We Were Wrong...

Those were the words in the Maine Sunday Telegram's editorial yesterday describing their opinion on the Bush Administration's ability to execute the war in Iraq.

I told you so.

Like many American's, I personally have had, and continue to have, no confidence in George W. Bush's ability to do just about anything. He is at best, not very bright and he has surrounded himself with people with dangerous ideas and distorted views of reality. Some of the have left his administration - thankfully - but not before creating the largest political and global blunders in the history of this fine country. This may take decades to repair.

It looks like the Maine Sunday Telegram editor's have finally come around to my way of thinking. It gives me no comfort.

~jeb

You got it, Toyota!

Sorry, I have been missing for a while. It was a busy week or two at work and I was blogging stuff on two of my other blogs:

Work 1: http://maineascd.blogs.com/
Work 2: http://www.jebswebs.net/blog/

So, I have been collecting news clippings and notes on stuff to write about and finally had the time this afternoon to comment.

The news that Toyota has now surpassed General Motors in selling more cars elates me. I helped to contribute to this news by purchasing a 2007 Toyota Camry Hybrid last summer. I traded in my 2004 Mercury Sable which on a good day was getting 27 mpg and on a bad day was getting 23 mpg. The Camry on a good day gets 38-39 mpg and the worse was 25 mpg during the depths of winter. I'm not sure why, but others are also experiencing this.

But that's not my message, my message is the American automobile industry has their heads up their...you know whats. I mean, they are bleeding red ink all over the place and all of the research is showing them that people was fuel efficient cars. So, what does Ford do? It ramps up the advertising for their gas-guzzlers. What a bunch of boobs.

They did this in the 1980s too. When the price of gas skyrocketed, they were still pushing the big guzzlers and when they finally responded, all they did was put crappy small, underpowered engines in their cars. I had a 1982 Mercury LN-7 which was a "sporty," two-seat version of the Ford Escort/Mercury Tracer. What a piece of crap.

So, good for Toyota.

~jeb

Sharing

I just found this on a link from Dave Barry's blog. You gotta watch this:

http://www.thisjustin.com/2007/04/11/david-blaine-terrorizes-passersby-again/

Sorry the embedding version does not want to work on Blogger

~j

I Don't Recall

I am certainly not the world's biggest Jon Stewart fan, but I do enjoy his Daily Show on Comedy Central, and I particularly enjoy his "moment of Zen" at the end of each show.

But when the NBC Nightly News starts to provide fodder for what will inevitably be Stewart's Daily Show Moment of Zen for April 19, 2007, I think we have achieved a new level of absurdity.

Tonight on the NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams, the program included a segment on the US Senate hearings with US Attorney General Aberto Gonzales in which they mentioned, and then demonstrated visually, Gonzales excessive use of the phrase "I Don't Recall." In fact they reported that Gonzales used the phrase 70 times during the testimony, and then showed a clip of a "protester" in the audience who was actually keeping a scorecard of the number of times the phrase was used. Quite amazing.

I can hardly wait until 11:00 pm to see Stewart's spin.

I guess Alberto may want to get his resume in order.

~jeb

Surviving the Storm

The news people have been busy this week with the horrible news of the tragedy at Virginia Tech, but here in Maine the news was just the latest storm to hit us this spring.

As I have featured, ad nauseum, in this blog over the past few months we have had a series of crazy winter and spring storms that have brought large amounts of snow, sleet and frozen garbage.

This last storm, which was more wind and rain than snow, has taken quite a toll on much of the coastal areas of Maine and the southern most counties in the state. We lucked out here, relatively speaking, with only about 3 inches of rain and wind gusts only in the 30-40 mph range. Along the coast the winds were near or just above hurricane levels and took down trees, eroded beaches, and even took a few lives. There were lots of road flooded and most people in southern Maine are confronting soggy basements.

We saw the sun today for the first time since Saturday and they are telling us it will be almost like spring this weekend. We'll see!

~jeb

My Home Town

I must admit to some fondness for my "home town" of Brooklyn, New York.

It has been a long time since I lived there - 35 years to be exact - but as they say, "you can take the boy out of the city, but you can't take the city out of the boy," or something like that.

