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Year: 2006

Jury Duty

Jury Duty SummonsOn the 28th of October, I received a summons to report for Jury Duty at the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.  I was to be “on call” for a two week period running from 10 November 2006 through 24 November 2006.

To find out whether you had to report to the Courthouse, you had to call a 1-800 number after 6:00 PM and enter your Juror ID Number. You were either told to report to the Courthouse on a particular day or were given a date to call in again.  On Friday, November 10th, I was instructed to be present in the Jury Assembly room at the Courthouse no later than 8:45 AM the following Monday or bad things would happen to me.  So on Monday, off I went.

So, Monday, I, and about 75 to 100 or so other upstanding citizens who reside in the US Court’s Eastern District of Virginia appeared in the Jury Assembly Room.  If course everybody was really “happy” to be there to do their civic duty, especially the poor guy who had to drive 73 miles one-way to get there.  I was fortunate in that I could take the DC Metro from Vienna to the King Street Station in Alexandria and take a 10 minute walk to the courthouse.

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The Color Purple, Part II

So why does my blog have a purple theme?   Well maybe its because:

  • I like the color purple
  • Or maybe I was inspired by The Color Purple
  • Or it could be that Barney is my hero
  • Or I might be color-blind
  • Or, as some have implied, I’m a Web 2.0 WannaBe and believe all the hype about using flashy color combinations
  • Or maybe I have a thing for Purple Cows
  • Or maybe because once upon a time I read this Zane Grey novel
  • Or maybe it was because I did some searches on Google and got 1,200,000,000 hits for Red, 941,000,000 hits for Blue and only 9,250,000 hits for Purple…and I decided to help Purple bump up its Google Ranking.
  • Or it could possibly be because of this or this.
  • Or maybe even one of these.

Or maybe the real reason is…

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The Color Purple

In case you haven’t noticed, HR’s halfVAST Blog has become more colorful. In particular, it now has a Purple theme.

Why purple, you ask? Stay tuned..more on this to come in the near future.

Veteran’s Day

My wife, who is president of the local American Legion Post Auxiliary unit, will be laying the wreath honoring our veterans at at 11:00 AM during today’s ceremonies.

11/11/11

Tommorrow, don’t forget to pause what you are doing on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month and pay tribute to the veterans who have served our country in the past, and to those who serve us today.

FiOS is Coming

FIOS is Coming

After months of negotiations and haggling, the Town Council and Verizon finally reached agreement on the terms and conditions for deployment of FiOS throughout the town. So, for the past couple of weeks, Verizon has been busy stringing fiber-optic cable around the town.

Verizon’s FiOS offers a bundled package of services (phone, Internet and TV), as does Cox Comunications, who holds the town’s existing Cable TV franchise. It will be interesting to see what pricing structure Verizon will offer to encourage Cox’s existinig customers to switch. Cox has had a monopoly on the Cable TV service for a number of year now. Maybe a little competition will be a good thing.

I’ve had Verizon’s DSL service since February of 1999 and it has been very reliable. I consistently get the best case speeds (3Mbps incoming, 768Kbps outgoing) and outages have been few and far between. Verizon is planning on offering existing DSL subscribers an incentive to switch to FiOS, so I will probably opt to do so. The basic FIOS package offers best case speeds of 5Mbps incoming and 2Mbps outgoing, so I’ll get a llittle performance boost in the process.