…for not posting to my very own blog lately. Because of that, you deserve a little update from Wyoming.

Since my last posting in early April, many things have happened. I graduated from Central Wyoming College with another degree. I lost my job running the college radio station because of that (bad timing, that…), which I have been doing for over three years. Sadly, my professor, boss, and good friend Dale Smith, after becoming blind due to complications from chemotherapy, spent the last few weeks of the semester in the hospital, getting out the day of graduation. He also had his job at the college changed from electronic media to humanities by the CWC powers that be. He’s doing better health wise, but I’m concerned for him as a friend, and will check with him regularly to see how he is doing.

The day after graduation, the wife and I and grandson loaded up a 5 by 8 Uhaul trailer for my daughter, and left for a cross country trip from central Wyoming, to Nashville, Tennessee, where she was moving. A nice leisurely trip there, got her unpacked and moved in, and then drove south to Birmingham, Alabama to visit family there that we hadn’t seen since our move to Wyoming in 2000. We spent 3 days there, had a wonderful visit, and still with the Uhaul in tow, headed west to Dallas, Texas…actually Plano, which is the northern boundary of the huge DFW metroplex. In Plano, we visited my mom and sister, and wife’s dad and step mom and brother. Stayed there for about 5 days, and then with the Uhaul loaded with tools from my late dad’s workshop, (which I spent 2 days cleaning out for mom) and a few pieces of furniture, we headed back north, home to Wyoming.

Then things got exciting. This was the day that the huge tornado hit in northeastern rural areas of Denver. We had spent the nite before in Raton, New Mexico, and had just hit Colorado City, and the rest area there for lunch, when I got a call from a good friend, whom we had just visited the day before in Ft. Worth, as we were leaving the DFW area. He was watching the news and weather, and got the news about the Denver twister forwarded to me by cell phone. In Colorado City, I couldn’t find any wifi for a net connection, so we headed north to Colorado Springs, the home of Cheyenne Mountain and Peterson Air Force Base. Got off the highway there, checked the McD to see if it had wifi…nope. Then, having spent several nites in various Super 8 hotels across the country the last two weeks, found one on the west side of the interstate…and yes, wifi.

I got on, hit weather.gov, and then the Denver area radar and Nexrad. Holy crap…the storm cell system I was seeing in real time was the WORST storm system I’d ever seen, as far as having to personally deal with it Real Soon Now, by having to get through it to get home. The super cell that hit Windsor, Colorado, was in an anti-cyclonic rotation, and was moving counter clockwise, and heading towards Laramie, Wyoming, which was our connection from 287 to Interstate 80, and places west. Warnings were posted in the Denver forecast page of the current storm, tornado, damage, direction, and so forth, and it just didn’t look good for us.

We heard on the radio about the storms and damage, and decided to take Highway 287 up through Fort Collins..getting of Interstate 25 asap. That took a while to get to, and just as we got through town, and about to get on the highway itself north of Fort Collins, the highway was shut down due to a bus and semi accident. We got detoured through the little town of Laporte to the east, and hit the highway AGAIN, north of the major accident.

All was going well for about 20 minutes. Then, we started seeing a lot of snow on the sides of the road…LOTS of snow. Next, we started seeing vehicles heading south from the summit on 287, with what looked like snow on their front bumpers and windshields. Weird. The skies to the north and east were astoundingly stormy and dark. Sunset was approaching quickly, and the storm clouds hastened the effect. Just then, I realized that what we were seeing on the sides of the road wasn’t snow…but HAIL….INCHES of it. Totally blew me away.

As we kept heading north on 287, it started raining lightly, and soon quite moderately. Within moments, the medium pouring rain was joined by small snow pellets that exploded quietly on the windshield of our car. As it got heavier and darker, the snow pellets turned to pea sized hail…and then to actual snow…and then to VERY heavy snow. The road conditions were deteriorating the closer we got to the summit, and the rain slick roads become ice slicked and then slushy fairly quickly. A group of cars, trucks, and a couple of semi’s (with us in the middle of the convoy) kept plugging along, at about 20 miles an hour, all of us with flashers blinking into what literally turned into a blizzard.

