Workbench

The Car for the Man Who Hates His Wife

Rogers Cadenhead — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 10:50:42 -0500

Here's an interesting message for 100 million Super Bowl viewers: If you hate your hectoring shrew of a wife ...

... you'll love a Dodge Ram Charger!

Article by O'Keefe May Explain Senate Stunt

Rogers Cadenhead — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 19:13:36 -0500

On Jan. 25, James O'Keefe and three other conservative activists were arrested after a weird incident in which they entered Sen. Mary Landrieu's (D-La.) office in New Orleans dressed as telephone repairmen and attempted to gain access to the closet where the phone system was serviced. They were charged with "entering federal property under false pretenses for the purpose of committing a felony," according to an FBI press release.

There's been a lot of speculation about the motives of O'Keefe, who led an attempted sting of ACORN offices last fall that was widely publicized and helped spur Congress to drop millions in funding for the voter registration and lower income charity. Messing with the telephones in a federal government official's office is a serious felony, whether O'Keefe and his associates were planning to bug the phones, vandalize them or achieve some other purpose. If they are convicted, the four men face up to 10 years in prison and a fine of $250,000.

On a web site published by Andrew Breitbart, who has O'Keefe on his payroll but denies involvement in the Landrieu incident, O'Keefe issued a statement after the arrest claiming that "[n]o one tried to wiretap or bug Senator Landrieu's office. Nor did we try to cut or shut down her phone lines."

This statement doesn't explain why some of them were dressed as repairmen and tried to access the telephone closet, as the FBI alleges.

An article that O'Keefe wrote in November 2008 for the online conservative magazine New Guard may shed some light on his actions. In the article, O'Keefe describes a past sting project where he and a young anti-abortion activist named Lila Rose contacted Planned Parenthood offices seeking to donate money to fund abortions and reduce the number of black babies in the United States.

We were able to donate money to the organization for the explicit purpose of reducing the number of black babies born in the United States -- in line with the intentions of Planned Parenthood's founder, Margaret Sanger.
We carefully chose a dozen or so "one party consent" states, where it is legal to audio record someone without their consent. Not a single Planned Parenthood employee we spoke to was disinterested in the prospect of a donation for our stated purposes.

As he did later at ACORN offices, O'Keefe targeted low-level employees of liberal leaning groups and tried to get them to say something damning while he was taping the interactions. Although he says that the Planned Parenthood taping was legal, he also writes this in the article:

Leaders taking on power structures need to be raw, confident, fearless and impermeable. Lila received a letter threatening to prosecute the group for violating wiretapping laws, but it did not stop her from continuing the investigation. After the investigation aired nationally on Fox News, Planned Parenthood could no longer press charges, as Lila would appear the victim.

O'Keefe believed that even if he and Rose were putting themselves in legal jeopardy, the fear of bad publicity would make it impossible for charges to be pressed against them.

I don't know what O'Keefe and his fake telephone repairmen were planning to do at Landrieu's office, but he seems to believe that when you break laws in pursuit of a media stunt, the coverage will shield you from prosecution. That hasn't worked out for him this time around.

Creating a Closest Store Locator in PHP

Rogers Cadenhead — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 15:37:30 -0500

Over the past year, one of my side projects has been the development of shopping directory sites for categories such as wargames, sports cards, videogames and farmers markets, the last of which I launched over the weekend. The sites are running on LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) using my own code and the Smarty template language, which keeps me from cluttering up my web pages with PHP.

As I prepared the newest site, I decided to implement a feature that takes a user-submitted address and finds the closest stores. This functionality was the original impetus for the project -- I thought it would be cool if Wargames.Com had a store locator that could find the closest wargame store when I'm out of town.

