RFID on the horizon

I went to a meeting today on RFID. Up until a couple of weeks ago, I had never even heard of this technology before. I am getting more caught up on it, but where it is going has continued to surpise me.

I recently started work at a movie theatre company and we are in the process of installing RFID readers in our theatres around the DFW metroplex. The meeting I went to today dealt with installing RFID readers in the theatres by consessions and the box office.

The technical support person who came out was telling us about the direction of where this technology is going and its nuts. They have already started shipping out credit cards with the RFID chip in it, which I am not too nuts about, becuase it just seems like identity theft waiting to happen. One of our PC tech people have already gotten one, and they send it with it embedded whether you want it or not. Granted most of the readers, you are supposed to be within a few inches in order for it to read, but still....It is just a new invention waiting to happen. Some guy is going to come up with some kind of portable scanner or something and walk around the streets waving a wand around purses and back pockets and start stealing credit card information. Just wait. The support guy was also saying that they are working on integrating the technology into cell phones. How crazy is that? In any instance, the worker at the store never even sees the credit card. How do they check the signature? I think the whole thing is just bogus, but I guess we'll find out in the near future how it is all going to shake out.

Holy Hurricanes!

I just thought I would comment on the crazy amount of hurricanes the past couple of years.

I grew up in a town called La Porte, which is a suburb of Houston, and is located on the water. In all the years that I lived there, there was only 2 bad storms in like 20 years, and one wasn't even a hurricane (Alicia and Tropical Storm Allison, Respectively).

My whole point on this is that I was reading a message board about hurricanes and someone made the comment basically, that everyone who lived on the coast was just just stupid people asking for trouble. That is just ridiculous. Had my husband not gotten a job up here, it would have never occurred to me to move. People don't think about the location as much, especially if you grow up there. You live there not because it is on the coast, but because your family lives there, and that's where your barber is, and where your favorite restaurant is located. And for the most part you don't even think about the storms because they happen so infrequently.

That is changing a bit, since there might be more named storms this year than any other year in recorded history, if it goes past 21 named storms. Citizens along the coast might start to think a little bit more about where they live. But don't call them stupid for wanting to live in a place they have lived their whole lives. Up until this point there hasn't been many major storms along the Louisiana and Texas coasts, so no one has had a reason to doubt that their choice of living wasn't the best choice to be made.

There is a natural disaster waiting to happen in every part of the United States....tornadoes, hurricanes, wild fires, blizzards, earthquakes, etc. Every part of the US needs help at different times for different reasons. We should just accept that things are are going to happen and then correct it to the best of our ability, but don't condemn people for living somewhere that they love and grew up in, because more than likely you will end up in the same basic scenario.