Archive for May, 2004

It’s a double dip in Pittsburgh

// May 28th, 2004 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

My brother and I are headed to Pittsburg for the day to catch the Cubs double-header at PNC Park against the Pirates. It’s our first time to the stadium and we’re both excited. Getting up at 4:30am is the hard part. Talk about dedication!

Go Cubs!

Flight 191 Remembered

// May 25th, 2004 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

Today marks the 25th anniversary of the worst airline disaster in US history, the crash of American Airlines flight 191. Though I had no relations to anyone involved in the accident, it was still one of those indelible moments of my childhood and I still remember it like it was yesterday.

I was 9 at the time and still in grade school. It was shortly after 3:00 PM and school was just letting out. I lingered around slightly after the 3:00 bell and was heading out when I noticed a pitch-black plume of smoke off to the east. Though Addison is quite a distance away from the airport, the smoke was still visible from where we were.

I figured that a building was on fire or some such thing and figured I’d find out about what happened when the news came on later that evening. When I got home, I was ready to kick back and watch my cartoons when the reality hit me. Mountains of flames and the resulting carnage was on every channel. Only the scattered bits and pieces visible in the background of the camera shots gave any clue as to what used to be an airliner.

That following Sunday (the crash was on a Friday afternoon) I was talking about the crash with my grandfather. Working for Symons, a contractor located just northwest of the airport and directly west of the crash site, my grandfather related the shock and awe felt by those at his company as well as others around the area and the resulting chaos.

Had the flight lasted slightly longer, it would have crashed into a gas farm not a 1/2 mile away. Had it been shorter, it would’ve landed right on a mobile home park, adjacent to the airport. As it was, some homes in the park were still destroyed by debris. The fire burned into the night and was still flaring during the 10 o’clock news reports that night. In all 273 people lost their lives that day; 271 on the flight and 2 on the ground. Rumors persist to this day that the site is still haunted by spirits who lost their lives that day.

May the victims rest in peace and their families find contentment.

Update: The History Channel will be running a special on Flight 191 on Thursday at 7pm Central as part of their Time Machine series.

My take on the new Blogger

// May 18th, 2004 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

Since I hadn’t posted in a while, I wanted to add something to the blog (yes, I know I still need to post the pix and stuff from Dan’s B’day party – it’s coming!). Logging in, I noticed the new look and the new features of the site. It now had basically everything I’ve wanted – comments, previous post snapshots amongst them.

However to get this new features, I had to make some sacrifices:

  1. I had to abandon my previous comment service in order to use the one’s Blogger now provides. Unfortunately, there’s no way to migrate the old ones from one service to the other, nor is there a way to migrate postings manually to blogs that were created before the site change.
  2. The new templates are nice, but to utilize the functionality, you either have to abandon your old templates (which I have done) or significantly modify them to incorporate the new functions. Again the only way to do this is to save your old one, migrate to a new template, make the changes to your old one and then copy the modified version of your old template back into the Blogger interface.

Oh yeah, when did they add the title field or why was it disabled by default? Separating my self-made titles from the rest of my posts so that they show up in the nav bar has been one big pain in the a@@.

Growing pains… gotta love ‘em.

Skunked again

// May 11th, 2004 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

In what seems like a recent pattern, the Cubs get skunked once again. This time the setting was LA and the Cubs end up on the losing side of a 7-3 score.

Speaking for getting skunked, my brothers and I went to the Calder Cup Conference Final game last night at Allstate Arena, where the Wolves did their best to hand the series to the Milwaukee Admirals. The worst part of it is that the Wolves not only got beat in thier home ice, they were embarassed (5-2) on it and the Milwaukee fans (all 30 of them who bothered to make the trip down) just relished in it. Chicago fans are use to this, however. With the Bears, Bulls and even the Cubs (Brant Brown anyone?), this cross-state rivalry is unlikely to diminish soon, if ever.

The Wolves, now down 3-1 in the best-of-7 series, have to win not only the next game in Milwaukee but the following game in Chicago just to pull even. If they can somehow accomplish that, they’ll then need to go back to Milwaukee for Game 7. They’ve done it before, but that was when they had a team much better than the one they’ve got now. Needless to say, I think it’s time to turn my attention to the floundering Cubs.