To accomplish this, I needed to split latitude and longitude into their own fields in the MySQL database and use the following SQL query to find the closest stores to a user-submitted latitude and longitude:

SELECT *, (3959 * acos(cos(radians({$user_latitude})) * cos(radians(latitude)) * cos(radians(longitude) - radians({$user_longitude})) + sin( radians({$user_latitude})) * sin(radians(latitude)))) AS distance FROM stores HAVING distance < 250 ORDER BY distance LIMIT 0, 10

This query, which I found in a PHP/MySQL tutorial by a Google Maps engineer, employs the Haversine formula to compute distances between two pairs of coordinates on a sphere. The fields latitude and longitude are from the MySQL database. The PHP variables $user_latitude and $user_longitude contain the coordinates of the user address.

An address can be specified many different ways, but most people don't know the latitude and longitude of their location. Fortunately, Google Maps offers a web service that can take an address in a wide variety of formats and attempt to determine its latitude and longitude. The web service, which is a simple URL request, returns the information in either XML or JSON format. It requires a Google MAPS API key:

http://maps.google.com/maps/geo?q=ADDRESS&output=json&oe=utf8&sensor=false&key=YOUR+API+KEY

Plug the address and your API key into the request, changing "json" to "xml" if you want XML data. Here's example output for Disney World in JSON and XML.

I chose JSON over XML because it's easier to work with in PHP. PHP 5 has built-in support for JSON, but my sites are on a server running PHP 4, so I installed the Services_JSON library. After a brutal hour of trial and error that made me question programming as a lifestyle choice, I figured out that the following four lines of PHP code will pull a latitude and longitude out of Google's JSON address data:

$json = new Services_JSON(); $json_data = $json->decode($this->get_web_page($url)); $addr_latitude = $json_data->Placemark[0]->Point->coordinates[1]; $addr_longitude = $json_data->Placemark[0]->Point->coordinates[0];

The get_web_page() function returns the contents of a web page as a string.

I've added the closest-store search to all four sites, which you can try on the home page of Sportscard-Stores.Com. The next project will be to create mobile versions of the shopping sites so users can hunt stores with their phones.

News Alert Banana Losing Appeal After Brown Victory

Rogers Cadenhead — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 17:36:49 -0500

Last night on the Drudge Retort, I honored the request of a few Republican members of the site to bring back News Alert Banana when the Massachusetts Senate race was called for Scott Brown. The Banana is the Retort's version of Matt Drudge's siren.

The banana has never celebrated a dramatic Republican upset victory with so much glee before. I don't know how he lives with himself.

There are a lot of reasons being batted around today for how the Democrats managed to lose a Senate election in Massachusetts. My favorite is the idea that voters in a liberal state that has universal health care voted for Brown, a candidate who supports the state's health care plan, in order to send a strong message in rejection of health care reform. That's like buying a Red Sox jersey to indicate how much you love the Yankees.

One reason for the ass-kicking ought to be getting more attention today, in my opinion: The Democrat-led Massachusetts legislature changed the Senate succession rules twice in the last six years to benefit their own party.

In 2004, when Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts was the party's presidential nominee, the legislature faced the prospect that if Kerry won, the state's Republican governor Mitt Romney would be able to appoint his successor. They changed the rules at the urging of Sen. Ted Kennedy so that a special election would fill the seat instead.

Last year, when it appeared that Kennedy would die and leave the Senate Democrats one short of a filibuster-proof majority of 60 members, the rules were changed again with his involvement. The state's Democratic governor Deval Patrick would be able to appoint an interim successor to serve until the special election.

So when a little-known Republican state senator faced off Tuesday against the Democratic attorney general, who was supported by the Kennedys and the state's political establishment, this was the first time that voters had a chance to have their say in the choice of a replacement senator.

Message received.

The American public is sick and tired of insiders rigging the system for their own benefit, whether the system is politics, banking or Wall Street. Kennedy's gamesmanship with Senate seats helped elect the first Republican senator in Massachusetts in 38 years.

