Okay, I can understand after the anthrax being sent through the mail a couple of years ago the US Postal Service having an interest in requiring an ID before accepting mail to be sent but I can’t help but think of the inconvenience this is going to add to my using the mail. I don’t want this to happen.

Actually I send very little mail now and 95% of what I do send in the mail could probably be handled online. This may be tha actual impetus needed to truely move to a paperless society.

A road trip Saturday took Gerri and me into the NE Georgia mountains. Tallulah Falls State Park was the highlight of the day. We did some hiking around the top of the gorge. The photo to the right was taken on a swinging bridge across the gorge.

Dillard, Georgia was the northern terminus of the trip. We had a late lunch at the Dillard House before turning back to Lawrenceville. The meal there was delicious but also a little overwhelming. They serve you “Family Style” which means they bring out bowls of food to your table and you serve yourself from the bowls. There were three different meats and about seven different vegatables served. That was a lot of food for just two people.

Other towns along the way were Homer, Clarkesville and Rabun Gap. The scenery was wonderful but the fall colors weren’t quite as vibrant as I had hoped. Still, it was a very enjoyable day trip. I look forward to doing it again sometime.

Rachael Boim, the young girl I wrote about Friday, had a column in the Atlanta Journal Constitution yesterday. Her expulsion has been suspended and is being reconsidered.

B&B Plumbing was broken into. Item stolen? One guard dog.

Fulton Co., GA school officials can now be added to the list of school officials who have their head up their ass when it comes to zero tolerance.

Fourteen year old Rachel Boim is a young writer. This Roswell High School freshman has filled up notebook after notebook with stories she has written and sketches that she has drawn. These notebooks are her private journals, not school assignments.

One of the notebooks was confiscated by a teacher when she was caught passing it to a fellow student. One story in this notebook is about a student who falls asleep in class, dreams about shooting a teacher, is shot by a school resource officer and then wakes up from the dream when the bell rings and walks to her next class. This is clearly a creative writing excercise but it now has Rachel expelled from school for a year.

“Anytime the safety and security of our students and staff are put into question, we investigate the situation and, if warranted, take serious action,” Hale said. “After reviewing the evidence, the hearing officer felt expulsion was an appropriate disciplinary response.”

The evidence was dozens of notebooks filled with various stories, testimony from Rachel’s parents, Georgia’s poet laureate and an editor of Five Points, a literary magazine published by Georgia State University, all stating that this was just a story. I guess creative writing is frowned upon in Fulton County.

I’ve got a son in Gwinnett County schools and I just had a conference with his teachers. His language arts teacher was impressing upon me the importance of him doing well on a state mandated writing tests later this year. He’s a grade behind Rachel so I guess I can assume that after passing this test Fulton County doesn’t care anymore about the student learning to be a good writer. Fulton County should be holding Rachel’s writing habit up as a model for the other students to emulate, not punishing her for one story making them feel uncomfortable.

Update: Unrelated to this incident the Superintendent of Fulton County Schools resigned last night for personal reasons. He had only held this position for four months. To tie this in the interim superintedent has temporarily suspended the punishment until it can be looked into more thoroughly. I suspect that more reasonable minds will prevail.

Since I’m updating this story let me make sure my position is clear on this. I do believe that Ms Boim’s story should have set off some alarm bells. I do believe that Ms Boim’s parents should have been alerted about the story she wrote and a meeting should have been held to discuss what the story may have meant. I have no problem with her being suspended for a few days while all this was being sorted out. I don’t even think that the privacy issue of a teacher reading a personal journal is much of a concern here because the journal was being passed in class to another classmate and at that point it’s no different than a note being passed in class.

Where I have a problem with this is that common sense was not used in considering whether or not this story actually posed a threat. If no real threat is present and no one is harmed there is no reason for this stiff of punishment. It is the lack of common sense being used here that is what has my dander up.

It looks like someone has come up with a nuclear power generating plant that’s just the right size.

The Galena design is part of a new generation of small nuclear reactors that can be built in a factory and transported by barge, truck or helicopter. A federal study, funded at Stevens’ request and published in May 2001, found they are inherently safe and easy to operate, resistant to sabotage or theft, cost effective and transportable.

Toshiba Corp., the Japanese electronics giant, calls its reactor the 4S system: super-safe, small and simple.

Washington, D.C., attorney Doug Rosinski, who represents Toshiba, calls the reactor a “nuclear battery,” although it has nothing in common with the typical AA cell. The power comes from a core of non-weapons-grade uranium about 30 inches in diameter and 6 feet tall. It would put out a steady stream of 932-degree heat for three decades but can be removed and replaced like a flashlight battery when the power is depleted, he said.

