text:
FORT MORGAN | The Duke of Wellington, with typical British understatement, called the Battle of Waterloo, "the nearest run thing you ever saw." Believe me, it was not nearly so harrowing as my daughter's wedding on the beach at Fort Morgan. Had it been a well-planned military operation, it would have been scrubbed and rescheduled.
FORT MORGAN | The Duke of Wellington, with typical British understatement, called the Battle of Waterloo, "the nearest run thing you ever saw." Believe me, it was not nearly so harrowing as my daughter's wedding on the beach at Fort Morgan. Had it been a well-planned military operation, it would have been scrubbed and rescheduled.
It's completely unusable as a movie script because nobody would believe it. One bridesmaid bravely carried on just weeks after her own fianc�e was killed in a tragic accident, while another, without any excuse, dropped out three days before the wedding. Needless to say, one endeared herself to the bride for the rest of her life while the other did not.
The minister's pregnant wife came down to the beach with him so their whole family could enjoy a vacation and wound up having an emergency cesarean section with strange doctors in a strange hospital. Their baby ended up at the University of South Alabama Medical Center, and the minister had to bounce back and forth between Fort Morgan, Foley and Mobile to handle the service and his family obligations.
The week of the service was greeted with about 8 inches of rain.
We had rented the house next to ours as a place for the bride and bridesmaids to dress and for reception overflow. The concrete area below the house on stilts was flooded.
High winds followed the rain, knocking over the faux plastic columns that were the backdrop for the wedding and making it impossible to decorate fully for the reception until the last minute.
And then rain blew in just as the after-rehearsal dinner was getting underway, and it had to be moved indoors.
We decided to add more rock to the area below our house where we held the reception (they turned my fish-cleaning sink into a tiki bar) so we'd have more room. The guy who was going to do the work told me that the rock would be reddish instead of white like the rock we had.
Somehow I missed the fact that it would be red because it was covered in red dirt of some kind that had to be washed off. And since it rained the week of the wedding, it was red mud. Doug, the guy who did the work, did a great job of putting the rock down. But after he was done, all I could see was red mud getting all over everyone.
The mother of the bride, running without sleep or rest for about 36 hours, tried to stand as the bride walked in and her leg gave way.
Fortunately, she landed in her chair, but she dropped the leash to the bride's dog — who was also dressed in a white satin dress — and the bride's dog escaped. Thankfully, the dog was corralled by the maid of honor, and the father of the bride held her throughout the service.
About an hour before the wedding, the bride couldn't find the groom's ring and a frantic search ensued. It turned up eventually, but not before creating considerable turmoil.
Some things work themselves out. The day before the wedding, I washed down the rock with a water hose, and it was able to dry out. I bought an inexpensive submersible pump at Lowe's and a neighbor loaned us another one, and I pumped the water out from under the house next door. When the pumps had done all they could, I finished it off with a shop vacuum. My son and I reset the faux columns
The weather turned out clear and beautiful the day of the wedding, and the high winds subsided just in time for the service and reception. It all looked like it was going to be fine — until the groom was an hour late.
When the bride burst into tears in the midst of the crisis, the bridesmaids and the cousin who had fixed her hair and makeup warned her that she'd ruin her makeup with tears. She cried harder.
There were real questions about whether a service might occur.
Then, after all that, I found myself walking her down the sand dune toward the minister who, despite his own problems, had been a joy and a rock. And the groom, seeming to take a better late than never approach, was smiling.
Despite having a daughter who was rapidly growing up, I had never expected to be standing there with her, and it seemed surreal. Then I said that I was the one giving her to be wed and stepped aside.
I had predicted that it would rain on May 4, 2013, at Fort Morgan from the moment they announced their intentions for a beach wedding. It didn't. The bride's 85-year-old grandmother didn't take a header down the beach house stairs. I didn't drop of a heart attack. A runaway container ship filled with burning hazardous material didn't crash onto the beach. The wedding happened.
The reception happened. I gave a toast without embarrassing the bride or hurting her feelings. I saw people I loved and enjoyed them. No one got drunk and set the house on fire or turned the food tables over. I didn't even step on the bride's toes when we danced.
Afterward she hugged me and thanked us for "making it perfect." I told her it wasn't perfect, but it was the best we could do.
I had dreaded it and complained about the cost. I had questioned whether it would happen and predicted that it would be a disaster if it did. I just wanted to get it over with. And the next day when I folded up the tables and chairs and realized it was all over, I felt sad.
I'll never figure life out completely.
Robert DeWitt is senior writer for The Tuscaloosa News. Email him at firstname.lastname@example.com.


text:
By Emily Oller
The Bulletin
REDMOND — Things were looking grim for Ridgeview.
But the Ravens, who were shut out heading into the bottom of the fifth inning, quickly — and forcefully — turned it around on Thursday.
Ridgeview scored three runs in the fifth and added four more in the sixth to turn a 4-0 deficit into a three-run lead on its way to a 7-4 softball win over North Valley of Grants Pass in a Class 4A play-in game.
The victory earns the Ravens their first state playoff appearance in the school's brief two-year history, which is expected to be a home game on Wednesday against an opponent to be determined.
"The win feels so good," said Ridgeview shortstop Erin Ware, who went 4 for 4 with a double and four RBIs. "I'm a senior, and it was great to see my team come back and get the win — for them, but also for our seniors."
Ridgeview had a mere three hits prior to the fifth — two by Ware.
"We came in knowing we were the underdog," North Valley coach Charles Chase said. "We were a 30th-ranked team (in the 4A rankings) against a seventh-ranked team. Our kids are better than what our record shows and attitudes were great."
The tides turned in the fifth inning for the Ravens, as Shawna Marshall stepped to the plate with the bases loaded and nobody out. Marshall capitalized and ripped a two-run double to begin the Ridgeview comeback.
"Going up to the plate at my (previous) at-bat there were bases loaded, and I got up and popped one up (for an out)," Marshall said. "So I had to redeem myself. So I went up, took a deep breath, and I just waited for my pitch."
The rally did not stop there. The next batter, Ware, belted an RBI double of her own to cap the three-run inning.
"She (North Valley pitcher Emily Allen) just pitched the same thing to me every time," Ware said. "So I just waited for her to throw that same pitch, and I took it every time. The last time I went up to bat in the sixth inning, I took a deep breath and heard all of our fans and just went up there and smacked the ball."
Momentum carried into the sixth, when the Ravens racked up four additional runs to complete the comeback and clinch Ridgeview's first-ever postseason victory.
Sara McKinney came on to pitch in relief in the second inning for the Ravens after starter Rachel Collins gave up three first-inning runs. The Ridgeview junior stuck out seven over the last six innings to pick up the victory, sending the Raven to their eighth win in the last nine games.
"The first inning that I went in, I threw two balls that I didn't want to throw," McKinney said. "But I was confident with all of my pitches and it helped that my catcher, Paige (Davis), called a great game."
While Ware provided an offensive clinic, Marshall chipped in with a 2-for-4 showing and two RBIs.
"Last year we went to play-ins and just got crushed," Ridgeview coach Sandy Fischer said, referring to the Ravens' 10-0 five-inning loss to Yamhill-Carlton last season. "We weren't even in the game for a minute, and they didn't want to feel that again. Our seniors didn't want to go out that way (this year). Now we just need to focus on the basics."
— Reporter: 541-383-0375, firstname.lastname@example.com .

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Blair Calvo pitched a complete game shutout, giving Nease a 1-0 win over Menendez in baseball on Thursday.
Sean Bryan scored the go-ahead run in the fifth inning for the Panthers (10-2), doubling and later scoring off a sacrifice fly from Sean O'Farrell.
The Falcons are now 6-6.
Creekside 1, Clay 0: Tyler Wills struck out 13 batters and allowed only two hits as Creekside topped Clay in a pitching duel.
Matt Allen went 2 for 3, driving in Taylor Westbrook in the fifth inning for the game's only run.
The Knights are now 9-1, while Clay drops to 10-2. Wills maintained a perfect record on the mound, now 4-0 on the year.
Ponte Vedra 4, Matanzas 1: Matt Deegan pitched six innings, striking out 11 batters and earning the win as Ponte Vedra won its first district game of the season.
Chris Levitt went 1 for 2, driving home two runs. The Sharks are now 5-6.
Bartram Trail 9, St. Augustine 0: Vinny Masi's grand slam and five total RBIs led Bartram Trail to a convincing win over St. Augustine.
Dalton Whitaker earned the win from the mound, pitching five scoreless innings. Mike Cassala went 3 for 3 for the Bears (5-4), including a double; Connor Fitzpatrick went 2 for 3.
Avery Geehr allowed one hit while striking out eight batters as Ponte Vedra beat Menendez, 11-1.
Brittany McGuire had a pair of hits, including a double and a home run for the Sharks (10-3). Gabby Allerton also hit a home run. Morgan Podany recorded three hits for Ponte Vedra, including a double. Geehr improved her record to 9-2.
For Menendez, Elizabeth Colvin hit a home run to lead off the game.
Creekside 10, Palatka 1: Victoria Daddis drove in three runs off of two doubles and a solo home run for Creekside. Ali French recorded two RBIs, both coming on a two-run home run.
Rachel Pence earned the win for the Knights (13-1), improving her record to 7-0 from the circle.
Bartram Trail 6, Clay 3 (8 innings): Bartram Trail needed extra innings to dispatch Clay. The Bears (13-1) recovered quickly after allowing Clay to tie the game at 3 in the bottom of the seventh inning, scoring three runs in the top of the eighth.
Kelsey Chisholm drove in a pair of RBIs for the Bears. Leslie Farris and Sami Smith both drove in one run for Bartram.
Megan Bristow (6-1) earned the win from the circle.
