A County Down man who was pulled alive from the wreckage of a plane crash which killed 47 people is to meet the man who rescued him…. From BBC News. Full story

This site may contain information about: holiday travel. The blog is also related to: discount flights.

URL : http://www.flashgame-girl.com/Puzzle-board/Crash-Down.html

Game description :

cick on a group of 3 or more of the same coloured squares to remove them.

Game controls :

Use mouse to interact.

Okay, as you probably know by now: I’m a fan of Superman Returns. I may or may not be listening to the soundtrack right now.  But YOU probably hated it so now I have to think of who else I’d want to direct another Superman movie. Fortunately, since V for Vendetta, James McTeigue, director of the upcoming Ninja Assassin, has been at the top of my list, and, pretty much since V for Vendetta came out, he hasn’t stopped talking about what HE would do with the movie.  And what would HE do with a Superman movie?  Well to  sum it up for him:  make it awesome.  And I’m okay with that.  Read more!

Next up on my fanboy wishlist is Len Wiseman, director of Live Free of Die Hard.  I don’t know what the hell he’s been up to since and I’m too lazy to look it up (I lied — not much.)   I’d also be interested in somebody like Paul Haggis getting a crack at a tent-pole like Superman.  Or I might give up my first born for Alfonso Cuarón.

If given the opportunity to post a pic of V on my blog, I'll take it.

Today was the first day we were supposed to be rock climbing in gym class. We learned how to tie all of the knots and attach them to our harnesses but as soon as we were supposed to get on the wall the teacher told us we didn’t have time and we had to go change. I was kind of mad but in the end it doesn’t matter because we get to climb for the rest of the week anyway. Then after school I had a volleyball practice and I also had a throbbing headache. It wasn’t the most fun practice I’ve ever had lets just leave it at that. When I got home I tried to go onto my computer to get the newest podcasts onto my iPod. That didn’t happen my computer is busted. No idea what is wrong with it, it wont even boot to windows. Talk about annoying. I tried everything I know how to do to fix it but nothing worked. Now I have to do everything on my laptop which at times is very annoying. I guess that’s just how it goes I’m hoping something magical happens overnight and it works again but until then I’m stuck with the slow laptop…

http://goerie.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20091116/NEWS02/311169924

Crea was cited by university police for drunken driving, careless driving and underage drinking after he was seen and admitted to driving through a university parking lot at about 40 mph just after 3 a.m. on Nov. 3.

Crea had not yet responded to the charges before Edinboro District Judge Denise Stuck-Lewis, university police Chief Thomas Nelson said.

“He might have been found guilty, or not guilty,” Nelson said.

Did he get a DUI but nothing happened?

My new car! She’s purdy. Now she needs a name.

A car gets a flat tire in the passing lane of a freeway. The driver puts the hazards on, but five other cars still manage to hit the disabled vehicle causing a pile up. This crash wasn’t caused by text messaging, but the one a mile back in the traffic caused by the pile up was.

17 year old Laurie Cartwright was likely distracted by a text message when she hit the tractor-trailer in front of her that was stopped in traffic from the crash caused by the disabled car a mile up the road. The crash took Laurie’s life. In fact, last year nearly 6,000 people died from distracted driving, many from cell phone/texting.

Last year nearly 6,000 people died from distracted driving.

Screen shot from the gruesome UK PSA on texting while driving

Laurie’s story is one that is shared by many people across the United States. Yet despite personal experience, the wide-spread acknowledgment that texting while driving is dangerous, and even gory PSAs warning against the practice, a new study by the Pew Institute shows that one-in-three teens text while they drive. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. Similar studies done in specific states such as Colorado and Texas have also shown even higher percentages of texting teens. If anything, the study should say “Texting while driving decreases among teen drivers.

A more disturbing fact found in the Pew study is that many teens confessed that they have seen their parents text while drive.  One teen said his dad drives “like he’s drunk. His phone is just like sitting right in front of his face, and he puts his knees on the bottom of the steering wheel and tries to text.” How can we expect our children to drive safely when this is the example we put before them?

