Number One Brother Going On Location
My brother, Dave, who is with the 783rd Military Police Battalion out of Inkster, MI finally boarded a plane Wednesday evening out of Mississippi to make his way with his unit to the other side of the world to Afghanistan. I chatted with him briefly this evening while he was still in route before boarding another plane. I’m guessing that by tomorrow morning he will have reached his destination.
It comes with mixed feelings. I’m proud of him and his unit with the service and dedication to the country’s interests. He was a part of Operation Iraqi Freedom during its first year. Now he’ll serve as part of the ongoing Operation Enduring Freedom. At the same time, I’m saddened at the fact that I won’t know when I’ll be able to seem him next. I assume that he’ll get a break at some point and be granted some leave time where he’ll fly back and visit for a week. But since things don’t seem to be going as planned, I can’t rely on hope.
There’s been some confusion in regards to his discharge date. His term of service is to end in February of 2009. Supposedly, he’s not to be deployed within a year of that date, but some wording in the official orders makes it seem as though they can hold him, an effective stop-loss, until the end of the tour. He had been trying to convince higher-ups that someone wasn’t interpreting the orders correctly, but to no avail. I guess there’s still a chance for the end of his term in February. We won’t know until someone else finally makes that call. Regardless of any outcome, he’s still in Afghanistan.
Here’s a quick video of my brother escorting his friend through an OC (aka Pepper Spray) training course.
Near Miss Incident 2008 08 27
I ranted a few days ago about the actions of a so-called good samaritan that almost led to a serious vehicle accident involving myself and at least one other party. Looking back, I can’t lay the blame entirely on the good samaritan. The road in question is notorious for being difficult to enter. Numerous businesses line both sides of the street for almost its entire length, and it’s long and heavily traveled. That wasn’t the first time someone tried to enter traffic from that driveway and try to turn left at the same time. They certainly won’t be the last.
I just think that had the good samaritan retained control of his right of way as he was legally allowed to do, the other party would not have felt obligated to take the opening provided to him and put himself into a dangerous position. I could not see the other party entering traffic. My first observation was watching all of the cars in front of the good samaritan traveling away while he didn’t move. As I was about a car length and a half away, I noticed the other party venturing out. They weren’t looking in my direction and never yielded until they heard screeching tires. By then, the other party was completely blocking my lane of traffic.
I was traveling about 30 miles per hour and had to lock up the tires in order to stop. The following day, I drove by the same area and could see my tire tracks on the pavement. I ended up pointing towards the traffic coming in the opposite direction and my left tire had stopped halfway between the double-yellow lines. There was an SUV approaching from the other direction that had to stop just as fast and was slightly past my front bumper when it did. I was on the phone with my brother at the time (more about that a little later) and could very well have not paid attention as closely as I had. The end result could have been catastrophic.
At work, we call these kinds of events “Near Misses”. It’s an accident that had the potential of being much worse than it actually was. Investigations are conducted, reports are made, rules are updated and mandated. The end result is having company-wide meetings where everyone is made aware of the changes in the rules including the possible reprimands should they be broken in the future.
It would certainly be nice to shut down that driveway.
Pepsi Sweepstakes - Yes, It Does Work
Yes, you can win prizes from the PepsiStuff.com sweepstakes. Tuesday, August 26th, I received a package through FedEx from Young America Corporation where a representative was congratulating me on being a potential winner of one of the Trek mountain bikes. Potential, not official, until they receive my signed and notarized release form. Once they receive it, it should take up to 4-6 weeks to actually receive the prize. It almost feels like waiting for a rebate check to arrive.
If you’re not familiar with this, Pepsi and Coca-Cola products have a ten or twelve digit code located somewhere on the packaging. Usually, they can be found on the underside of the bottle caps. If it’s a pack of cans, it’ll appear on the inside of the box somewhere. You take those codes and submit them to each company’s respective website where you earn points for each code. You can use those points to either “buy” goods or products, or use them towards sweepstakes where each entry is worth a certain number of points.