St. Augustine 8, Ridgeview 1: Sierra Riter kept her record from the circle and that of St. Augustine's perfect as they topped Ridgeview.
Riter struck out 11 batters as a pitcher. From the plate, she went 2 for 4 with a double and one RBI.
Kaylee Allen went 2 for 4 for the Yellow Jackets (13-0), also hitting a double and driving in one run. Hannah Hudson went 2 for 2 and Kaitlyn Shaw hit a home run.
Girls tennis
Creekside defeated Matanzas, 5-2. Katy Nystrom (8-3), Alexis Phelps (by default), Kelly Geffen (8-1) and Elizabeth Neuzil (8-1) won singles matches for the Knights.
Phelps and Savanna Page won their doubles match, 8-5.
St. Augustine 3, FSDB 0: JoJo Woolbright (8-1) and Remy Cook (8-4) won singles matches for St. Augustine. Holly Washburn and Claudia Young teamed for an 8-4 doubles win.
Boys tennis
St. Augustine topped Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind, 5-2. Colton Andre (8-3), Justin Lane (8-0) and Ian Frasier (8-0) won singles matches for the Yellow Jackets (6-9).
St. Augustine won both doubles matches, as Andre and Travis Smrekar teamed for an 11-9 win, while Quinton Pooler and Ethan McLeod won 8-2.
Menendez 6, Bartram Trail 1: Hunter Hutcheson (8-1), Ben Thoms (8-3), Joe Razon (8-1) and Paul Razon (8-4) won singles matches for the Falcons. Hutcheson and Austin Kayworth won the first doubles match for Menendez 8-3, while Thoms and Joe Razon won their doubles match 8-1.
Bartram's Martin Gutierrez won a singles match 9-8 (10-8).
Creekside 5, Matanzas 2: Leo Foster (injury default), David Klein (8-0) and Chandler Guest (8-0) won singles matches for Creekside.
Aadhiv Ramsunder and Klein teamed for one doubles win (8-6) for the Knights, as Foster and Gregory Antkiewicz won the other for Creekside, 8-1.


text:
When it comes to the working world, it seems that Lawrence Rook... *sunglasses*
I just had a vision of a John Hughes movie.
The lameness of the joke makes it so much funnier, if I had mod points I would have handed them over.
I have had extremely good luck with UPS, but most peoples complaints are that the delivery driver doesn't even attempt to ring the doorbell, and drives off.
On two occasions I have had courier drivers post a "you weren't here" card on the front door exactly two inches away from the "For Deliveries Ring Bell at the Back Door" sign.
We've actually caught delivery guys posting us "You weren't in" cards in the past. Some of them are just really lazy and don't want to get your package out of the van if they can avoid it.
Yes. Through my window I watched a FedEx driver walk up without the package, slap the notice on the door, and walk away. I called the local office and raised hell.
In our neighbourhood, they stop looking about a block away because there is not a house with the right address where the GPS coordinates say it is (but all the houses on the street are clearly marked).
I've caught a UPS deliverer just dumping it and running off even though the sender had requested a signature, and the only reasoning I caught him was because I was eagerly expecting the package, happened to be home, knew it would arrive soon, and knew a signature would be required. "Huh, oh yeah
Another time a UPS deliverer just put a "you weren't there" notice while I was at home late one evening, never heard a knock and I would have.
I often have stuff I've ordered that is too big to fit through my letter box left on my doorstep. It's a very quiet road and there is partial cover so it's nearly safe, but still.
The worst one so far was my latest (contract) mobile phone. You couldn't tell it was a phone from the package, but there was an impossible to miss "MUST BE SIGNED FOR" sticker on it. Needless to say, it wasn't.
(Oh, and this isn't UPS, this is Royal Mail in the UK)
Re:UPS Rings Doorbells?
First time I've ever heard of that. Here they only deliver weekdays 8 - 6p.m. Maybe on a saturday morning if you pay two or three times the standard charge and maybe on the day they say they will (but even that's not guaranteed) -- and that's all.
So far as getting domestic deliveries for households where people work for a living, forget it. There's no possibility that ANY of the couriers will work outside business hours. All I can suppose is that they make far too much profit from their current practices
Usually my dog chews 'em up so bad I have to get rid of them after a couple of weeks.
Where I used to live the mailman was afraid of one of my dogs because she has blue eyes.
No, seriously, that was his explanation!
So whenever he was supposed to deliver a package he'd just drop off a "You weren't home" slip and drive off, leaving me to pick up my package at the post office. Considering how ridiculously expensive packages are to send in Denmark that really pissed me off on numerous occasions, especially when I'd ordered something from a company and paid the postage myself.
Our local driver(s) have on several occasions not come to the door, but mark in their system that I wasn't home. I've even been sitting out on my front porch before and gotten a notification in my email that UPS missed me. However upon calling it they said "we're sorry but if you missed the driver he'll try and redeliver tomorrow". Basically they treat residential customers like shit because they can and most people simply put up with it. Once or twice they've left a package for me at the front office of my apartment complex without bothering to leave a note on my door meaning they just drove as far as the office and then left. Being that the front office is nearly a mile from my door, I made the driver go pick the package up and bring it to me the next day. It was about 75lbs of bulky box, and since I have no car there was no sane way of me going to pick it up. Seriously fuck UPS right up their fucking asshole.
This used to happen to me all the time.
One amusing incident, I had ordered about $10,000 worth of equipment from the Apple online store. I was eagerly awaiting it, for fucking obvious reasons. I was waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Hours were ticking by. The end of the day was coming. I was getting worried. Eventually, I checked online again. It claimed it had been delivered. It had not. It wasn't outside and nobody had knocked or rung a door bell or called my phone or anything.
I called the leasing office to see if it had been left there (often UPS or FedEX will claim I wasn't at my apartment, so that they could just dump the package in the leasing office and skip delivering it to me). Nope, nothing there.
So, I called FedEX. They looked into their information. Confirmed - yep, we delivered it!
Um . . . . no, you didn't. You definitely did not deliver a bunch of shiny expensive stuff to my door.
They said they would have to look into it and call me back, later.
In the meantime, I took a wild fucking hung and called up the physical Apple Store at the local mall. I asked if they had received a delivery today. They confirmed that it was delivery day and they'd received pallets of stuff. I explained my situation and asked if they could look for any out of place deliveries with my name on them.
Yep, they found them.
I went to the store with my ID and receipt to prove that it was my stuff and they gave it to me.
Two days later, I got a call from FedEX to let me know that they believed they might have delivered the items I bought from the Apple Store to the Apple Store.
I told them that I knew that and that I'd already driven there and picked it up earlier in the week.
I think more people knock than ring doorbells, even when they are available.. UPS has over the years gotten bad about just dumping the package on the porch.. I think most do attempt a knock (or ring), but they are trying to get on to the next address so they are not going to wait too long before they just leave it.. If you are really concerned and unable to be there to make sure you get you package, Fed Ex has a hold for pickup and you can get your package at the nearest office.
Many people don't realize that UPS and FedEx now offer a shipping option called "shipper release". It is a discounted shipping option that guarantees that the driver will leave the package, no matter the neighborhood, weather conditions, etc. The building could be on fire and they will leave the package. The catch is that the carrier is not responsible for lost or stolen packages. Many shippers use this option because it is cheaper to replace any packages lost, than it is to pay full shipping price (The shipper release discount is pretty big). Many, many shippers now use it. This in large part why packages are left. Often a driver wont even knock when the package is shipper release, they just drop and run.
I know someone who lives in a rural area and has about 7 dogs and other animals. The UPS guy is a wuss and is afraid of dogs. He throws their packages in the desert next to their house, leaves them in the road in front of the house, and in general does everything he can to avoid going on their property. One package sat in the desert for 2 weeks before it was found. Another nearly got run over.
Whats funny is that the guy complained that one of the dogs "tried to bite him" and so he kicked it. I know the dogs
You might know the dogs, but the delivery guy does not. Why should he take the chance, or brave phobias to deliver a package into the property, rather than just to the property? Think before you compose.
If you're seriously afraid of dogs, why would you take a job that requires you to travel to and on stranger's property where there's a pretty good chance you're gonna come across dogs pretty often?
I dunno; hunger, rent, car payments
I never get why every single person's dog is "harmless" if you ask them.
I suppose I didn't tell the story well enough. The UPS driver got pissed off and started doing this *intentionally* to piss off the home owner.
As for the dogs, I can tell you that the first time I went to that persons house, the dogs did NOT know me, and they came tails-a-waggin' ready to lick me to death!
That's very easy to say when you met the dogs with their owner around. When he's not, even the calmest dog will become territorially protective and aggressive towards strangers coming near a home (or car, as anyone who's ever worked as a parking valet and had to deal with asshole customers who complain to your boss because you didn't want to get in the car that their rottweiler was growling in the back of and then leave unattended in the July noonday sun for five hours can attest to).
Of course, UPS doesn't ring the doorbell. They knock. Three times. [collegehumor.com]
I used to have this issue too. If you are expecting a delivery, the only solution I have found to this is to post a large note on the door telling the UPS driver that you are home.
I suspect that most UPS drivers don't expect people to be home so they do a light knock & run before you have a chance to get to the door. They are damn fast too. Before I started posting note it was always race to the front door and out the front yard to try and catch the driver before they left.
I've got one worse than that.
A housemate of mine once handed me an unexpected package on the 25th...which contained crumpled business documents that had been overnighted to me for delivery on the 18th. The week-long delay had cost me half of my permitted time to research and fill out the rather extensive, and necessary, paperwork in the package. Incensed, I figured that FedEx was to blame since they had delivered it, so I checked the tracking info for the package, only to discover that it had been delivered
I had one company (UKMail) deliver a "We called but you were out" card without even attempting to deliver the parcel. The guy stopped his van in the middle of the road, got out, put the card through the letterbox, got back in and went to drive off.