The other problem here is the feeling of invincibility most teens have.

Try this experiment if you disagree with me. Ask any new driver how they think they compare to other drivers on the road. Chances are they will tell you that they are better than the average driver. You know, and I know, that based on the amount of experience they’ve had behind the wheel the chances of them being better than average are pretty slim, unless they are some driving prodigy. Despite this, most teens suffer from delusions of grandeur when it comes to their driving ability, and it shines through in the type of crashes they are involved in (typically caused by following too close, speeding and distractions.)

One teen in the Pew study said,  “I usually try to keep the phone up near the windshield, so if someone is braking in front of me or stops short, I’m not going to be looking down and hit them.” another said “it’s fine” to text and drive, and that he wears sunglasses while doing it “so the cops don’t see”

How do you overcome a false sense of skill and get it across to kids that what they are doing is bad? One thing to do is to show them how much texting does effect their awareness and reaction time. Unless you have professional driving instructors teaching this is best done outside of the car. Another option is to look at software that turns phones off while driving, such as Zoomsafer. Parents need to reenforce the dangers of this practice and set rules.

Here are some take aways from the Pew study:

• 52 percent of teens ages 16 and 17 who have cell phones say they have talked on their phones while driving.
• 34 percent of teens ages 16 and 17 who text say they have done so while driving.
• 48 percent of teens ages 12 to 17 say they have been in a car when the driver was texting.
• 40 percent of teens ages 12 to 17 say they have been in a car when the driver “used a cell phone in a way that put themselves or others in danger.”
• 75 percent of teens ages 12 to 17 have a cell phone, and 66 percent of them send or receive text messages.
• Boys and girls are equally likely to report to texting while driving.
• Many teens blame the need to report their whereabouts to friends and parents as the reason for texting while driving.

Tenho sempre algumas dúvidas quando o enredo de um filme é passado para um conceito de série em televisão, dúvidas essas que se acentuaram nos últimos tempos com algumas desilusões como a série baseada em “Crash”. Existe sempre uma tendência para banalizar grandes ideias e grandes argumentos.
Talvez neste caso do “Exorcista”, que é um dos meus filmes preferidos (assim como o livro), esse risco possa não ser tão acentuado, uma vez que o projecto assenta quer no autor do livro, quer no realizador do filme. Contudo, talvez a tentativa de levar algumas partes do filme mais longe possa entrar em choque com uma certa simplicidade crua que o filme possui, mantendo quer o argumento quer a realização focados no essencial, e que a meu ver é um dos seus grandes trunfos.
Um projecto a seguir com atenção.

Three schoolgirls are injured when a tractor carrying a hay bale tears through the top deck of their school bus…. From BBC News. Full story

This site may contain information about: education school district. The blog is also related to: home school.

A 70-year-old driver killed in a collision with a petrol tanker near Wimborne was a teacher from Bournemouth…. From BBC News. Full story

This site may contain information about: instructional. The blog is also related to: teach charter.

My entire life I had a feeling I would be “found out.” Like I was living a secret life that belonged to someone else and one day someone would expose me and demand to know who I really am. My anxiety arose when I knew that I wouldn’t be able to tell them because I didn’t know who that ”real person” was at all.

I’ve lived my life, squished down. Living a “normal” life that is wonderful and happy in all of its convention only then shaken to acknowledge that this is not all I am supposed to be.

The fear to do something bigger, something important, was so great that I ran or shall we say drove so fast and distracted having one car crash after another for the past year, culminating in me rapping my vehicle around a pole last week. In every accident, no one but me was hurt, banged and bruised badly, but alive, spared to live another day.

The reason, He is not allowing me to run any more; I must do bigger things and not just be ”happy.”

I am listening. Lesson learned! Enough. Fear will not keep me from finding out what it is I am here to do. I am ready to get ready to do what I’m here to do. It’s big. Oh boy, it’s big and I don’t know what it is but I’m ready to stand up and stop squashing myself down. I’m still here, starring life in the face. There’s so much of it to live. Thank you.