Human Target's Opening Credits Hit the Mark

Rogers Cadenhead — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 20:01:18 -0500

The new Fox series Human Target has amazing opening credits:

I caught the pilot during a special preview Sunday night sandwiched between episodes of 24. Regular airings begin Wednesday. The show, based on a DC comic book from the '70s, was a light escapist romp. Mark Valley, who was great a few years ago in a similar role as Keen Eddie, plays an out-of-his-mind bodyguard for hire who manages to get shot, stabbed, blown up and trapped on a runaway bullet train in a single episode. The great Jackie Earle Haley, Rorschach from Watchmen and Kelly Leak from Bad News Bears, plays his unscrupulous henchman Guerrero.

And Now You Want to Be My Friend on Facebook?

Rogers Cadenhead — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 13:49:22 -0500

I was poking around Google Reader when I found a recommended six-month-old blog post by Google engineer Mark Chu-Carroll on why he will not be attending his high school reunion:

... it's twenty five years since I got out of that miserable fucking hell-hole. And people from my high school class are suddenly getting in touch, sending me email, trying to friend me on Facebook, and trying to convince me to bring my family to the reunion. (It's a picnic reunion, full family invited.) Even some of the people who used to beat the crap out of me on a regular basis are getting in touch as if we're old friends. ...
Stay the fuck away from me. I don't want to hear about your lives. I don't want to know how you've changed since high school. I don't want to hear about your jobs, your spouses, your children. I've got a good life now, and I cannot imagine a reason in the world why I would pollute that world with contact with any of you.

Chu-Carroll describes in his post and subsequent comments how his fingers were broken by a bully and a swastika was once burned into his lawn while he attended a suburban New Jersey high school in the '80s. He received hundreds of responses to his post, including one that recommended an appropriate song by the Australian singer Kate Miller-Heidke:

The song's titled "Are You F*cking Kidding Me? (Facebook Song)," and you can hear a better audio version on her iLike page. I think my favorite genre of music is antisocial piano rock. Last fall, Miller-Heidke toured the U.S. as the opening act for the master of the form, Ben Folds.

Why Leslie Harpold's Sites Disappeared

Rogers Cadenhead — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 19:36:23 -0500

Leslie had a special kind of magic. But today there's no trace of her sites.
As long as those sites were up, her brand of humanity was alive, pure, unedited and quenching. The availability of her writing made her slightly less absent. Sad isn't really an appropriate construct for missing Leslie. And sappy sentimentality wouldn't please her at all.
But that writing should remain on the Internet. Those sites should never come down. They belong here like Leslie belonged here. Immortal.
-- a comment by Liria Mersini

A little over three years ago, the web designer and online essayist Leslie Harpold died at age 40. Leslie was a friend of mine, part of a circle of early web creators who discovered the medium as it was blossoming in the mid-'90s. We hung out together on a private mailing list for a decade watching the web (and ourselves) grow up. Leslie left behind a vast body of online work in the form of essays, web sites, weblog entries and photos.

Since that time, almost all of it has disappeared.

Leslie's family allowed her domains smug.com, harpold.com and others to expire and politely turned down all requests to mirror her sites. Several of her friends, including me, had offered after her death to pay the costs required to keep them online.

The recent death of Brad Graham, another early web publisher, has renewed interest in the fate of Leslie's work. I sent an email yesterday to Leslie's niece, asking if it would be possible for some of her friends to reprint her work as a book and web site. Today I heard back. They will not allow anything to be republished. Because I've been told that some of her writings might be a sensitive issue for her family, I replied to her niece that if this is indeed the case, those particular works could be excluded from reprint.

This did not go over well.

I was told that it's none of my business why her family doesn't want her work republished, which is absolutely true, and that her legacy "is not dependent on websites or books; her legacy is with every person who knew her and loved her." This is only partially true. Leslie was an early pioneer in the creation of autobiographical content and experimental web design. She left behind thousands of web pages, many of which are as memorable as Possible Scenarios for Heaven from 2003.

Leslie's family appears to have decided to let her entire body of work disappear and be forgotten completely. The only things that are left online are articles she wrote for other sites, such as The Morning News.

