From the AP:
They came throughout the day – some bearing flowers, others wiping away a stray tear. They moved slowly, reverently on the gently curving path in front of Burruss Hall, pausing to look at each of the names engraved on 32 distinctive chunks of “Hokie Stone.”
Nicole Regina White. Daniel Patrick O’Neil. Matthew Gregory Gwaltney. Ross A. Alameddine.
“To me, this is like the first day in the beginning of a healing process,” Charles Bray said Friday, he and his wife, Becky, having just strolled past the somber memorial that now occupies a place of honor at his alma mater.
Come Saturday, there will be a commemoration of a different sort. More than 66,000 people – most of them adorned in the gaudy school colors, maroon and orange – will cram every nook and cranny of Lane Stadium to watch their beloved Hokies take on East Carolina in the first game of a new college football season.
“When you talk about ‘We will prevail and get on with our lives,’ sometimes it’s sort of hard,” Bray said. “When is it appropriate to not cry, to not mourn. When is it appropriate to cheer? I think football will make that evident.”
Reema Joseph Samaha. Caitlin Millar Hammaren. Rachael Elizabeth Hill. Waleed Mohamed Shaalan.
Even now, more than four months later, it doesn’t seem possible that the worst mass shooting in modern American history could befall an idyllic campus such as Virginia Tech, nestled up against the Blue Ridge Mountains, far away from any hustle and bustle.
Then you see all those names carved in stone, each of them representing a life that was cut short so senselessly. They were the ones who paid when a deranged student – one of them, no less – decided to unleash his rage.
Now it’s time for football. The survivors are eager to scream and yell and show the rest of the nation that the Hokie Nation is getting along fine, even though they’ll never forget that bitter April day.
“I suspect there will be a lot of tears shed,” Bray said. “But I think by the end of the game, there will be a lot of cheering. Maybe we’ll have a better feeling about things.”
Good long piece, balanced in its look at sports’ place in collegiate life.
Well, it’s out. It finds some fault with the university, but it also says that there was no reasonable way to prevent what happened.
And I think that’s the truth.
Virginia Tech’s square footage is larger than some High Desert cities and towns, it’s got vastly more buildings than most universities and has a daytime population larger than that of Barstow. There’s just no way to practically control a campus that size, that quickly, when the danger could be anywhere.
There are people who wish the university could have gotten the word out earlier. I can’t disagree with that, although I’m not sure I agree where the threshold is to alarm tens of thousands of people is. If you think it’s a two-person domestic and think you have a suspect in custody, do you want to effectively cancel classes for everyone because of it? I think this was a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” scenario for Tech officials.
Even the AP story on the report is long:
Virginia Tech’s president, facing calls for his ouster, defended his university’s response to the nation’s deadliest school shooting, saying Thursday that officials couldn’t have known the gunman would attack twice.
“Nobody can say for certain what would have happened if different decisions were made,” President Charles Steger told a news conference.
“The crime was unprecedented in its cunning and murderous results,” he said.
A governor-appointed panel that investigated the April 16 massacre at the Blacksburg campus released a report late Wednesday criticizing Virginia Tech officials, saying they could have saved lives if they had acted more quickly to warn students about the first shootings that morning at a dormitory and that a killer was on the loose.
Instead, it took administrators more than two hours to send students and staff an e-mail warning. The shooter had time to leave the dormitory, mail a videotaped confession and manifesto to NBC News, then return to campus and enter a classroom building, chain the doors shut and kill 31 more people, including himself.
“Warning the students, faculty and staff might have made a difference,” the panel in its report. “The earlier and clearer the warning, the more chance an individual had of surviving.”
Steger said the administration was responding during the hours that passed after the first two students were slain in the dormitory.
“The notion that there was a two-hour gap is a great misconception,” Steger said. “There was continuous action and deliberations from the first event until the second, and they made a material difference in the results of the second event.”
One victim’s mother urged the governor to “show some leadership” and fire Steger, and other parents demanded accountability for the errors.
