Anyhow, the first story was on NPR Morning Edition on September 5, 2008 about Robert Morrow, the country coroner, dentist, and volunteer fireman.

The second story which was on the NPR Morning Edition on November 3, 2008 were various viewpoints about how people there were voting, and included interviews of a couple of friends of mine. Cool stuff!

Be sure to check out the photo galleries in both stories– great photos!

Stocks take a turn for the worse as investors scoff at the Fed’s decision to step in yet again, this time adding $3 bln in temporary reserves. At $35 bln (the sum of the first two repos), the Fed had already stepped in more aggressively than its actions following the 9/11 attacks to calm a nervous market.

Since a third injection is unprecedented, as such infusions typically only occur during a crisis, investors are again left wondering just how bad the subprime situation is and questioning whether or not an emergency rate cut would even be enough to avert a possible true credit crunch.

I’ve seen Jim Cramer go asplodey before, and mostly I just generally find him entertaining rather than taking his advice seriously at all, but he really went AWOL on CNBC about this same issue recently.

My assessors evaluation this year showed that my place has lost value, homes in the area are now selling for about 10-15% less than I paid four years ago, and many houses have gone to into foreclosure in this area. I’m still waiting to see what prices the homes that recently sold in a foreclosure auction went for wondering how much they will bring the value of my place down. I do somewhat regret buying a place when I was so young, but maybe it’s better in the long run to learn this lesson on a relatively inexpensive piece of property with a standard 30 year loan.

Early Sunday afternoon I started looking around on the interwebs about buying a Wii just for the hell of it. I found a couple of sites which tracked where you could by them online via RSS but I didn’t bookmark them. I’d read somewhere that you can sometimes come across them on Sunday’s because for whatever reason that’s when retailers have been putting them out lately, so I started calling around to see if they had any:

Super Target: “We won’t have a shipment of them for at least a couple of weeks. Even then it’s only a few”
Game Crazy: “No idea when we’ll get another shipment. Just try calling every few days, but it might be a few weeks.”
WalMart: “We had 5 in stock this morning, and I don’t think anyone has bought any yet.”

Wait. Woah, wtf, they have them in stock? I’d just got done selling a bunch of stuff on Craigslist and decided it would be my only chance in quite awhile to get one, so Linz and I hurried down there.

Me: “Hey, I called earlier and someone said you have Wii’s in stock?”
Walmart Lady: (lights up) “Yep, we do. Would you like me to go to the back and get you one?”
Me: “Yep!”

It was kind of crazy– since they weren’t out on the floor no one would have even known they were there. As it turns-out, I just got randomly lucky. Apparently they have been getting about 5 per week, which they usually put up for sale at midnight on Saturday. This past Saturday someone new was working and had no idea about this, so a bunch people came to buy them around that time and he told everyone that they didn’t have any.

As I was buying mine someone else was getting one as well, and you could tell a couple of other people were thinking about it too just because they had them in stock. The WalMart employee (an older woman) was actually all excited about it and it was because she had a Wii as well and got a kick out of someone finally discovering they had them in stock. She gave me a couple of good pointers on games to pick and what accessories I needed (this was definitely an unexpected purchase so I didn’t already know that stuff).

You can read all about how cool it is in other places, and yeah, it’s totally a blast. Lindsey and I played Wii Sports and Wii Play the rest of the afternoon until she needed to go home. So far I’ve mostly been playing Wii Sports– I also have Trauma Center but am waiting until Wii Sports starts getting a bit boring before playing it. Not sure what games I’ll buy next, but I have my eye on several.

I guess if I actually used the Twitter account I signed-up for a couple of months ago, this would be a good entry for that.

According to my server logs, two of the biggest fans of my Snacks On A Plane spoof are the US Department of Justice, and The Pentagon.

I also have a brother-in-law in Kansas who works for the local power company as a journeyman, and last I knew he hadn’t been home in 7 straight days. Nebraska and Kansas seemed to receive the brunt of the ice storms, while Baca County seemed to be hit the hardest by the snow.

It warmed up very nicely in Colorado Springs and Pueblo on Wednesday, so you may think that the danger is behind us for the storm battered southeastern plains.