This raises an important question for those of us who create work on the web that we publish ourselves. When heirs decide to bury a web creator's body of work by shuttering sites and rejecting all republication requests, can anything be done to save the material?

If the heirs of Charles Dickens had decided that his novels were not his legacy, they could have spurned all publishers and let the books fall out of print, but the existing copies would not have vanished entirely. There still would be physical copies of the books to read and some would've survived long enough to fall into the public domain.

For works created on the web, however, the only thing keeping them around is an active publisher or a copyright license that permits others to reprint the material. A copyright holder who wanted a web site to disappear completely could take it offline, demand its removal from all archives and never allow republication. Leslie's work will not begin passing into the public domain until 2065.

Perhaps this is the way it should be. No one has found an email or web page where Leslie stipulated her desires for her work in the event of her death, leaving the decision to her heirs.

But everything I learned about Leslie over the years tells me that she'd want this part of her to survive.

Danish Cartoonist Left Child Outside Panic Room

Rogers Cadenhead — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 16:22:35 -0500

Last week, the Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard was confronted at home by an axe-wielding intruder enraged by his depiction of Muhammad. Initial media reports indicated that the 74-year-old and his five-year-old granddaughter Stephanie fled to the safety of a "panic room" in his home and alerted police, who arrived within minutes and shot the intruder.

Yesterday, news reports revealed that Westergaard fled to the panic room without his granddaughter:

At the time, Westergaard was looking after his five-year-old granddaughter, Stephanie. He was confronted with a terrible choice: risk being killed in front of his granddaughter, or trust that the PET, Denmark's security and intelligence service, knew what they were talking about when they had told him terrorists usually don't harm family members but stick to their target.
Westergaard chose to escape into his bathroom, which had been specially fortified as a "panic room", while Stephanie was left sitting in the living room. From the bathroom he alerted the police as his assailant reportedly battered the reinforced door with the axe, shouting, "We will get our revenge!"
"Those minutes were horrible," Westergaard recalled yesterday. "But I think I have got through this fairly well -- and so, it seems, did my grandchild.

Westergaard has given several different explanations for his decision to hide without the child. He told the Copenhagen Post that he was trying to draw the intruder away from the child and said to another paper that he didn't have time to get her.

Regardless of his rationale, I can't think of a any reason I'd lock myself in a secure room while leaving a young child outside with an intruder. She could've been kidnapped, attacked or threatened as a means to get him out.

We're having a lively debate about this on the Drudge Retort, where the only thing we can agree on is this: If your dad requires constant security because of death threats, he's a poor choice for babysitter.

My Life as a Religious Parable

Rogers Cadenhead — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 17:06:20 -0500

Rick Brown, a preacher for ChristBridge Fellowship in Tomball, Texas, used me as the subject of a sermon printed in the local newspaper this week:

When Pope John Paul died Rogers Cadenhead quickly registered www.BenedictXVI.com thinking this might be the name chosen by the new pope. When Cardinal Ratzinger was elected Pope he did choose the name Pope Benedict XVI, causing many to question what the Vatican would do to get the rights to that domain name.
Cadenhead didn't ask the Vatican for money. Instead, in a humorous manner on his blog he suggested a few things he would trade for:
1. Three days, two nights at the Vatican hotel.
2. One of those hats (referring to the bishop's hat).
3. Complete absolution, no questions asked, for the third week of March 1987.
Wonder what Rogers did the third week of March in 1987? Me too. Most of us have at least a week we'd like total forgiveness for.

Since my 15 minutes of fame as the popesquatter in 2005, I've become a religious parable. A couple times a year I'm mentioned in sermons. I've turned up in churches, a syndicated radio broadcast and the book Facing Your Giants: A David and Goliath Story for Everyday People. In English, German and Spanish.

A few years ago, my sister-in-law Trish and her family were looking for a new church to join near Purdue in Indiana, so they went to a house of worship they'd never been to before. As they listened to the sermon, the pastor mentioned my name.

Like the Tomball preacher, the pastor told the story of benedictxvi.com and my request for absolution, inviting the congregation to ponder what I did that week which required papal indulgence.

