Mumblings

"Even the trees have ears."

I know, companies have been doing this for a while. I find it a little creepy, I like the cell towers in church steeples more than any of the other examples. They could put them inside minaret towers and give the mosques free text messages to "call worshipers to prayer." That would be awesome.












Photo by kevinzim
under Creative Commons License: Attribution.

On May 21, the 499 foot tall cooling tower at the Trojan nuclear plant north of Portland will be demolished using more than two thousnad pounds of explosives. Just to give you an idea of how massive this demoliion is, the cooling tower is only a little smaller than the tallest building in Portland. Yet Portland General Electric, which owns the Trojan plant, doesn't want people to come and watch.

I find this very dissapointing; I've been to a number of implosions and each one is a very memorable expirience. I don't understand why PGE is taking such extreme levels of precaution--yes this is a nuclear power plant, however the nearest radioactive material is 900 feet away from the tower, sealed in concrete casks that can withstand collision with a locomotive. The reactor itself is in a concrete burial hundreds of miles up the Columbia River.

My friends and I are trying to find a good spot to watch the demolitions. If anyone has any thoughts on where there are loopholes in PGE's lockdown that would enable a decent sight of the implosion, please tell me. As far as I can tell, the best options are: (a) on the other side of the river from the site, either way up in the hills east of I-5 or (b) right on the river itself or (c) on the same side of the river as the plant, up in the cliffs above (there's a log road that gets you within a mile of the cliff, the rest would be walking). I'm not even sure if the last option would give a good viewing point: it may be wooded in, or the cliffs may be much softer than the maps are showing.

Anyhow, I would really like to see the demolition, so if you have any thoughts, send me a line.

You would be surprised how six tiny squares, no wider than the width of two hairs, could become such an annoying pariah. This Saturday, I opened my aforementioned macbookpro to find that six pixels sat, utterly lifeless at the bottom of my screen, just to the left of the shiny "MacBookPro" label. This adds to another dead pixel in the upper left corner of the screen, but these six are not only right next to eachother, forming a nice big speck on the screen, but they're right in the center of the dock. Grr! I'll be calling AppleCare pretty soon about it. Hopefully they can fix (replace) the screen without having to ship it off to some far away factory for days on end. I would feel naked without it. What's more, I think they might make me back up all my data before I send it to them: which means about five more hours for me.