Having been evangelizing RSS for a while now it’’s good to start seeing some of the things I’ve always sort of thought would happen actually materialize. It looks like Google is on the way towards integrating RSS reading into their gmail application. (via /.).
Monthly Archive for April, 2005
Of all the ways to die in service of the fire department (every tragic occurence in FDNY history on record) the worst way I can think of is the fate I nearly suffered last night. I won’t drag the story (too much) since it is far from exciting, but will briefly lay the circumstance with an accounting of the day. Every firefighter yearly attends an Education Day at the Academy to participate in a variety of drills, as I did yesterday. In one of the concrete training buildings, fires were lit and my group was sent in to search for unconscious firefighters. This building, like all fire buildings, when filled with smoke is like a maze, and we had to find our way back through blinding conditions dragging our heavy victims up stairs, around corners, down hallways, and finally out to fresh air. Education Day is interesting, somewhat fun, and extremely exhausting. Afterward I worked the night tour. It was not too eventful, but exhausting nonetheless. I layed down sometime after midnight, got up for the tones ten minutes later, went out on a run, returned, went back to bed, got up for the tones twenty minutes after that, and so on. I was shot at five a.m. when the tones ripped me out of a heavy, desperate sleep. My instant mechanical reaction swung my feet from the bed directly into my shoes. I rose and half ran for the pole hole (elapsed time 4 seconds). I’ve slid that pole in the middle of the night a million times, but for some reason this time my foot got caught on the edge of the floor as I began to slide. I got stuck, and nearly flipped over, barely keeping my grip. I had to do a pull-up on the pole to free my foot and slide to the apparatus floor. As I pulled on my bunker pants, flung my radio over my shoulder and threw my bunker coat on my back, I was thinking of the stupid irony. People have actually died on this job sliding the goddam pole! Well, not me. I ain’t goin’ out that way! Of all the ways to die in service of the fire department, that is the worst way of all.
Jer recommended this to me and it just came in my netflix queue the other day. It’s a great one-hour piece on the making of a very kickass album and you can see just how totally anal Walter Becker and Don Fagen are when it comes to crafting their sound. If you don’t like that sound, this will probably put you to sleep. If you like the sound, it’s pretty interesting. Oddly, there’s no mention of the Steve Gadd work on the Aja track. I did learn that Wayne Shorter was called in to do some sax work though.
“Classic Albums - Steely Dan: Aja” (Alan Lewens)
Your gmail inbox as an RSS feed. Who knew? More here. Granted, I don’t use gmail since i couldn’t get sjwillis as a username and Yahoo! has always been good to me. Still, I imagine some of you may find this interesting ;-)
Thanks to Tom Pendergast for alerting me to this critical bill. If you haven’t already, please have a quick look at Idaho’s HCR #29. You won’t regret it.
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