Afterwards, Trish met the pastor and she sheepishly told him exactly what I'd done:

Her younger sister.

Anil Dash is Wrong About Treehouse Clubs

Rogers Cadenhead — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 14:22:41 -0500

In a post about how the Twitter API is becoming a de facto standard, Anil Dash derides the impulse of groups to work together to create web standards:

The natural inclination right now for geeks of a certain type is to start dreaming up new standards bodies, or how they can participate in the Open Web Foundation to make a Super Awesome Twitter API Evolution Committee. Here's my recommendation: Don't. Don't do any of that shit, and don't run off to make membership badges for the Treehouse Club quite yet. Instead, just iterate and ship. ...
The good news is, consensus around evolution of the Twitter API can happen simply by saying to each other, "If two application developers who share no common investors or board members can reach agreement around an extension to the API, and between them they have a significant enough number of users to be relevant, then we should all just adopt their work."
This is important because it reframes the conversation from being about technical merits, and all the boys who like to play with APIs always think they know what's "better". I'm sure if I wanted to waste an afternoon, I could tell you a dozen ways in which the Twitter API could be "improved". But guess what? That shit does not matter. Adoption matters, and I'm heartened by the fact that people seem to be getting that.

As he suggested in our prior discussion of RSSCloud, which currently is being revised unilaterally by one person with no public process to ensure its soundness, Dash believes there's value in "simple, human-readable but potentially ambiguous specs."

I used to think that too, but after spending so many years involved with RSS, I have a better understanding of the costs that developers incur because of half-assed specs. During the 18 months in which the RSS Advisory Board drafted the RSS Best Practices Profile, we accumulated more information on how RSS has been implemented than anybody else on the planet. It's never a good thing for a specification to be "potentially ambiguous." If two developers disagree on what a spec means, their software will not interoperate. And once their software ships, they'll be mad as hell if the specification is revised to make their interpretation the incorrect one.

This leaves you with a situation where you know that a spec is confusing people, and you know that developers are implementing it in incompatible ways, but the most you can do is offer advice like this:

Support for the enclosure element in RSS software varies significantly because of disagreement over whether the specification permits more than one enclosure per item. Although the author intended to permit no more than one enclosure in each item, this limit is not explicit in the specification.
Blogware, Movable Type and WordPress enable publishers to include multiple enclosures in each item of their RSS documents. This works successfully in some aggregators, including BottomFeeder, FeederReader, NewsGator and Safari.
Other software does not support multiple enclosures, including Bloglines, FeedDemon, Google Reader and Microsoft Internet Explorer 7. The first enclosure is downloaded automatically, an aspect of enclosure support relied on in podcasting, and the additional enclosures are either ignored or must be requested manually.
For best support in the widest number of aggregators, an item SHOULD NOT contain more than one enclosure.

So when somebody asks me if an RSS item can contain more than one enclosure, I give that long-winded answer. When I'm asked the same question about Atom, the answer is this:

Yes.

Guess which one was created by a Treehouse Club?

Dash's vision of a Twitter API that evolves every time two developers agree on a new feature would rapidly devolve into an unworkable mess.

Book Giveaway: Teach Yourself Java in 24 Hours

Rogers Cadenhead — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 13:10:10 -0500

My newest book, Sams Teach Yourself Java in 24 Hours, Fifth Edition, recently hit bookstores. The book is a for-absolute-beginners guide to programming Java, and this section from chapter one's Q&A section shows how much license I get from the publisher to have fun with the series:

Q. Do you only answer questions about Java?
A. Not at all. Ask me anything.
Q. Okay, why is Prince mad at the Foo Fighters?
A. Prince is unhappy that the Foo Fighters performed a cover of his song "Darling Nikki" and released it as a B-side single in Australia. He told Entertainment Weekly they should write their own tunes and wouldn't let the band release it in the United States. This became a pretty meaningless distinction as the song became a radio hit around the globe and was played regularly during their concerts.
When Prince performed at Super Bowl XLI a few years later, he covered the Foo Fighters' "Best of You," an artistic decision that surprised the Foo Fighters as much as everybody else.
"It was pretty amazing to have a guy like Prince covering one of our songs," Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins told MTV, "and actually doing it better than we did."
Although playing someone else's music is an odd way to exercise a grudge, this was a better option for the 5-foot-2 Prince than challenging the band to a fight.