So it was interesting that two Brooklyn related "events" affected me this week. The first was an article in the local Kennebec Journal, Augusta's city newspaper. The article in the Sports section - a section I rarely read - was entitled "No media circus greeted Jackie Robinson" and written by Jim Becker, a retired sports writer for the AP. Here is a link to the article on MSNBC (it's not on the KJ site). The article marks the 60th anniversary of Jackie Robinson's arrival in the major leagues. The historic event of the first African-American major league player took place at Ebbets Field, the home of the Brooklyn Dodgers. The article goes on to describe some of the backstory which has been obscured by 60 years of history. It's a good read.

Regretfully, by the time I was "of age" to know and follow baseball, the Dodgers had moved to California and Ebbets Field had been raised and turned into an apartment complex. I actually know more about that than Ebbets Field. I do remember when they held a big auction at the stadium and pictures on the news of people walking off with memorabilia including tracts of stadium seats. I remember my parents were depressed of the loss of the Dodgers AND the Giants who had also run away from the city. Indeed I remember the prejudice at the time towards "Negros" with some blaming them for the loss of these two National League treasures. That was in the day when there wasn't much money to spend on stadiums and teams would simply change cities when they wore out their stadium.

I remember that they kept the flag pole from Ebbets Field and installed it in front of the Ebbets Field apartments...I think it is still there. But apparently the apartment complex has been renamed for Jackie Robinson. You can visit a memorial to Ebbets Field here. And there is another tribute site here which includes the memorable sound clip of James Earl Jones talking about the "the one constant through all the years" from the film Field of Dreams. Very fitting. I'll tell you about my encounter with James Earl some other time.

The other Brooklyn connection came last night when I visited Johnson Hall in beautiful downtown Gardiner, Maine and heard a three-piece band from Brooklyn called The Wiyos. Hard to describe, their website calls their music a mix of "Vaudevillian Ragtime Blues, Hillbilly Swing and Old Time Country." I call it fun. Great little band.

Although only one of the band members is actually FROM Brooklyn, they apparently all live there and Joebass, the guy I talked to after the concert lives on Classon and Bergen Sts. which is even closer to the old Ebbets Field site than where I lived in Clinton Hill.

And so it goes, Brooklyn has been on my mind. I wonder what that means?

~jeb

Mud Season

Sorry I have not had anything to add to this blog in about a week. I have been busy updating my three or four other blogs - all of which are job-related - so you know how that goes.

It seems all I ever do on this blog is talk about the weather...so forgive me if I note that we are expecting another large snowstorm tomorrow and then another one possible on Sunday night into Monday. As I think I pointed out in the previous entry, Mother Nature has a bad way of paying us back for early winter nice weather, and is she ever.

The other thing I've noticed is that the enthusiasm for foul weather, which is a trademark of just about all TV weathermen, has been ebbing away as they have to forecast winter storms in the middle of spring. Joe Cupo, the weatherman of the NBC affiliate in Portland has been apologizing for this pattern and almost playing down the storms. This compared to December and January when they announce such events with great fanfare, donning their striped sweaters with the STORM CENTER - Channel 6 logos and matching coffee cups. They chitter like little birds as they announce school closings.

I always tell friends and family back home that March and April are known as "mud season" in this part of New England. Apart from the obvious mud that tends to be ubiquitous, mud season is also very bland - brown, in fact. Everything is brown this time of the year, the trees, the grass, the mud, your shoes...even some of the people. So, having the occasional blizzard this month is actually making things a bit more "colorful" - that is if you consider white a color!

We resign ourselves that this is a crappy time of the year weather wise in New England. April showers in Maine can bring April Floods, so keeping it white can have some benefits. At least we are getting water into the ground in a slower and more efficient manner. But if this pattern of stormy weather continues into May - when I really hope it is not still snowing - we may have May Floods this year.

Oh, well...I gotta get off this subject or I'll get depressed.

~jeb

More White Stuff

Yes, it is April, it is Spring, it is almost Easter, Baseball season has already started and yet Mother Nature is making up for lost time.

Sometimes when we have a late-start to winter like we did this year, the big lady treats us to a late spring, or more often, NO spring. This looks like it could be that kind of year.

Fourteen inches of white stuff last night into this morning. Ugh!



~jeb

Tired Puppy

It could be the time change to Daylight Savings Time over the weekend, the 13 hours spent driving to and from New York City, or the lack of quality sleep due to my stay in a hotel, but regardless, I'm one tired puppy. I really think having spent 10 hours with friends from 30 years ago and having to tap into long-abandoned memory centers in my brain is the real cause for the delirium.

