THE FRONT PORCH GANG “Yesterday, a friend of mine sent an e-mail out with this in the subject line: ‘You can’t own anything nice if you live inside the loop…’ She sent this because the large wooden bench she keeps on her front porch had been stolen. Carted off. In broad daylight. This was a big bench. It was not a one-person job. This tells me there must be a big gang of these people in the Heights, strolling around while we sit at our desks in office buildings, treating our houses like unattended garage sales. I would tell her to get a dog, but we have a dog. And we’ve still had every single thing not attached to our concrete foundation pilfered. Maybe she should get a dog bred for something besides decoration. Maybe that’s the key.” [A Peine for Your Thoughts]
Sign up for the Newsletter
Tag: Security
COMMENT OF THE DAY: FORM, FUNCTION, AND HOME SECURITY “Properly implemented, turrets *are* good. The problem in this particular case as well as with so many modern faux-Tuscan and faux-Chateau adaptations is that architects fail to incorporate functional support for modern defensive armament and surveilance equipment. For instance, no McMansion is truely complete without a remote-controlled servo-actuated Browning M2 machine gun hardwired to the saferoom. But that critical bit of hardware doesn’t do the least bit of good if the turret does not project out from the structure or if it is lacking a sufficient number of meurtrieres to ensure an adequate field of fire. Along similar lines, I question the lack of murder holes above the entrances to such homes; no McMansion should be complete without the capability to dump a vat of scalding hot oil onto Jehovah’s Witnesses at the mere flick of a switch.” [TheNiche, commenting on Comment of the Day: Beauty Is in the Intention of the Landholder]
Was that Dept. of Homeland Security airport restroom surveillance camera we posted about last week for real?
SnapStream CEO Rakesh Agrawal, you’ll remember, snapped the now-famous urinal photo shown above. The text on the official-looking DHS sticker read:
Automatic infrared flush sensors also provide video monitoring for security purposes
Agrawal has now posted an update on his blog:
First of all, the photograph was NOT photoshop’ed. It went straight from my iPhone to Natuba (what I use to post photographs to twitter) with no editing in between. If anyone is at Hobby Airport and wants to see this thing, it was in the men’s restroom near gate 51 last week Wednesday.
More importantly, though, what’s the story here? Is DHS actually monitoring airport restrooms using cameras installed at the urinal? I exchanged emails with Marlene McClinton at the Houston Airport System (as a side note, HAS uses SnapStream to monitor mentions of themselves on TV) over the weekend and she wrote:
Note: Story updated below.
Smile! Urine candid camera!
Acute airport-urinal observer and SnapStream CEO Rakesh Agrawal catches this unlikely warning posted in a men’s restroom at the newish Southwest Airlines terminal at Hobby. The text below the Dept. of Homeland Security logo at the top of the urinal reads:
Automatic infrared flush sensors also provide video monitoring for security purposes.
Hey, you’ll probably want to make sure you . . . uh, “look your best” before you step away then, no? Reports the high-tech exec:
It seems son-of-a-son-of-a-guv Paul Hobby wasn’t quite clear at first what to do with a huge industrial site he bought in the First Ward:
Over the years, Hobby says, there was interest in turning it into an indoor soccer facility. There was also talk of growing lettuce inside the large warehouse. But a year ago, Hobby came up with the idea to create a data center in the space.
But that’s just the start of it. The site is the former Budweiser distribution plant Silver Eagle Distributors left behind when it built its new bunker further west on Washington Ave. Hobby bought the First Ward facility quietly from Silver Eagle in 2004 and leased it back to the company for a while before it left. The site stretches along Edwards St. from Sawyer to Silver, a few blocks north of Washington.
Indoor farm . . . server farm . . . why not? The possibilities are endless! But then, there’s always . . . townhomes!
A row of eight to 10 townhomes are slated to be built along Edwards Street. And an undetermined number of units are being considered for the eastern-most part of the property.
Of course! But it gets better . . .
