Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent

W&OD Conquered; Mt. Vernon Trail >50% Conquered

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So the weekend ended up a bit more busy than I had really expected, but it’s going pretty well. I realized though that I had neglected to update you all on my effort to conquer the W&OD bike trail. Status: Success.

Last Thursday, I pushed myself to [and perhaps slightly beyond] my limit, setting off from the 16 mile marker on the trail and riding all the way to the 0 mile marker, and then all the way back for a total ride of 32 miles. My limit, in case you’re wondering, was around 25 miles ;-). I survived though. In the last 3 or 4 weeks, I’ve ridden the entire 45-mile length of the W&OD trail in both directions.

Today, I did have a couple of free hours so I started a similar exercise on the scenic 18 miles of the Mount Vernon Trail. I did a 10-mile ride from it’s northern terminus to a spot just south of the Beltway, then back again. Sometime in the next week or so, I’ll start from the southern terminus and ride 10 miles north (which will complete the whole trail, with a couple miles of overlap in the middle).

Hopefully soon, I’ll do another 30-miler and not feel like I’m about to die at the 25th mile ;-).

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Nothing Beats Ownership

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It feels great to own something—especially something big. When I first started talking about buying a new car, I mentioned that the big problem was that I really didn’t want to take on a second car payment. As gas prices went up, continuing to drive a V6 4×4 Mazda Tribute SUV became less and less appealing and less than a month after the first entry I was driving off the lot in my new Subaru Outback. Go figure.

Anyway, I still don’t much like having two car payments so I—ever the financial dynamo—managed to swing an early payoff of our 2006 Honda Civic using money out of savings. We got the title in the mail today, so now we own our Civic outright and have the paperwork to prove it. It’s a good feeling (and it’s one less monthly payment to make).

Overreacting to Weather

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When I was in high school, our school system (in Bedford County, VA) once closed down for two or three weeks because of the weather—a few consecutive snow storms of a few inches each. I wrote about it at the time in the Liberty High School Sentinel newspaper, pointing out that it was a bit silly to close the schools for a couple inches of snow, especially for so many days. During those two or three weeks off school, the roads were clear enough that I spent most of those days visiting friends, going to movies, and so on. If I could drive safety to the towns of Altavista, Virginia, and Lynchburg, Virginia, (each 30 minutes away from Bedford), I’m sure I could have made it the half-mile up the road to the high school.

The lunacy hasn’t stopped there. In my current home of Northern Virginia, it’s not uncommon for a summer thunderstorm or a couple rainy days in a row to result in widespread road closures, drastically worsened commutes, power outages, and more. Come on people; our infrastructure can’t handle a little rain? It’s absolutely, utterly ridiculous. A single drop of rain turns most DC-area drivers into drunken lemurs.

The National Weather Service certainly isn’t helping matters. Jason Samenow at the Capital Weather Gang raised the question a bit over a week ago whether our local NWS office in Sterling is too trigger-happy with issuing severe weather warnings. There’s no question; they are. An average afternoon thunderstorm passing through on a summer day does not necessarily qualify as ‘severe’, nor is it worthy of initiating the regional Emergency Alert System, interrupting TV programming, or setting our weather radios blaring.

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Breaking the Internet

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This is a ‘nerd post’ for nerds and aspiring nerds (though it might be nominally interesting to non-nerds as well) . . . just to get that out in the open right away.

The Domain Name System (DNS) is part of the core functionality of the Internet and was central in making it usable for mere mortals. Basically, without DNS, web site addresses would look something like ‘209.85.171.99’, which is a bit harder to remember than ‘google.com’, the name under the DNS system for the exact same place on the Internet. To oversimplify, this is how the system works:

  • Google has a ‘nameserver’ (probably something like ns.google.com). That nameserver has been set up by Google to know that ‘google.com’ really means ‘209.85.171.99’.
  • The Domain Name registrar that Google uses to register ‘google.com’ to them has been set up to know that if people ask for google.com, they need to talk to ns.google.com to find out where to go.
  • The ‘root’ DNS servers on the Internet pretty much know the right other nameservers for pretty much every domain name, and update that information periodically.
  • ISPs that people use to access the Internet have nameservers too, which talk to the root servers to figure out where their customers go on the Internet when they type in ‘google.com’.

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A Half-Second of Nipple Is Not Indecency

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The Associated Press reports (via WTOPNews.com) that a federal appeals court has tossed the half-million dollar fine levied by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) against CBS for the brief (9/16ths of a second) display of Janet Jackson’s right nipple on national television in 2004. The court ruled that a brief exposure unintentionally broadcast does not amount to actionable indecency.

I’ve said it a few times before, but I’ll say it again: Janet Jackson’s nipple didn’t hurt anybody. It might be news to the censorship brigades at the FCC and elsewhere, but most people—even children!—have nipples, know what they look like, and aren’t particularly bothered by them.

Having said that, CBS and the NFL should have used discretion when green-lighting a halftime show that was pretty raunchy (and vacuous, even by halftime standards) to be broadcast to potentially millions of children. I concede that point without debate. But poor discretion and an unintentional 9/16ths-of-a-second display of a nipple on national television is not an actionable offense for the FCC to issue fines over. Adults can choose to not watch, nor let their children watch, CBS programming from now on if it’s really that big an issue.

Better yet, talk to your children. Teach them. Don’t focus so much on ‘protecting’ them from reality, try teaching them how to handle reality. That’s how they grow up to be well-adjusted adults, unlike those who went crying to mommy-government-FCC when they saw a nipple on TV for a fraction of a second.

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.