Finally, after what seemed like hours, we hit the crest, and started down the miles long hill that led down into the south side of Laramie. Strangely, it was dark…where it wasn’t supposed to be. Seems that the supercell from Denver/Windsor, dropped another tornado, which tore up some houses and a couple of farms, and took out a few hundred blocks of power. We stopped at the Flying J truckstop to gas up, cleaned the snow and ice off the front of the car and the trailer, and hit the road on I-80. The snow, sleet, and rain stopped about 20 miles west of town, and from there on home, it was very dark, and very cold. Throughout the last 200 miles of our trip, from Laramie to Riverton, the roadway was clear and safe, but the sides of the road held quite a bit of storm passage…meaning snow as far as the eye could see…all the way to Beaver Rim, and halfway down that 9 degree grade of that steep hill.

We arrived home around 3:30am, dragged ourselves in, and went to bed.

It took us a week to recover from that 3600 mile trip. Holy crap we were tired.

Since returning home on May 23, we’ve been busy working on getting ready to move into a new apartment in town, packing boxes, cleaning our storage unit out, and doing a lot of computer work.

And, oh yes, SUMMER college classes…Society and Self from U. Wyo, History and Statistics from CWC. 10 credit hours during the summer session.

THAT’s what we’ve been doing since April.

More to be added later…including some great news about the SurvivalRing website project.

Rich

Sometimes it DOES pay to get out of bed VERY early…1am
——————————————————————————–

I’ve been having a bit of trouble sleeping the last couple weeks, and tonight, I dozed off before midnite, while rocking my nearly 2 year old grandson to sleep.

My daughter Laurie is working two full time jobs right now, days at the main book store here in town on main street, and half the weekend and evenings at one of the Community Entry Services homes as an assistant.

She is socking away funds for a move from Wyoming to Nashville in May, and just bought her first new car 2 months ago.

We live on campus here at our college, and our bedroom window view is of the main parking lot. I normally park my 92 Towncar in the curb slots right outside our window, about 30 feet away. My big conversion van is in the middle row about 30 feet or so past the Towncar, and is directly in our view out of our window.

Well, tonight we had an “incident”…another in a series of “happenings” that has affected us personally in the five years we’ve been here (earning 7 degrees between us).

First incident was a dwi driver backing out of a curb side space two years ago in a Toyota 4×4 pickup, and totalling dear daughter’s Grand Am, which was parked straight and legally in a parking space, occuring just after midnight one nite.

Second incident was a police chase that ended in the parking lot outside our window, with the alledged perp diving out of a full size Suburban to run into the campus dorms to hide and being tackled in the grass by a fleet footed cop, and the still-in-gear Suburban t-boning the car parked in the EXACT spot where my Towncar was TONIGHT!

This third incident tonight, was the first DIRECTLY focused at me.

A slim, tall, black hoodie wearing fellow was seen BY MY DAUGHTER (who was looking out the bedroom window right at this moment, having just come home from her second job around midnite)…trying to open her car door (which she dutifully locks EVERY day). Her car was parked literally in the next curb side space next to mine.

The Hoodie-”Hood” then turned to my car, on the passenger side, and tugged on the passenger door handle, which wasn’t locked. The door opened, and he then stooped down so as not to be seen.

Dear daughter is looking DIRECTLY AT HIM, while she is 8 feet from our bedroom window, in the door to our room, and she says “they’re breaking into our cars”…at this point, I’m wide awake from the first restful sleep I’ve had in days.

I open my eyes quickly, and see her bolt for the front door, which opens into the courtyard of our dorm building. I jump out of bed, grab my jeans and mocasins, and dance to the front of the apartment on one leg trying to put my shoes on. I check my car before hopping in, and see that my cheap little Ipod charger has been yanked out of my dash…which is the only thing of value in the car. Perp saw the pretty blue LED light glowing and HAD to have it.

By the time I get 40 feet down the sidewalk to the breezeway walkway to the parking lot, and then the 50 feet to the parking lot curb, she’s already out into the street that comes up the side road from Main Street, which is fronting the entire college campus. I jump in my car, just as shes coming back to the sidewalk out of breath, and she says the perp has run across the field, to the College Hill apartments, which are a quarter mile west of us. These apartments are fairly new, but are mostly Section 8 housing (*low subsidized rent).

I start the Towncar and literally tear across the parking lot, out into the street, and make a quick right, then a left, which brings me to the first row building, where a gentleman is standing outside smoking.

I screech to a halt, roll the window down, and ask him “did you see somebody just run over here”? He says “Yep”.

