Tag Archives: news

Where were you when _______ happened..?

So people used to say something like “Where were you when Kennedy was shot?”, for most of my life I think the closest I could come to that was “Where was I during the attempted Reagan assignation?”, it’s not the same thing, but it’s a President being shot so it’s what came to mind for me in those situations.

sts-51l-challenger-2.jpgTwo other things that stick in my head were the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster and Space Shuttle Columbia disaster. The Challenger sticks more in my head mostly due to the imagery of it’s explosion 73 seconds after the launch.

Clearly for many people, “Where were you on September 11th, 2001?” will be that type of question. Personally, that one sticks in my head mostly because I saw much of it live. But then I assume the attacks was designed that way, one crash so that everyone was watching and then additional crashes while so many were already watching. And then so many watched the towers fall so even if you missed the earlier part of the disaster there still parts for you to catch live.

It’s generally disasters or death that people remember: The Oklahoma City bombing (1995), the London Bombing (2005), when John Lennon was shot, when Princess Diana died and things along those lines (FYI, I don’t remember when all these happened). That’s sad that these are the parts of life that people remember and talk about. Keep in mind, it’s not when the event happened it’s really about when you heard about it.

Maybe because disasters are always disasters to most people but great things to one person aren’t always a great thing to another person…

If you can think of some “Where were you?” events, please add them to the comments!

Newly released aerial photos of the World Trade Center

Here are some newly released aerial photos of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center from the New York Times. I can’t believe this was over eight years ago…

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The images were taken from a police helicopter — the only aircraft allowed in the air space near the towers on Sept. 11, 2001.

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ABC posted 12 other photos from the collection of the 2,779 pictures. Some look to be the same or awfully similar.

Found at Zudfunk.

360 degree videos of Haiti Earthquake

Here are a series of three videos taken in Haiti last week by CNN. They’re not of the earthquake itself but of the area afterwards.

What is so interesting is that it’s video and you can drag the mouse to look in all directions, but the video (and audio) keeps playing as you drag the video around. At 900×500 it’s pretty large video too, I can’t promise how it’ll play on your older computer. CNN put this together so maybe they’ll add more later.

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Video 1 in a three minute car ride through Haiti.
Video 2 on a three minute walk in Haiti.
Video 3 short car ride through Haiti.

It’s similar to the YellowBird demo I mentioned a few months back

Don’t forget to set your clocks back

In the United States Daylight Savings Time (DST) ends today. DST around the world (Picture from wikipedia)So at 2 AM on Sunday November 1st, 2009 set your clocks back one hour in the US (if you’re in the EU, you should have done it last week).

I hate them messing with the clocks, but more importantly, I hate them messing with my internal clock…

But I won’t complain about the extra hour sleep :)

Image courtesy of WikiPedia…

Space Shuttle STS-128 is ready for launch

The Space Shuttle Discovery is on the launch pad right now. This always excites me and still gives me chills when it takes off! You can watch NASA TV live on their site. At this point, they are in a hold and I think they are still supposed to launch in the next hour (11:59 PM EST).

sts-128.pngI’ve always wanted to see a launch, I don’t know why I’ve never made this happen. I was supposed to go a few weeks ago to see this launch (STS-128), but they moved the date so it didn’t work out. I’ve got to make this a priority over the next year before they stop the shuttle launches.

It’s been 25 years since this ship’s maiden voyage, it was August 30th, 1984 when Discovery had it’s first launch! It was the third orbital vehicle in service (OV-103) and is now the oldest running shuttle. Wow!

Once they introduced the shuttle, I always thought they’d have some way to take passengers. I always assumed that’d be airplane type seats in the bay, like envisioned in the 1970’s James Bond movie Moonraker (anybody have an image of this?).

So let’s just plan to catch a shuttle launch in the next year, okay? Anyone have any tips on going to a launch?

Forty Years Ago Today: We landed on The Moon!

On this day 40 years ago Apollo 11 landed on the Moon. astronaut_Apollo_11.jpg I’m not sure what else needs to be added to that statement: “We landed on the Moon”! How amazing is that?!?

Just for some frame of reference: The Moon is 238,000 miles away (384,000 km), if you were driving 75 miles per hour it would take you 3,100 hours. Keep in mind that’s speeding and you don’t get to pull over for any bathroom breaks or snacks!

Actually it took them more like five days to get there, so just dividing that out, that’s around 2,000 miles per hour (assume it took them a while to speed up and slow down).

When I was a kid, my mother purchased me a two record set of the mission. Lots of audio recordings of the launch and landing. I’m thinking there was some insert with a bunch of photos too. I played that a lot on my record player. I don’t have any idea what year she purchased that, but I’d say I was six or seven(?), and it was amazing to me!

It’s still amazing to me. Whenever I can watch a launch of some kind or another, I always turn on the TV and still get thrills and chills. I get chills just thinking about it as I’m writing this…

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The sad part is we only landed six times and then we stopped.

Photos courtesy of Wikipedia.

Michael Jackson rules the iTunes store.

It’s a shame to become so popular after someone dies. I guess in Michael’s case so extra popular (since he was so much more famous in the past and not so much lately).

And it’s always shame for someone to die so young.

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This is from just a few minutes ago at the iTunes store.

Rest in Peace Michael!

Election Wrap Up

Random results thoughts – (these are based on my observations not statistical calculations)

  • Across the nation, most proposal results seemed lean towards pro-choice.
  • Also across the nation, most proposal results seemed to be against any gay/lesbian/non-traditional family units. Even at the cost of allowing children to not be adopted.
  • The medical marijuana use proposals seems to have passed in most places (all?).
  • We still don’t have results for North Carolina (only 14,000 difference in the votes). Although this still won’t make a difference in the end.

    I still don’t think you should be able to vote straight ticket on your ballot. If you really want that, then fill in all those circles by hand. You only vote a few times per year people!

    I also still think the electoral college is weird and electoral votes should be based on the what the people of the state voted not what the winners party. Or just ditch it and have the whole thing based on popular vote. I understand there are reasons not to base it on popular vote, but…

    Final part – The president I voted for won and so did the proposals I picked, I don’t know if that’s happened to me before (but Michigan didn’t have many proposals this year).