Asheville NC Gas shortage, has some links and a gathering of prices and availabilities. It looks as though many stations in the Asheville area are out of gas.
Tag: north carolina
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SED can make some things SO much easier
If you have a linux machine and haven’t ever made use of sed (stream editor) you’re missing out on a great automation utility. I’ve saved myself probably 20 hours of manual editing with about an hour of work TWICE today. Here’s how…. over on the North Carolina Genealogy site I was opening forums for each county in the state of North Carolina (100 counties.) Now, I could have gone through and typed out a description, slug (address) and name for each one, but that looked too tedious. So…
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Roll your own search engine… sort of…
Several blog posts have heralded the arrival of Google’s newest toy, a custom search engine setup… sort of Through Google Coop you can design a search engine that only covers the sites you want it to cover (or favor, it can search the web and just be biased towards the sites you prefer.) Of course, this relies on googles existing index, so if a site has not been crawled and indexed by the googlebot, you seem to be out of luck. I’ve tried a test at http://www.southcarolinagenealogy.org/search for my North and South Carolina genealogy sites…. a merged search between the two would be handy…
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Banning access to myspace for minors?
There’s a proposed bill that would block access to “Social networking sites” like myspace and Friendster for minors. The main concern with the social networking sites is that they have profile information on their members, in many cases under the age of 18 and the children then can be targetted by child predators. One of the problems is that “social networking” sites are loosely defined and could be interpreted quite widely.
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Profiteering and scams after Katrina
It’s worth warning that there will be a number of sham organizations and individuals looking to profit off the misery of others after the recent hurricane. The security fix has a posting on just that.
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News on New Orleans
Really, the news over the last few days has been overwhelming. We’ve had some effects here in North Carolina with stations running out of gas rumours of all the stations closing at 6PM and prices climbing by the hour. (Mostly yesterday, but there are still lines at some gas stations.) We will likely return to normal within a matter of days or a week, those that were directly affected will not see normal lives for months, perhaps years. There are a number of ways to help. Hearts With Hands is a Western North Carolina organization that does very good work. They accept donations of money (which most organizations are preferring here) as well as physical needs (blankets, baby wipes, non-perishable food, etc.) Of course, there is also the Red Cross.
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Protecting your computer hardware from Lightning
I think it was last night on the local news, they led with a story about a local family that, during a recent thunderstorm heard/saw a very close lightning hit. They had some nice film footage of a tree that had its bark completely blown away and a nice rip down the side of the tree. (My guess is the lightning hit flash heated ( vaporized) the sap or water inside the tree and the pressure of that is what blew bark around. I don’t know though.) The report talked about how North Carolina is high on the list of states with regards to lightning strikes (more…)