Yikes, that is not good, Stephanie.

There's an awesome story on NPR right now about online communities in relation to the V. Tech story.

I heard some of that. It sounded very familiar. The part I heard was discussing the reality of comfort provided by our online community friends. It should be up on their site. I'll look for the link.

I heard on NPR this morning how Facebook communities are being set up.

Today, after receiving an email to delete our *own* personal stuff off the drive, someone went in and deleted all the stuff that was *not his*.

That's just... that's moronic on an epic scale. I'm so sorry.

Pneumatic tubes are boss! We still have a pneumatic tube system here at work, mostly for transporting lab orders and (in very, very padded tubes) bodily fluid samples. The elevators here are so crappy that tubing the stuff is usually faster than hand-delivering it.

I eagerly await the first major metropolitan area brave enough to institute a Futurama-style public transit by pneumatic tube system. I don't care where it is, once the thing is up and running I'm moving there.

I bet it'll be Portland, OR. It just seems like a very Portland thing to do.

I was 200 messages behind, so everything else I was going to say or comment on has been said and commented by people smarter and more caught-up than me. Except that I have to wave fondly and sadly at the pixels of Nilly, whom I apparently totally missed. Phooey.

I want to create a superhero - Pneumatic Tube Man! He travels from office to office nearly instantaneously via the city's old system of pneumatic tubes. The only person who knows his secret identity is the crotchety old man who maintains the city's pneumatic tubes.

But wait - I suppose he should have some superpower in addition to being able to travel nearly instantaneously from office to office....

Oh, I know - he reshapes himself into the shape of one of the things that goes through the pneumatic tubes, and shoots rapidly towards his foe! while he makes cool pneumatic tube noises!

The NPR link on online communities offering condolences. [link]

Also, I need both a cabana boy and multiple pnematic tubes.

(Today, it was some sort of support thing that goes around your waist to relieve some of the strain of holding the baby? )

Before birth or after? Cause I have a binder that I was given post birth. I used to have a maternity belt but that got given away.

I eagerly await the first major metropolitan area brave enough to institute a Futurama-style public transit by pneumatic tube system.

NY did that about 15 years or so before they started building the subway system. The one-block length that was constructed was only partly successful, and ended up being abandoned after only being a curiosity. When they were expanding the subway system some 40 years later, they discovered the pneumatic-tube prototype, still with the beautiful waiting area and first-class car. You can read about it here.

I heard on NPR this morning how Facebook communities are being set up.

Yeah. This was kind of about how online friends do provide comfort and support even without ever having met. It's pretty much the exact opposite of what this person says in the DMN Blog.

Please don't indulge in godless modern paganism and set up homely, self-indulgent makeshift memorials with cheap flowers and teddy bears. Don't hold hands and sing bad pop songs.

I'm not sure how makeshift memorials are any more self-indulgant than any other kind of expression of grief. And I'd prefer we didn't hold hands and sing bad pop songs, but that has more to do with my dislike of public displays of affection and (most) bad pop songs than what I think is an appropriate response to a tragedy like this. Also, shut up Kathy Shaidle! Who are you to tell people how to grieve.

Go to church. That's what it's for. For centuries, people smarter than you and with more finely honed aesthetics worked on rituals that actually do what they're supposed to do.

Ah. I see. Greiving is only appropriate for the religious, expressed in religious ways.

Asshole.

I eagerly await the first major metropolitan area brave enough to institute a Futurama-style public transit by pneumatic tube system.

[link]

In 1869, Alfred Ely Beach and his Beach Pneumatic Transit Company of New York secretly began constructing a pneumatic subway line beneath Broadway. Its single tunnel, 312 feet long, 8 feet in diameter, was completed in 1870 and ran under Broadway from Warren Street to Murray Street.[1] The line was built as a demonstration of a pneumatic transit system, open to the public with fares donated to charity. It remained little more than a curiosity, running only a single car on its one-block-long track to a dead-end at its terminus.