I found the following page in a search result for “Arconati”.
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The snow was mostly cleared from the roads, but the sun had already set. The highway looked dry as my Trailblazer rumbled eastbound in the moonlight on I-70 last Thursday evening. It had been a hectic day and a frustrating week. I was looking forward to wrestling with the weight machines at the “Y” and sitting in the steam room for a while. Linda said she’d hold dinner for me until I got home.
Taking the southbound exit at Earth City Expressway, I gave no thought to the weather and entered the turn a little high, intending to slighly accelerate as I got into the straightaway. I never got to the straightaway.
The policewoman later called it “black-ice,” meaning that it was ice that had little glare or discoloration and wasn’t easily seen. All I know is that the ‘Blazer left the road at probably 50mph, went down one snow-covered embankment, up the next, over the circular on-ramp, then down into the big-circle area of the cloverleaf. Re-freezing snow on highway grass has just about zero traction, so the 400-feet or so that I traveled with the anti-locks full-on made straight tracks in the snow. Thankfully, I hit nothing of substance on the way, so there was no air-bag trauma, and no friendly OnStar operator. But I do remember looking straight out the windshield and seeing the moon directly ahead of me (it would have actually been at about a 40-degree above the horizon at that time) and I remember feeling like I dropped 10-feet or so. A passerby who stopped to help later said I was “airborne” going over the second road, but she seemed as startled and adrenalined as I felt.
It was a bit surreal as the ‘Blazer came to rest. I glanced at the instruments – engine still running, ABS light is on, heat from the blowers, radio still playing quietly in the background. After a mental inventory of no broken bones, no blood, no real pain, I cautiously opened the driver’s door and stepped into the snow. It didn’t look too bad in the moonlight, let’s look around it. About half-way around the ‘Blazer, it occurred to me. “I am ALIVE and this could have been much worse. Who cares about the truck!”
A mental “thank you” to whatever angel protected me, and I got onto the business at hand. Find the cell phone, call the right
folks, talk to the concerned citizen running up to me, and say another “thanks” to that angel. By this time, the police have arrived and are protecting the scene, towtruck is on the way, and I notice that its pretty cold out here. The rest of the evening is devoted to tow-trucks and getting home and call or hugging all the good people in my life. And one more thanks to that angel.
Its now Monday – the aspirin and whirlpool seemed to have worked their magic on most of the muscle pain. TrailBlazer is sitting in the driveway a bit pushed-over and is waiting for a verdict from the insurance adjuster. I’m driving a Jeep courtesy of Enterprize leasing, and life is sorta back to normal.
Somehow, I have a feeling that I might owe some payback to that angel.
Come visit the Seamist Inn, but … mind yer manners! This place, as they say, can be a little rough.
Recent posts have some content borrowed from Wizards.com adapted for my home-brew campaign setting of Zethul.
I spotted a comment from Bill Arconati on a high profile blog, TechCrunch.com. I’m trying to see if he has a blog or website I can link to but so far it doesn’t look like it.
I think Bill Arconati is the son of my Dad’s cousins. To my knowledge, I’ve never met him. It would appear that he started a blog too, although there’s not much content there currently.
I like to think of this as The Arconati-Way-Back-Machine
. Version 1.5 of this web site was hosted and was using a modified (but originally default) blogger template called Sand Dollar, created by Jason Sutter.
I used this template as my blog and also for the main site as I built it up, first simply hosted at my earthlink space, and then hosted with Sparky. The template was an orange/cream two-column design which I was fond of, but was popular with many bloggers. I wanted to create something from scratch that reflected me a little bit more, was more flexible and made use of a three-column template.
When Sparky got slammed by some script kiddies from France in the middle of July 2005, the site was down for a few months while the storm subsided and Sparky revamped the server.
I am considering officially naming the current version 2.0. It uses a three-column template and is well styled. Everything in it I designed from scratch, so I am very familiar with it. The background is a marker colored page done by Reese. I’m extrapolating every other color in the page from that mixed up background color set; purple, blue, pink, green and throwing in some white and black for good measure. CSS will be used only, no tables, please.
The Arconati Web Portal is moving back to a real web host. Up until the DNS change today I make today, the main domain was forwarding onto a blog*spot page at arconati.blogspot.com, and our other domain, Arconati.net, was forwarding onto my old Earthlink host at home.earthlink.net/~arcojedi. But I am changing both of them today. The home page will most likely be the same as you see it now (minus this post) but will be available directly rather than a redirect.
For those of you that have this page bookmarked, you will want to update your file to point to the right place. We are still deciding what to do with the other domain, Arconati.net, but go to the first page and then look for news from there.
Thanks!
We want to wish Reese Arconati good luck and work hard on your studies in the coming year! Reese enters first grade today with Mrs. Hynes as her teacher.
Congratulations to the Happy Couple!
The SANS Institute was established in 1989 as a cooperative research and education organization. Here is one published research whitepaper in the SANS Institute Information Security Reading Room:
This paper discusses an approach to Enterprise Security Architecture, including a security policy, security domains, trust levels, tiered networks, and most importantly the relationships among them.
The objective of enterprise security architecture is to provide the conceptual design of the network security infrastructure, related security mechanisms, and related security policies and procedures. The enterprise security architecture links the components of the security infrastructure as one cohesive unit. The goal of this cohesive unit is to protect corporate information.