I was outside the house working on my car. He walked right past me. You'd have thought that the extension cable running through the slightly-open front door would have been a dead giveaway...
OK, I'll acknowledge that some people are abandoning their land line and going only wireless, but putting a doorbell on a 3G system strikes me as somewhat absurd. Maybe it will be useful in places where the cell carriers don't rape their customers, but using it in the USA, with the extra account it would require, would be crazy for most people. At the very least it should also have the option to tie into the home's land line rather than use the cell network.
I could "invent" a lot of things, if practical costs of using a wireless network were not a consideration.
Let's all stop innovating because of cost, then! This silly progress thing is just plain too expensive!
well here in ireland a prepay sim can be picked up with no paperwork and i think 5 euros every six months will keep it active and in credit. so 10 euros a year to run it?
it would be nice with a wifi model running voip to your mobile though.
Except this isn't anything 'new'. One of the newer apartment buildings built on campus (finished in ~2005) lets you buzz in anyone from anywhere using your phone. I believe the place also had washer/driers that would text you when they finished their cycle.
It may be cool, but definitely not a new 'invention'.
Think further. Think company doorbell.
Imagine you have a small one-man shop and you just step out for groceries or something, wouldn't you want to be able to tell your delivery guy that he should wait for 5 minutes (and receive a nice tip if he did) instead of having to wait all day in your office for him?
Imagine you're a big company and you try to avoid having a phone system. It's not as absurd as it may initially look, considering that the setup cost of phone systems (even aside of the system itself, cables, phones, etc) is easily overcome by handing cells to all your employees, which has pretty much become the standard in some companies anyway. How about every secretary (or a few of your personnel) receiving a call when someone rings the doorbell and they can even open the door for them? Even if they're not in the company (granted, opening the door should be reserved to certain special occasions in such a case).
I could even see an added security feature, akin to a four-eyes principle, where the security head receives a call when a certain security door is to be opened and only his code, sent via cell, can unlock the door in addition to the guard's button.
I could see a lot of interesting ways this could be used in business.
I know it's hard to grasp for a geek, but most people are not tech savvy. They also do not want to "tinker" with it, they want a solution that "just works". For reference, see Apple and its recent success.
Also, 3G's price is not a killer everywhere either. Especially big companies can easily get a very affordable company rate from cell telcos, where adding another phone to the plan runs in the cents. Plus, you shift the burden of security on the telco. A VoIP solution would again require cables, something y
OK, I'll acknowledge that some people are abandoning their land line and going only wireless
What planet do you live on? Everyone except the elderly has cell phones now, and most got rid of their land lines years ago.
In some places (here in the UK) landlines can be so cheap when purchased with DSL/TV/etc that its worth having, e.g. to receive international calls, call premium numbers, etc.
I don't have one any more though.
For that matter, who pays $50 a month for an entry-level contract any more? Mobile contracts in the UK (and this is a UK story so I'll quote prices in GBP) start at around the £10 a month mark. For an application like this, you'd probably be far better off on a pre-pay tariff. The postman only comes once a day, and you're not going to be having long conversations with him over the intercom.
Remember that this system most likely just places voice calls, so won't need any data allowance.
> Maybe it will be useful in places where the cell
> carriers don't rape their customers, but using
> it in the USA
Er... the title clearly says "English". He's from England. We give 3G SIM cards away for free, no monthly cost and they remain active so long as you put a few quid credit on every other month or so.
I've got an emergency Nokia 2100 in my missus' car, has had about a ten quid in credit spent on it in the last year and the number is still active and the credit still valid.
England is only 50
it sounds like you're answering the door over an intercom system, even if you're really across town
oh, there went my how-could-that-possibly-be-abused alarm.
If you're capable of physically ringing the doorbell to cause abuse then you already have a million and one ways at your disposal to do it. You already know they're not home.
He invented this? How come I had one before he was born?
I think I still have it saved somewhere in my old "Cool"
alarm equip. I used to do installs in the pre-computer
(pre 386 days). This was a box, with triggers and a phone
module. Event triggers, allowed for voice out, mic in.
Exact same thing. So... innovation?
Kudos to him for a great innovation.
AC til I find it...
He invented this? How come I had one before he was born?
I think I still have it saved somewhere in my old "Cool" alarm equip. I used to do installs in the pre-computer (pre 386 days). This was a box, with triggers and a phone module. Event triggers, allowed for voice out, mic in.
Exact same thing. So... innovation?
Kudos to him for a great innovation.
AC til I find it...
You were using 3G in the pre-386 days?
Yes, the spectrum was nice and clear back then.
He invented this? How come I had one before he was born?
I think I still have it saved somewhere in my old "Cool" alarm equip. I used to do installs in the pre-computer (pre 386 days). This was a box, with triggers and a phone module. Event triggers, allowed for voice out, mic in.
Exact same thing. So... innovation?
Kudos to him for a great innovation.
AC til I find it...
You were using 3G in the pre-386 days?
the 3G part is not that part that people think is the cool part. In fact, the 3G part is entirely irrelevant to the operation of the invention. You could rig one of these things to work over a ham radio, or better, as was suggested earlier, VOIP through a pre-existing connection and save a fortune. The 3G part was because the kid is 13, and all the components of this setup are fairly easy to wire together (probably doesn't even require a breadboard). All of the parts are standard off the shelf modules. Hel
Likewise, I've seen this sort of thing before. The gate to the development I used to live in had something like this. To get in, a visitor had to punch the house number into the gate keypad. It would then phone whatever number had been programmed into it for that house.
You could then talk back and forth and decide whether to let them in or not by pressing the button combo for gate opening.
It's not a bad idea, but it's not a new one either. At 13 I'm still impressed, but if the kid was older I wouldn't be.
Couldn't you just hook the door bell up to your LAN and make it call through Skype or whatever instead of this 3g chip nonsense?
That's what I was wondering, too.
Yes, yes I could.
My elderly parents and semi-technically-literate friends, probably not. Hell my brother doesn't even have an Internet connection, but could still use this.
Couldn't you just hook the door bell up to your LAN and make it call through Skype or whatever instead of this 3g chip nonsense?
No! Microsoft clowns would eat you!
Nothing new here, aside from maybe the 3G chip. When I rented out a loft in SF 10 years back, the landlady gave me the manual to the door intercom and I was able to program it via it's dial in touch-tone API to dial my cell so I could answer the door from wherever -- which was very handy.
Call me once it's possible to remotely zap Jehova's Witnesses and other annoyances.
Please somebody mod parent funny or insightful or such!
This reminds me of the hack used in the Ferris Bueller movie when the door bell was pressed and a recording would playback over the intercom. If Ferris had this then, he could do his improvise the "sick and can't come to the door" routine from anywhere using a cell phone and not get busted by the recording repeating.
So the single category which best sums up this story and so is used for the icon is...
And the very next
While we're at it - why do red antique phone booths represent the UK?
While we're at it - why do red antique phone booths represent the UK?
For the same reason that Malt Shops represent the US.
Ignorant foreigners picking up on something that used to be a part of the nation but have long since passed into obscurity.
The whole world knows that here in Scotland EVERYONE plays the bagpipes.
"Hi, I'm a pizza delivery, not a burglar. Could you open the door?"
"Um.. sorry, no not just now"
"Why not?"
"You're not even in, are you? You're miles away!"
"No I'm not. I just don't want to open the door."
"Look out the window then. Can you see me?"
"No, I can't go to the window just now. I'm, er, in the shower."
"Yeah, right. Thanks for confirming the house is empty. I'd wouldn't have been sure if I'd just got no answer."
The unfacts, did we have them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude.


text:
Office Space to Rent in Baron Street, N1
We have a variety of serviced offices available to rent in Baron Street, N1. Each office space is offered at the best rates and suited to your individual needs and requirements.
We have a variety of serviced offices available to rent in Baron Street, N1. Each office space is offered at the best rates and suited to your individual needs and requirements.
This bespoke workspace is specifically designed for small businesses, start-ups and entrepreneurs. Dedicated desks, each with their own lockable storage unit, as set within an open plan area, giving members the opportunity to network, socialise and collaborate with other like minded businesses. Everything is included within the price; all bills, rates, services, fast broadband and WiFi, use of meeting rooms, printing, scanning, even freshly ground coffee, cappuccino, and espresso. The agreement is on a flexible rolling monthly basis, and no deposit is required.
Created by Shed Architects, this business centre is created with bright colours, bold forms and simplistic shapes. This building is a 30 second walk from Angel Square underground station and located on Upper Street with the broadest selection of restaurants and eateries in London. The building has individual office space as well as a large co-working space, fixed desks and meeting rooms.
This business centre occupies the basement floor, 1st floor and the 4th floor, in addition to a rear landscaped area. All facilities and services are state-of-the-art having been completed in June 2017.
This 17th century listed building provides a flagship location, occupying a prominent corner site opposite "The Angel". Behind this traditional facade, the newly refurbished centre brings you the very latest in ICT infrastructure with inclusive 50MB fibre-optic internet and telecoms solutions. The furnished commercial accommodation and meeting rooms are available to suit any configuration, giving you the ability to expand and contract according to your changing needs. Space can be taken for any period, from one month to indefinitely and without any set-up costs. The following services are included in the monthly rental: fully furnished offices, 24-hour access, commercial grade internet, staffed reception, office cleaning, building maintenance and insurance, electricity, lighting and heating, as well as a range of business support services. Every company that uses the building becomes a member of the Business Club which includes complimentary access to the clubhouse space for relaxed meetings and to the boardroom area for structured conferences.
