After years of living in and around Roxbury, I finally had the opportunity to go inside the Cochituate Standpipe (the "fort") at the top of Fort Hill. The visit was lead by Rep. Byron Rushing and Discover Roxbury as they showed a film crew from This Old House around Roxbury.
It was great to see how sound the structure is overall, although there was some loose brick chipping off here and there. Unfortunately, when the park service worked on the building a generation ago, they used plexiglass instead of regular glass for the windows. Over time plexi clouds up and becomes opaque, which meant we had four windows but no view.
Oh well. Maybe a preservationist society will take up the cause and restore the monument to its former self. It would be great to have something as well-preserved and open to the public as the Bunker Hill Monument someday.
Entries from January 2010
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Facebook's "Mandingo President." Ugh!
There's random and then there's "random."
While posting a status update on Facebook, I was asked to prove that I'm not a spambot by completing one of those captcha text boxes. Usually they're a random combination of letters and numbers, although lately I've noticed that a combination of actual words are appearing more often. Usually the words are bland and common, but today I came across this:
What the hell is this crap?! There's no way this is random. Some techie working for Facebook or the captcha system programmed this in. People, get a grip. Barack Obama is the president for at least the next 3 years. Programming your racism into the internet will not change that.
And you, Facebook, do you have any internal codes of conduct regarding employee actions like this?
Friday, January 08, 2010
Hello, 2005.
Yes, I realize that it's now 2010, but I was sent back 5 years in time earlier this week. While at a function at the Park Plaza Hotel, I passed by one of their computer rooms and saw this nighttime street image as the screen saver on every monitor:
What you see above is actually from their website. But, follow this link to see why I was transported through time.
Yup...you can imagine my shock. Years later and there it is being used without my knowledge. After a couple of days of contacting various people at the hotel, I've finally been in touch with the Marketing person. I expected to hear denial or be ready for a fight, but she's been quite lovely. She admits that they didn't know who the photographer was and she's interested in working out rights, crediting, and possibly future job ops. Woo hoo!
Wish me luck, and send advice on this kind of thing if you have it.
Happy New Year!
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