It's been four days since I have returned from our wonderful Treaty Stone Reunion Folk Festival at St. Francis College in beautiful downtown Brooklyn, and my head is still spinning. I have provided pictures, but little commentary, on the TS-SFC blog, but in some ways I don't think words can capture the experience. Clearly the photos have not; you should have been there!

For those who wonder, Treaty Stone was a loosely formed group of "hippie types" who attended SFC from about 1969 - 1977. The group, officially a "club" under the Student Affairs rubric had as its primary purpose the pursuit of happiness, art and camaraderie. I just made all that up, but I would expect that if you could find written documentation of the group's existence in the annals of SFC lore, you would find something pretty close to this description.

Treaty Stone was the brain child of founder and leader Dominick Delsante who was a man wise beyond his years and equally mysterious. A true free spirit, Dominick organized this merry band of "long-haired, hippie freaks" as part of the anti-war movement of the time, but our primary activity was the folk festivals that we held 2-4 times per year.

I joined the group in 1971 and probably played in my first folk fest in early 1972. I had only been playing guitar for a few years at that point and had tried to master a singing and performing style based upon my idol Stephen Stills of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young fame. But my repertoire of songs were not limited to CSNY and over the years I managed to get a little better with each folk fest. Well, at least I thought so.

The folk fests were always held in the study hall outside of Founders Hall and were low maintenance affairs which included tables with candles, simple junk food and a BYOB policy. We spent more time with making arrangements for sound equipment than anything else and we only charged students a few bucks to get in. The folk fest were always on a Friday night and would run until around midnight. Most of them, for obvious reasons, are a blur. You can see images from the SFC year book on the TS blog.

After Dominick and I graduated around 1975 the remaining members kept the TS tradition alive for a few more years until interests changed, the Vietnam war was over, Nixon was gone and disco had invaded.

We held a couple more folk fests in 1986-7. The one in '86 was successful with a nice turn out, but I recall the attendance was lacking in 1987 and we put the idea back on the back burner.

John Kiely who, like me, was one of the later members has been instrumental in making all of the arrangements for each of the reunion events. This one was a big success with probably close to 200 people in attendance. Bill Boyle and Brian Dennigan should also get lots of credit for making this year's event a success. Bill and his family provided the sound system and served as The Lord of Illumination. In addition to Bill, John K, Brian and myself, other performers included Pistol Pete Mancuso and his son, Emil Baccash and Ellen Tucker.

When my head stops spinning, I'll write more.

~jeb

New York, New York

I'm in The Apple today in preparation for our Treaty Stone Alumni Reunion Folk Festival at St. Francis College. The TS Folk Fests were where I first learned to play guitar and perform in front of an audience. I got involved with this group of "hippie types" at the otherwise conservative Catholic college in beautiful downtown Brooklyn while a student there from 1971-1975.

It's always a driving challenge to come to the City. I remind my Maine neighbors that just in my drive through The Bronx I will see more cars and more people than I will see in a year in Maine.

It's a busy place.

The surprise news is that they are building a new stadium for the New York Mets. Located in the parking lot adjacent to Shea Stadium, the new digs, to be called Citi Field, are well on their way to completion for opening day 2008. Check out the webcam for the play by play

George Steinbrenner and those people from The Bronx are not to be left in the lurch. The New Yankee Stadium is being built next to the old.

And there is the news about the NJ Nets moving back to The City and becoming residents of a new stadium being build in beautiful downtown Brooklyn. Of course not without major controversy.

So, I am staying at a motel with a lovely view of Astoria, La Guardia Airport and a corner of Riker's Island.

See you later.

~j

Wa Happened???

I know, I know...the website is gone.

We'll the truth is I damaged it beyond repair when I was updating some files to the DNN application and I could not get it fixed. So, I had to delete the database and now it's toast.

Rather than trying to repair/rebuild using DNN, I am moving the site over to a new host and will be using either Joomla! or Drupal to run the site. I'm fairly convinced that the LAMP environment is better suited for web apps. I've had just too many headaches with the .NET experience.

So, you can take a look over at www.jebswebs.net to the new host. It's all still experimental.

