CBC and Wargames

For those of you that actually know me and don’t just lurk on my blog, you know that one of my favorite movies is Wargames (and the Karate Kid, damn you Will Smith!). Anyway, a few nights ago, I couldn’t sleep, so I started watching some news video on Yahoo! News and stumbled upon this story (sorry if the video is no longer there). Interesting story about a Russian space rocket part landing in Canada. At around the 0:50 point in the story, the reporter talks about a conversation he had with NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command). There’s a representative image of NORAD on the left of the video screen.

Whoa.

That looks an awful lot like what I remembered from Wargames. Here’s a screengrab from the NORAD set of Wargames from Wikipedia.

Despite the $1m cost of the Wargames NORAD set (according to the Wikipedia entry), it really looks nothing like the real thing, according to the NORAD website’s image gallery. Here are a few samples.

And I thought I only liked the CBC for Hockey Night in Canada…

Driving through a thunderstorm

The red band of thunderstorms is between us and St. Louis

Marco and I (or at least I; Marco entertains me by talking to me about it) have always watched weather radar, waiting for the colors indicating harder rain to hit us. I watch it because I like the rain and Marco and I like to drive on flooded roads in our trucks, but I digress…

We rarely get the “red” radar images in the Bay Area. The weather radar uses colors from green to indicate light rain, to yellow to orange to red to indicate severe rain. Bernadette and I are in Jefferson City, Missouri visiting her family for Christmas and the Sharks happened to be playing in St. Louis this weekend. It’s a two hour drive from here to St. Louis, which we always have to take in order to get to and from the airport. This time, however, there was a severe band of thundershowers between us and St. Louis, including flash flood warnings and tornado watches. Good stuff.

There’s not much to this story aside from us driving through some of the hardest rain I’ve ever been in, but there are several things I noticed during the drive:

• Missouri highways are very well maintained; I remember when I lived in Washington and was driving west on I-90 between Issaquah and Eastgate. There was some pouring rain and I started to hydroplane in the tire ruts. Granted, I probably had nearly bald tires on my old Honda Accord, but that’s a different story.
• On the two-lane I-70 highway, drivers are quite good about keeping to the right except to pass.
• There are many idiots that don’t drive with their lights on when it’s raining; sure this is now a law in California (and in several other states), but it’s common sense.
• I only saw one Prius. I feel like on my 10 mile commute to work, I see no less than a dozen Priuses… I’ll have to count next time

Somehow I figured this would be more interesting when I thought about writing it vs me actually writing it now. Sorry about that. I do have a queued post in my head about car taillight colors, though. I know everyone’s excited about that.

Thank You Yahoos!

 

Thank You Yahoos!, originally uploaded by Kelly Hirano.

Yesterday at work, a wonderful thing happened. Again.

Every year, Yahoo!’s around the world get a holiday present. In the past, the present has ranged from a custom Yahoo!opoly game to a Yahoo! blanket to a jacket to a sleeping bag. What I don’t think many people realize is that this gift isn’t from the company, it’s directly from our founders, Jerry and Filo. In fact, it’s so direct that they walk around the campus and hand out these gifts directly to employees. Say what you want about their leadership of the company, but their generosity and genuine concern for us is awesome.

Last year, every employee was given $100 to donate to charity. Given the company situation, economy, etc, this year that number was reduced to $50. However, given around 14,000 employees, that’s around $700k that various charities will receive that they wouldn’t have received otherwise. Thanks to some internal campaigning (and knowing that Chuck once worked on this project) I selected a few teachers from DonorsChoose.org to receive my donation. There are so many charities out there, but with DonorsChoose you know your money goes directly to a teacher who has a specific desire to make the lives of their students better.

Given all of the bad press that gets out there about Yahoo!, positive news is always nice. Thanks, Jerry and Filo!