Welcome to my little Nerdery on the Net! :)

This weekend brought another round of sorrow to the Raleigh area, this time during the 2022 Raleigh Christmas Parade. One of the trucks pulling a float apparently suffered brake failure whilst descending a slight incline and struck a young girl who was dancing with her studio in the street in front of the truck. She was taken to hospital but unfortunately did not survive her injuries. I can't even imagine how gutted her family and…

After many years of delays and technical setbacks and even being chased back into the Vehicle Assembly Building by a hurricane, NASA has finally launched the Artemis I mission using the largest and most powerful rocket ever flown to hurl an Orion capsule to a distant retrograde orbit round the moon on a 25 day mission to test and prove the system's ability to return humans to the surface of the moon for the first…

I'll confess that I made no secret of my opinion that Mr Trump was fundamentally and temperamentally unqualified to be President of the United States prior to him standing as a candidate for that office in 2016. Whilst I'd no doubts that his years in business and taking full advantage of the loopholes offered by the tax code would be strengths he could bring to the job, I felt at the time that he lacked…

Another election done, another reprieve from the near constant carpet bombing of the phone, mailbox, and TV with political attack ads that are misleading at best and often outright lies. The political lobbyists seemed to really be out in force in this year's mid-term elections so I figured I'd survey the massive pile of political BS in slick professionally produced mailers that would drive one stark staring mad if you took their "message" at face…

On Election Day, one of the joys of running the gauntlet of political operatives hawking their candidates before reaching the safety of the "no electioneering/lobbying beyond this point" sign is pointing out to them that they might want my vote to stay as far away from their candidate as possible because it's usually the kiss of death. This year actually turned out to be better statistically than is usual for me! The ballot that I…

I’ll confess that today’s entry is probably one of the harder ones I’ve had to write of late. The easy part is being thankful for the sacrifices and service of our citizens who took an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic, so help them God…even without the constant reminder sitting on top of the entertainment centre! And make no mistake, I am very thankful for the privilege…

After all of the negative campaign advertisements bombarding the TV and carpet-bombing my phone and mailbox, it’s finally our turn to head off to the voting booth and put an end to this campaign, one way or another. Frankly, it can’t come quickly enough for me. I’m so over all of the negativity where the extremists on both ends of the political spectrum can’t be bothered to accept that people who do not agree completely…

Rishi Sunak has climbed to the top of the greasy pole of politics and has been crowned the leader of the Conservative and Unionist Party in London after a rather tumultuous week which saw the various divisions amongst the Tories laid bare for all to see. He managed to see off his final challenger Penny Mordaunt prior to the 1400 BST deadline for candidates to have 100 nominations for appearing on the ballot without a…

"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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…