~j

Loss of an Icon

Most people in central Maine are walking around in a daze today, in shock that the most beloved and famous of local restaurants, Slate's in Hallowell had burned to the ground on Sunday.

This is a terrible loss on many levels but we can be thankful that no one was seriously hurt in the fire. But it is very sad nonetheless.

But I am feeling a particular uneasiness about this event. You see I had dinner there just the other night and so I am thinking that I was one of the last people to have enjoyed Slate's Restaurant the way it was.

I am reminded that I had a similar experience almost 20 years ago when the Cape Neddick Inn (and here for picture) burned to the ground a few days after I had dinned there.

That's a little bit spooky.

Let's hope that Slate's can rise from the ashes and again serve the good people of central Maine.

~jeb

Town Meeting

The Portland Press Herald ran a piece about town meetings in this weekend's paper.

I will not comment on town meetings in Maine as I am sure they are wonderful and colorful. I don't believe they are very efficient these days and I have a little trouble with letting small numbers of people - who have the time to attend these meetings - make all the decisions about a town's affairs. My guess is that they are probably past their prime and will continue to become a vestige of bygone years.

But my perceptions of town meetings may be adversely affected by the experience at my very first town meeting in Bartlett, New Hampshire.

I kept hearing about this phenomena when I arrived in town the the school district I worked for was pretty worked up about the process. In SAU 9 in the Mt. Washington Valley, there were nine towns making up the district and that meant there were actually TEN town meetings the district administration had to contend with. One for each of the towns and then one for the whole SAU.

In actuality these were really Annual School District meetings because the only thing that was discussed was that school district's business. The actual town meeting took place about a month later after the school district meeting had been held and the school budget approved. So, in those days, all we seemed to do and talk about were the annual school district meetings and town meetings.

Well, anyway at this first annual school district meeting in Bartlett, I witnessed what was perhaps the most reprehensible behavior of a public figure in my life.

Now, I thought that that thing with Richard Nixon was pretty bad, and I certainly had seen my share of corrupt politicians, but this one took the cake.

It began when one of the town selectman - these are three people, almost always men - who basically run the town - stood up at the annual school district meeting and demanded to know what the thousands of dollars of special education was being spent on. The special education director, my boss, carefully responded in general terms talking about teachers' salaries, specialists' (like me) salaries, books and materials.

The selectman was not satisfied with this explanation and asked for more specifics about "out of district placement costs."

My boss then explained that occasionally a student's needs could not be met in the local public school and that the law required we find a special placement for them.

After several more questions it became clear the selectman had an axe to grind and he wanted to know about a specific student.

The special ed director would not budge and refused to answer specific questions due to confidentiality.

With that, the selectman said, (paraphrasing) "I know that we are spending $30,000 per year on that [insert name here] kid to go to that school in [insert name here] and I have a solution..."

By now, everyone was on the edge of their chairs. I was was simply horrified.

"You get me a silver bullet and I'll put that kid out of his misery and save the town all that money."

Mild pandemonium ensued, but the selectman did not back down and did not apologize for his statement. The moderator eventually moved us off the topic and the meeting continued. I found out later that the parents of the child in question were in the room and that they had endured this behavior for many years.

In the years that followed, I attended a number of town meetings without the same antics, but always with a fairly large amount of "high theatre." It seems that there are some in town who attend those meetings only for the theatrical value and that there are others in town who like to be the actors and hear themselves talk.

In all fairness, usually the only ones who attending the annual school meeting were the teachers and parents and they always voted in the budget. At one of these meetings, one of the parents I worked with insisted they get me some help - yes he mentioned me specifically, thought I did a crackerjack great job and that I needed help. And right there the town did just that, they voted to add more money to the budget and add another position. Six months later there were two of us.

~jeb

The iPhone War is Over - Money Won!

It appears the momentary battle between Cisco Systems and Apple Computer over the trademark name iPhone is over.

According to the New York Times, the battle ended Wednesday when the companies settled their lawsuit. The paper alludes to the payment of some settlement, but that information is not disclosed.

Don't you wish all wars could end so easily?

~jeb

Daylight Savings Time

I remember when I heard the news last fall that the U.S. federal government has decided that they would change the dates for the beginning and ending of Daylight Savings Time (DST) in 2007 that it would be trouble. I can't recall the last time they did this (I think it was during the energy crisis of the mid 1970s) but I do know that I did not own a computer and all kinds of clocks and devices that automatically change when DST begins. I imagined there would be a similar "crisis" this year similar to the Y2K whoop-dee-doo in 1999.