I’ve been found out.

The quality of this video kind of  sucks, toward the end, some dude driving a Ferrari California in Sofia, Bulgari screws up and slams into a bulldozer. Oops.

[streetfire id=93f2187b-8c96-41c1-82a2-9cc20092e8d9 w=428 h=352]

“We Love Russia!

Songs:
1st song: Goga – bobi-boba (thanks gawchik)
2nd song: Ветер с Моря Дул – Натали (thanks wbitkownik11)”

Having a laugh! Very entertaining. Thanks!

Credits to twisternederland2 & Video Creator.

Weather forecasting and stock forecasting are similar in many ways. The TV weatherman tells you about today and tomorrow, and then, gives you a 7-day forecast. How many times has the 7-day forecast been wrong – and WHY?  Read on !

Trick or Tweet? That question is not intended to remind you of what you hear on Halloween, when your neighbor’s kid knocks on your door and asks the annual question with a lisp.

We recently finished Halloween shenanigans, where kids disguise themselves as fictional characters and knock on doors in their neighborhood, traditionally asking if you’d like to give them a treat or risk a less enjoyable alternative. The question raised in this post, however, is whether use of social media, and Twitter in particular, is a bit of the same situation. Is Twitter being touted as a viable emergency notification system when it is not fit for that important purpose? A companion question might be whether we, as customers (i.e. The “Twitterati”), are putting pressure on this social media channel to transform itself into something for which it was not originally intended.

Many schools may start using social media channels, such as Twitter and Facebook as a more regular part of their emergency notification program. A variety of vendors are coming up with way to make this happen.

In a move that plenty of other institutions are sure to follow, Oregon’s Pacific University has integrated its emergency notification system with the popular social networking sites Facebook and Twitter. The move allows the 3,100-student university to send emergency messages to students via e-mail, RSS feed, or text message to mobile phones, Blackberries, wireless PDAs, pagers, and smart or satellite phones–and now Twitter or Facebook.

The university subscribes to an emergency notification system from Omnilert’s e2Campus that allows administrators to send a single message to a designated list of recipients on a variety of devices and in various formats. In November, e2Campus added Twitter and Facebook as options–and Pacific University was the first institution to jump on board.

University Links Twitter, Facebook with Notification System

My last post, Did Twitter Replace Cell Phones for Ft. Hood Shooting News?, mentioned that even the military recommended Twitter as an emergency information source, when a sudden surge in emergency traffic crashed the civilian cell phone system in the Ft. Hood area. As a country, the United States has been blessed with fewer natural disasters than many countries. Clearly, we are still trying to digest the disaster preparedness and recovery lessons from far-reaching events like hurricane Katrina, which likewise disrupted cell phone traffic in a number of ways. Is Twitter any better?

Matt Williams, Assistant Editor of Government Technology Magazine, posted an interesting article, mentioning some of the many uses the U.S. government is making of Twitter:

When Twitter’s founders launched the service in 2006, they advertised it as a way to keep abreast of friends’ everyday lives. The idea of “tweeting” in short bursts about mundane details – “I’m watching Dancing with the Stars!” – may seem narcissistic, or pointless. But a loyal following has found novel and unexpected applications for the service. This movement includes government agencies, which are use Twitter for various functions, such as real-time alerts about emergencies, election results and even science projects.

The most practical government applications for Twitter are in public safety and emergency notification. For example, the Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) updates its Twitter page with bulletins about structural fires, the number of responding firefighters, and injuries and casualties. A typical post is something like: “12126 Burbank Bl* No ‘formal’ evacuations; Firefighters maintaining 500′ exclusion zone pending LAFD Hazmat arrival…”

“The question really would be, why not do Twitter?” asked Bill Greeves, the county’s IT director. “It is 140 characters, so granted, you are limited in the message you put on there. But we’re not creating content for Twitter; we’re creating content to send out a message to the public, and we’re just taking advantage of the latest and greatest channels available.”

