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I came across this ad in today’s Keller Citizen and have to admit I was a bit taken aback when I first saw it.

Perhaps I’m misinterpreting the image, but it looks a lot like some sort of white power/neo-nazi advertisement rather than something for a church.  Just to clarify, I’m not talking about the name of the church, but rather the upraised fists.  Am I being overly sensitive?

I meant to comment on this on Wednesday, but things have been a bit crazy lately.  The “tattoo bandit” decided to have a press conference to talk about her escapades.  First, though, she seemed to be surprised by all the attention:

Surrounded by photographers, videographers and reporters from six TV stations and two newspapers, Harvey said she was surprised by all the media attention.

“I couldn’t believe that I was getting that much coverage,” she said. “I was freaking out. … I couldn’t even go into Wal-Mart without people staring at me. That was not the reaction I wanted. I was trying to hide.”

I don’t know… maybe that whole armed robbery, carjacking, kidnapping thing might just be something that catches the public’s attention.  But maybe I’m just strange that way.

But this isn’t the main topic I wanted to discuss.  This is what was bugging me:

Phyllis Dawn Harvey, who became known as the “tattoo bandit” during a 12-day crime spree, said she never had any bullets in her gun.

I always hate it when people say “it wasn’t loaded.”  Either as an excuse for poor gun handling or as a mitigating factor in a criminal case, it sets my teeth on edge.  In real life, there’s no way to tell a gun is loaded without close inspection.  If someone is pointing one at you or waving it around your best bet is to proceed as if it’s loaded.  She’s just lucky that she didn’t encounter a police officer or an armed citizen. 

In general, Texas law doesn’t seem to distinguish between loaded and unloaded (there is an exception for making a firearm accessible to a child).  Either with regards to aggravated robbery or simple carrying, the law appears to regard a firearm as a deadly weapon.  I think this makes sense, because as I mentioned above, there is generally no readily distinguishable feature that can help someone (at a distance and under the influence of adrenalin) tell if a gun is loaded.

I got an interesting postcard in the mail over the weekend.  It concerns a public meeting to be held tomorrow about a new gas well in the Bear Creek Park area.  It appears that after drilling down 1 to 1.5 miles they will go horizontal for up to 6000 feet to extract the gas, which means that it could potentially go under my neighborhood (the postcard just showed a circle with a 6000-foot radius from the well; it didn’t explain if they’d take a particular direction or not).

They also mentioned signing a lease for the drilling, which got me to wondering about mineral rights.  It occurred to me that I had never really thought about them and I didn’t know if they were transferred to me with the house or not.  It certainly wasn’t on any of the paperwork I signed (and I took another look yesterday to be sure).  It appears that the drilling company knows something I don’t (we suspect that they used the county records to decide who to send cards to).

I guess I will attend the meeting to see what this is all about and whether I stand to get anything out of it.  If anything I wouldn’t expect more than a few dollars, though, given the size of my lot.  I’m certainly interested to know more about horizontal drilling and rock fracturing, though.  Even if it’s 1.5 miles below me, I start to get a bit nervous when you propose to “fracture” the rock.  The last thing we need is an earthquake…

I tend to leave my PCs running for convenience.  Even with an XP desktop system I’ve been known to go two months without a reboot.  But the latest version of Firefox is really testing my ability to do so without having to carefully manage my applications.  Consider this:

That’s with six open windows running since Thursday (approximately 5 days).  There’s absolutely no good reason for a web browser to be sucking up nearly 1GB of RAM.  Up until I switched to Firefox 2.0 I didn’t have this problem.

I’ve done some searching in Google and there are some pages that suggest lowering the overall page cache, but there are others that say it won’t make a difference.  I really started noticing this on my old laptop as it would get horribly sluggish after a couple of days.  I’d check the running processes to find that Firefox was using 350MB or more, which is really bad on a system with 512MB.  I only noticed it on this system today because opening new windows was becoming very slow (this system has 2GB, which seems to have masked the problem somewhat).

I’m going to give the memory cache trick a try.  Hopefully it’ll do the trick.  Otherwise I either have to switch back to IE (I hate IE 7’s interface) or restart Firefox every other day.

Update:  Looking at some of the threads about memory leaks with Firefox I saw that the first response was always to have you delete all extensions and then see if the problem still occurred.  If not, then add the extensions back one by one until you found the culprit.  In this case, it turns out to be v1.5.0.32 of the PayPal Virtual Debit Card beta.  They only recently added support for Firefox, and I suspect that they did something naughty in their code that’s causing a memory leak.  I’ve submitted a report so that hopefully they can fix it soon.

I’ve been using the Scrubbing Bubbles automatic shower cleaner for a while.  While it seems a bit expensive, it also seems to help keep things cleaner, which is a plus considering my usual cleaning habits (I employ a service to come in every two weeks, otherwise nothing would get done).

I couldn’t help but notice over the past few months how the warning label on the refill bottles has changed.  Initially, all of the instructions and warnings were on the back side of the front label, which meant you had to read them through the bottle.  A couple of months ago they added a fairly plain printed label to the other side (the one you end up staring at as you shower) that included information about not replacing the batteries when the unit was still wet.

It’s the last iteration of the label that really got my attention, though.  It’s very colorful and matches their overall branding strategy (it has their logo, etc).  But what really stood out to me was this particular warning:  Not a body wash.

I’d really love to know the back story behind that one.  What kind of doofus uses a shower cleaner as a body wash?

