From the “The Prime Minister Could Not Outlast a Head of Lettuce!” Dept:

"I'm a fighter, not a quitter!"Liz Truss quoting Peter Mandelson during PMQs in the House of Commons, 19 Oct 2022 The question from the Leader of the Opposition Sir Keir Starmer that prompted that defiant response which included her slamming her briefing book onto the despatch box for effect was asking her if she would last in Number 10 until Christmas. I can't imagine he'd have ever reckoned that she barely lasted 24 hours after…

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From the “If You’re a Cashier, Know the Standing Specials!” Dept:

(It helps to imagine the title screamed in Steve Dangle's voice when he's yelling "if you're a goaltender, TEND THE GOAL!" :) ) Yesterday evening, Katie met with one of her friends from middle school who now attends Sanderson High School who were the latest to demolish Enloe's footy team in the Sanderson stadium. It's all good...you generally don't go to footy games when Enloe is one of the sides that's playing for the quality…

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From the “So Many Candles Will Go Out Tonight” Dept:

All Life. Every Life. We are all born as molecules in the hearts of a billion stars. Molecules that do not understand politics or policies or differences. Over a billion years, we foolish molecules forget who we are and where we came from. In desperate acts of ego, we give ourselves names, fight over lines on maps, and pretend that our light is better than everyone else's. The flame reminds us of the piece of…

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From the “Photon Torpedoes Locked On!” Dept:

A couple of weeks ago, NASA torpedoed the asteroid Dimorphos with the DART spacecraft with a direct hit. I'm still amazed at how well that went...a spacecraft that flew millions of miles to intercept a double-asteroid system and didn't even see it's target until 20 minutes prior to impact and still nail that rock dead centre blows my mind. The goal of the project was to see if they could alter Dimorphos' orbit round it's…

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From the “Bringing the Nerdery Back Online” Dept:

It's certainly been an eventful past couple of days with Hurricane Ian slamming into southwest Florida and then wreaking havoc all the way through Central Florida and out over the Atlantic Ocean before sweeping back in to Myrtle Beach and then passing just west of us. It is an old joke in Florida that no one takes hurricanes and tropical storms until Jim Cantore of the Weather Channel turned up in your city. That was…

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From the “No More 771 Codes For Us!” Dept:

With the massive wall of water coming at us courtesy of Hurricane Ian and knowing the 771 signal loss that would inevitably come with it, it's about time I finally get off my duff and reject yet another price increase from DirecTV satellite service and also give the vastly faster fibre network connection a little more to do. Do keep in mind that I actually liked DirecTV's service and had it for many years and…

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From the “That’s Giving ‘Em One In the Eye” Dept:

NASA and the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Unit just scored a most extraordinary bulls-eye when they intentionally crashed the Double Asteroid Redirector Test (DART) spacecraft into the roughly 170m rock known as Dimorphos which orbits a larger asteroid named Didymos which is about 780m wide. The point of the test is to see if an impactor can significantly affect the orbit of an asteroid so that we might avoid the fate of the dinosaurs which…

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From the “You Can Count On It, Mr President!” Dept:

The third response to the carpet bombing of official Washington about the Supreme Court's leaked first draft in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Org. case came from a rather surprising place a couple of weeks after the meh response from our senior Senator. When I saw the image of this envelope in the daily briefing from the US Postal Service which shows the letters destined for my postbox, I was genuinely shocked. When I…

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From the “Life In The Senate? Never Mind…” Dept:

The second response to the carpet bombing of official Washington about the Supreme Court's leaked first draft in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Org. case came from Senator Richard Burr, our senior Senator from North Carolina decidedly later than the response from our junior Senator. In fairness, he did actually respond for the first time in four official contacts to his office. And he did actually get my gender correct which Senator Tillis' staff…

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From the “There Is Life In The Senate After All!” Dept:

The first response to the carpet bombing of official Washington about the Supreme Court's leaked first draft in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Org. case came from Senator Thom Tillis, our junior Senator from North Carolina fairly quickly after I had mailed off the letters. Shockingly quickly! It was almost as if his staff anticipated the likely negative reaction to the Court's decision and gender of those people who would contact his office and…

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From the “What Did the Bloody English Ever Do For Us?!?” Dept:

When I saw this post, I couldn't help but be reminded of a gent we had round in my last major project at BCBSNC where we were completely revamping the mailing and fulfillment system used to create and send out the subscriber ID cards, welcome kits, the dreaded rate notices, and essentially anything that was printed. Part of that effort was integrating a software package called "Thunderhead" which would take data from the back-end systems…

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From the “Please Don’t Let London Bridge Fall!” Dept:
Britain's Queen Elizabeth II sits alone in St. George’s Chapel during the funeral of Prince Philip, the man who had been by her side for 73 years, at Windsor Castle, Windsor, England, Saturday April 17, 2021. Prince Philip died April 9 at the age of 99 after 73 years of marriage to Britain's Queen Elizabeth II. (Jonathan Brady/Pool via AP)

From the “Please Don’t Let London Bridge Fall!” Dept:

Just as my newest friend came round to the Nerdery to install Google Fibre, the BBC was reporting that Her Majesty the Queen has been placed under medical supervision at Balmoral. For the moment, she's reported as being comfortable and resting as the rest of the Royal Family make their way to Aberdeen in Scotland to be at her side. I'm hoping against hope that she'll pull through this medical scare but the reality is…