Offering various office sizes with bespoke features that suit your budget and meeting needs. Car parking, on site storage space, easy access and IT connectivity available. Enquire today!
The building combines the virtues of a professional and modern business environment within the setting of a stunning Grade ll listed building and is centrally located moments from Angel tube and just outside the congestion zone. The centre is the chosen location for over 150 enterprising companies thriving on our philosophy that a stimulating building motivates staff and develops commerce.
The former art-deco tobacco warehouse offers six large offices and studios in Angel. The recently refurbished reception and common areas of the building gives the property a modern look.
This newly refurbished 1930's Art Deco building is set in a prominent location and is only 100 metres from Angel Tube Station. Benefiting from the local bars, restaurants and shops of Islington, the building also provides a recognisable city address. The building has 24hr secure access, 2 on-site parking spaces available (on 1st come-1st serve bases or for regular usage (price on inquiry), and on site building management support.
This business centre offers facilities in a modern purpose-built office/education complex in the heart of Kings Cross. The attractive, contemporary design of the state-of-the- art centre provides a vibrant, welcoming environment. All training rooms are equipped with interactive whiteboards and provide seating for between 8 to 30 participants. Office spaces to rent are fully furnished and include an optional telephone system. The building is air-conditioned and has wi-fi throughout. There is full disabled access and all rooms are on the first floor, reached by a lift from the ground floor. The relaxation area in the centre of the building provides comfortable seating, with hot and cold drinks and light snacks available.
This period business centre is located close to Clerkenwell and Islington in the City fringe area. The accommodation provides more basic unfurnished offices and workshops. The property has a meeting room and reception.
Below you can see the nearest areas to Baron Street, N1 where you can find serviced offices:


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Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 18th Mar 2013 15:51 UTC
Thorsten Heins, BlackBerry's CEO: "Apple did a fantastic job in bringing touch devices to market ... They did a fantastic job with the user interface, they are a design icon. There is a reason why they were so successful, and we actually have to admit this and respect that. History repeats itself again I guess ... the rate of innovation is so high in our industry that if you don't innovate at that speed you can be replaced pretty quickly. The user interface on the iPhone, with all due respect for what this invention was all about is now five years old." Ironic, perhaps, that this comes from a BlackBerry CEO, but that doesn't make him wrong - although I'm sure the usual suspects will claim that it does.
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RE[8]: Comment by MOS6510
by unclefester on Wed 20th Mar 2013 08:56 UTC in reply to "RE[7]: Comment by MOS6510"
I'm sure there are benefits, but it sounds expensive and laptops are fragile. Even more in the hands of young and wild kids.
Schools are spending more than £450 million a year on tablet computers, education games and electronic whiteboards with little or no evidence that they benefit children's education, it was claimed.
RE[9]: Comment by MOS6510
by MOS6510 on Wed 20th Mar 2013 09:14 in reply to "RE[8]: Comment by MOS6510"
If I take this article to school the teachers will read it, say it's true and still order a bunch of laptops.
I have no doubt technology can aid in education, I just don't think teachers know how to apply them well. Right now they think "it's computers, it must be better because they are more expensive than pen and paper". Most teachers aren't tech savvy at all.


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gscan2pdf is a GUI to ease the process of producing PDFs from scanned documents. You scan in one or several pages and create a PDF of selected pages. Scanning is handled with SANE via scanimage. PDF conversion is done by PDF::API2. Perl is used for portability and ease of programming, with gtk2-perl for the GUI.
Jailer is a database subsetting and browsing tool. It is a tool for data exporting, schema browsing, and rendering. It exports consistent, referentially intact row-sets from relational databases. It removes obsolete data without violating integrity. It is DBMS agnostic (by using JDBC), platform independent, and generates DbUnit datasets, hierarchically structured XML, and topologically sorted SQL-DML.
FTPL (FakeTime Preload Library, aka libfaketime) intercepts various system library calls and tricks programs of your choice into seeing a faked system time without having to change the time system-wide. This can be used for running legacy software with Y2K bugs, testing software for year-2038 compliance, debugging time-related issues such as expired SSL certificates, and using software that ceases to run outside a certain time frame. The faked time can be specified either absolutely or relative to the real current time, and optionally also affects file timestamps. The faked clock continues to run, but can optionally be frozen, slowed down, or made faster. A wrapper script "faketime" simplifies the usage, similar to tools such as fakechroot.
RCDevs OpenOTP Server provides two-factor authentication with one-time passwords (OTP). It supports OATH RFC-4226 HOTP (Event-based) and TOTP (Time-based), OCRA (Challenge-based), Mobile-OTP, YubiKey Software/Hardware Tokens, SMSOTP, MailOTP, and OTP lists. It provides a SOAP/XML, RADIUS, and OpenID APIs and integrates into your LDAP (OpenLDAP, Novell, ActiveDirectory). It works with Web applications, VPNs, Linux PAM, Microsoft, and more. It is composed of the RCDevs WebADM server application, the OpenOTP SOAP service, the OpenOTP Radius Bridge, the User Self-service Desk, and Token Self-enrollemnt end-user Web application. VMWare appliances and Web demos are available.
PeaZip is a cross-platform file archiver utility that provides a unified portable GUI for many open source technologies like 7-Zip, FreeArc, PAQ, UPX, etc. Creates 7Z, ARC, BZ2, GZ, *PAQ, PEA, QUAD/BALZ, TAR, UPX, WIM, XZ, and ZIP files. It extracts more than 150 archive types: ACE, ARJ, CAB, DMG, ISO, LHA, RAR, UDF, ZIPX, and more. Features of PeaZip include extracting, creating, and converting multiple archives at once, creating self-extracting archives, split/join files, strong encryption with two factor authentication, an encrypted password manager, secure deletion, find duplicate files, calculate hashes, and export job definitions as scripts.
Bluefish is a programmer's Web development editor written using GTK, designed to save the experienced webmaster some keystrokes. It features a multiple file editor, multiple toolbars, custom menus, image and thumbnail dialogs, open from the Web, CSS dialogs, PHP, HTML, Java, C, and XML support, external program integration (tidy, weblint, make, javac), and lots of wizards.
Talend Open Studio for ESB is an innovative, Eclipse-based tooling environment for modeling, configuring, and deploying integration solutions using the Apache-based open source enterprise service bus (ESB), Talend ESB. Talend ESB is a versatile and flexible ESB that allows organizations to address integration challenges, from simple departmental projects to complex, heterogeneous IT environments. Powered by the Apache CXF, Apache Camel, and Apache ActiveMQ Open Source integration projects, it makes enterprise-class integration accessible by delivering a cost-effective and easy-to-use way to integrate and expand systems and applications.
Ariadne is a Web Application Framework and Content Management System built with PHP. It allows you to build complex Web applications and sites with ease. It takes care of the mundane stuff like internationalization, security, user management, templating, data retrieval and storage, caching, and site management. It stores content in a structured object store that can be accessed through an extensive filesystem-like API.
A simple RAID checker.
A Mozilla-based browser.


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What advantage does this hold over existing "peer to peer" solutions like rsync or Unison? Is it just speed? I imagine that each additional update will speed up until downstream bandwidth is exhausted. If you have symmetric up/down, then there would be no speed advantage.
And tends to suck when you have changes happening on both end, and when you want simple conflict resolution, and when you have more than two devices, or when both sides are moving targets...
Rsync is about as far from a "set it and forget it" syncing solution as you can possibly get, the list of caveats and cautions is about as long as the feature list.
Exactly, but Unison doesn't have those problems - it handles where changes have happened on both ends and flags conflicts. I can use my desktop and laptop as much as I want without having to remember which files I modified on which and then simply run Unison to sync my home directory between the two devices.
What does this bittorrent one have as advantages over that?
Advantages over Unison:
~This is real time syncing initiated automatically on a file change. Unison syncs when you ask it to.
~Gracefully handles more than 2 devices. Unison was designed to keep files on 2 devices in sync. This is designed to keep files on N devices in sync. This also means you have N copies of your files for potentially better redundancy.
~Speed. Here a file you're missing may be transferred from multiple hosts. In the case where you have just 2 nodes in your network it reduces to Unison spee
That's the kind of answer that should be '+5 informative'. I'll keep using Unison as I only have 2 devices I need to sync between at the moment, but consider this for the future if I get an Ubuntu Tablet or something like that.
For the non-techies, I assume that coming, out of the box, with the various tricks that bittorrent clients use to Just Work behind nasty little plastic NAT boxes would be the major advantage. Nothing intrinsic to bittorrent as a protocol; but certainly a side effect of bittorrent's history.
It might also be useful if your sharing scenario involves enough people that the efficiencies of bittorrent come into play. If it's just keeping Host A and Host B synchronized, you aren't going to do much better than break even, at best, with rsync. If your plan involves all two dozen members of your club, or your entire extended family and a tedious-but-HD vacation video, bittorrent starts to look better; but with the advantage that this 'key/encryption' stuff allows you to have a single host serving different folders with different access controls, unlike conventional trackers that are usually 'public' or 'private', with granular control, if any, mostly hacked on.
Aside from the ease of use, though, the amount of benefit you'd see over rsync seems likely to be directly related to how wide your distribution is.
It might also be useful if your sharing scenario involves enough people that the efficiencies of bittorrent come into play.
I imagine that the next step for BitTorrent is to make a corporate play.
It would be interesting to see how that would work for them: dropbox is a total raging clusterfuck for anything that you actually need to keep secure(I once caught a user storing fucking children's medical records on a personal dropbox account. That was not a fun chat for anybody involved...); but it's hard to deny that the consumer-derived 'cloud sharing' stuff frequently beats the IT department on usability and convenience.
