Jason Griffey

…shiver me timbers, it’s Talk Like a Pirate Day. If ya be needed me, I’ll be on the mizzenmast, sippin’ my lot o’ grog. Arrrrr…….

Or, in our case, The Real Paul Jones. Via Justinsomnia, of course.

He finally caved, after two years of Justin, Jean and I bugging him about one. 🙂 Paul, if you’re reading this, why did you finally give in and become a blogger?

In other random online news, two of my favorite librarians are guest blogging over at Commons-Blog. Head over and say hello to Jessamyn and Eli.

It’s been way too long between posts. I started my new job as Web Specialist for Middle Tennessee State University this week. I’ll be assisting with oversight on the homepage, as well as consulting with faculty on their web projects. So far, I’ve just barely gotten a handle on the layout of their stuff…everywhere has a different workflow, and a different way of doing things. Not to mention different capabilities. Gotta learn that not everywhere is up on the whole PHP/MySQL method of web development. 🙁

Overall, I think it’s gonna go well. I’m guaranteed to learn a lot, and that’s still something.

From Wired, Dick’s latest inane commentary, along with a zinger from everyone’s favorite VP candidate, John Edwards.

“Is Dick Cheney trying to prove he’s hip to the internet? Speaking Thursday in Cincinnati, Cheney downplayed recent negative economic indicators, such as unemployment rates and consumer spending, because they miss an important source of income for Americans: eBay. “That’s a source that didn’t even exist 10 years ago,” Cheney said. “Four hundred thousand people make some money trading on eBay.” Let’s hope these folks aren’t selling off their belongings to stay afloat. John Edwards, the Democratic VP challenger, responded: “If we only included bake sales and how much money kids make at lemonade stands, this economy would really be cooking.”
— Debra Jones”

Well, it’s that day again. I’m avoiding the TV today, just because I don’t really wanna see the footage repeated endlessly, with talking heads telling me that we should “remember.”

I hadn’t even planned to blog, but I started reading Fark, and they had linked to their original discussion thread on the day it happened, and re-reading that made me want to at least say something.

On 9.11.2001 I was at Kinko’s on Glenwood Ave in Raleigh, NC. I had opened that day, and so was there at like 6 or 6:30am. Early morning was slow, so I had various news sites open on the computer in the production area, reading while copiers hummed. Slowly everyone else filtered in for the workday, and we saw a few customers.

Then a customer came in, and said that she heard on the radio as she was pulling in that a plane had hit the WTC. We checked CNN, and sure enough, there were photos of the first tower smoking. There was a small TV in the back room…we all turned it on and crowded around it to find out what happened. I called Betsy at home, and told her to turn on the TV…she did, just about the time that we both watched the second plane hit.

After that, the day got seriously wierd. We were only minutes from Raleigh-Durham International, and on a major road, but the day got very quiet. No traffic, no planes, nothing. Just a lot of us staring at the TV, customers gathered around the counter to watch with us.

The oddest thing for me personally about that day is that I was supposed to fly to Atlanta…had a ticket and everything. My luggage was in the car. I was supposed to take off at 11 something in the morning for management training. Needless to say, I didn’t make it to the airport. I remember Betsy being very worried that I might go, before everything was locked down.

Now, on 9.11.2004, we’re in Sewanee, TN, and I’m appalled at the complete inappropriateness of things like this. Can’t say that I think our country has gotten any better since then. matter of fact, we’ve spiraled into something that I don’t even recognize as the US that I remember. Personal liberties and privacy have been given up for the illusion of security. We’re embroiled in a war in a country that had nothing to do with 9.11. I’m just hoping beyond hope that the upcoming election will result in something, anything that is better than the atrocity of a head of state we have now.

Today I took my first caving trip with the Sewanee Outing Program, to Grapevine Cave. It’s just off a part of the Domain called Lost Cove…not a huge cave (no one seemed to know a length, but I’d guess maybe a mile…probably less). Very nice though for a first trip. I’d call it an intermediate level trip, with LOTS of crawls, but very few squeezes. Very active, but not a lot of drip formations. Not sure if that’s due to a sandstone cap or if the cave is just young. Throughout the entire length, I probably only saw a dozen or so speleothems.

The interesting thing to me was that I was able to keep up with the 18 year olds IN the cave without issue. The climb out (several hundred feet of elevation in very little horizontal distance) was nasty, though. I felt pretty good, seeing as how I’m now almost double their age.

I’ve avoided political discussions on my blog, if only because they have a tendency to become vitriolic under certain circumstances.

But this is just unbelievable.

“It’s absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on Nov. 2, we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we’ll get hit again and we’ll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States.” – Dick Cheney

For the Vice-President to equate voting for the republican party with preventing terrorism is just vile. Lewis Black said it best when he said “Dick Cheney? I met Dick Cheney. I’ve never stood so close to evil.”

First we had the GmailFS, a hack which allows a Linux sytem to use Gmail space as its file system.

Now we’ve got Gallina, a Gmail based blogging system.

Google can’t possibly like this…it’s incredibly clever, but supplying free server space AND bandwidth just seems sub-optimal for them.

So we went car shopping last weekend, planning on hitting a few dealerships and seeing what kind of deal we could find.

The first stop was the Honda dealership in Chattanooga, where we were shown lines and lines of Honda CRV’s (the car that I had been sold on from the start…great reviews, good resale, last forever). After I asked for the “best price” they’d give me, I was shown a price a couple thousand below the MSRP on the car. Pretty good, I thought…except I’d done my homework. Thanks to Edmunds and Kelly Blue Book, I knew the invoice on the car, and that they desperately wanted rid of the 2004’s.

I countered with a price a couple hundred above invoice, and they agreed….so we are the proud owners of a new Honda CRV.

This is our first ever new car, so it’s a pretty cool thing for us.