I had been skeptical in the past as to whether or not these prizes that Pepsi and Coca-Cola are giving away were actually awarded to anyone. The goods you can buy are usually pretty cheap looking or require an outrageous amount of points in order to get them. The sweepstakes appeared as black-holes for points. I was quite wrong.
I have no idea what the Trek bike is supposed to look like or even what model it is. There wasn’t much information along those lines. Only the retail price of the prize is given at $330. I’ll have to throw a few more dollars towards my IRA next year to offset the 1099 claim on the taxes.
My Right Of Way Is Not Your’s To Dictate
Let me paint the scene. There’s a small shopping strip that has two driveways. The first driveway exits to a four lane road. The second driveway exits to a side street that intersects with said four land road which is controlled by a traffic signal. Often times, there are people wanting to make a left turn from this shopping strip and opt for the first driveway to the four lane road. This presents a problem of accessibility as the aforementioned traffic signal is only a short distance away and causes stopped traffic to block this driveway. The more efficient route would be to exit to the side road and utilize the traffic signal to stop traffic and allow a clear intersection in which to make the left turn.
Understood? Great. Now enters the good samaritan.
Along comes the good samaritan that will wave an exiting driver out on to the main road while they retain further blocking traffic behind them. They understand how difficult it can be to enter traffic on such a busy road and feel obligated to do the Christian thing and yield their own right of way, and consequently everyone else’s behind them, to the other driver. While this may work well in instances where the main road only has two lanes, one in each direction, it creates a great potential for injury and/or death when presented with multi-lane roads.
Today, I was subjected to such a yielding, unbeknownst to me at the time. I was one of those unfortunate souls that was traveling down that extra lane with no knowledge that a minivan was about to appear from nowhere directly in front of me and stop. Imagine my heart rate when I finally came to a stop a mere three inches from impacting the minivan AND the SUV traveling in the opposite direction that I was angling towards from trying to maneuver out of the minivan’s way.
The occupants of the minivan were an elderly couple, which I quickly estimated to be in their late 70s or early 80s, enjoying the fruits of their retirement by going shopping in the afternoon. Now imagine if I hadn’t been paying as close attention as I had and plowed right into them. Given my speed and the potential angle of impact, it’s quite reasonable to assume that one or both of them would have gone to the hospital, or the morgue. Thankfully, there was no one behind me. If I had been bumped from the rear, even in the slightest amount, I would’ve made contact with the minivan.
In the end, we’re possibly looking at severe damage to my car, the minivan, serious injury or death to a number of parties, collateral damage to surrounding vehicles, and all because someone wanted to be a good samaritan. You really want to be a good samaritan? Follow the rules of the road without deviation. If everyone did as is expected of them, we wouldn’t be paying higher insurance premiums.
I’ve been part of three vehicular accidents during my 18 years of driving. All three were not my fault. The first was because an elderly couple decided to stop in the middle of a bridge on the freeway because they took the wrong lane and were trying to figure out how to get back into the right lane. The second was on my way to a concert during a rain storm in which a van didn’t maintain its lane, entered mine and stopped. This was precipitated by another car that began to spin-out after hydroplaning on the wet pavement from excessive speed. The third was a woman in a van when she backed out of her drive without looking. Today, I narrowly missed a fourth.
Now if the cute redhead I met today wasn’t married, this post would’ve been about a different subject altogether.
Added A Gallery
I came across a real decent plugin for the plug called PhotoXhibit by Benjamin Sterling that helps to incorporate photo galleries into WordPress. Now I can easily share some of the photos I have rarely been known to take. That is, I have a camera but rarely remember to take it with me to memorable moments or events. For instance, I start the gallery off with my visit to my brother’s Army unit when we dropped him off for deployment. I didn’t have my camera but luckily my mother had hers. We took a few snaps of the unit in formation.
