aubreyturner.org

It appears to me that the QT issue brought a lot of visitors to Keller City Limits who hadn’t seen it before.  Visitors who are absolutely seething over the SUP’s approval at the last council meeting.  A subset of whom are still so angry that they aren’t capable of coherent comments other than name calling.

Jim Carson wrote a short post explaining his rationale for voting for the proposal.  The commenter who stood out the most, however, was someone going by the name Jennifer, who left this in reponse to Jim’s post:

BLAH BLAH BLAH

You had your biased mind made up before you ever stepped foot into City Hall that evening.

Ok…  whatever…

But what really had me scratching my head was this exchange, posted in response to a comment from Doug:

#  Jennifer Says:
August 22nd, 2006 at 2:14 pm CST

Gee Doug, nice job giving Jim his obligatory pat on the back. I’m surprised Monty and Aubrey haven’t chimed in yet. I would have expected all of Jim’s sidekicks to have responded by now.

# Doug Says:
August 22nd, 2006 at 3:09 pm CST

Jennifer, should I chastise him for a vote that I agree with?

# Jennifer Says:
August 22nd, 2006 at 4:43 pm CST

I haven’t known about this website for very long but my guess is that I would be hardpressed to find anything in the archives that you disagree on with Jim.

Just curious, is there anything? I’m hopeful to learn that maybe only Monty and Aubrey are the bigger asses.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

I hardly ever comment at Keller City Limits, and I only wrote one post on the QT issue.  I was only being mildly sarcastic in tone, and completely serious in content, so I’m not quite sure what has earned me this enmity.  Perhaps it was something from earlier?  Maybe the library?

I suppose I’ll never know, because Jennifer’s anger over whatever sin she thinks I’ve committed makes it completely impossible to hold a conversation with her.

I’ve noticed several other commenters with similar problems.  QTDS (Quick Trip Derangement Syndrome), perhaps?  Or maybe it’s TCLDS (Town Center Library Derangement Syndrome).

Don’t worry Jennifer, I won’t bite you should we meet in real life.  I’ll be polite, shake your hand, and make quickly for the door like I do with most people who’ve gone off the deep end… 

[That’s humor. Laugh, damn it!]

In all seriousness, should you wish to have a reasoned conversation on whatever issue it is that is bothering you, feel free to frequent the comments.  But my patience is wearing thin with the personal insults.

There’s a husband/wife couple that I see on the trails fairly regularly along with their dogs.  It’s one of those cases where Boots immediately took a liking to them and their dogs.  She ignores most people, but she goes fairly crazy when she sees them.

Until today I hadn’t seen them for a month or so, but I didn’t think much of it, since they had previously said something about taking a long trip in August.  However, when I saw them today I was almost tempted to ask the wife if she was pregnant, as she had the characteristic belly (which she didn’t have the last time I’d seen her).  But, fortunately, my thinking brain kicked in before my impulse brain had a chance to get the question out. 

I think it’s likely that she’s pregnant, but if she isn’t, asking the question would have been A Bad Thing™.  I think I’ll leave well-enough alone and wait for her to bring it up…

Just about two years ago I built a RAID system to use as my media/file server.  I’m fairly paranoid about shutting it down, since I’m afraid that I’ll lose a drive.  But when the A/C went out I shut it down to prevent it from overheating. 

The A/C is now back on (fortunately it turned out to be something simple—the fan start capacitor had burned out and shorted out a couple of other wires, but nothing that couldn’t be fixed), and as I feared, it lost a drive on bootup.  I’ve got a new drive on order, and until it gets here the system is still operational, although it’s no longer fault tolerant. 

At the time I thought that a RAID setup would be a good way to prevent losing data, especially given the costs of tape.  But I’m not so sure anymore.  Even though it allows for a single drive failure, it still makes you nervous to pull a drive out of the array and replace it, then rebuild the array.  You always feel like you’re hanging by a thread.

I’ve got some old systems laying around.  I think I’m going to add some disks to one of them and run it as a backup (maybe a daily rsync or something similar).  Hopefully, both systems wouldn’t die at the same time, should something happen to either one.  Of course, that doesn’t take into account something like a lightning strike.  What I really need is an offsite backup.  Perhaps I could persuade one of my friends with high-speed Internet to let me place a system at their place in return for backing up their data to my systems (i.e. cross-site backups).  Or maybe I’m just being overly paranoid.  But I’m starting to feel like someone carrying a bunch of eggs in a frayed basket, so I’m going to have to do something.

