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Randy Cassingham's BlogHistorical Details and Author's Notes from This is True® - the First For-Profit E-mail Publication (and Still Going Strong). |
Away From Work Archives
Road Trip
Before the snows return, I thought it was time to take a few days off and see some more of this incredible state. I turned off my computer last Tuesday and drove down to the southwest part of Colorado to see some places I had heard about.
Silverton is a tiny old mining town; you'd expect to see a picture of it in the dictionary under "quaint".
Road Trip Redux
Chelle, who didn't say where in the U.S. she was from, was one of many who wrote appreciative notes about last week's description of my vacation trip to Southwest Colorado.
"I loved your note about Ouray!" Chelle wrote. "I got to visit there over Christmas last year and... wow!! It was even amazing at night, as the layer of steam settled over the town, and driving in on the road above, Ouray was just a glowing disc below. My reason for seeking out this tiny town was that my favorite author, Ayn Rand, used it as the setting for 'Galt's Gulch', a hidden place in the mountains, in Atlas Shrugged."
Howdy from the Deep South
I've been in Georgia and South Carolina all week, there for my first time to attend a conference, eat my fill of seafood (hard to get in landlocked Colorado!) and enjoy a bit of Southern Hospitality.
Southerners really do know how to make good fried chicken (but watch out! I got a second-degree burn on my lip it was so dang hot!) And I got a taste of Krispy Kreme doughnuts.
Hit the Road, Jack
The True offices will be closed October 8-23 while I take a trip. This is True will still be coming out, so don't worry about getting your fix!
Where to? Eastern Europe. When I first started True, part of my plan was to do once-a-year trips to interesting places to immerse myself in a different culture ...and collect the local newspapers to do special issues of True. I got the idea on a trip to Canada, of all places. You might think that Canuck newspapers would be pretty similar to those in the U.S., but no: there are clear differences. I can't imagine how different other, non-English cultures, might be. By going there and collecting the newspapers, I can not only (perhaps!) work to sell True as a column to those newspapers, but also be in the culture so I can ask questions of locals in order to best understand what I read, and understand the context of what's "news" to the people there. And, of course, what's "weird"!
Art Imitating Life
I caught up this week with one of the few TV shows I'm watching -- the newest Star Trek series, Enterprise. The episode I saw this week had the ship come across a comet. A landing party went down to it, blasted out a crater, and took a core sample. (Nitpick for the producers: an 80km comet* doesn't produce full Earth gravity! Sheesh!)
Anyway, the entire concept is so much like real life, I have to mention it: the Deep Impact Mission just passed its critical design review. You may know I used to work at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Deep Impact is a JPL mission that will slam a probe into comet Tempel 1 on July 4, 2005. Mission planners expect the resulting crater will be about 90m wide and 30m deep (the comet itself is about 3km, or 1.9 miles around), yet even that impact isn't expected to change the comet's orbit at all**!
OK, Buddy, Where's the Fire?
Forest fire season has started in Colorado. Last week you may have seen pictures of the "Snaking" fire in the mountains west of Denver on the news. I volunteer for a special Red Cross team that provides communications in disasters (radios and cell phones don't work well in the mountains). I'm a "ham" -- no, not that kind of ham, an amateur radio operator! -- and hams in Colorado have set up some amazing radio systems that work quite well in the mountains.
Last week I and my wife (who is also a ham) pulled shifts to provide communications for the Red Cross -- from the shelter for the people evacuated from the fire areas, and from the fire command center, which is where the Red Cross gets most of its information about the fire to pass along to those evacuees.
Where There's Smoke, There's Fire
I was called out last week for Yet Another Wildfire, this time just over the county line from Boulder, about 20 minutes from my house. This time we weren't quite as lucky: one of the air tankers "bombing" the fire with retardant crashed, killing both of the crewmen aboard.