I park the car at the curb, and run over to him and see if what he saw was what my daughter described. “Yep”. He and his wife live in the west end of this building. He’s seen the perp going into an apartment stoop 4 doors down, after hearing my daughter yelling at the idiot moron across the field as she was chasing him in stocking feet…no shoes.

As I’ve dressed and run out the door, dear wife has called 9/11. Not 45 seconds after I first say something to the smoker, the first local cop pulls up right behind my car, spotlight on me.

Smoker Guy and I point to the door where the perp has gone. As cop #1 has started walking over to that door, Cop #2 comes around the corner down the street, and #1 radios him to go BEHIND the building, to keep an eye out for runners.

2 minutes later, a Sheriff’s deputy drives up behind #1’s squad car and gets out.

#1 and Deputy knock on the door for a good twenty minutes before someone opens up. They go in, and have a couple of people come out and SIT on the stoop while they check the apartment.

Another five minutes…#1 comes back to me (daugher has JUST walked over from our building) and he says “I’m gonna ask you the hardest question you’ll have tonight….PLEASE tell me you had something stolen from your car….”

I said “yep…my Ipod charger”… and he asks “Missing a cell phone?” and shows a shiny new cell phone…which ain’t mine.

Daughter tells him the description of what she saw in my car and who she was chasing after.

He goes back in that apartment, and comes back out about 10 minutes later…holding my Ipod charger.

He says there were 10 people in that apartment (that no one was wanting to answer the door of), and that FIVE of the people inside matched the description of what daughter saw.

He also says they’ve found a STASH of LOTS of stolen car stereos, phones, and other items inside…who knows what else.

Long story short…I’ll get my charger back tomorrow at the police station, after it’s photographed for evidence.

Chances are, there will probably be drugs involved, and probably some ICE stuff, too.

From now on, even though that car is parked right outside my window, I’ll be locking the doors EVERY time, and will be looking for a good paging alarm system.

And, I’m proud of my daughter for not just standing there, and taking off after an evil-doer (she is in one of those moods lately of “Don’t f*** with me” because her senior level college classes are stressing her…and this dude is REAL lucky that SHE didn’t get her hands around his neck…

And, kudo’s to the cops…showed up like lightning…caught the perps…and retrieved my stolen goods back for me, and will be returning a lot more merchandise to folks who were hit previous to tonight…

Well, the clock on the wall says 3am…two hours after this all went down…and I’m gonna crash.

Moral of the story…lock your doors, even in pleasant extremely rural locales…know your neighbors, and don’t be afraid to meet them and make new friends…and most of all…if you can do something….DO IT.

Don’t let criminals get away with shite…track’em down, catch’em in the act….and prosecute to the fullest extent of the law.

I don’t let little things go unnoticed very often, but the principal is the thing…I earned the money to buy that cheap little charger. I could replace it next payday. But, perps like the one caught tonite HAVE TO KNOW that there are some of us who WILL “make their day” one to remember…

Rich

Hi friends,

Here is an update to the hack attack on SurvivalRing yesterday, as mentioned in the email below.

This hack attack seems to have darker overtones than I originally suspected.

While I believe the hack was as I stated yesterday ( a web bot spamming program, which gained access to the site via php script vulnerabilities), I’ve done a bit more research on the destination website that all the spam links were pointing to.

Every one of the nearly fifty hidden links point to a hacked website hosted in the middle east…

hxxp://qasweb.org/library/universe/online/?page=49 (link disabled on purpose)

A quick search found an arabic language based website is the home of

http://qasweb.org/

This is the Qatif Astronomical Society forum website…in Arabic.

You can view a mostly translated into english version here (google cache file)

Following the path of the hacked files, we see this…

Here in Wyoming we’re in the beginning stages of a snow storm of historical possibilities…biggest spring snow storm in years….

But, the entire midwest is also getting hit with all kinds of OTHER weather…

Be Careful Out There!

