Author Archives: Ryan Markel

East St. Louis Government Cuts What?

Rev. Joseph Tracy said he’s tired of going to funerals. And now, he suspects he’ll be going to more of them.

“It’s open field day now,” said Tracy, the pastor of Straightway Baptist Church here. “The criminals are going to run wild.”

The pastor voiced his fear of a spike in crime on Friday at a raucous special City Council meeting at which East St. Louis Mayor Alvin Parks announced that the city will lay off 37 employees, including about one-third of its police officers.

In total, 19 of the city’s 62 police officers, 11 firefighters, four public works employees and three administrators will lose their job in the layoffs that take effect Sunday.

At this point, they might as well just build a wall around East St. Louis and be done with it. This is appalling.

There are lots of good people in East St. Louis who have tried very hard to improve the conditions there. It’s a shame they don’t have a government that supports those efforts adequately.

(via St. Louis Post-Dispatch.)

Westbrook In, Ludwick Out in 3-Team Deal

The Cardinals have acquired righthanded starting pitcher Jake Westbrook and cash considerations from the Cleveland Indians in a three-team trade that sends right fielder Ryan Ludwick to the San Diego Padres. The Cardinals receive minor-league lefthander Nick Greenwood from the Padres.

I’m good with this. Jon Jay is looking like a great investment in the future of the Cardinals, which gives Ludwick less of a place with the team, and another pitcher isn’t a bad move.

Sounds like a good money deal, too.

(via St. Louis Post-Dispatch.)

Jazz and Thunder

The kids and I were waiting for my wife in the car last night, so I took the opportunity to play with my new camera’s video capture. It’s actually very nice.

As the title implies, there is jazz, and there is thunder. There is also the cacophony of my children’s voices. The video is quite short.

Emails

Some people can never be helped enough, some people are never satisfied, some people don’t realize that I get requests for more promo codes than Apple gives me and that a promo code has never produced enough “exposure” to have been worth the time to generate and send it, and some people don’t realize how little time I have during the day to either meet with them or respond to any emails that justify more than a few words in response.

But occasionally I get the best kind of email, and it makes it all worth it[.]

This short post by the developer of Instapaper has one of the best email screenshots ever. The key is the title of the email, which if I’d seen it, would have been the first email I opened.

It’s also a fantastic example of the kinds of requests that I’m assuming are very common to app developers.

via Marco.org – Emails.

Why Free Software is a Matter of Life and Death

As the worlds of digital and analogue become intertwined, so the fundamental idea behind free software – that people have a right to see what this stuff is doing – becomes not a theoretical matter of ethics, but a practical, quotidian necessity if we are to avoid the situation where bad code leads to the ultimate Blue Screen of Death – ours.

A fascinating solution proposed for what sounds like a very real problem. It would benefit more and more people for embedded source to be available for perusal for more things, like medical devices, telemetry systems in vehicles, and voting machines—then again, could we trust that the code released is the real stuff in use?

(via ComputerworldUK.)