If I were BitTorrent, inc. a corporate play would certainly seem sensible(not too m
but it's hard to deny that the consumer-derived 'cloud sharing' stuff frequently beats the IT department on usability and convenience.
Quattro Pro and Wordstar on MSDOS 6.0 beats almost anything the IT department offers in terms of usability and convenience.
dropbox is a total raging clusterfuck for anything that you actually need to keep secure(I once caught a user storing fucking children's medical records on a personal dropbox account.
You can't really create a product that lets you easily store and share information then moan when some people store and share information inappropriately.
If someone wants to put their name, address, phone numbers and credit card details on facebook with no privacy settings, how are you going to stop them?
I don't care what people do with their data on dropbox. My point was that, as a tool for environments that handle sensitive data dropbox is deeply unsuitable. I can definitely understand why people would want to use it, it sure is handy; but in a situation where you have an obligation to safeguard data pertaining to other people, you are no longer in "what people do with their data" territory, and dropbox is seriously flawed.
Bittorrent Sync could be even more private than Dropbox - you can send out time-limited shares and restrict permissions, etc.
I think BTSync could completely take over the corporate space if it's well designed enough. I can already see exactly how this would supplant Sparkleshare, SFTP and/or Dropbox for working on large/sparse project teams with large relatively static datasets (e.g.: large report output files, XML interchange data, etc)
It's still not clear whether BTSync does binary diffs, and it definite
If you have symmetric up/down, then there would be no speed advantage.
Well I suppose it still depends. Imagine you have 20 computers staying in sync, all through symmetric 10mbps connections, then you add another. Even if the additional computer only has a 10Mbps connection, meaning you may not get the download faster than simply downloading from one source, you could still see a benefit from distributing the load among the other 20 computers. So instead of saturating the upload pipe for one computer, you're a minor
With 2 computers involved no advantage over rsync or Unison as far as speed of transfer. If you have 3 or more computers this is a better option. This works just like any other torrent. If a file is on computer A, and computers B and C need it. As B gets part of it and C gets a different part of it, then B and C can help update each other in the case of A's pipe being saturated. If you are trying to sync A, B, C, D, E, F, G and H, then it will be MUCH faster and much less complex to maintain.
Once you add in
Seems like a better alternative to my paid Dropbox subscription.
Yeah, I was hoping this would be some sort of mesh backup, where files are encrypted and spread redundantly throughout the network.
Still, it could be a useful collaboration tool, but not a replacement for Dropbox or Crashplan.
Why would anybody touch it after this:
https://www.google.ca/search?q=bittorrent+MPAA+Team [google.ca]
"Why would anybody touch it after this:"
Who the hell cares about that?
That only has to do with BitTorrent's (the company) OWN servers. And they weren't aggregating infringing links anyway.
The vast majority of BitTorrent traffic has absolutely nothing to do with BitTorrent, the company.
As far as I know, there is no way to track file syncing via BitTorrent, unless your ISP is monitoring your usage at the last mile. You might be able to pull off a man-in-the-middle, or spoof a node, IF you knew somebody was about to sync. But how many machi
If it's not open source it could be monitoring what you have legit or not.
No network hacks required, just a patient app reporting back a-la-RealJukeBox randomly at 3am 6-9 months after product launch.
PS: Thanks for the Troll paint job.
Exactly. I try not to be a zealot for FOSS, but this just seems like the sort of software that I would want to make damn sure the public can see the source on. You don't get to just say "It's encrypted!" and have me believe everything was done correctly.
I'll tell you, this seems to me to be a very interesting development. I think the next step they should be looking at is to develop the ability to purposefully implement partial replicas at different sites, allowing for a kind of distributed filesystem.
For example, lets say I set up 30 servers around the world, each with this Bitorrent Sync system set up, each containing 20 TB of data. Now in order for Bittorrent to work, I don't think I need each of those servers to have a full copy of every file. Imagine I could say, "Make sure than any one block is automatically stored on at least 6 servers". Now I have 100 TB of redundant storage online accessible via the bittorrent protocol. Then I could have different individual clients set to only sync a certain subset of that storage.
After reading over threads such as http://forum.bittorrent.com/topic/8816-will-syncapp-be-open-source/ [bittorrent.com] on their website, I am disappointed to find that SyncApp (as well as Surf, and Live, other BTLabs projects) is not currently open source, and apparently the most they're shooting for at the moment is some sort of API in the future. While I was initially intrigued by Sync's feature set, especially the "shared secret" encryption variations (master key, one way sync, one time sync and more.), as well as that they could be integrated within BitTorrent's existing (and open source) protocols such as DHT, using a BitTorrent tracker, PEX, stream encryption etc, when I read that the implementation was not planning to be free and open source, that is a major blow to its long-term viability as part of next-generation file-sharing protocols.
Especially in a world of "Six Strikes", overzealous industry groups and corporate cronies, government censorship and more, it is absolutely imperative that the tools that those interested in privacy, activism, journalism etc...be free and open source. From being able to audit the code if you have the skills, to crafting decentralized and inter-operative networks across multiple platforms, operating systems and more etc... FOSS is necessary. I can nearly guarantee that if the original BitTorrent protocol had not been released free and open source (along with many of the most popular evolutions of said protocol, such as DHT/PEX/uTP, encryption, private trackers etc..) it would not have come to such prominence. I personally am no fan of the proprietary uTorrent client, but thankfully I can make use of Deluge, KTorrent, or Transmission and have access to the latest features on the BitTorrent network, able to interact with others so long as they were using open protocols. I'd love to see this extend to Sync, which I feel could be excellent not just for users syncing their data amongst multiple computing devices of their own, or sharing with friends, but creating another protective web when it comes to file-sharing, adding privacy protections - an intermediary step that doesn't have nearly the speed/hardware demands of say, operating BitTorrent exclusively through Tor.
Sync, Torque/btapp.js (One has to install the proprietary, headless Torque client (or uTorrent) which has very little documentation on its features/privacy etc... why not have them simply integrate with an open API that any BT client with sufficient support can be called to utilize - thus, using all the safety features like my blocklist, encryption preferences etc... in my client of choice?), Live, Surf (Which I hope will be open and customizable, available on Firefox ASAP,) SoShare - all of these BitTorrent Labs productions sadly seam to be proprietary in nature (though, I must give them kudos for offering Linux versions of Sync for instance). Much like the acquisition of the proprietary uTorrent and the "Plus" version of the client being sold, BitTorrent's latest ventures seem to be steering away from the free and open source paradigm that made the protocol such a great advance in filesharing.
When it comes to file sharing in today's legal and technical clime, proprietary and centralized just won't do. What Sync offers is novel and could create additional layers of security (consider an entire tracker using Sync technology where connecting to each torrent requires a unique "Shared secret", which is available exclusively on a totally different site, extrapolating another legal level of obfuscation, deny-ability, and privacy protection), the community cannot trust it offered as a proprietary service with a central point of failure (legally) and the inability to audit the code. Hopefully, this will change and that Sync and other elements will help to extend BitTorrent as the excellent, multifaceted, free and open tool for disseminating data... but for the time being, it is a curiosity that is in the hands of a company that seems to put profit and control above user privacy and technical freedom/openness
Our business in life is not to succeed but to continue to fail in high spirits. -- Robert Louis Stevenson


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Guitar Basics 101
Age Group: Adults, Seniors & Teens
11/17/2013 • 12 p.m. - 1 p.m.Sahara West Library
Room: Board Room
Local guitar instructor, Matt Hennager, teaches this three-week course, covering how to read music, what type of guitar is best for you, an introduction to guitar chords, chord practice progressions and other key components. By the end of the course, you will be able to play a full song on the guitar.
Classes are one hour in length and those wishing to attend must bring their own electric or acoustic guitar. You must arrive 10 to 15 minutes early to tune your guitar.
This course is geared towards beginners ages 10 and older, though intermediate players may enjoy a review.
This session runs November 3, 10, and 17. You must attend the first class of the session in order to attend the subsequent classes.
Classes are free and open to the public. For more information, please call 507-3631.


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Basically, the jet's internals are hot enough to melt rock back into glass... So after a couple of passes through ash clouds, you have a thin layer of glass covering all the internal turbine blades. Which completely destroys the engine, and is extremely hard to repair without completely replacing the blades.
So, basically, what I've been told is that, yes, flying a jet through a volcanic ash cloud is a good recipe for completely destroying the engines, such that they need to be rebuilt, within two or three passes through the ash. It sounds plausible, and I've not yet heard anyone who actually does aircraft maintenance or anything like that suggest that it's harmless.
There's some uncertainty over [bloomberg.com] the level of ash that poses a significant threat, though. What's known is that zero ash is fine, and a lot of ash causes significant damage, but not too much seems to be known about the concentration/response curve beyond that.
Of course, it's also pretty clear that Branson is angling for a handout here, not really deeply interested in science or public policy. He has a pretty big self-interest in convincing people that the cause of the shutdown was government overreaction, in which case the government should compensate the airlines; rather than having people believe that the shutdown was a necessary reaction to the volcanic eruption.
I ain't engine expert nor volcanologist nor geologist, but I'd rather think more than twice before pouring sand into my car's engine.
Suffice to say that if my car engine dies, only the engine conks, the rest of my car don't break up in pieces.
But if an airplane's engines die, it'll crash, and everyone inside the plane gonna die with it.
That old British hippie is getting way too greedy.
That old British hippie is getting way too greedy.
They should offer him some compensation, but he has to fly there in one of his passenger jets through the ash to collect on it.
Oddly, modern jet engines are generally okay dealing with sand [youtube.com]. The fine silica particles in volcanic ash seem to pose much more of a problem.
That's an apple-oranges comparison. The video shows a GE-Honda HF120 turbine [wikipedia.org], a 2,000 lb two-stage, two-compressor turbofan designed for the light jet market. A very different design from...