Yesterday and today I eschewed my normal hiking/cargo pants-o-many-pockets and loud shirts in favor of more respectable attire that included a dress shirt and tie.  And then I sat around, doing a little bit of work, and waited.  I was on standby should I be called to testify as a prosecution witness at the Dallas County Criminal Court in State of Texas v Lindsey Alyn Crumpton (for Manslaughter).  About an hour ago I got an email informing me that my services wouldn’t be needed, as the defendant admitted to the issue about which I would have testified.

Some of my long time readers may remember my previous postings about Lindsey Crumpton.  For those who don’t, here’s a brief refresher/timeline, along with some events that I didn’t detail at the time:

1. November, 2004:  I wrote a short post with my take on a case where a young woman (Ms. Crumpton), while attempting suicide, ended up killing an innocent woman on I-35 by driving across the median.  That post, entitled Deadly Stupidity attracted a couple of comments, including one from the outraged daughter of the woman who was killed.
2. January, 2006: (approximately 13 months after the original posting)  I received an angry, insulting, and vaguely threatening message via my Contact Form from someone who appeared to be Ms. Crumpton herself.  I posted her message, along with my response, in a post entitled You Have Mail!.
3. April, 2006:  I received a message from an Assistant District Attorney with Dallas County, who had found my posts and was very interested in them, as he thought they would be material to the trial.  I went ahead and forwarded him the messages I’d exchanged with Ms. Crumpton.
4. May, 2006:  A relative of Ms. Crumpton (or someone claiming to be) found this site through Google and proceeded to leave a nastygram in the comments to an unrelated post.  I moved the comment and added my reply in More Deadly Stupidity.
5. July, 2006:  The Dallas County ADA called me again to say that the trial was going forward (starting Monday, August 21, 2006) and that he wanted me to testify.  Shortly after that I received a letter and was served with a subpoena to appear as a witness.

I think it can be safely said that the old advice about shutting up still holds in the digital age.  DA’s are now routinely checking online search engines to try to find information about defendants.  I was told by this ADA that he often found incriminating information by looking at a defendant’s MySpace page.

As they say, “anything can be used against you,” and that includes online, provided it can be proven to have come from the defendant.  In this case, I couldn’t say with 100% certainty that it was Ms. Crumpton, since anyone can enter any old email address in the contact form.  However, I responded to the email address that was given and got a reply back.  Further, the email address was of the form her_name -at- hotmail.com.  Taken together, I felt safe in assuming I was dealing with her at the time.

Anyhow, the moral of the story is to shut the hell up if you’re facing a criminal trial.  No matter where you say it, someone will eventually find it and use it against you.

Update: (5:50pm, 8/25/2006)  I just received word that Lindsey Crumpton was convicted.  I am waiting to get confirmation of that, as well as what sentence she may receive.

Update 2: (11:30am, 8/26/2006)  More on the verdict here.

Since my central air conditioning is down I’ve confined myself to working from my bedroom where I’ve installed a small window unit.  Unfortunately, since I can’t cram all of my computer systems in there (and I probably wouldn’t be able to cool the room), I had to shut down everything except a laptop.  This means that my main file and media server is offline.  This is annoying, but I can still work since I have an offline replica on the laptop.  The only problem is that the laptop seem to think that I don’t know this and sees fit to remind me every 30 minutes or so that “dominion is still offline” with one of those little notification balloons.  I wonder who was responsible for this bit of code?  Why do I need to be reminded of something I’m painfully aware of? 

I suppose I could look on it as a learning experience, as I’ve learned where to find the setting that turns that balloon off.  But it brings up a point about user interface design.  I hate annoying pop-ups, notification balloons, etc that simply repeat stuff that I already know.  A good example of this was an internal support application that our corporate masters forced on us through the automatic update feature they load on our laptops.  This helpful little application decided that it would be good to tell you every time your network connection was lost. 

I found out about this while traveling and spending time in a conference room with spotty wireless coverage and only 5 wired ports for 9 people.  We’d share the wired ports by taking turns using them as needed, which means we had to periodically disconnect the ethernet plug.  Windows already features a little balloon for this along with the little “X” on the adapter in the system tray.  So if I’ve just pulled the plug, and Windows has notified me, why does this app need to do the same again?  Worse, unlike Windows (which allows you to disable notification), the app had absolutely no way to stop being notified for dropped network connections.  The best you could do would be to delay notifications for a while.

I was suitably annoyed by this, so much so that I was moved to submit a rather angry trouble ticket against it.  I was a bit surprised to get an actual phone call from one of the developers about a week later (mainly because I expected them to just ignore the ticket).  It turns out that the development team had received quite a lot of “feedback” along the same lines as mine and that it was quite unexpected to them.  But they did add an option in the last release to turn off notifications.