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From the “Go Right To Ludicrous Upload Speed!” Dept:

Today will mark the first day since I moved back to Raleigh after graduating from university that Time-Warner Cable and their successors will no longer be part of my life and I can assure you that I will not miss them in the slightest. To be fair, the actual broadband cable internet service was generally rock-solid and it was a very rare outage that couldn't be cured by resetting the cable modem and letting it…

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From the “You Know Programmers…They’re Always Changing Things!” Dept:

If you're thinking the site looks a wee bit different today...your eyes are *NOT* deceiving you. This site was my first shot at Wordpress and it was sort of a Frankenstein's creation between the Genesis-based theme Revolution Pro and the NextGen image gallery. And it worked pretty well together. The website I re-designed for the photos for the kids and the family also used NextGen (to be fair, it's so image-heavy that it's really stressed…

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From the “Larry’s Working On His Fourth PM!” Dept:

For the first time in the 15 times that Her Majesty the Queen has invited a member of the House of Commons to form a government in her name, the actual ceremony of accepting the resignation of the incumbent PM and the prospective new PM "kissing hands" was not at Buckingham Palace but rather Balmoral Castle in Aberdeenshire in Scotland. This was due in part to the Queen's comfort reported as "mobility problems" but even…

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From the “Someone Pinch Me!” Dept:

I'm still rather in shock that it looks like it's finally going to be happening...the long dreamt of upgrade in the Internet connectivity to Google Fibre is finally happening here at the Nerdery in East Raleigh. I've been waiting for about seven years from the first time I signed up for the EMAIL notification when they'd finally pushed their install out to my neighbourhood. Seven years! Since then, AT&T came through a couple of years…

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Day 5 – Norfolk and the Outer Banks

I was hoping that the Airbus A380 that I'd bagged on the way from Dulles to Arlington was a sign that I'd be able to put my foot down and fly down the road to the Outer Banks via Norfolk to get the kids and Mistletoe for a three-hour run home to Raleigh. After all, it's a Sunday morning and there shouldn't be a whole of traffic out there until the afternoon, right? Ah, yes.…

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Day 5 – Arlington National Cemetery

It's time to head out and make the grand circle tour from Dulles to the Outer Banks and then finally on the way to Raleigh. But first, it was finally time to tank some petrol for the short run to Arlington National Cemetery to visit Dad before heading off to get the kids and Mistletoe. At the petrol station, I'm sure I scared the hell out of the guy at the pump next to me…

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Day 4 – Outside the National Museum of American History
Automobile, 'Tucker sedan', back view. 1993.0484.01.

Day 4 – Outside the National Museum of American History

After a lovely kielbasa and some pop (yeah, I know...haute cuisine in our nation's capital!), I've made it down the mall to the National Museum of American History and sit down on the bench to get a feel for what's on display. I was really interested in visiting this museum for one artifact in particular...a 1948 Tucker Sedan. The Tucker is a special car amongst petrolheads as only 51 of them were ever built thanks…

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Day 4 – National Gallery of Art

After making it round the Capitol Building, I arrived at the National Gallery of Art. The Gallery is actually split into two buildings so I started with the smaller East building which is connected to the West building via an underground tunnel with a fascinating light display. The architecture of the buildings is stunning but the treasures of artwork on display even more so. I've always liked Henri Matisse and Auguste Renoir but I'll confess…

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Day 4 – Capitol Hill

We're now into the "bonus" day which is going to find me wandering round the north side of the Mall starting at the Supreme Court and Capitol Hill and then working my way down the Mall toward the White House. I will say that finding Weihle-Reston East station via the surface streets does still tend to be a bit more of a miss than hit...today I missed a turn and ended up overshooting Weihle-Reston East…

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Day 3 – Smithsonian Metro Station

After a whole heap of walking through the galleries and now having an extra day to play with, I decided it was going to be a early trip back to the hotel and some more quality time with the Jacuzzi tub in the room. Between me and the blissfully warm water and the jets was a hour-long trip on the Silver line back to the Weihle-Reston East terminus. One thing that struck me as I…

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Day 3 – Freer Gallery

After finishing the wandering round Hirshhorn, it was time to tackle the final museum of the day...the Freer Gallery on the other side of the castle. The first impression one gets looking at the entrance to the Freer Gallery is that it seems pretty small compared to the other museum facilities along the National Mall and indeed it is. But that appearance is very deceptive indeed because the Arthur M Sackler Gallery is physically connected…

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Day 3 – Hirshhorn Museum of Modern Art

I've made it to the Hirshhorn Museum of Modern Art and I must say that it was well worth the effort even with the building undergoing a fairly impressive amount of renovations. It appears that a lot of the Smithsonian facilities along the Mall (including my favourite National Air and Space Museum which was unfortunately closed during this visit) were taking advantage of the pandemic to push forward these big renovation projects to prepare the…

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Day 3 – The National Mall

After wandering round the back of the Smithsonian HQ Castle, I realised that I hadn't brought something to drink and I was starting to feel it so I found a convenient little cafe on the Mall to fix that problem. As I was closer to Hirshhorn having come from the east-facing side of the Castle, I figured I'd visit there next and then make my way back to Freer which is not too far from…

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