Commercial airline engines are rated from 14,000 (old-school Boeing 737) to over 100,000 (Boeing 777) pounds.
Aside from that, the difference in scale of a fine volcanic ash particle compared with a grain of sand determines the melt rate. Volcanic ash passing through a turbine is essentially a fluid, one that melts at around 1000 C. Aggregate sand (in the video) melt between 1500-1700 C.
Turbofan combustion chambers burn at between 1500-2000 C. Grains of sand are too thick to melt, given the airflow rate through an engine (250-1400 mph.)
The engine isn't the only important part of a jet aircraft. Apparently flying a jet aircraft through what's effectively 200 miles of sandblasting has other deleterious effects such as sandblasting the windshield, abrading the skin of the wing and other forward parts and trailing parts including the tail, obstructing the pitot tubes that gauge airspeed. Some of these effects are immediate and inconvenient (landing an aircraft when the windscreen is frosted glass can be challenging), and some are not immediately apparent but can cause aircraft failure several months after the ash is gone. Trailing edge surfaces can also be affected in subsonic aircraft, though these can be less important because critical control lines can not be routed aft of trailing edge surfaces. The mobility of ailerons and flaps can be affected by grit. This grit can cause failures in flight because the maintenance schedules for aircraft do not account for flying through powdered glass.
Let's review: Glass is harder than steel. Volcanic ash is glass. Volcanic ash in the air can be as course as 1.5", or as fine as 60 microns. The skin of aircraft are predominately aluminum. Aluminum is not as hard as steel. These ash particles can abrade aluminum. If you fly though enough abrasive, the skin of your aircraft will wear through.
The way airlines work some of these aircraft might be rotated to routes far from northern Europe, placing almost anyone at risk. Did that commuter plane from San Francisco to San Diego accumulate ash damage over the North Atlantic? You don't know.
It's better safe than sorry I think. We have a long history of airlines ignoring common sense and basic safety to put butts in the seats. They need regulation to keep them from getting stupid.
It's not like volcanos were just recently discovered. They predate airlines by a good bit, and Iceland volcanos go off on a regular basis. I say it's part of the normal order of the day for these airlines. If they're not insured against this risk then it's their own cost because they're self-insured. I'll bet some of them are getting compensation from their insurance and want to be compensated twice to improve their bottom line. Getting paid twice to not carry passengers is almost three times as profitable as getting passengers to grandma's house - especially if Grandma's house is in Finland, since they save some accellerated depreciation on a very expensive aircraft.
I don't know about Branson, but some of the airline CEOs did go up on one of those successful test flights they sent up Sunday through, I think, Tuesday after eruption. It still took those regulators days after that too lift the senseless ban.
They was just publicity stunts of no scientific value at all, especially given the majority of the flight time was well above the ash cloud. If they had spent hours up there flying at various speeds and altitudes and covering large swathes of Europe it might have meant something.
Of course, fortunately, the original question is easy to answer as there was no over re-action because they had to no choice. It is the law. You do not fly through volcanic ash. Maybe some research could be done on concentrations of volcanic ash that pose a threat and the law subsequently changed but as it stands, the right thing was done.
I speak as someone whose flight was cancelled.
Exactly, I am not sure why past tragedies have not been mentioned by ANY of the officials or NEWS networks..
I remember seeing something about this on Discovery or History channel years ago and a quick search pointed me to British Airways Flight 9 on Wikipedia, all four engines FAILED!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Airways_Flight_9 [wikipedia.org]
I remember seeing something about this on Discovery or History channel years ago and a quick search pointed me to British Airways Flight 9 on Wikipedia, all four engines FAILED!
BA Flight 9 flew through a concentrated ash cloud, and no-one is saying that aircraft should do so. But there's a level between that concentration and zero where the ash causes no significant impact on the engines, at which point it's safe to fly; more than that, there are higher levels where the engines will require increased maintenance but the airlines may be willing to pay that cost in order to keep the planes flying.
The idea that a tiny level of ash will cause an airliner to fall out of the sky is just
closing down European airspace for a brief period was justified, keeping it closed for days was certainly an overreaction by burrowcrats who were too scared to take the risk of letting planes fly
Yeah. If only they'd come out of their burrows into the sunlight once in a while, maybe they wouldn't be so scared.
And to go along with your post, the British Airways flight was about 100 miles from the volcano, and all 4 engines started up again after they were out of the ash. One of them failed again, but they were able to make it safely to an airport on their own power rather than strictly gliding.
I thought the travel blackout was a little too knee jerk. I don't know how high the ash got in the atmosphere, but I'm thinking that there would be a more or less safe zone either above or below the main concentration of
And to go along with your post, the British Airways flight was about 100 miles from the volcano, and all 4 engines started up again after they were out of the ash. One of them failed again, but they were able to make it safely to an airport on their own power rather than strictly gliding.
After one of the longest glides in history in a regular aircraft, and landing instruments-only because the windshield was rendered almost opaque from the ash, and even then with half the instruments out of commission.
Given the history of aircraft encounters with volcanic ash clouds - near disaster every time, averted only by heroic efforts by the pilots - the total shutdown was the only appropriate short-term response.
And to go along with your post, the British Airways flight was about 100 miles from the volcano, and all 4 engines started up again after they were out of the ash. One of them failed again, but they were able to make it safely to an airport on their own power rather than strictly gliding.
That's great for 4-engine planes like the 747, A340 and A380. What about the twin-engines used for shorter-haul flights?
I thought the travel blackout was a little too knee jerk. I don't know how high the ash got in the atmosphere, but I'm thinking that there would be a more or less safe zone either above or below the main concentration of ash. Then there is the bigger safe zone away from the main corridor the ash is traveling. They might have needed to make adjustments to flight plans, but I think that they could have had a much smaller no-fly zone. Of course I am not even an aerospace janitor, so what do I know?
There had never been extensive testing done to determine safe levels of volcanic ash, so they could not, on a few hours notice, set up "safe zones" with any confidence. In those same first few hours they also might not have had the detailed maps and analyses of ash concentrations and altitudes that we saw in the days after.
Granted I'm not an aerospace janitor either, but given the little they knew at the time, which included direct knowledge of what can happen when flying near volcanic eruptions (British Airways 9 and KLM 867), IMHO they really had no choice but to issue a complete ban until at least some tests were done without using paying passengers as guinea pigs.
I thought the travel blackout was a little too knee jerk. I don't know how high the ash got in the atmosphere, but I'm thinking that there would be a more or less safe zone either above or below the main concentration of ash. Then there is the bigger safe zone away from the main corridor the ash is traveling. They might have needed to make adjustments to flight plans, but I think that they could have had a much smaller no-fly zone. Of course I am not even an aerospace janitor, so what do I know?
I am pretty glad you're not in a position where the life of a LOT of people depends on your decisions.
> But there's a level between that concentration and zero where the ash
> causes no significant impact on the engines, at which point it's safe to fly
There probably is. But the problem is that no one knows at what level between zero and BA Flight 9 concentrations (and for how long at that concentration) it is safe to fly. The airlines don't know. Boeing and Airbus don't know. And the jet engine manufacturers don't know. The tests and certifications have simply never been done. The airlines were proposing to do said testing live and in the sky with airliners loaded with passengers. Do you see the problem with that?
The second problem is that, even if it were known that a certain concentration of volcanic ash is "safe" to fly through, it takes specialized and uncommon equipment to measure said concentrations. Said equipment is not carried aboard aircraft. And the onboard radar they do carry detects water droplets in weather formations. Volcanic ash doesn't show up at all. So an airliner flying through a "safe" concentration of ash could be five minutes away from a BA Flight 9 type cloud, and they wouldn't know until the engines shut down.
So the engines are a good detector for ash clouds you say
Sure, just as food tasters are a good way to detect things wrong with the food. Sucks to be the taster though.
"Is he still moving?"
"Mmmm, I guess this week old fish salad is bad then. Send in the next taster for the running cheese!"
"Don't you mean runny cheese".
The testing was done by airforces, you know the ones with ejection seats and two engines per passenger? And they considered it unsafe. I take their word for it. If Finland grounds its fighter defence, then I don't go up. I do not know better.
These conditions apparently don't show up enough to justify the cost of determining safe operating parameters. Therefore, no flying. It isn't really complicated -- if a bunch of airlines want to get together and pay for the testing, they can fly. Otherwise, they stay on the ground.
The captain of that flight Eric Moody is hilarious
Despite the lack of time, Moody made an announcement to the passengers that has been described as "a masterpiece of understatement":[3][4]
"Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damnedest to get them under control. I trust you are not in too much distress.
followed by the gem
"He then called out how high they should be at each DME step along the final track to the runway, creating a virtual glide slope for them to follow. It was, in Moody's words, "a bit like negotiating one's way up a badger's arse"."
(a)The equipment, systems, and installations whose functioning is required by this subchapter, must be designed to ensure that they perform their intended functions under any foreseeable operating condition.
(b) The airplane systems and associated components, considered separately and in relation to other systems, must be designed so that--
(1) The occurrence of any failure condition which would prevent the continued safe flight and landing of the airplane is extremely improbable, and
[(2) The occurrence of any other failure condition which would reduce the capability of the airplane or the ability of the crew to cope with adverse operating conditions is improbable.
Firstly, Aircraft are not designed to fly through clouds of corrosive silica ash.
Secondly, 'Extremely improbable' is defined in the Advisory Circular (AC 25.1309) to that regulation, which requires chance of catastrophic loss to be less than "extremely improbable" or "1x10^-9" chance of total loss. Techniques such as Fault Tree Analysis are used to allocate reliability of systems to sub-systems, so the entire aircraft can be built from components with realistic reliabilities. However, the volcanic ash offers a 'common mode' failure across all engines including gas turbine Auxiliary Power Units.