For those in the Keller area who might be interested, I’d like to let you know that the Keller Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) will be hosting a SKYWARN class on Saturday, September 15, 2007.  The class will feature Mr. Gary Woodall of the National Weather Service Forecast Office – Fort Worth. 

It will be held from 9:00am to noon at the Keller Police community room (located at 330 Rufe Snow Drive). 

So just what is SKYWARN and why would you be interested? 

SKYWARN is a volunteer program established by NOAA’s National Weather Service (NWS) in partnership with other organizations.  According to NOAA, “SKYWARN has nearly 280,000 trained severe weather spotters,” and “these volunteers help keep their local communities safe by providing timely and accurate reports of severe weather to the National Weather Service.”

While that might sound kind of intimidating, SKYWARN training is valuable for anyone who lives in North Texas whether they wish to participate in storm spotting activities or not.  The basic SKYWARN class covers:

• Basics of thunderstorm development
• Fundamentals of storm structure
• Identifying potential severe weather features
• Information to report
• How to report information
• Basic severe weather safety

I’ve been to both the basic and advanced SKYWARN training, and while I don’t go chase storms, it’s helped me quite a bit in understanding when I should worry about a particular storm and which areas are most dangerous in such a storm. 

If someone out there really wants to save the planet, they’ll come up with a way to stop phone books from being dumped on your front door.  I don’t think that I’ve looked in a phone book in the last two or three years.  Yet I get three or four of the damn things, all from competing companies.  Some even come in multiples (like the company that sends a large book and a smaller satellite book for “your convenience”).

I did some searching to see how one might politely decline the avalanche of unwanted paper, but it turns out that getting them to stop is harder than you might initially think.  Once you understand the economics of the deal, however, it all makes sense.  The deliveries are actually done by a subcontractor who gets paid for each book delivered (typically some tiny amount like $0.15 per book).  So it’s in the best interest of the subcontractor to deliver as many books as possible.  On top of that, the companies that print the books base their ad sales rates on their coverage, so they have absolutely no incentive to take you off their lists.

What we need is some sort of sign that indicates to all and sundry that the resident doesn’t want marketing material, phone books, promotional newspapers, or any other such nonsense.  I added those other categories because I’ve seen that some companies don’t seem to understand that “No Soliciting” also means not to leave any marketing junk on my door.

Having numerous electronic gadgets and gizmos, I naturally have lots of wall wart transformers.  These things are the bane of my existence.  They occupy two or more outlets, and the more egregious ones seem designed explicitly to block two wall outlets, thereby monopolizing that particular outlet.  The worst offender, though, has to be the transformer that came with an Ikea lamp I bought a while back.  This thing is about 2” wide, 3” deep, 2” high, and weighs about 5 lbs. 

While I’m starting to see a few smaller and more friendly transformers that don’t monopolize outlets, there still seem to be lots of manufacturers who aren’t getting the message.  Which is why I highly recommend Outlet Savers (you can also get these at Fry’s).  Whenever I get a chance I pick up one or two of these and it always seems like I’m using another one somewhere.

In the long run it occurs to me that having so many wall warts is inefficient for items that remain plugged in long-term.  In the back of my mind I envision a secondary, low-voltage, distribution system built into houses to provide for these sorts of items.  There are some downsides, though, in that low-voltage DC tends to require larger wiring for large loads and there is a proliferation of voltages for the various devices. 

For portable devices I’m noticing that more and more of them are moving to USB for charging, which at least makes for a handy standard (USB specifications call for a powered port to provide up to 500mA at 5V, if I recall correctly).

I’m currently sitting on a conference call that started at 7:00AM (Central time).  Starting a few minutes ago I started hearing a strange sound.  At first I thought that something was interfering with my headset or perhaps the VoIP adapter was malfunctioning or experiencing congestion.  But someone eventually commented on it and we figured out that it was someone snoring! 

I suspect it was one of those poor schmucks in Tucson.  They’re currently two hours earlier than us, so that means this meeting started at 5:00AM their time.

So you’re out and about, running errands and minding your business, when Deputy Friendly saunters up and hands you an envelope.  Congratulations, you’ve just been shanghaied into jury duty.

Madeline Byrne was making a quick trip to the grocery store to buy some cheese when a sheriff approached her car in the parking lot and slipped something through her open window.

Byrne didn’t get the cheese, but she did get a jury summons.

The 64-year-old woman was ordered to report for jury duty a little more than an hour later at the Lee County courthouse in Sanford, N.C. When Byrne protested, the sheriff told her: “Be there or you’ll be in contempt.”

“I wasn’t too happy,” said Byrne, one of at least a dozen people handed summonses at random in March outside a Food Lion and Wal-Mart.

This would cheese me off no end.  Not that I want to shirk jury duty.  But that there’s no warning. 

I have no problem serving on a jury, and in fact I’ve done so before.  But at least the normal jury summons gives you a chance to get your schedule in order before you go.  Having only an hour’s notice would be a major PITA. 

The article goes on to decry how people today won’t serve on juries.  And I’ve no doubt that it’s a serious problem.  But picking random people in the shopping center parking lot and disrupting their lives isn’t going to make things better. 

At least they realized that it’s not the right way to do things:

Ann Blakely, the clerk of Superior Court in North Carolina’s Lee County, said sending out sheriffs to find jurors at random is done very rarely, and only when a judge is about to begin a case and there are not enough jurors.

“Not again in my lifetime, I hope,” she said. “We got a lot of complaints from people. You do not make friends like that.”

I’m not sure what the solution is for getting people to serve on juries, but I’m fairly certain that this isn’t it.