Every chapter ends with one reader question that has bupkiss to do with Java. I used to be the Fort Worth Star-Telegram's Ed Brice, an answer man who fielded random questions, so old habits die hard.

My book has been fully updated for Java 6 and has new chapters on JAX-WS and game programming. I have 20 copies I'd like to give to people who want to learn Java, and there's still time for me to mail them before Christmas.

If you know someone who wants to learn Java, or you can make a convincing case for why Santa owes you this book after the year 2009 you just endured, please leave a comment here on Workbench or in a Twitter post to rcade. Make sure I have some means of contacting you, so I can get the address of the person getting the book.

I'm planning on mailing these out on Wednesday morning in the pre-Christmas scrum at the post office. I will mail the books directly to the people receiving them and can put your name and address as the sender and wrap them if necessary. No one needs to know I was involved.

Please note that I'm expecting the people who get this free book to teach themselves Java in a single contiguous 24-hour period. For too long, Sams has coddled readers who devote one hour a day to a subject and learn it at their leisure.

Homeless Man Performs Radiohead's 'Creep'

Rogers Cadenhead — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 11:00:26 -0500

On Friday, the Opie and Anthony radio show invited several homeless men they pulled off the street into the studio to promote their annual "homeless shopping spree" bit. When they learned one of the men was a musician who had written some songs, they procured him a guitar and he performed Radiohead's "Creep."

There's more details on Daniel Mustard's appearance on Sports Inferno and Reddit.

RSS Advisory Board Becomes Publisher of Media RSS

Rogers Cadenhead — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 18:57:59 -0500

Last night, I finished creating a copy of the Media RSS Specification as part of its move from Yahoo to the RSS Advisory Board. We found out 21 months ago that Yahoo was amenable to the idea of finding a custodian to publish the spec, so several board members and I have been working with them to make it happen.

Media RSS is a namespace that extends RSS to support sophisticated distribution of audio, video and image files. In the five years since it was created by Yahoo, it has become extremely popular with podcasters and other multimedia publishers. It is supported by Yahoo Search, Bing, Wikipedia, Flock, Picasa and a lot of other sites and software.

Because version 1.5 of the specification was just released in October, I expect the first priority of the board will be to help developers implement the new features such as user ratings of media content, the ability to define scenes, Creative Commons licensing and support for geolocation. Our first job should be to ensure that the Feed Validator for Atom and RSS can validate all of the elements in a Media RSS feed.

This move wouldn't have happened without Sapna Chandiramani and Nilesh Gattani at Yahoo and Randy Charles Morin and Ryan Parman on the board, so I'd like to thank them for their efforts.

In the nearly four years since the board went public with its votes and deliberations, we've been entrusted by Netscape to publish the first two versions of RSS -- RSS 0.90 and RSS 0.91 -- and now by Yahoo to publish Media RSS. I'm glad that we've gained the trust of the RSS development community for projects of this kind. The board can assure the permanent availability of any namespaces, documentation or services related to syndication, and we are an independent group with members who have been involved in syndication going all the way back to its creation in 1999.

Before I worked on moving the Media RSS spec this week, I didn't notice that it contained an example that only would make sense to people who grew up in Texas in the '80s:

<media:title type="plain">The Judy's -- The Moo Song</media:title>

The Judys were a twisted bubblegum pop band that toured Dallas, Austin and Nacogdoches when I was in college and had no money to see them. A few of their songs, though not "Moo," can be heard on MySpace. The Judys fan at Yahoo turns out to be David Hall, the author of the original version of the spec. He graduated from Berkner High School in Richardson, Texas, seven years after I did.

