Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent

“Don’t Bring a Gun to a Snow-Ball Fight”

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The Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) of Washington, DC, doesn’t have the best reputation as a law enforcement agency to begin with, but an incident during this last weekend’s blizzard really takes the cake. A ‘veteran’ detective with over 25 years of experience, when faced with a crowd of people wielding snow-balls, pulled out his handgun in an apparent effort to deter this wild crowd of . . . snow-ball throwers.

Look, the snow-ball throwers were in the wrong—some of their snow-balls were hitting passing cars, which is potentially dangerous, and they didn’t exactly behave in a respectful way toward the detective. I don’t fault the detective at all for stopping his car, confronting them, or calling for backup. Fine. An overreaction, but an understandable one. But pulling your gun? In what universe do hand-lobbed balls of snow (and this wasn’t even wet, packable snow) constitute a threat worthy of brandishing a firearm?

As you might expect, the detective has been placed on desk duty pending an investigation. Check out the video below, including the enjoyable chant that I stole as this entry’s title.

Read more . . .

A Few Blizzard ’09 Pics

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I’ve mostly been hanging out indoors, but I did spend some time yesterday afternoon and then again today digging out the car. They plowed our street today, so we are no longer stranded. Our total accumulation was somewhere in the 18″ ballpark, easily ranking in the top three biggest snowstorms I’ve experienced. I love snow!

Website 21.1 Revision

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I took the snow-day opportunity to tie up the last bit of development and launch a minor revision to the site, bringing the version to 21.1. Visually this is just a small, incremental improvement, but I’ve done quite a bit on the back-end. There are a few little touches throughout that you will probably like. Here are some highlights:

  • Social Media Integration: Much as I don’t like it, people are spending more and more time on Twitter and in the ‘walled garden’ of Facebook—and, consequently, less time visiting real web sites like this one. New Off on a Tangent posts are now automatically cross-posted at my previously-disused Twitter and Facebook pages.
  • Pretty Photo & Gallery Pop-Ups: If you click on a photo in an entry, it’ll now come up in a nice little pop-up (powered by Thickbox). Click on one and you’ll see what I mean. You can even click through multiple photos in an entry from within the pop-up.
  • Mobile Site Improvements: The mobile site looks about the same as it did before, but the code is heavily reworked (and faster). Now that I’ve dropped support for the ancient Palm OS ‘Blazer’ browser I could write some modern code for the mobile side.
  • Holiday Information: For a long time, special images have appeared at the top-right of the site on particular religious and civil holidays. Now, mousing-over the image on a holiday will give you a little pop-up with the name of the holiday, a brief description, and a link for more information. Oh, and mobile users get a holiday notification now too.

Lots of other small (mostly-technical) changes are part of this release, so if anything isn’t working for you please let me know!

Major Winter Storm to Wallop DC Area

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A major winter storm appears on-track to wallop the Washington, DC, metropolitan area with heavy snow beginning late tonight and continuing through much of the weekend. The National Weather Service has issued a Winter Storm Warning for the DC metro area stating, in part, that ‘accumulations of 10 to 20 inches’ are expected.

The Capital Weather Gang, a group of weather bloggers with a solid, conservative [read: realistic] track record of accumulation predictions, estimate 8-16″ for much of the region with 10-18″ in some areas. They characterize this storm as a ‘Major Event’ for the DC area and predict widespread hazardous road conditions.

Those of us who have lived a long time in the DC area know that this area doesn’t handle snow very well. The various Departments of Transportation have an annoying tendency to spontaneously forget to treat major highways, and the MetroRail system was apparently designed to fail if exposed to winter precipitation (because they have exposed electronics [!] on train underbellies). Drivers in the region seem to fall into two camps: one, those that refuse to go anywhere at all even days after most of the roads are clear; and two: those (usually with SUVs) who believe you can drive on snow at full speed as if the road is perfectly clear. Reality, as usual, is in-between.

Off on a Tangent recommends the following: don’t be afraid of a little bit of snow, but don’t drive like an idiot either. 4WD and AWD vehicles are generally good in winter weather, but every car has 4-wheel braking and every car will take longer to stop than it would in clear conditions and any car can spin-out if you take a turn too fast on a slick highway. So, even in your 4WD and AWD cars, drive careful. If you don’t have to go anywhere, don’t. Make sure you have enough supplies at home to last you a couple of days.

Have fun and be safe!

Misusing the Word ‘Hacked’

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I read an interesting story over at CNN.com about how Iraqi insurgents figured out how to monitor the video feeds from our un-manned Predator drone aircraft. There are a couple things that bother me about this article—one about how it’s written, and one about the content itself.

First, despite the gripping headline, the insurgents ‘hacked’ nothing. The video feed they were watching was broadcast over the airwaves without encryption. They ‘hacked’ the feed in the same way I ‘hack’ a broadcast TV feed by turning on my television, or in the way I ‘hack’ air traffic control communication by turning on a scanner I get at Radio Shack. If an unintended recipient receives a broadcast sent ‘in the clear’, they’ve simply monitored open communication—which anybody can do and, in fact, has a right to do barring any specific laws prohibiting it.

(An example of a specific law is this: most jurisdictions in the United States legally prohibit the use of police scanners to evade the police, so if a bad guy uses one to get away he gets an additional charge on his rap sheet when he’s caught.)

Second, and much more troubling than run-of-the-mill journalistic exaggeration, is the fact that the United States Air Force broadcasts Predator drone video in the clear. Billions of dollars invested over decades in defense encryption technologies, and they can’t even apply a trivial cipher to put at least a speed-bump in the way of the bad guys? In the clear? Come on guys.

Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.