The beauty of it, Greeves said, is that if something better replaces Twitter or it all falls out of vogue, it won’t hurt the bottomline.

Governments use Twitter for Emergency Alerts, Traffic Notices and More

Williams’ article notes that one of the major hurdles to greater government use of Twitter may be “viewership,” but it appears even the U.S. State Department has taken note of Twitter’s potential use in an international context. An article by Lev Grossman, Iran Protests: Twitter, the Medium of the Movement, points out:

The U.S. State Department doesn’t usually take an interest in the maintenance schedules of dotcom start-ups. But over the weekend, officials there reached out to Twitter and asked them to delay a network upgrade that was scheduled for Monday night. The reason? To protect the interests of Iranians using the service to protest the presidential election that took place on June 12. Twitter moved the upgrade to 2 p.m. P.T. Tuesday afternoon — or 1:30 a.m. Tehran time.

So what exactly makes Twitter the medium of the moment? It’s free, highly mobile, very personal and very quick. It’s also built to spread, and fast. Twitterers like to append notes called hashtags — #theylooklikethis — to their tweets, so that they can be grouped and searched for by topic; especially interesting or urgent tweets tend to get picked up and retransmitted by other Twitterers, a practice known as retweeting, or just RT. And Twitter is promiscuous by nature: tweets go out over two networks, the Internet and SMS, the network that cell phones use for text messages, and they can be received and read on practically anything with a screen and a network connection.

This makes Twitter practically ideal for a mass protest movement, both very easy for the average citizen to use and very hard for any central authority to control. The same might be true of e-mail and Facebook, but those media aren’t public.

This use of Twitter in a mass crisis has apparently not gone without notice at headquarters. Twitter co-founder, Evan Williams, in comments to the BBC about the Iran-related maintenance delay said:

“We did it because we thought it was the best thing for supporting the information flow there at a crucial time, and that’s kind of what we’re about – supporting the open exchange of information.

“So it seemed like the right thing to do.”

Twitter Iran delay ‘not forced’

Is Twitter the new boss in social media town? Even networks like LinkedIn seem to be trying to attach themselves to it, as Taylor Singletary points out in his article on the LinkedIn blog, You want Tweets? There’s an App for that…:

As you’ve likely heard by now, we launched our first Twitter integration features at LinkedIn earlier this week.  For professionals who want to make Twitter part of their professional identity, you can now easily add your Twitter account to your LinkedIn profile, and seamlessly post LinkedIn status updates to Twitter, and vice-versa.

This launch also brings with it a brand new addition to the LinkedIn application platform: Tweets.

Tweets is an application that allows you to seamless integrate basic Twitter functionality into your LinkedIn experience.

Twitter itself, however, is not immune from interruption of service. Last August, it was the subject of an apparent denial of service attack. Eliot Van Buskirk’s article on Wired gives a nice outline of the event:

Twitter was shut down for hours Thursday morning by what it described as an “ongoing” denial-of-service attack, silencing millions of Tweeters. It was the first major outage the service has suffered in months and possibly the first ever due to sabotage. The outage appeared to begin mid-morning, EST, and affected users around the world. After about three hours, the service was coming back online in fits and starts.

In a denial-of-service attack, a malicious party barrages a server with so many requests that it can’t keep up, or causes it to reset. As a result, legitimate users can only access the server very slowly — or not at all, as appears to be the case here.

Not only was the site down, but client applications that depend on the Twitter API could also not connect to the service, creating a complete Twitter blackout. According to June ComScore numbers Twitter has more than 44 million registered users and its user base has been growing rapidly for months as it becomes better known in the mainstream.

Denial-of-Service Attack Knocks Twitter Offline

Twitter’s statement was, of course, less verbose:

We are defending against a denial-of-service attack, and will update status again shortly.

Update: the site is back up, but we are continuing to defend against and recover from this attack.

Update (9:46a): As we recover, users will experience some longer load times and slowness. This includes timeouts to API clients. We’re working to get back to 100% as quickly as we can.