Well I heard nothing more about it until about a week ago when I got a newsletter from Microsoft indicating they had developed protocols and patches for various products so they would continue to function correctly. The patches were downloaded with the next updates. But I have been going around and checking various other devices to see if they will explode or so something screwy on March 11th when the clocks need to "spring forward." I'm most concerned with my Palm, but then I realized it doesn't automatically update to DST and that I have to do that manually. Not sure what will happen with my atomic clocks. Probably a nuclear meltdown.

Well I was fairly satisfied that things would be fine when I came across a website called dateand time.com. Now talk about someone having too much time on their hands!

Anyway, this is actually a pretty neat site that has a list detailing when the DST changes around the world. Until I saw this website, it didn't even occur to me that they had DST in the southern hemisphere. It just never occurred to me.

And it never occurred to me that different nations would change on different dates. It must make airline schedules a real delight.

Anyway, this explains the need to continually rely on Greenwich Mean Time (GMT or Zulu). At least that doesn't change - I don't think...

Now, who has too much time on their hands....

~jeb

Microsoft Firefox

So, I'm the one most of my relatives and friends contact when it comes to on-line hoaxes and spoofs.

It wasn't always that way. I earned this reputation as "Hoaxbuster" by regularly refuting the endless number of silly e-mails friends and relatives would send me that, to me, were so obviously phony. I've trained two relatives, a sister and an aunt, to at least check with Snopes.com/Urban Legend before passing on this dribble.

So, I had a particularly good laugh when one of my edu-geek blog-friends found themselves victim of a website called Microsoft Firefox. Maybe it's that cynical New Yorker in me, but I immediately saw the pun intended. The edu-geek apparently did not and has a rather lengthy blog describing her victimization.

The outrage that she expresses is funny, but the numbers of comments from readers trying to carefully explain the joke is even funnier.

Sorry, I know I should be more sensitive. But watch the video for the "product" it is hilarious.

~jeb

The Morning After

All I can think of is that syrupy song from The Poseidon Adventure, the original one (1972). You know that song, the one by Maureen McGovern.

God, I'm showing my age.

Anyway, here's a video of ...the morning after the storm...

~j

Valentine's Blizzard

Accessible Politics

Wouldn't it be great to have at least one campaign website that meets accessibility standards?

It must be exceedingly annoying to people with disabilities, particularly those who use assistive technology, when it comes to politics on the Internet. In the last election, I sent out several e-mails to candidates and the state Democratic Party asking them to make their website accessible. At first there was the customary, "Oh thank you ... so nice to hear from you..." followed by implications that they would be taking my advice and getting right to it. And this would inevitably be followed by abandonment.

In all fairness, I'm sure there was some poor unpaid intern reading and responding to my e-mail and they had no time or power to effect any of my suggestions. But you would think they would have thought about this before the election process started.

So on this date, I did a little testing and looked at most of the people already running for president.

Now, before you jump all over me, I will admit that this was not a very scientific study and I merely used one on-line tool (The WebAIM Wave) to test ONLY the home page of each of these candidates. And in some cases, these were still sites for "exploratory" activities. So, things might change....

Anyway here is the score; the number of accessibility errors showing on each site.

• Hillary 6 errors
• Obama 8 errors
• Rudy 8 errors
• Mitt 3 errors
• Biden 5 errors
• Dodd 8 errors
• Richardson 4 errors
• Vilsack 8 errors (I know, "who?")
• Edwards 2 errors
• McCain 4 errors

Now, I would encourage you to do your own testing and see if there are things that I am missing. And, I would challenge the accessible web community to raise their voices on this one.

Oh, and BTW, the most common area where accessibility errors were found were in the labeling of the input boxes - you know those places where you write down how much money you are going to send to the campaign and where you enter your e-mail address so they can send you propaganda for the next 22 months....

~john b

Winter in the Northland

Now is it our turn to act hysterical.

We have a snowstorm in the forecast for 12+ inches of snow here in Augusta tomorrow into Thursday. There are already parking bans and school closings and the first flake is 12 hours away.

What a bunch of wimps.

~j