Outstanding! So our government is now actively preventing corporations from improving their product safety. Sometimes I wish there was someone I could just shake by the lapels and yell “what the hell are you thinking” at.
The Associated Press: Court: US can block mad cow testing
The Bush administration can prohibit meat packers from testing their animals for mad cow disease, a federal appeals court said Friday.
This is promising:
Streetsblog » Obama Builds Rail Cred With Biden Pick
Barack Obama’s standing as an advocate for investment in US commuter rail looks to have gotten a boost with his selection of Joe Biden as his running mate. Whereas John McCain is the Senate’s sworn enemy of Amtrak, his colleague from Delaware is known as a “Champion of the Rails.”
Woot. One of my coworkers was proud yesterday that he set a new personal best bike-to-work time. So when I got up this morning, I decided I should do the same. And I did!
My new record is 24:43, which 75 seconds less than my previous best. I frankly don’t know if I can improve on this without getting in substantially better shape. I was pooped when I got to work.
Perhaps you heard the AP news story that Wall Arch in Arches National Park collapsed. Well, the AP got the story wrong. Here’s the story:
The Associated Press: Iconic stone arch collapses in southern Utah park
The article says, “He [Paul Henderson, the park's chief of interpretation] said it’s the first collapse of a major arch in the park since nearby Landscape Arch fell in 1991.”
However, Landscape Arch didn’t fall in 1991. It’s still up. A piece of the arch did fall off in 1991, but the rest of the arch is still there. So is Paul Henderson a crappy park ranger (I doubt it) or did the AP misquote him (more likely)?
This illustrates an interesting thing about modern news. If this were a blog article or Wikipedia, then people in the know could dispute and correct the mistake. But it’s the Associated Press, an old-school news agency with no external checks and balances. So I see all over the web reposts of this same AP article with the same error, but there’s no way to say, “Hey, AP, you got this part of it wrong!”
By the way, I’ve seen Wall Arch and Landscape Arch several times, but not recently. Maybe I should go see Landscape Arch before it finally collapses, too.
Regular readers may remember I ordered a Drobo external computer storage device last month. My experience with the company hasn’t been great so far. I ordered the thing on July 11, at which time they said there was a 5 day backlog of orders. That would put delivery about July 23.
After contacting them the following week, I got an email from Malissa King, their director of sales, on July 23. She said they expect the order the ship by the end of the week. That would put delivery about July 30.
In reality, the order shipped July 31 and arrived August 6. That was three and a half weeks (18 business days) after I placed the order. But at least it arrived intact.
However, then I was looking over my Visa statement, and noticed that they overcharged me! I dug around to try to find what the real price of the order was supposed to be and found this:
It seems strange they can’t seem to make up their mind about the actual price of the thing. I wrote an email on August 7 to sales@drobo.com to let them know about the discrepancy. We’ll see if I hear anything back. I’d hate to have to dispute the charge, but it doesn’t seem right to charge me more than the original invoice, without any explanation.