Rich

My thanks for Morgan of GlobalIncidentMap.com for this forward…

In the midst of a tornado outbreak …

James Bryant, Meteorologist, The Weather Channel 34 minutes ago

Severe thunderstorms, including several that are unleashing twisters, have exploded over the western High Plains. More than 45 tornadoes have been reported during the evening hours. These big and dangerous storms will persist into early tomorrow as they coalesce into one or more squall lines with a threat of heavy rain. The area under greatest threat extends from south-central Nebraska southward into West Texas. But isolated nasty storms have blossomed as far north as western South Dakota and as far south as the Rio Grande River in Texas. Isolated severe storms, primarily packing large hail, may also chimney up along a cold front in North Carolina, southwest Virginia and northeast Tennessee this afternoon and evening. Overnight, as an offshoot of the severe thunderstorms in the Plains, heavy downpours are expected to unload on parts of western Kansas, the Texas and Oklahoma Panhandles, and the northern portions of West Texas. On Thursday the slow moving thunderstorms along the I-35 corridor will feature rounds of repeat severe thunderstorms with a real concern for excessive rainfall. Please don’t drive over flooded roadways or during flash flooding. You are better to turn around and don’t drown. In the Interior West, heavy wind-driven snow is plaguing a good chunk of the Rocky Mountain region. Heavy snow, winter and storm warnings and even are posted for much of southern Montana, most of Wyoming, a large area of Utah and the mountains of western Colorado. Blizzard warnings are in effect for a small portion of southeast Montana and northeast Wyoming where travel over I-90 and I-25 is extremely difficult if not impossible. Travel in the region is discouraged till the storm weakens late on Thursday. By the time the storm winds down late Thursday to early Friday, snowfall in some spots could reach three to four feet with drifts as high as a house. Heavy snow is currently being reported from Buffalo and Sheridan, Wyo., and winds have gusted as high as 60 mph.

This evening, I took my wife out on a date. This one we planned for a few days in advance. It was a fun evening…filled with facts, video, pictures, fun, laughs…and deadly serious work.

We both went to the Weather Spotter class held on our college campus here in Riverton, Wyoming, with Chris Jones of the National Weather Service (now a good friend after 3 years) leading a great evening of VERY educational information for folks who, among other things, just like to be part of an active community wanting to help their neighbors.

This spotter school is the second one I’ve taken (the first one was in Spring 2004), and was even better than the last time. The college class room was crowded, with close to 30 folks showing up from all over the county, and even some from neighboring counties.

The class earned Spotter cards, which contain the info we need to report troublesome weather in our area of the state. Most threats we’ll see here are occasion thunderstorms, outflow boundaries, a rare twister or two, straight line winds (86 miles an hour last August), flash flooding from spring runoff in the nearby Wind River Mountains, and the good old Wyoming winter weather.

A quick look at the web found the Skywarn homepage, the very interesting Storm Spotter Guides Online!, the National Weather Service Skywarn info page at Weather.gov, and more. Interested in looking for a local class? Click there and find your state, for a list of upcoming classes you can attend.

What does a Skywarn Spotter report?
Although all reports are welcome, the National Weather Service is particularly interested in the weather elements described below.

Do something good for yourself…and something good for your community. Become a certified weather spotter for your area.

Rich

I’m finishing up an Associates of Applied Science degree in Web Design in a few weeks, and I’m working on my “big project” for this semester…conversion of SurvivalRing.org to a database driven website, from static html pages. It’s going to be a biggie, but I’m at the point of total understanding of how and what to do.

Very happy to be at this point, too. This is the reason I came back to college as a non-traditional student…to learn the skills to enhance a project that has taken over my life, and make it the cutting edge resource that I know it can be.

At the same time I’ve been working on this degree, and the A.A.S in Electronic Media that I earned last year, I’ve also been playing with a lot of other web technology.

Using Dreamweaver and Flash, I’ve done some pretty cool things, and I’m very comfortable with what these tools can do. I’ve come to enjoy a handful of tools that make web development much faster and easier. For example, I have a full blown web server running on my laptop right now, using Wampserver. This package is free, includes mysql, php, apache, and phpmyadmin. Perl, Zend Optimizer, and Webalizer are also available as downloads for this wonderful tool. I’m using this system to work on many projects right now, before taking them to my online hosting account. Development time has been greatly increased.

I’ve also been hearing a lot about Ruby on Rails, and found a similar package for creating an environment on the laptop for learning Ruby. It’s called Instant Rails, and creates a running server environment for Ruby. I haven’t done anything with Ruby yet, but it looks like an immensely likable package. Once I’ve played with it a bit, I’ll share some fun stuff I do with it.

I’m sure I’ve stated it before, but I’ll say it again. I’m not getting these degrees and skills to just be hireable by other companies. I’m putting enormous amounts of time into creating cutting edge web tools, infrastructure, and state of the art programming, to enable much easier, greatly enhanced, and much faster serving of the same science and fact based survival and preparedness information I’ve been doing for almost ten years now.