Least I Could Do - Short 4: Wildly Inappropriate
Don’t watch this video while on the job, in a church, surrounded by children, or the like. Ryan Sohmer of Least I Could Do states that this short touches on some delicate subject matter and continues with:
There is coarse language (a lot of it). There is sexual content (even more). I can almost guarantee that there will be more than one WTF moment.
If you’re like me, you will get a laugh out of it. Find some alone time, hit play, sit back and enjoy.
Vacation 2008.08 Day 7
Happy Birthday to Me!
Happy Birthday to Me!!
Haaapppyyyy Biiiiirthday Toooo Meeeee!!!
Happy Birthday to Me!
I’ve got nothing else.
I used to feel younger than my actual age. Now I feel older. I’ve got to reverse that.
Confusing The Truth
Some punk in Thailand decided he wanted to a rob a taxi driver. His reasoning was that he wanted to see if it was as easy to do in real life as it is in the Grand Theft Auto IV video game. Eventually, the punk stabbed the taxi driver to death when the driver fought back. Now, stores in Thailand are pulling the game off of the shelves.
Supposedly, this comes as a “wake-up call” to the Thailand government to enforce some regulation on the gaming industry in their country. Proposed solutions include imposing a rating system on games, and implementing a curfew for kids playing these kinds of games in arcades. News agencies are reporting on the crime and making parallel comparisons to issues in other countries. If we were to believe the hype, we would think that kids all over the world are robbing, killing, and raping all because of video games. We would believe that we could live in a calm and serene world were it not for the negative influence of violent video games.
And why should we stop at video games. Music has been blamed for decades of robbing our kids of their innocence, turning them to drugs and sex, and making them kill others or themselves. And then when we finish with music, we can turn our attention back to the horrors of books and set piles of them burning into the night as we send them and their evil messages back to the devil himself. We could fuel the fires with the alcohol we would end up banning. Everyone would be so enlightened by this time that no one would need a drink in order to get through the day. And then all the evil and its murderous ways would disappear from the Earth and we would live in paradise, a heaven on Earth.
The truth of the matter is that humans will kill, maim, and destroy with no outside encouragement from games, videos, music, alcohol, drugs, or otherwise. What was Jack The Ripper’s influence? Did he see the recently published Gray’s Anatomy and wonder if the insides of women were just like they were in the book? It’s a good thing he hadn’t said so in his letter to the London Central News Agency or else our progress in the medical world might have been delayed. Was there a version of Stratego in the 1930s that might have influenced Hitler and his appetite for world domination? If so, it was never mentioned. And thankfully not or else millions all over the world might not enjoy that game today. Did Napoleon see a play? Did Attila listen to a story?
My point, which mirrors that of a large majority, is that you cannot blame things, video games or otherwise for why people do what they do. The kid in Thailand might have found another reason to do what he did. The fact that GTA4 brought out a desire to rob a taxi cab is not the fault of the game, even though it may have influenced him in some way. Millions of kids and adults play GTA4. There aren’t millions of acts of murder taking place at this very moment because of it. I’ve been listening to heavy metal music and playing violent video games for most of my life. If the hype was true, I’d be either chasing crack highs with beer binges, sitting on death row, or dead in a ditch already.
I don’t, and the millions playing GTA4 don’t, because we have a sense of what’s right and wrong. This kid in Thailand should have known that robbing and killing a man is wrong. But humans will do what they do for any reason. Kids have burned themselves from fire because no matter how many times they were told that the fire would do that, they didn’t fully realize it until they got burned. It happens. There is nothing you can do to fully stop it. Ban all the violent video games and someone else will get killed because they saw it happen in a movie. Ban all the violent movies and someone else gets killed because they read it in a book. It isn’t the media that’s provoking people to kill.
And while those in the gaming community are beginning to reel at the knee jerk reaction of New Era Interactive Media to pull the games from store shelves in Thailand, or the news media’s overactive attention to this one event, keep in mind that it will pass. Video games are big business. The fan base is huge. And the gaming industry knows that they don’t turn people into murderers.
