Earlier today, another reminder of the new world order we are now facing. A series of bombings rocked a packed commuter train near Madrid, Spain earlier today killing over 190 people and wounding over 1,000. This is exactly the nightmare scenario we faced in NYC following the events of September11th, but have nonetheless been spared so far. It is the worst terrorist attack on Spanish soil in history.
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Preliminary blame has been placed on the Basque separatist group ETA, though only time will tell if they acted alone in this atrocity or even at all.
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Seeing the protests and peace rallies in Seville and Madrid remind me a little of my college days when I spent a semester in Seville, in early 1988. There were a number of peace rallies against the Cold War and the large American military presence at the time. However, these protests were part of the reshaping of society following the end of Fascism and integration with the West during the end of the Cold War.
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Historically Spain has sat at the crossroads of Western Europe, the New World, and the Middle East. Let us hope it can be on the crossroads of peace as well.
Friday, March 12, 2004
Wednesday, March 10, 2004
With cold weather making a brief return to the NYC metro area, I'd like to give my thanks to all those who keep transit running in even the worst weather. Reminds me of the "Blizzard of '96" which fell about two weeks after I first moved to Jersey City in mid-December, 1995. While people were x-country skiing down 5th Avenue (and boy was I unhappy I left my skis at my grandmother's farmhouse near Lake George, NY), the PATH train was the only thing running, between Grove Street station and 33rd Street. When the 22+ inches of snow were finally cleared and people ventured back out to work, rail was still the safest way to travel. Not that rail doesn't have its own issues in mixed sleet and ice, but it's a good alternative to the NJ Turnpike or other arterials when bad weather hits.
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Seems we're having an epidemic of obesity, or so they say, like you can just catch it in the air walking through [insert name of fast-food joint here]. Well maybe you can just catch it. I personally packed on quite a few pounds recently, between holiday eating and really lazy stuff like hopping on a bus with my Unlimited Metrocard just to go 5 blocks, with the rationale that it was faster. Have nobody to blame but me. Fortunately, using a fairly liberal reading of the South Beach diet allowed me to drop about 15 lbs in 6 weeks, but not clear yet how much of that was simply dehydration, and whether I'm about one lasagna dinner away from gaining it all back. Believe me, driving door to door only makes it worse, and doing the drive-through at your doughnut shop only exacerbates the problem. (Note use of GRE word.)
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Still at a standstill on this site. Have had extremely little spare computer time recently, and am pretty much forced to do content management via my handheld and hotsyncs. Email me or put a note in the Wiki if anyone's curious about how that works. That's the subject of a future article *someday*. Did I mention I have two toddlers at home? Once I can learn how to cut into the 5 hours of sleep a night I'm still getting, I'll try to get back to work on this stuff. :) The planned migration into mySQL and PHP is going a bit slow, and now that I found out that SQL Server has some kind of proprietary XPath extensions to SQL that'll allow hybrid SQL/XML queries, I'm rethinking the migration until later this year or even next year. Just too many projects at once for an unpaid venture!
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Seems we're having an epidemic of obesity, or so they say, like you can just catch it in the air walking through [insert name of fast-food joint here]. Well maybe you can just catch it. I personally packed on quite a few pounds recently, between holiday eating and really lazy stuff like hopping on a bus with my Unlimited Metrocard just to go 5 blocks, with the rationale that it was faster. Have nobody to blame but me. Fortunately, using a fairly liberal reading of the South Beach diet allowed me to drop about 15 lbs in 6 weeks, but not clear yet how much of that was simply dehydration, and whether I'm about one lasagna dinner away from gaining it all back. Believe me, driving door to door only makes it worse, and doing the drive-through at your doughnut shop only exacerbates the problem. (Note use of GRE word.)
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Still at a standstill on this site. Have had extremely little spare computer time recently, and am pretty much forced to do content management via my handheld and hotsyncs. Email me or put a note in the Wiki if anyone's curious about how that works. That's the subject of a future article *someday*. Did I mention I have two toddlers at home? Once I can learn how to cut into the 5 hours of sleep a night I'm still getting, I'll try to get back to work on this stuff. :) The planned migration into mySQL and PHP is going a bit slow, and now that I found out that SQL Server has some kind of proprietary XPath extensions to SQL that'll allow hybrid SQL/XML queries, I'm rethinking the migration until later this year or even next year. Just too many projects at once for an unpaid venture!
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