Sure, I’ll love a good paying, benefit enhanced, and long term job to make my life easier, supporting my wife and I, in some comfort and ease (compared to the path we’ve had for the past 20 years of hard work due to no college degrees).

The Entreprenuerial bug has bitten, and I’ve got a business plan, along with marketing and publicity plans, to make my little SurvivalRing website THE survival and preparedness site for the ages…or at least enough to help folks worldwide, while making a real living from it. Time will tell…but I know enough now that I can make it happen.

Time to head back to the editing screen to do some more code hacking…Enjoy the sites!

Well, the news hit the local newspaper today, and the college website Friday, about my winning the New Century Scholar award for Wyoming this last week

And, this week I’ve been thinking of other things that helped guide my path into scholarships and success…and thought I might share a couple of ideas that came to mind.

a) A college degree is a wonderful thing to have, but not easy to get. When the time came that I needed to have one for better employment opportunities after becoming homeless, not having one cost me jobs, and meant a much lower income back in 2001. I had to start at the bottom again..flipping burgers.

b) Small colleges offer better opportunities for advancement into the scholarly ranks. A 1200 student campus is much easier to embed yourself into the daily rigors of student life and extracurricular activities, than a 10,000 or 15,000 student campus. I started in this town with no friends or contacts, and in 18 months I was elected to the student senate … simply because I was helpful, concientious, outgoing, and willing to help anyone with a problem or project.

c) Small campuses allow you to make a bigger difference to your community for the same investment of time and energy. Before I won this particular scholarship, I was already well known to the college faculty, president, most of the deans, and the board of trustees…by my name. Most of these folks recognize my face and say hi to me in the hallways or stop and chat for a few minutes occasionally. All because I’ve taken the time to become part of local student organizations, help in any little way I can, and try to make a difference for my fellow students. I don’t shy away from controversy…I look for it…as an opportunity to open eyes to bigger problems, and find solutions for them. One such thing was taking the college’s current smoking policy and creating a paradigm shift for the entire college, by updating policy from Smoking outdoors only, to no smoking within 20 feet of designated doors. You’d have thought I was going to kill all the smokers by the amount of anti-change people that came out of the woodwork, and verbally accosted me or made very negative comments about the project. The project was picked up by the AP and made it into several regional newspapers, and the college administration passed the new policy update last week. So much for not being able to make a difference.

d) Small towns with colleges are better than big towns with colleges…or small towns with big colleges. When I moved to rural Wyoming, I moved to Lander. In the past, Lander has made it to the list of Best towns to live in, for quality of life, educational opportunity, recreational options, and cost of living. CWC is located in Riverton, the next town over from Lander. Because Riverton is small, yet full service, you’ll find all you need here…120 miles from the nearest interstate. Because of the size of the town, I’ve been able to make a difference in my community volunteering with the high school, police department, emergency management, and city fathers…especially with the video and media tools I bring, including Telly Award winnning public service announcements. Being a part of the community, instead of apart from it, has meant I’ve helped others learn how to be more self reliant and self sufficient, in everything that I do. I don’t hide the fact of what I do with my website, and I share my thoughts with anyone who asks for more info. People have noticed, and no one thinks I’m a wacko of any sort.

e) Considering that Riverton is in the middle of nowhere, 120 miles off the interstate, and has no industrial base of any kind in town, there are still plenty of job opportunities here. The college is one of the larger employers, followed by the super Walmart, the Honor Farm minimum security prison, and BTI which is a trucking firm that moves Trona from southern Wyoming to Shosone north of town and the railhead there. And, with the big increase in oil production nationwide, this area of Wyoming has tons of job openings that pay very well in the oil field. Unfortunately, a good economy and lots of labor based jobs, means that college enrollment goes down. Still, living in a small town in a good economy is really the best of all worlds.

f) The future. With a quality education, earned degrees, time spent involved in the community, and a record of success personally and collegiately, anyone who puts the time in, can go as far in the world as they wish. The only limits implied are the ones you put on yourself. Just going to college for a piece of paper when you graduate isn’t enough these days. As a college student, you’ve truly got to invest real time and talents in the world outside the classroom. It doesn’t hurt, and helps reveal and and all areas you can improve on, in the entire process.

Take the time in college to do EVERYTHING. Everyone wins when that happens.

Rich