I can always grab a racket, or a golf club, or rent a race car at the track. But there are no zombies in real life that need killing. There are no special powers that help me scale tall buildings or fly through the air. And I can’t rightly walk through the streets of any major city and go on a killing spree. For all those reasons, I turn to the joy of video games.
Vacation 2008.08 Day 4
Vacation plans are going smooth and slow. My license plates are renewed for another year. My car was due for an emissions check (E-Check) since I’m lucky enough to live in one of the few special counties of Ohio (Cuyahoga, Geauga, Lake, Lorain, Medina, Portage, and Summit). Luckily, the E-Check is free for those vehicles required to get one. Unfortunately, you need to hand your car over to strange people while you sit in a little booth and wait for them to perform all the little tests required for your particular vehicle. Mine, they just plug in a computer to tell whether or not my car’s computer is doing its job. Older cars, like ones I’ve previously owned, get operated on a dyno machine. That calls for some alcohol to calm the nerves while you watch some teenager trying to keep your car from jumping off the dyno.
This vacation has given me the time to catch up on website work. RebelZero.com is slowly coming around as I learn the Drupal CMS. I began another site called SungInBlood.com which is a tribute site to my favorite author, Glen Cook. It, too, is based on Drupal and, since I haven’t officially released it, I’ve been able to take my time adding content to it while experimenting with how Drupal works. I’d like to concentrate more on customizing the theme. Of the available ones that I’ve found, only a small handful seem to fit and only to a certain degree.
Insert catchy segue here… (that’s segue, not segway)
The teacher notes on the back of my report cards always mentioned that I rarely applied myself. I could never understand what they were referring to and, if possible, how to change that. After a while, I thought it was one of those rubber-stamp phrases they had for certain students in which they didn’t have the patience to teach. I see now that my problem was never a lack of applying of myself but rather the opposite. Concentrating on one task until its completion before moving on to another is the problem I see before me today and must be what my teacher’s were referring to. I always apply myself to the task, but my interest wanders from task to task until I have so many tasks going on at once that I don’t seem to complete any of them.
At work, I can manage priorities based on the needs of the day. If need be, I can micro-manage tasks off to others instead of assuming them for myself. This comes in handy when my boss is too busy to see how unbalanced the workload has gotten throughout the day. But at home, there are rarely no real reasons for tasks to become prioritized. Just looking around the room, I can see nine tasks that need completion. I can also see that my beer is empty. And with that, the distractions continue.
Vacation 2008.08 Day 1
On the first day of my vacation, I woke up… at frigging four in the morning!!! After wandering around on the internet for a few hours, I proceeded to pass out until the ripe time of twelve noon.
I recently migrated this blog from Movable Type “Open Source” to WordPress which went very smooth in regards to the text. Any inline pictures, logo, graphics, screen shots weren’t part of the import. Luckily, I had a backup done before I wiped the MTos installation off of the host’s server. I think I’ve gotten most of the images back. This current theme likes to float them to the left whereas I like them to the right. After trying to hack the css file to make it work, I decided to live with it and adjust.
Aside from the blog, I have other action items to prioritize for my vacation that include renewing the plates, replacing the rotors, and performing an oil change for the car. I’ve got a few books from my reading list I want to either finish or start. I’m also looking into re-organizing the home network so I can move a more robust and feature full server forward to act as the router/firewall while at the same replacing the current Linksys router by converting it into a simple wireless access point.
The Type-A personality side of my brain must be taking over as my re-organization tasks all began with the few websites I’m currently administrating. During this re-organization, I noticed that my page for working around OpenOffice.org’s bug while using a dark GTK theme was missing. It was due to move to my RebelZero.com site, but the link to its original location was still in place. In the mean time, I place a static page at its original location until I find the time to officially move it.
Now I’m off to get a bottle or three of Labatt’s Blue and enjoy the start of my well deserved vacation.
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