Hold Your Breath
Last week, I ran this paragraph:
It's very weird to call 911 to summon help, but I did so this weekend. We have a carbon monoxide alarm, and it was going off. Once may be a fluke, but after being reset it went off again, so I asked the fire department to swing by with a professional grade detector to see what they got -- and they found 250 ppm of CO, which is definitely NOT good. Luckily, levels in my office were low, but we opened a window, turned the furnace off, and I went back to work. The men in red called the gas company and a beleaguered guy being run ragged by emergency calls all over the county showed up about 5 hours later. I love it when a competent person shows up! We figured out that the furnace was not defective, but rather the problem was "my fault": my wife had been painting the walls while I was writing this week's column, and when she was done I turned on the attic fan to blow out the paint fumes. Since it was chilly outside the furnace had kicked on, but by then there was so much pressure from the attic fan that the furnace's vent pipe had a downdraft, which blew the CO fumes into the basement. Case solved, but we never would have known without that detector. The $40-60 they cost is well worth it. If you don't have one, give your family an early Christmas present: Get One!
A Bat Out of Hell
I moved this week, from just outside Boulder, Colorado, to rural Ridgway, Colorado, in gorgeous Ouray County. Actually, I'm not even in Ridgway (population: about 700; the entire county only has around 4,000), but outside town, on a mesa looking at two mountain ranges. I've long said that as a writer and online publisher, I can live anywhere I want -- so why was I in a city when I truly prefer more rural areas? As long as I have a decent Internet connection, I can live anywhere I want.
Come On Down for a Visit
After posting a few details about where I moved last week, several readers wrote with concerns similar to Sheryl, who didn't note where she is located: "I can certainly see why you'd be thrilled to be moving to such a lovely place, and obviously understand why you want to share it with the world. But I hope you didn't do yourselves a disservice! What if your glowing picture brings thousands of your readers to the area?"
Penny Wise, Pound Foolish
I'm the founder of an industry group that has a conference every year. My wife is organizing next year's event and negotiated with a large hotel to host us. Conferences are big money makers for hotels: they get a bunch of people staying in the rooms, and they get to feed the conference attendees rubber chicken and industrial coffee for exorbitant fees. So once she finished negotiating with the hotel and finalizing all the costs and details, the contract arrives and there's a charge they never disclosed: a $3/room/night "energy surcharge".
Small Town Life
The new place I live in isn't really rural, per se -- we're 20 minutes from a town big enough to have a Home Depot, for instance. But that's in the next county; the county I live in has fewer than 4,000 full-time residents. As it happens, one of the leading local politicians, Alan, is the brother of a good friend of mine from California. I should say "was" a leading local politician; he retired from politics, but as an ex-sheriff, he's still pretty active in the community. He's one of the volunteers for the local ambulance service, and recently was appointed the head of the Office of Emergency Services. (It seems everyone wears more than one hat around here!) Now, being as small as we are, there aren't all that many county-wide emergencies, but One Must Be Prepared, especially now that the ugly specter of terrorism is a constant concern in the U.S. (as it has been in a lot of other countries for many years).
Paper-Based Spam
I'm getting sooooo sick of in-the-mail solicitations from credit card companies! But they're starting to make me angry, and I hope you'll join me in getting revenge. The major USA issuers subscribe to a service by one of the credit reporting agencies that will supposedly cut down on the mailings (toll-free: 888-567-8688). I called and registered with them, but I didn't notice any slow-down in the junk. But it's the new attitude they have that makes me angry.
Ouray Ice Festival Photos
It's winter in Colorado. No, I mean winter! The temperature here this morning was -12.2F (-25.5C). The high today was 10.7F (-11.8C). This weekend, then, was perfect for the Ouray Ice Festival, held each year at what is likely the premier ice park in the world -- at the very least the best public park of its kind, the Ouray Ice Park.
TV Land
I don't watch very much TV, so when I do I want something that's interesting and thought-provoking as well as entertaining. There's a new show on this year that I really like -- and naturally it's not doing all that well in the ratings. Why? Because, I think, it's interesting and thought-provoking as well as entertaining, and what really seems to attract a big audience these days isn't the smart stuff. So I'd like to urge you to try out Studio 60 on NBC, which comes on (for me, anyway!) at the exact same time Premium editions come out (Monday night at 9:00).
Winning is Everything
A good friend of mine was inspired to create this video and post it to YouTube yesterday:
