Tag: In The News

Christmas trees removed at Sea-Tac (from Seattle PI) — *sigh*. Seriously? This is beyond lame.

Edit 12/12: Looks like they finally got some common sense. The Christmas Trees are back.

This took me by surprise… My hometown, Eden Prairie, is ranked #10 out of 100 for Best Places to live by CNNMoney.com. How cool is that?

This past Saturday night the last residental home on Eastlake Ave E was moved off of its lot, thru a parking lot, and onto a barge. The Seattle PI has a photo slideshow of the event as well as an article. So, in short, this is what is going on:

The yellow, 3,000- square-foot house had been lifted and then rolled on a dolly with wheels as big as airplane tires from the spot where it had sat since 1908 (since before there was even an Eastlake Avenue East), down to within a hundred feet from where a barge waited to carry it to the San Juan Islands.

Pretty dang impressive if you ask me. It was a huge house and there wasn’t a lot of space to move it.

Recently, for some reason or another, schools, parents, and the media have found out about teenagers habits on line and are beginning to use their postings as leverage against them (see this MSNBC article: “District to monitor students’ MySpace pages”). Mainly, these issues revolve around one site, Myspace.com. This shouldn’t come as any surprise to anybody who posts material on line on a semi-regular basis, uses a search engine, or understands how the Internet works. With the arrival of search engines like Google, MSN, and Yahoo!, it is fairly easy to find personal information for people who wish to post it on line. And, if you put it all in one place, like Myspace.com, it’s made even easier to find. Now, where this information gets used can sometimes be disturbing (see NBC’s To Catch a Predator series), enlightening, and informative. Continue reading “Schools and the Internet”

Today in the PI there’s an article about Seattle thinking about installing cameras at intersections to detect cars that run red lights. What’s funny, to me at least, is that in Minnesota they’ve had these cameras up for a little bit, but the ACLU (and some angry drivers) got involved and claimed that drivers were not given due process. That, and you can’t tell who is driving, so ticketing the owner, isn’t really the best approach. So, a judge temporarily shut them down. In my opinion, if you’re caught running a red light, you’re caught. Deal with it. Now, if we all had RFID implanted in us they’d be able to tell who it is driving. But, implanting RFID and letting the government have access to that is an entirely different can of worms.

If you are a smoker, tonight is the last night of your free reign on smoking in public places. At 12:01 Thursday morning the Smoking Ban, which was passed by a 2:1 margin on November’s ballot will go into effect. This means, that you can no longer smoke in public places or 25 feet around an entrance to them. The Seattle Times has a nice Q&A up that covers the basic details of the ban. Here’s an excerpt:

Q: But I’ll still have my smoking sections and patios in restaurants and bars, right?

A: Nope. Those are considered workplaces and public places. What’s more, the few cigar rooms and hookah bars in the state must follow the law, too.

Q: Holy smokes! When does this ban go into effect?

A: 12:01 a.m. Thursday. Yes, that means if you are sitting in a bar late tonight, you can light up at midnight, but you’ll only have a minute to smoke it.