Update (4:14p): Site latency has continued to improve, however some web requests continue to fail. This means that some people may be unable to post or follow from the website.

Ongoing denial-of-service attack

Some, such as Roberta Whitty, a member of the Gartner blog network, clearly feel it dangerous for organizations to rely upon Twitter:

The denial of service attack on Twitter should remind organizations that are automating their emergency call trees and crisis communications that a single end point isn’t good enough. Given the growth in social networking, more and more organizations are starting to think about leveraging these sites for emergency/crisis communications. But if it becomes your only end point, you risk not getting your message out when it is most needed – during a disaster.  In addition, no national telcom network has been tested for a regional disaster, so your phone messages might not get delivered either. Hence, build for emergency notification around multiple channels for best coverage. What is your organization doing to support best coverage?

Don’t Rely Only on Twitter for Emergency Notification

One must also wonder how the continuous barrage of scams might impact use of any form of social media as an emergency notification system. Michael Arrington’s article, Facebook To Increase Enforcement Of Anti-Scam Rules, points out:

Facebook says that deceptive ads are a widespread problem on the Web…

Anyone who doesn’t engage in scammy behavior right now is at a monetization disadvantage. There are real similarities between this issue and steroid use in baseball. As long as the MLB didn’t really enforce steroid use among players, it was a competitive necessity to take the drugs, and so many more players took them than otherwise would.

We know that companies such as Microsoft are the target of frequent attacks by hackers. Some of these may have gained insider knowledge as employees of their targets and are thus extraordinarily effective in their destructive efforts. How could any governmental entity, however, think it might be less likely to attract detractors?

Referring to last Augusts’ attacks against both facebook and Twitter, Ryan Singel’s article noted:

They don’t make any sense.

“I’m afraid two outliers make a line and there is something going on… We have entered the third generation of denial of service attacks, and anyone that plans on the rationality of criminals is at risk.”

What does that mean? It means if you make the assumption that the bad guys online are just a new breed of bank robbers, that can get you into trouble if there are a few sociopaths mixed in.

The ongoing attacks Thursday on Facebook and the micro-publishing site Twitter likely involve tens of thousands of compromised computers under the control of a single person. Likely the attack involves asking the sites to serve up a page of search results, or some other processor-intensive requests. That makes it hard to determine if the request is a real user action or a malicious fake.

Is There Rhyme or Reason to the Attacks on Twitter?

As the title of another of Ryan Singel’s articles tells us:

Security experts say the attacks on Twitter and Facebook are nothing new under the sun and that Distributed Denial of Service Attacks — which render a web server useless to real users by overwhelming the server with fake requests, are commonplace on the net. DDoS (pronounced dee-daas) attacks are usually carried out using a zombie army of infected Windows computers known as a botnet, where the controller tells the infected computers what site to bombard with requests.

“This kind of stuff happens every day, but when it happens on Twitter, people don’t know what to do with their thumbs,” said Paul Ferguson, a senior threat researcher for security giant Trend Micro.

And so far there’s nothing to indicate there’s anything particularly interesting about the attack from a technical perspective, according to security expert Tom Byrnes, the founder of ThreatStop, a network security company.

“Taking something down on the web is garden variety vandalism,” Byrnes said. “They aren’t doing anything new … someone has a botnet and they are just pounding on Twitter and Facebook.”

Twitter, Facebook Attacks No Surprise to Security Experts

So how do we reconcile these events? The government is recommending use of social media channels for emergency notification purposes. Schools and other organizations are rapidly adopting it as a significant part of their own emergency systems. At the same time, however, disgruntled employees and political activists are focusing their efforts at bringing down these emerging communication giants, and are doing so with amazing success.

If a single hacker can bring down the Twitter and Facebook networks, what damage could be done by a terrorist organization or, perhaps one of the many rogue nations we face in our global village? We can certainly hope these social media moguls will learn their lesson from these attacks and spend more of their effort on making these networks secure. We also know that, historically, the hackers often seem to be at least one step ahead of law enforcement, network security experts, and others upon whom we rely for protection.

