Friday, February 22, 2008

Get Your Head Around my Blue Morning

Recent NPR Song of the Day tracks for you:

You can stream them from NPR's site (which is linked from each song). I've sent Pandora an e-mail suggesting that they add the songs to their database. On that note, I always get a personal response from one of the people at Pandora whenever I send them a song suggestion. I think that's pretty cool.

Sunday, February 10, 2008

Showing your Grandview Colors...

Outside the Window at Stauf's, a white car was pulled over by a Grandview cop. The white car pulled over near a light, so the cop car stopped in the middle of the intersection. After about five minutes, the cop came out and walked toward the car. A black female was driving the car. After a few minutes of talking to the woman, they asked her to come out of the car, put cuffs on her, and put her in the cop car. She cooperated. No struggle. No argument. No violence.

By this time, two other cop cars had arrived. You can see all three of them in this picture (click for larger).
Here's a zoomed in version that shows the cop car blocking the intersection... (click for larger)
Eventually, the passenger (a black male) moved into the driver's seat, and another cop came and talked to him. After many minutes of talking to him, they asked the black male to get out of the car, and they frisked him (in 14 degree Fahrenheit weather). Eventually they let him get back into the car, but he had to get back into the passenger seat. Evidently, they didn't think he'd be going anywhere anytime soon.

During this whole time, a black child with a little red hat with a light blue winter jacket bounced around in the back seat, trying to figure out what was going on with the adults in the car.

During this whole event, two Stauf's regulars behind me recollected on how the Grandview cops only pull over "ratty cars" and "cars with black people in them". The word "profiling" was used.

Traffic has started to form behind the cop car blocking the intersection.

It'll be interesting to see how long this lasts. Good thing there are three police cars, at least two of which carry multiple police officers.

Like reading my horoscope...

In a comment on a previous post, I got a complaint that all of my new posts are about computer stuff only. Evidently, I'm much more entertaining when I talk about life.

A little after I left my job in Austin to start grad school, my boss left his job to go to grad school. His most recent post really resonates with me. As a bonus, Clay was always more entertaining than me, so I figured forwarding "you all" to his post would be even better than me taking the time to report on life in general.
From Clay's post:
Sundays are tough at the Menlo Park outpost of the Daigle/Box family. The psychology of it all is as follows: LL takes Sundays pretty badly because it means the weekend is almost over. So she regrets how, yet again, we failed to do anything fun or get any skinnier. For example, last night (which was a Saturday), she wanted to go see a movie, but instead we stayed home and ordered Chinese food, which accomplished neither the fun nor skinny parts of her goals. It is also on Sundays that LL notices the apartment isn't tidy and sometimes that can compound the feelings of not getting stuff done.

I on the other hand, don't mind Sundays that much. My low point actually comes on Friday when, yet again, I feel like I didn't make very much progress that week on school or research or whatever else.
(...continues...)

So, go read about Clay and LL's "Furniture repair!".

Friday, February 08, 2008

I've finally done it...

After 15 years, I've finally done it.

I've put set -o vi into my profile.

(Sam Cooke's "A Change Is Gonna Come," performed by James Taylor as in the West Wing episode, plays in the background)