The regulators have an obligation to ensure the chance of total loss of an aircraft due to flying through an ash cloud remains 'extremely improbable', i.e 1x10^-9.
Also, if the airlines lost an aircraft because they were allowed to go flying, and were being sued by the families of the victims, they'd be screaming blue murder at the regulators saying they didn't do enough to protect the airlines.
If one had flown and crashed, everyone would have blamed the governments involved for not stopping all the traffic. While I am no fan of the government, this is one where they could not win.
I'm not nor have I been stranded in an airport as a result of this (nor do I know anyone affected) - so I admit I have no appreciation for how much this is costing travelers and how impatient they are getting.
If a plane had crashed this is what would have happened, and since volcano is still active, I hope this doesn't happen:
1) Public total outrage at the airline(s) that had been flying.
2) Even more blame for the airliner that had flow the flight that crashed. The public will blame said airlines' policy and procedures, and probably, the pilot at fault.
3) They will blame the government.
4) The media will surely get involved in the fiasco they'll tear said airline to pieces.
5) Massive lawsuits.
5) And, eventually, the airline will probably have to declare bankruptcy since it won't get enough passengers or will be sued to smithereens.
But all is fair here, if an airliner crashes - regardless of if the ash is the cause (a plane can crash for other reasons), there will be massive litigation, (more unfortunately) people will die, families will be upset, and I argue a few airliners might take too much heat and won't be able to stay in business.
Better losing billions with no flights and than one crashing flight. How much is a life worth? That can't be expressed in €.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Safety_problems_and_scandal [wikipedia.org]
Every time I see someone bring up the question of "How much is a life worth?" I recall this event.
Ford was aware of a flaw in design that placed the fuel tank close to the rear bumper. This meant that relatively-low impact rear-end collisions would rupture the tank and set the car ablaze. The corrective action would involved installation of a dividing plate, however they measured the probability of occurence, the amount of potential losses in litigation, and the costs involved and decided that it just wasn't worth doing a recall.
Their reputation took a pretty severe hit, but it has more or less recovered since then(Toyota will be fine too in the end). When you see this, you have to imagine that some companies have made similar cost-benefit analysis regarding human lives and managed to avoid the same kind of publicity.
It can be argued that some companies valued the cost of a human life too little by reducing it to the amount of dollars involved in the lawsuit. Perhaps the cost benefit should be adjusted to involve the value of the life itself. However, when you put that number in, you've already established that there is a price on human life, and from that moment on, you're just haggling over how much.
At some point, there's a limit. Is a human life worth more than 1 million? I think many would say yes. 1 Billion? Probably not as many, but sure there'd be plenty. Multiple-billions? The number of people is going to drop. I think few people would argue that a life is worth 1 trillion dollars (assuming they have any notion of scale). After all, a trillion dollars could probably save many lives, just from the economic externalties alone, let alone what it might do if applied directly to life-saving measures.
Even more simply, calculate the cost of personal luxuries against the amount of donations needed to save a human life somewhere in the world. My American dollars can stretch pretty far in those desperate countries. But ultimately, that's not how I decide how much I give. There's a discount rate involved, not based upon time, but proximity. I'm not necessarily talking about literal physical distance, but mental immediacy. If the person in need is presented to me through video with a detailed documentary about how human this person is, I'm much more likely to sympathize and give money. Especially if that person looks similar to me.
But anyway, I'm not disagreeing with the initial statement by saying that human lives can be priced. An airplane carries quite a lot of people, and I think that number of people being lost simultaneously would certain be more damaging than few billion dollars. The government was just being cautious, which they should be. Those airlines are just fishing for money.
The summary is wrong. It is the founder of Virgin Atlantic that wants compensation, not the government. Has anyone ever heard of a government wanting to dish out compensation?
We already have evidence of at least one plane nearly crashing due to volcanic ashes. Is this guy saying that we should take the chance? Would he say that to the families of those who could die because of it?
We have evidence of planes crashing for a wide variety of reasons, some of which were never explained at all. Are you saying we should continue to allow planes to take off when we have reason to believe one will eventually crash? Should any family allow any of its members to ever fly again given that flying is a slightly risky endeavor?
Life has risks. Get over it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Airways_Flight_9 [wikipedia.org]
The ash killed _ALL_FOUR_ENGINES_ and infiltrated the fuel system through the seals.
That never happens. This isn't a small thing.
In actuality, they are very fortunate the ash cracked and fell out of the engine when it cooled. Jet engines don't work to well when the airflow is full of solidified rock.
There were also all those military flights [wikipedia.org], especially the Finnish one (pics [flightglobal.com]):
On 15 April, five Finnish Air Force F-18 fighter jets on exercise flew into the ash cloud in northern Finland. Volcanic dust was found on the engines of three of the aircraft and a further inspection revealed extensive damage by molten glass deposits inside the combustion chamber of one of the engines. The engines were sent for disassembly and overhaul. As a result all unnecessary military flights were cancelled except for identification flights to enforce sovereign airspace. Meanwhile a BAE Hawk trainer with special equipment to sample the volcanic dust was being flown from the 41st squadron in Kauhava. Even short test flights with an F-18 revealed engine damage sufficient to destroy engines.
and then also:
On 23 April it was announced that British Royal Air Force training flights had been suspended following volcanic ash damage to the engines of Eurofighter Typhoon aircraft.
Why should I trust commercial airlines which were losing insane money over this, over militaries of several countries?
Don't know if you put any stock in what an aircraft manufacturer might say on the subject, but...
http://www.boeing.com/commercial/aeromagazine/aero_09/volcanic_story.html [boeing.com]
Summary: If you find yourself flying into an ash cloud, turn around immediately.
So, yeah, maybe Branson wants a check, but flying into ash clouds is a very bad idea. And they don't show up on weather radar.
Don't know if you put any stock in what an aircraft manufacturer might say on the subject, but...
http://www.boeing.com/commercial/aeromagazine/aero_09/volcanic_story.html [boeing.com]
Summary: If you find yourself flying into an ash cloud, turn around immediately.
So, yeah, maybe Branson wants a check, but flying into ash clouds is a very bad idea. And they don't show up on weather radar.
There are thick ash clouds and thin ones. No, you shouldn't have been flying planes in Iceland or northern UK, but halting flights as far south as Turkey certainly seems to have been unwarranted. There is particle-per-million level below which the Boeing bulletin fails to be applicable, and it appears most of Europe was below that level during most of the ban.
Planes are one of the safest means of transportation. This is reached by systematically evaluating all risks. The exact effect of vulcanic ash on the various types of engines seem not to be known. Normally engine failures are not correlated on a signle plane. However there have been examples of planes loosing several (or all) engines at onces when flying trough volcanic ash. This means that this (unknown) risk does not enter in the usual power law for several redundant systems. Moreover its known that in influences sensors of the plane. A loss of sensors caused the crash of the Air France flight some time ago. If several engines fail at once of the sensors fail in a fatal way, people may die.
The logics for this must be: "Do we for sure that a plane can operate as designed under these conditions?" instead of "do we know fore sure its dangerous?"
I dunno. KLM Flight 867 [wikipedia.org] lost all four engines after flying into Mt. Redoubt's ash plume, back in 1989. I was in Fairbanks at the time, and many people I know where stranded, trying to get home for Christmas vacation.
Ash is not good for jet engines. Period.
I was in Fairbanks at the time, and many people I know where stranded, trying to get home for Christmas vacation.
That's "were," you fucking moron.
Jesus, I hate people who can't spell.
I just did a couple of quick Googles and found that every time there was a mention of the British government accepting that there was an overreaction was a direct quote from Branson. I don't think that he could be considered an impartial source on this quote. I certainly find it difficult to believe that the government is asking for compensation.
And don't the airlines have insurance against this sort of natural disaster?
"Flawed computer models may have exaggerated the effects of an Icelandic volcano eruption that has grounded tens of thousands of flights, stranded hundreds of thousands of passengers and cost businesses hundreds of millions of euros.
The computer models that guided decisions to impose a no-fly zone across most of Europe in recent days are based on incomplete science and limited data, according to European officials. As a result, they may have over-stated the risks to the public, needlessly grounding flights and damaging businesses."
From the Financial Times (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/0821cc00-4bb5-11df-9db6-00144feab49a.html?ftcamp=rss)
Where the atmosphere is concerned, every model is flawed for some given value of "flaw". Sure, the dimensions of the ash plume were certainly exaggerated, but how much exaggerated and where?
Knowing you've overstated the aggregate risk to the public doesn't necessarily imply that the groundings were unnecessary, because you don't know *which* groundings averted disasters. Put another way, suppose you know that 90% some set of flights are safe, but you don't know *which* flights. Grounding 100% of those fli
And this flawed computer model grounded me at Frankfurt for more than one week! (And I never planned on being at Frankfurt longer than 2 hours; I was connecting to a flight to London.)
Everyone here who says regulators acted appropriately will surely change their tune if this senseless and groundless overreaction stranded them at a foreign non-destination for a week (more, actually), causing them to miss work and leisure travel alike.
If, at the level of ashes they had over most Europe, it was so dangerous, h
Had they permitted a plane to fly, and it crashed, the outcry of permitting a plane to fly when we knew about the risks posed by volcanic ash...
But this wasn't even volcanic ash, it was volcanic glass, the effect would be sandblasting the engine while in operation. The safe option was to keep planes on the ground.
Fly or stay grounded - either way, whiners will whine.
Finland's air force flew into the ash cloud [ilmavoimat.fi], and released some photos of the damage. It ain't pretty.
My vote's on cash grab.
