Otherwise you might wake up dead like this guy:
Andreous Robinson, 20, went outside around 1 a.m. and shot a few rounds into the air. Police said Mr. Robinson then came back inside and thought that he’d discharged all of the rounds, so he put the gun to his head and pulled the trigger, said Sgt. Bruce McDonald, a homicide officer.
Mr. Robinson was taken to Parkland Memorial Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Nothing is more admirable than the fortitude with which millionaires tolerate the disadvantages of their wealth.
I wrote and lost a long post about this. Thankfully I don’t have to rewrite it because someone else has written it for me. Nick Coleman has an oped piece that speaks exactly to my point. His is called Gussets, public servants both let Minnesota down.
There was nothing “routine” about the bridge, including its inspections. It had so many problems that it was the most-inspected bridge in Minnesota and engineers were openly worried (according to a story in this paper Aug. 19) about the dangers of a collapse.
Inspections did find that many of the gussets were corroded and thinning, plus a host of other significant problems ranging from cracks and missing bolts to a tilted bridge pier and frozen expansion rollers.
The question isn’t whether the original designers were distracted by thoughts of Marilyn Monroe as they were planning the bridge.
The question is why wasn’t the bridge closed, or fixed, by those in charge now?
But the gussets are a godsend to officials who want the public to believe they had no idea the bridge was in jeopardy and there was nothing that could have been done about it.
The gusset plate problem means that there was too much weight on the bridge. The notion that it was impossible to determine that the bridge was unsafe is false. It’s possible and perhaps likely that under a Democratic governor, the same thing would have happened. But maybe not. The Republican ideology of starving the government of resources creates a system where the cheapest solution always wins.
Whether it was Pawlenty’s fault or not is not my main concern. But somewhere along the line our processes failed us. Pawlenty’s administration seems to be saying that nothing could have prevented this. I don’t buy it.
Apparently Sun is going to buy MySQL. This could have huge implications not just for the mysql database but for open source in general. Sun isn’t a bad company, per se, and they have been embracing the open source model. I can see how this fits in nicely with their strategies for the future. MySQL, on the other hand, could benefit from having big brain hardware and software guys and a lot of commercial relationships with huge installs of expensive, legacy Sun equipment. So, their stock price to the contrary, Sun is probably not that bad of a partner for MySQL.
Sorry, I’m very pissed off right now because a long and thoughtful blog post was just deleted by Movable Type (MT) when I tried to save it. Literally, it was there when I hit save and gone from then on. It was very helpful that MT had an autosaved version that it deleted, apparently, as it saved the freshly erased content. There is nothing more annoying than having to rewrite something that you were perfectly happy with. Even the “back” button couldn’t save me (another pet peeve for another time).
This is Michael Koppelman’s web site. He puts stuff up here for people to look at. People like you, apparently. Â By reading this you just agreed to my Terms of Service. And, believe me, you don’t want to see my Terms of Service.
Actually, let’s get serious and abandon the third person. I’m an entrepreneur, a musician and an astronomer. I live with my lovely little family in Minneapolis, MN.
I blog about whatever I think in a mostly uncensored way. I don’t shy away from my words whatsoever, but realize that they are not meant for every context. You are, in essence, listening in on my private thoughts so cut me some slack. 🙂
My BFF and A-list blogger Chuck Olsen is involved with The Uptake, a citizen journalism project that is doing some great work and getting some nice attention. I’d encourage you to turn off CNN and turn on grass-roots journalism like this during the upcoming 11 months of election frenzy.
According to my Google Analytics reports, here were my most read posts in 2007:
lolife 