But analysts are saying that ranchers can lose $2 billion in cattle in this storm. And that’s just the cattle industry.

Factor in collapsed buildings, people trapped in remote homes, businesses shut because they can’t get deliveries and customers can’t reach them, and a terrible disaster is looming.

Volunteers on snowmobiles, eight national guard helicopters, and even two F-16 spotter jets were involved in Wednesday’s frantic effort to save the cattle, who’ve been without food and water for a week now.

Another storm is expected to hit on Friday. The prediction is for minimal snowfall. However, wind could cause a ground blizzard, once again covering the roads that have already been plowed.

Nearly 3,000 people are still without power near Lamar and Walsh because of downed power lines caused by the storm.

However, things are looking up. Both Govenor Owens and US Senator Ken Salazar are asking that Bush declare the area a disaster area to start getting Federal assistance, and the National Guard has made it’s way down to the SE corner to help get crucial supplies in. A friend of mine that I grew-up with is in the National Guard and was actually headed back down to that area from Denver to go help with the work going on down there.

A lot of volunteers have made their way down there, including snowmobile clubs and various people trained for this sort of disaster. They’ve also got equipment from everywhere from Pueblo to the Denver International Airport helping to clear snow, and food shipments are starting to make their way there as well. All that I can really say is a big thank you to all of those who are helping out. If I felt there was something I could do other than get in the way and I wouldn’t get stuck myself, I’d head down to lend a hand.

Some updated media coverage:

• Crisis looms in snowed-in southeast Colorado – Currently the headline story for the Rocky Mountain News. Be sure to check out the slide show too.
• Race to find, feed cattle swirls across Colo. ranches
• Baca County digging out – Several good photos of Springfield CO, which is about 18 miles from my hometown of Walsh CO and is the county seat of Baca County.
• Groups scour southeastern Colorado for trapped cattle
• Situation on southeastern plains dire – Streaming video with this one.
• Ranchers Racing to Feed Livestock – More streaming video coverage here.
• Grocery Stores and Cattle Both Lacking Food

As for news and general life updates, I’ve really been very burnt-out on school (yet again) lately and decided to take a long break from it. It eats up all of my free time and between it and work it makes me very one dimensional. I’ll eventually go back like I always do, but I really need a break from it for awhile. I honestly struggle with whether or not I should finish. Part of me wants to take a few more of my CS theory classes and call it a day, and the other part wants to finish-up the degree and for some reason consider grad school.

I’ve started back up again on some minor projects around the house, and would finally like to start restoration/performance work on the Z in the Summer since I don’t plan on being back in school for at least a year. Lately I’ve also been poking around in Django as well as starting to browse through a Java certification book in my free time. I’ve been working in Java fairly exclusively (finally!) for a couple of months now and find myself enjoying it a lot more than doing scripting despite all of the falsehoods about how it’s “dead” now. Maybe it’s just because it’s a new tool, time will tell, but I find it actually enjoyable because of the tool support for it. That and I’m dealing with fun Computer Science problems like connection pooling and thread blocking rather than “can you make that phone red?” type boring bullshit.

Right now I’m on a needed two week break from teh works and am getting caught-up on a lot of things that I’ve been needing to get done.

Anyhow, I doubt I’ll write too many posts like this in the new blog as it keeps the stalkers a bit too informed. Not to mention, this isn’t a LiveJournal.

Oh, one other fleeting update after pulling an all-nighter to get this blog setup– it snowed.

I haven’t much touched the car since I bought it other than typical old car maintenance items (for the most part, I like doing all of my own work), so I’ll be kind of interested to see the comments it generates on it’s current state. Sometimes I want to leave it alone, other times I’m ready to do a few minor things to it.

For a little more about Autoblog, as far as I know it’s one of the most popular blogs about cars out there (each entry seems to generate tons of comments) and most gearheads who are also interweb nerds seem to read it. As for me, I’ve loved cars as long as I can remember and have owned at least two at a time for the past 8 years or so.

As for myself, I seem to end-up in a lot of old Kerouac haunts for whatever reason.