Yes, despite all appearances to the contrary here in Seattle, today is the official beginning of spring. When I lived in places with sunnier weather, I used to look forward to spring almost as an honorary summer. At least the last half was always nice — usually even "shorts weather." But in Seattle, spring and too often the first half of summer are just extensions of winter: rainy, gloomy and too cold for shorts.

And if spring weren’t disappointing enough by itself, we have to start this one off with a war. Sigh.

It sure doesn’t feel like spring is just a few days away. The weather will be nice by August.

I’ve always been a news junkie. The first thing I do when I wake up in the morning is read a bunch of news websites and the first thing I do when I get home from work is turn on the TV news. I have email "breaking news" alerts from nearly a dozen different news organizations, just so I don’t accidentally miss something important. This means that when something big happens, I get ten or twenty messages about it, but that’s ok.

Even with all of that news input, real time reporting is hard to come by when I’m not at home. I don’t have a TV or radio at work and most of the online streams have one problem or another (they cost money, they are unreliable or they aren’t completely focused on news). So with a war impending, I’ve been trying to figure out how to get a real time news fix from work. Buying a cheapie radio is one option. But I decided to take a different path: I set up my own streaming audio feed.

Continue reading “News in war time”

Friends and supporters of Rachel Corrie wrote words of memory at Westlake Park in downtown Seattle today. Rachel is the American woman who was killed by a bulldozer Sunday in Israel.

These photos are posted simply as interesting current events-related images. I’m neither making a political statement nor taking a side. I appreciate comments on the images, but please refrain from posting political comments here. There are countless excellent forums on the Internet for political debate. Thanks.