The reactor core would be constructed and sealed at a factory, then shipped to the site. There it is connected with the other, nonnuclear parts of the power plant to form a steel tube about 70 feet long with the nuclear core welded into the bottom like the eraser in a pencil, Rosinski said. The assembly is then lowered into a concrete housing buried in the ground, making it as immune to attack or theft as a missile in its silo.

The reactor has almost no moving parts and doesn’t need an operator. The nuclear reaction is controlled by a reflector that slowly slides over the uranium core and keeps the nuclear fission “critical.” If the reflector stops moving, the reactor loses power. If the shield moves too fast, the core “burns” more quickly, yielding the same amount of power but reducing the reactor’s life, Rosinski said.

I like this. I like this a lot. When you consider the environmental risks involved in transporting all the diesel fuel now used to generate power for only a few hours a day in these remote Alaskan villages you can quickly see how this nuclear reactor can be deemed very environmental friendly.

I awoke this morning to two news items dealing with airport security. Both items make me mad.

The first case isn’t breaking news. It has to do with a twenty year old college student, Nathaniel Heatwole, who placed boxes containing box cutters, blocks of clay and bottles of bleach onboard two Southwest Airlines flights. It seems that the government, specifically the TSA, wants to fry his ass over this stunt that has exposed a very large security problem to the public.

I can understand charges being placed against him and even some public service time done for his actions but U.S. Attorney Thomas DiBiagio wants to put him away for ten years. DiBiagio said Heatwole’s conduct “was not a prank. This was not poor judgment. . . . It was a very serious and foolish action.” I can understand and agree with that statement but 10 years for showing us a severe security hole we have? I can’t believe they are serious abou this.

The second one is about a jerk in the airport at Greensboro, N.C. who pitched a temper tantrum over just missing his flight. He made a statement something to the effect of, “What do I have to do to get you to stop that plane so I can get on it, tell you there’s a bomb aboard it?” Well, that did stop the plane and delayed the passengers on the plane for a couple of hours while they searched the plane for the bomb this guy that missed the plane supposedly knew about.

These two stories very vividly illustrates the problem I’ve had with the new tighter airport security since they were implemented when the airports reopened after Sept. 11, 2001. Too much emphasis is being placed on security measures that do not one thing to actually give us more security and are pretty much ignoring the security measures the truely matter.

It isn’t so much writer’s block as it is that I just don’t have anything to say. I guess I could have written about my trip to Dahlonega last weekend but I went there, looked though some shops with Gerri, had a decent, but not great meal at an Italian restaurnt there and then came home. I forgot my camera so I don’t even have any pictures of the trip. I enjoyed myself but all in all I don’t think I have anything interesting enough about the trip that you would care to read about.

I guess I could be writing about the Bush administration’s PR blitz on the good things that are being accomplished in Iraq but really what is there to say? I haven’t had time to check it all out with this new job and I have no idea how much is hype and how much is accurate. How can I write about what I don’t know?

The thing is, I’m doing fine and I’m very busy with a paying job. My lack of writing doesn’t mean that there are problems, the opposite is the case. I’m just too busy to write and too busy to involve myself in things that are interesting to write about. Maybe this coming week will give me something to write about. If not then maybe I need to just let this weblog rest for a few weeks.

I’ve just spent the first full week on the new job and so far I’m convinced that I made the correct choice in accepting the position. I’ve been given ownership of the code for a tool we use and told to make it useful enough for the project I begin in earnest next week. I think I’ve been successful and it’s a good thing too because I’ll need this tool for the work I’ve been assigned. It could save me a a few days work on a project phase that I only have two full weeks to complete.

This project I begin next week is scheduled to last at least through the middle of February with my being scheduled to be on site from December through the end of the project so I’m looking at spending my winter in Tucson, AZ. I’ll be coming home on weekends and will be home the week of Christmas but I’ll still miss my family while I’m there. Even though I dread the time away from them I’m still excited about the trip. Tucson is suppose to be one of the best cities in the US for bicycling. I guess I’ll have my bike shipped out there if it looks like I can get some cycling in during my stay.

I really like the people I work with. There has been very little idle conversation with most people concentrating on work and that’s the type of environment I prefer. I think this is a place where I can be very productive.

This is Norbert, my son’s bearded dragon. He got him about a month ago and he’s grown about 50% in that length of time. He’s an interesting pet. I love watching him go after the crickets we feed him.

His picture is here because I’m trying out some photo gallery software that my friend Mueon wrote. Click on the photo to go to the entry for this image.