Duffy's Rant Netcast

As I have family connections to the CFD, I’m happy to see that this has finally happened.

chicago Fire Museum opens

Never forget what they have sacrificed to keep us safe. St Florian, watch over them.

I wonder if any of my readers know that the May 1 celebrations actually have their roots in chicago?

Here is a link to the story: Haymarket Square and May Day

If you are a fan of great buildings and Chicago history, the Beverly Home Tour is coming up!

Here’s the scoop!

This article from the Chicago Tribune is amusing.  The publisher of Blogo’s book went under.

Blogo publisher folds

Man, this is a long time coming. As one who has had experience with both Cook and Will County townships when it comes to GA, I can tell you the system is FUBAR.

Now, the Southtown Star is digging into it. Click on the link to read the article. Southtown article

Over the weekend, we had one hell of a wreck in the south suburbs when an Amtrak train slammed into a minivan and killed a young lady who was going home from a dance competition.

26 yr old Kathy Lunn had no idea that a)the CN crew was working on the signals and had shut them off and b)that the crew had given the go ahead for an Amtrak train to proceed through the crossing at full speed to test the repairs they had made.

Several questions come to mind:

Why wasn’t there a flagman from the crew present to stop traffic on BOTH sides of the crossing while this test was in progress? If there had been, Ms. Lunn would still be alive.

Why did the crew give the Amtrak train the okay to go full speed through a repair area without making sure that there would be no traffic? Let’s put it this way: Train vs car – train wins every time. If you live in the Chicago area, you’ve seen what the aftermath looked like. Ms. Lunn didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of surviving that.

I see multiple lawsuits, not only from the Lunn family but what about the poor folks behind her who saw the accident?

How much mental anguish is that causing them?

Better get the pockets open CN, because your repair crew just cost you a fortune.

OMG.

Just read the news on CNET about the FUBAR with McAfee. Man, what a screwup.

Univ. of Michgan had 9,000 machines affected by this buggy update which incorrectly targeted SCVHOST.EXE as a virus.

Lexington Ky. police shut down their terminals and had to hand write reports, etc.

Rhode Island hospitals turned away non-emergency cases and cancelled some elective surgeries.

Big companies weren’t immune to this either. Intel got whacked but as of now they don’t know exactly how many machines got slammed.

Aussie supermarket chain Coles had to shut down completely when the update whacked over 1,000 of their POS terminals.

Needless to say, Twitter went nuclear over this screwup and there really was no excuse for it.

Dunno if McAfee will recover from this but there are several governmental agencies that have blacklisted McAfee over this, including the District of Columbia. I wonder how many PCs in the government got nailed. We’ll likely not know any time soon, but McAfee is going to have a LONG row to how to get its reputation back. This was just monumental.

Oh, and the fix that they offer…it’s not easy. CNet has an article on how to fix your machine if it got whacked.

Copy this to your address line. It’s all one line:

http://download.cnet.com/8301-2007_4-20003106-12.html

Good luck.

I’ve reupped the domain thanks to the money gods.

the feed is the same:

http://feedburner.com/drp

I’m gonna try to put up a couple podcasts
this week if the ghods allow.