The Google translation clearly shows that Koneiden tultua laskuun koneet tarkastettiin ja moottoreiden imuaukoissa havaittiin perunajauhomaista vulkaanista tuhkapölyä means Machines after the decline in machinery and engines are inspected inlet was observed from potato flour, volcanic ash and dust. They should try it again without the potato flour.
That's a really telling translation. It appears as if the Google translator is trying to decipher the sentence in a way that assumes Finnish word suffixes are directly mapped to English prepositions. It saw the "sta" at the end of "perunajauhomaista" and assumed it means "from", and properly translated "perunajauho" as potato flour... Of course, the word is a form of "perunajauhomainen" which is an adjective that basically means "resembling potato flour" that was being used to describe the volcanic "ash dust".
My vote's on cash grab.
Well go figure when the options are:
a) Leave the planes on the ground and lose lots of money
b) Fly and get expensive damage that'll ground your planes
c) Blame the government and get a bailout
He doesn't want to send his planes up there, he just wants money. There's no doubt that many airlines took an extreme financial hit, here in Norway the entire airspace was closed for days and they were losing millions of dollars each day. And that's only counting the direct costs, not counting all the bad experiences pe
I know almost all regulations are written in blood. If the wind decides to shift and a plane goes down that's unacceptable.
I know almost all regulations are written in blood.
Not this one. Not a single fatality owing due to volcanic ashes. Yes, there have been a few flights disrupted and a couple flights where all engines shut down and plane maybe had to crash land, but there have been no blood (unless you count scratches that may have happened in crash-landing) for this regulation.
Richard Branson should fly through an ash cloud and let us know.
> Dutch airline KLM said it flew a Boeing 737-800 up to the usual maximum altitude of 13km (8 miles) on Saturday and Germany's Lufthansa said it flew 10 planes to Frankfurt from Munich at altitudes of up to 8km.
> KLM chief executive Peter Hartman, who was on board the plane, said there was "nothing unusual" about the flight.
- http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8627720.stm [bbc.co.uk]
I believe many of the other test flights had management staff as passengers, too. Can't find any details either way about Virgin, though....
I measured the effects of engine ingestion of ash, etc. for several years, and crash/failure rates, for a major military aircraft manufacturer. It was one of our highest priority concerns. As our founder said, we would not build a single-engine aircraft--two at least, to bring the pilot home. Don't underestimate the effect of rocks bashing multi-layer coated alloy blades spinning at X in a plasma. As I told my students, just jump up and down a few times: gravity works.
I don't know how many flights were grounded, but I worked on some planes that passed through the cloud. When popping some panels to change the reading lights, I would find small piles of ash (more like gray sand) up inside. Nobody seemed too concerned about it. They probably figured they would clean it up during the next "C" inspection(they tear out the entire interior). And the engines would probably remain until somebody complains about reduced power or high turbine temps or fuel consumption. Now, if you want to really wreck an airplane, fly it through some hail [flickr.com]. And be ready for a tremendous noise.
As ably demonstrated by "Bang Goes the Theory [bbc.co.uk]" on the BBC (UK-only video, unfortunately, but the content is up on Youtube (for now) here [youtube.com]), at Jet-engine internal temperatures the volcanic ash melts into glass, that then sticks to both the turbine blades and the casing, and can cause imbalance and catastrophic failure, but there is a fix! If you turn off the engines and glide the plane through cold air and allowing the turbine blades to cool down, the metal contracts, which is enough variance to shatter the brittle glass and expel it from the engine. However, of course, this involves turning off the engines for an extended period, finding a patch of cold air to glide through, and hoping the glass shatters and is expelled, and that you can get the engines fired back up again, before you get what is referred to in the business as an "Uncontrolled descent into terrain".
It's slightly worse than that, if the blades get covered in glass much at all, they need to be replaced. The problem is that the glass blocks up the cooling channels and they can overheat. Once they've overheated they will tend to creep and fail later.
I live in oregon and maybe 20k years ago we had a volcano blow its top off, mt mazma. covered multiple states in multiple feet of ash. a bit of the eye witness accounts are still around. looks like to me, these things are often troublesome.
I lived in seattle when mt st. helen went. I looked up and saw the plume and chose to immeadiate drive to the closed office and shut the computers down. This was winchester tech, sort of a big platter set, with external air blown in to keep the head up. The ceo wanted to burn me for an assumed failure to protect capital assets in my custody, but had to settle for being mean to my second.
now seattle was never really bothered, but eastern washington got feet of ash drift in places. I hear from the manufacturer hardware techs that a lot of disks had to be completely rebuilt.
so i would say some caution is justified, particularly with life critical tech.
as far as bailouts, nobody owes these stockholders anything. usa tsa budget is already pretty much an airline pr boondoggle.
Shutting down most of Europe's airspace was entirely the right decision. All it would take is one flight through an unexpected dust cloud to produce a near-disaster, if not a crash. That's happened at least five times in the past. Read Boeing's advisory on volcanic ash. [boeing.com]
Read Branson's autobiography? Several times in his life, he's been involved in adventure vacations that left someone else dead. This is not someone you want making risk management decisions for others.
The big problem now is that the airlines are botching the logistics of getting people back where they're supposed to be. [bbc.co.uk] There are people being told they can't get a flight until mid-May, because they booked a flight using frequent-flyer miles or via some discount deal that has a low priority. They can't get the airline on the phone, and they get hit with heavy roaming charges while on hold. This is really tough on people in transit running out of money.
I would like to add that on the near accidents mentioned above the damage to the aircraft was also VERY extensive. The BA flight needed 4 new engines (around U$ 14 million EACH), new windows (more expensive than you would think), new pitot and static ports (and an overhaul of tubing and sensors) and a paintjob (big surface, costs quite a bit) as well as a thorough overhaul of pretty much everything.
Even if no one dies it is still extremely expensive to fly accidentally into an ash cloud.
I really don't think this was an overreaction. Safety must be paramount, and if only one or two aircraft had gone down due to ash that would have seriously impacted the publics faith in the airline industry and their view of safety. That would have been a lot more expensive in the long run, and the airline industry has spend decades building an image of themselves as super safety minded.
And just for the record, I'm an ex-commercial pilot. From Iceland. I've flown smaller aircraft around volcanic eruptions and had great fun.
It's my understanding that volcanic ash is, among other things, incredibly abrasive. Wouldn't flying an airliner through some airborne ash, be like a couple hours worth of sandblasting? I'd hate to think what that does to the engines.
I am not sure that calling the airlines greedy is really fair, the airline industry has been having a very tough time in various different ways since 9/11.
BA in particular have had lots of problems with strikes leading to a negative effect on their already poor finances.
Now I am not saying that they should be compensated, or that it was right for the airlines to want to fly when the conditions could have been dangerous, but "greedy airlines" is probably a little too simplistic.
So that's an easy one: no, it wasn't.
It is not for me to attempt to fathom the inscrutable workings of Providence. -- The Earl of Birkenhead


text:
The DeKalb County 13-year-old girl who has been charged as an adult in the death of her 2-year-old sister made her first court appearance on Tuesday.
Police said Tyasia Jackson stabbed Sasha Lamaya Ray multiple times, killing the toddler.
Shelton Latroy Ray told CBS Atlanta News that he is the biological father of Sasha, who was found dead Monday afternoon outside their townhome on North Waldrop Trail in Decatur.
According to investigators, Tyasia was babysitting Sasha and her four other young siblings while both parents were at work.
According to Ray, Tyasia called him Monday about 11 p.m. from jail and confessed to the murder.
"She told me out of her own mouth that she did it," Ray said.
Ray said Tyasia was caught with a boy inside the townhome while he and her mother were away from the house.
"My wife's co-worker lives across the street. She was watching them. She seen my older daughter let a boy in the house. She called my wife at work. My wife told her to go get the boy out of the house," Ray said.
"I told the boy to come out the house," said that neighbor, Veronica Hillman. "If it was a boy in my house I would want someone to tell me."
Hillman said she found the boy hiding inside a closet. Ray said after the boy and Hillman left, Tyasia told her three siblings to go upstairs while Sasha stayed downstairs with her.
"She made all the other kids go upstairs and then she stabbed [Sasha] by the back door. Put her outside came back in the house, cleaned up the blood, changed clothes then came outside and started looking for her with everybody else," Ray said.
When her parents returned home, Ray said they asked Tyasia where Sasha was and began looking for her.
Hillman said she was the first person to find baby Sasha.
"I told the mom, 'I found the baby,' but I didn't go into detail," Hillman said. "It wasn't for me to go into detail, I let the husband do that."
Ray and Tyasia's mother then found Sasha's body in the backyard with serious injuries.
"I thought a dog or something had gotten to her because of the bruises, the scars and the bleeding. Murder was far from my mind at that time. I didn't think anyone had did something to her," Ray said.
Ray said he picked his daughter up and attempted to take her the hospital. But before they reached the end of their subdivision, Sasha died.
Investigators said Sasha was stabbed several times in her chest area.
Neighbors were shocked to hear that a 2-year-old was killed.
"It is really upsetting. When I heard it I wanted to cry, because it is someone so innocent," Jose Aguilar said. "They can't even defend themselves or talk. It is just sad."
Other neighbors said Tyasia was very pleasant and well-mannered. One neighbor said she would walk some of her younger siblings to the bus stop every morning.
Ray, his wife and other family members attended Jackson's court hearing on Tuesday. Before the judge came inside the courtroom, Ray told his daughter he loved her.
Ray said he and his wife have to bury one child and find the strength to support another.
"It's tough to swallow right now. I can't believe it," he said. "At the same time, she still needs our help. We are her parents."
The funeral for Sasha will be held on Tuesday, Nov. 27 at the Raleigh Rucker Funeral Home in Decatur.
Stay with CBSAtlanta.com for updates on this story.
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