One, a San Pasqual freshman was stabbed in Kit Carson Park just across the street from the school yesterday, in broad daylight. I'd say times are tough when landscapers are sticking up kids, but apparently it wasn't a robbery.

The administration at Stevenson HS was feeling unappreciated, and decided Chicagoland needed a reminder of what a bunch of uptight douchebags they are. So they spiked the student newspaper again over articles that shatter the myth that Stevenson students are all wonderful virtuous angels. God forbid that people should be aware that some of their teenage snowflakes shoplift, smoke, drink, fuck, and elect not to have abortions! This comes eight months after they spiked an issue about students casually fucking.

As an honorably discharged student of neighboring District 225, I can say with confidence that a few of my fellow honor students shoplifted and/or smoked, many drank, most fucked, and from all that, I only heard of one of my classmates getting his girlfriend pregnant. Nobody was shot, stabbed, beaten with 2x4s, or thrown from a moving car. All in all, exactly what you'd expect from an affluent suburb. And in nearly 20 years since, ain't nothing changed.

Also, when a 10-year old in Arkansas decided to quietly stand up (or rather, sit down) in support of an oppressed minority, Jon Stewart did the right thing and called in the cavalry to defend the boy against his homophobic peers. That's right, Mick Foley will bring the pain down upon all who would call Will Phillips a gaywad. (It is unknown what role the Gaywad-Dorkwad alliance may play in support.)

(It's a damn good thing they didn't cross Shane Botwin, as fruit punch left elementary school, went to summer school, then graduated to actually capping motherfuckers.)

[Edit] And a great piece on what he could've said instead :-)

Randhurst was closed down and demolished last August.

I'm not surprised... the last time I was there, it was a ghost town. Half the stores inside were empty, and the future was grim. Most of the anchor stores had gone out of business, through either bankruptcy or mergers. Newer big-box retailers had locations nearby. It's still a very vibrant retail area, but everything's moved into strips. But the indoor regional mall concept seems to be going through something of a decline. Northbrook Court, Hawthorne Center, Woodfield, and Old Orchard are doing well, partly by moving more and more upscale. Deerbrook and Town & Country became strip malls. Golf Mill is somehow surviving. Lakehurst was consumed by the economic ghetto that is Waukegan.
( -- MORE -- )

Here is a gallery

But this is my favorite.

Well, what's next is basketball season, which will hopefully be better.

Football ended last night, with a mostly-ignominious 27-13 loss to Rancho Bernardo. Terry predicted a 28-10 finish, he wasn't far off. It was 10-3 at half, on a last-minute RB touchdown. We were capable of making it a game, even winning it, but we were completely incapable of finishing anything. Their field goal came off Nick fumbling and losing the ball trying to grip it for a sure-fire TD pass to a receiver RB's defense just ignored in the end zone. We let them take the third quarter 14-0, letting one of their running backs go up the middle again and again. We gave up one more with just under 2 minutes to go, but it was long since over.

We put Colton in, our previous starting QB, for the last drive. One of our third-string receivers caught his first pass all year, and it set up Colton to hit Brett for one last score with 30 seconds to go. At least they get one good memory to walk out on. I wish we had more for the seniors, with few exception they're a good group of kids. But we just didn't have the bodies for it this year.

But the JV won 40-20, and the frosh killed them Thursday 41-0, so at least we've got a future...

One of my long-running backburner projects is a decoder for our scoreboard controllers at the high school. If I had something that could read the output, then spit it out a serial port, I'd have a way to put live game status up on the web. Or integrate timing data with the scorekeeping software I'm also forever developing. Or build my own mini-displays for the rooms our teams retire to at halftime. Possibilities, you know?

There's two things that have to happen to make this possible. I need to electrically decode the control signal (reliably pick out the 1's and 0's off the wire.) Then I have to decode the payload (what do those bits actually mean?) The second part is unreliable at best without the first part, and the first part meant beating up on microcontroller code for a while, and verifying the results by comparing them to a visual inspection of the oscilloscope trace. Ugh. Tedious.

Until now. I finally got hold of a wireless Daktronics controller. Cracked it open, and lo, an off-the-shelf 2.4GHz data radio stares out at me. (It's a Laird/Aerocomm AC4424-200, if you care.) They're about $90 each. Or you can buy a dev kit with TWO of them, with power and RS-232 level conversion, for a hair over twice the price. Knowing that the wireless payload is exactly the same as the wired data payload (it has to be--they sell upgrade/retrofit receivers for scoreboards, and the scoreboard internals are (mostly) not field-upgradable,) I can now plug this dev kit into a laptop, and the first problem is solved. Then I capture some data, write a script to post-process it and pick out patterns, and that's the second problem. THEN I can go back and design my own hardware for decoding the wire signal, because I can compare my own decoded payloads to the captured wireless payloads.

For my own reference, the end credits theme from The Plan:


Aum bhoor bhuwah swaha,
Tat savitur varenyam
Bhargo devasaya dheemahi
Dhiyo yo naha prachodayat

The Air & Space Museum has a weblog detailing its work, including the multiple restorations of the original series Enterprise shooting model. It looks like they were fortunate the model survived five years in storage after the series was cancelled: http://blog.nasm.si.edu/2009/06/04/starship_restoration/. Down in the comments section, there's a link to a gallery of high-res restoration photos.

Via Rob, origin unknown:

Over on Facebook, Dan linked to a site where someone has made available an archive of old Apple II software.

And a fucking browser plug-in that emulates the Apple //gs.

McDonald's finally got permission to open the first drive-through restaurant in Northbrook. It'll be on Skokie Boulevard. They proposed one for Dundee between Hazelwood and Anthony Trail, but the Village rejected leveling those houses in favor of a commercial development.

No shit, we really never had one before. For that matter, we didn't have much in the way of chain restaurants to begin with. There was the McDonald's in Sanders Court (closed several years ago--after the Village shot down its attempt to add a drive-thru in the parking lot.) The Brown's Chicken in White Plains came in the late 80s. There was a KFC on Dundee and Waukegan for a long while. The Subway on Dundee and Pfingsten came a little after that (as well as one on Shermer, next to Mario's.) Dairy Queen has been on the other corner for thirty years or so, and I suppose it kind of counts, though most of their business is ice cream. (We had two Baskin-Robbins.) Everything else was an individual business or small local chain. Really, we were not poor deprived children, either.

The drive-thru-less McDonald's in Plaza Del Prado? That's technically Glenview. The McDonald's WITH the drive-thru on Waukegan is in Deerfield. The nearest Burger Kings were in Highland Park and Glenview.