Gov. Timothy M. Kaine, however, said the school’s officials had suffered enough without losing their jobs.
“I want to fix this problem so I can reduce the chance of anything like this ever happening again,” the governor said. “If I thought firings would be the way to do that, then that would be what I would focus on.”
Kaine said instead that parents of troubled children who are starting college should alert university officials, and those officials should “pick up the phone and call the parent” if they become aware of unusual behavior.
“The information needs to flow both ways,” the governor said.
I sure hope Kaine moves to change the rules about Virginia public schools keeping mental health issues of students and graduates private. Obviously, there are privacy concerns, but I have faith that a provision could be crafted that would respect a student’s privacy but still alert universities to potential problems before a student arrives on campus.
The report detailed a breakdown in communication about the gunman, who had shown signs of mental health problems for years.
His middle school teachers had found signs of suicidal and homicidal thoughts in his writings after the Columbine High School shootings in 1999. He received psychiatric counseling and was on medication for a short time. In 2006, he wrote a paper for his Virginia Tech creative writing class about a young man who hates students at his school and plans to kill them and himself, the report said.
The university’s counseling center failed to give Cho the support he needed despite the warnings, including his referral to the center in 2005 because of bizarre behavior and concerns he was suicidal, the panel said. It blamed a lack of resources, misinterpretation of privacy laws and passivity.
Individuals and departments at Virginia Tech were aware of incidents that suggested his mental instability, but “did not intervene effectively. No one knew all the information and no one connected all the dots,” the report said.
Likewise, the university needs a policy that these sorts of scenarios are reported upwards to the dean of each department, the dean passes this information along to Student Health and Student Health passes along issues that present a possible threat to other students to campus security.
The problem, though, is that creative writing classes — I took three at Virginia Tech — are full of maudlin and dark writings. Do we really want to report every student who writes something a bit bleak or a bit violent? I would have gotten reported, if that were the case.
In the words of Mike Myers, I’m as giddy as a little guuuuurl.
Apple apparently just sent out media invites for the unveiling of their new iPod next week.
NPD surveyed 11,000 U.S. consumers older than age 13 earlier this year, and found that only 6.6 percent of respondents purchased a television show or movie online during the past six months. It’s not clear how many folks are watching videos on their iPods as opposed to on their computers or TVs via Apple TV, but mobile video is still very much a niche experience at this point.
That’s what Apple could be hoping to change on Wednesday. The most persistent rumors over the past couple of months have involved a redesign of both the current iPod video player as well as the smaller iPod Nano to provide a better viewing experience.
Only the fifth-generation iPod supports video playback at the moment, but it uses a 2.5-inch screen that after the launch of the iPhone looks impossibly small. Several Apple-oriented sites, as well as a few financial analysts, have gone on record predicting Apple will release an iPod with the same 3.5-inch widescreen display found on the iPhone but without the phone hardware.
Many also expect Apple to have a new version of the iPod Nano that supports video playback. It’s not clear at all how this might be accomplished while preserving the diminutive size of the iPod Nano.
We’ll see on Wednesday.
In the meantime, if you live in New York City (and you know who you are), where the subway is plastered with ads warning about iPod theft, help is at hand.
Found via Digg:
These 20+ Firefox Plugins For Managing Email look pretty good — I’ll probably download the Webmail one for sure — but nowadays, I’m trying to keep a better eye on Firefox bloat, since it becomes a huge memory hog when there are too many plug-ins added. (Foxytunes is one of the worst offenders, since you have to have it running as well as iTunes.)
My current 30 GB iPod — a Christmas 2005 gift — is now on its last legs. The battery life is pretty much untouched, but it is periodically not recognizing touches to the scroll wheel or sending anything through the audio connection. It’s not a critical problem yet, so I’m able to hold out for the presumed widescreen iPod Video coming out at some point this year or early next year.
Engadget seems to think it’s going to be announced in September or October. Here’s hoping.