We have likewise read stories about illegal probing of military and infrastructure networks, including those designed to make our nuclear facilities secure. Might we not anticipate that at least some of this probing may be leading up to attempts at breaching the defenses being tested. Sure, some of this may just be teens with too much computer time on their hands, or political dissidents whose focus in on something other than world destruction. On the other hand, are we setting ourselves up for the big bang by increasing our reliance upon social media for emergency news, rather than what this media was intended for originally?

That’s what I think. Please leave a comment and let us know what you think.

If you are really interested, I just started yet another free group on LinkedIn, Social Media Search and Forensics. Many of these articles and discussion about them are posted there. Please join us.

hello youtubespacebookmyfacewordpresstwitter. i filled my belly up with chicken. now i am emptying my belly in the form of popular song. a friend of mine says that i should talk more about more about popular topics on my blog so, adhering to that, i wrote a story:-

balloon boy and sarah palin went for a walk together one lovely, sunny afternoon in washington d.c. ms palin, ever the philanthrope, had adopted young falcon after his mummy and daddy were banged up in incarceration with conrad black, bernie madoff and friends, and young trig needed a playmate after the great majority of sarah’s other kids had gone off and had babies of their own.

on their rounds around the park, they met britney spears shaving her head, lou dobbs protesting immigration, and pete doherty skagging up for a hit of smack.

falcon said:

“ms palin, why’re you pretending to be my mommy? i want my real mommy!”

sarah palin replied:

“falcon, later when we get home you can look across the ocean and see russia from our house.”

“but ms palin all the kids at school are saying you only adopted me because you want a publicity hit?”

“now come on falcon…”

“but ms palin…”

“from now on you call me mommy!”

“the kids at school are saying you wanna become president in 2012 and are using me for publicity…..”

there was an uncomfortable silence.

the end.

is that enough key words for you?
is it?
hmmm, probably not. here’s to another day of 0 hits.

love,

john

this is from September.

This is from last week.

A man has died in a helicopter crash over farmland in Cheshire, say police…. From BBC News. Full story

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The hits just keep on coming, folks.  Up next, Washington looks to extend its reach to the country’s rail systems in a proposal by the Obama administration.  Apparently, they’re not satisfied with their unconstitutional control of banks, the auto industry, the energy industries, and health care.

by Michael Naragon

In a story that first surfaced Sunday in The Washington Post and was reprinted by FOXNews.com, President Obama’s subordinates have expressed a desire to get a grip on the nation’s rails.

Administration officials cite poor management and lack of oversight as their reasons for taking over the light-rail industry, which leads me to wonder: could the American people take back the federal government using the same line of logic?  Cities affected by the federal usurpation would include Chicago, New York, Atlanta, Los Angeles, and every other city, large or small, that uses a rail system, such as a subway.  Washington officials are using last summer’s Metro Red Line crash in D.C. to justify taking over the systems across the country.

“After the [Metro] train crash,” said Ray LaHood, Secretary of Transportation, “we were all sitting around here scratching our heads, saying, ‘Hey, we’ve got to do something about this.’  And we discovered that there’s not much we could do, because the law wouldn’t allow us to do it.”

It appears from the Post’s piece that the measure has at least some degree of bipartisan support, as two Republicans, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) and Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA), said the administration was right in raising concerns.  To be fair, Coburn did qualify his statement by saying the federal government should be limited in its regulation to rail lines that cross state lines.

It is striking that, after allowing our federal government to become so bloated and ineffective, that officials still have time to sit around and think about other areas they’d like to control, as if the federal government’s track record at regulation is so effective that they feel compelled to take over and fix things.  Does not the FAA regulate airlines?  Do we not still have incidents?  However, the pervasive school of thought in 21st century America is to give all our problems to Washington, where they can be solved.  Or, if not solved, at least buried so deeply in bureaucracy and political pandering that they become unsolvable problems and, therefore, are no longer our direct concern.  Comfortably numb, as Pink Floyd put it.