystone kops...too late. And what do they mean by "TSA approved?" Since when do devices taken on an airplane have to be "approved" by the TSA...or is that their way of saying, it isn't on our disapproved list (surely a shorter way I guess).

More on the Second Amendment

The District of Columbia will be defending its ban against handguns at the United States Supreme Court later this month and they are arguing this question: "Whether the Second Amendment forbids the District of Columbia from banning private possession of handguns while allowing possession of rifles and shotguns." There are all kinds of legal implications about this case, but I will wait for those that grasp them better to explain them.

I wanted, however, to update you on the other side of the coin. Reports indicate that all the suspects involved in the death of my friend's son are either citizens or legal residents of the United States and they have pled guilty to the charges before them. They are all from "good" homes (therefore there was no "gang" involvement) and it really was a simple case of wrong place wrong time. That being said, please explain to me, again, why it is necessary for everyone to own a gun? A young man would be alive today if there were more restrictions about who could own them, how they are stored and the credential needed to posses, carry and use them. I cannot support the argument that if more people had guns there would be fewer gun deaths. It is counter intuitive and makes no logical sense. But then, like many things in the United States, it is just one more.