Photographer Makes Weighty Request

Rogers Cadenhead — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 14:49:23 -0500

Philip Greenspun, an MIT computer science teacher who founded the photographic community Photo.Net, has posted an unusual request on his weblog:

I'd like to get some pictures of fat people eating (example1; example2). I'm in Orlando and it seems like an ideal opportunity to combine two quintessentially American themes: obesity and theme parks. Also, a theme park is a great place to walk around with a big camera and lens without attracting attention. I would like to find a theme park where there are a lot of restaurants, a lot of fat people (aside from myself), and most of the restaurants have outdoor seating.

He believes that diet pills will emerge in the future that make today's fat people a historical curiosity in the year 2100.

I've been to Orlando dozens of times. When you need to add blubber to prepare for the harsh Florida winter, the best places I've found are the Chevy's Tex-Mex at the Crossroads shopping center on State Road 535, the Wolfgang Puck Cafe at Downtown Disney and the Rainforest Cafe outside Animal Kingdom.

Crash Kills 2 Teens in Jacksonville

Rogers Cadenhead — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 14:09:19 -0500

There was a terrible two-car accident in Jacksonville Sunday night that left two teens dead and five other people hospitalized with serious injuries. Around 8:30 p.m., a Chevy Silverado going north on Phillips Highway near the Avenues Mall collided with a southbound private ambulance turning left near Interstate 95. The truck's driver, 19-year-old Michael Linder, and his 18-year-old girlfriend Megan Bunn died from injuries sustained in the accident. Florida State Highway troopers told News4Jax that no one in the truck was wearing a seat belt.

I was driving north on Phillips Highway at the same time as the teens, and at around 8:30 I was turning onto Southside Boulevard no more than 1,200 feet before the intersection where the crash occurred. I didn't see or hear a collision. When I returned to the highway 30 minutes later after an errand, the road was completely shut down and police and ambulances were all over the place.

Megan Bunn had an active MySpace page with lots of pictures of a person just getting started in her life. One titled Me and You is presumably her and Linder. The page records her last login as 11/29/2009, the day of the accident. One of her recent status messages reads "my life makes me laugh till the day im dead."

The cause of Sunday's crash has yet to be determined. The ambulance driver has reportedly told police he had a green light when he turned and the damage to the truck indicates that it must have been going pretty fast. Police are looking for eyewitnesses, but I did not notice any vehicles driving in an unusual manner.

I used to read about tragedies like this and see myself in the participants. Now I think more about how my oldest son is two years from legal driving age. I don't know how parents muster the courage to send their children out in motor vehicles. When you are a teen, it's difficult to let go of the idea that you are indestructible. I'm a neurotic person with a highly developed sense of caution, but at age 18 I can recall being stupid a few times behind the wheel. One incident in particular -- when I was leaving the Starck Club in Dallas and had a near-miss accident on Interstate 30 in the middle of the night -- convinced me to never drink as much as a single beer if I'm going to be driving. My heart goes out to the families of the people involved in this accident.

The First Coast News story I linked contains a lot of unkind speculation from readers, which seems to be the norm on newspaper and TV station web sites. I don't understand why there's so little humanity in the reader forums of local media. Even though several friends of Been and Linder have participated in the discussion, it hasn't stopped some people from being incredibly cruel.

Media sites attract vicious commenters. When my college friend Bill Muller died two years ago, he was the longtime film critic for the Arizona Republic and the paper ran a feature obituary about his many accomplishments in journalism. Here's the first comment it received, which is still online today:

While my sincere condolences go out to Mr. Muller's family & friends, it is my greatest hope that the paper will replace him with a film "critic" who actually LIKES movies that normal people go to see rather than the "artsy-craftsy" c-r-a-p that always get rave reviews. ...

I don't understand why blogs like this one attract kinder communities than the ones on local newspapers, where the audience is an actual community. You'd think people would be nicer to their neighbors.