I think part of the problem with both Windows and with our internal support people is that they think in terms of the lowest common denominator of user.  There’s no way for me to specify that I’ve done this stuff for a while and don’t need excessive handholding.  Since I’d not heard of this new application they were deploying until we got an email saying it would be sent to our systems in the next few weeks, I can’t help but think they didn’t involve users with some technical experience in their trials (if they even bothered with trials).

Anyhow, I suppose being too verbose can be excused provided that it can be changed.  Making something verbose, annoying, and useless to certain users without allowing it to be disabled isn’t excusable.

It seems that animal rights terrorists have succeeded in getting a researcher to abandon his work.

Colleagues suggested that Ringach, who did not return e-mails seeking comment, was spooked by an attack on a colleague. In June, the Animal Liberation Front took credit for trying to put a Molotov cocktail on the doorstep of Lynn Fairbanks, another UCLA researcher who does experimentation on animals. The explosive was accidentally placed on the doorstep of Fairbanks’s elderly neighbor’s house, and did not detonate.

I can’t help but note that this is in California.  I wonder if these idiots have tried this in Texas?  If they ever get the idea to try, I’d suggest they (as well as their potential victims) keep section 9.42 of the Texas Penal Code in mind:

§ 9.42. DEADLY FORCE TO PROTECT PROPERTY.  A person is justified in using deadly force against another to protect land or tangible, movable property:
      (1)  if he would be justified in using force against the other under Section 9.41;  and
      (2)  when and to the degree he reasonably believes the deadly force is immediately necessary:
            (A)  to prevent the other’s imminent commission of arson, burglary, robbery, aggravated robbery, theft during the nighttime, or criminal mischief during the nighttime;  …  (emphasis mine)

I wouldn’t weep for these idiots should one get his or her just deserts at the hands of a potential victim.

Via Instapundit.

I went to visit some friends in Carrollton on Saturday night to help them install their entertainment system in their new house.  After visiting with them for a while I didn’t make it back home until about 1:45am.  On my way into town I noticed a lot of runoff from the sprinklers in the killer medians on 1709 over by Keller-Smithfield.  I also noticed a lot of runoff at the KISD Natatorium.  My initial thought was that it would have been nice if I had my camera to document the waste, especially as the city wants to lecture us on how to conserve water.  Of course, later (and fortunately before I had a chance to post something snarky here), I realized that the Natatorium problem is a KISD issue instead of the city’s.  Still, it’s part of Town Center and the Town Hall “complex,” so it looks kind of like the city is involved (and it wouldn’t hurt for the city to apply its policies to *all* users, not just us peons out here who are just trying to keep our houses from cracking in two and sinking into the ground like the House of Usher).

Regardless of that, though, there is still a lot of wastage from the sprinklers in those stupid, dangerous medians.

So I’m sitting there minding my business about 9:15 last night when I notice that it’s over 80 degrees inside the house and all the vents are blowing hot air.  I went outside to check on the condenser unit and it was making an awful racket so I shut it down.  When I went back I could smell a burning odor.  I suspect that it’s the fan motor, but I’m currently waiting for a callback from Airwise to try to schedule an appointment (I was sorely tempted to call one of the 24-hour places, but my home warranty requires that I go through the process).  In the meantime, expecting that it might take them a while to get back to me, I went to WalMart and bought a small window unit so that at least my bedroom would have some cooling.  I suspect things may get a bit warm later in the day in here, as the unit is probably a bit small for the size of the room, but my choices were limited to either the little unit (5150 BTU) or a 10,000 BTU unit for twice the cost.  The 10,000 unit seemed like overkill for a temporary solution.

I supposed I’ve kind of been expecting this, given that the unit is almost 20 years old (it’s the original one from when the house was built) and that it’s been running nearly continuously this summer because of the heat.  Eventually, something has to fail on a unit that’s that old. 

On the positive side of this is that if it requires a new unit my warranty covers a 13-SEER replacement, so perhaps I could get a more efficient unit out of the deal if it’s more than just the fan motor.  That old unit is pretty inefficient compared to the newer models, and I’m reminded of this fact monthly (to the tune of $520 on the last bill).

I suppose some people would have just put up with the heat, but it’s already unbearable in the rest of the house and it’s only 89 outside.  I remember growing up that we rarely ran the air conditioner.  However, we lived in an old house with high ceilings and good airflow.  We could keep the house bearable, even in 90-degree temperatures, with a large fan that drew air through the house.  More modern houses just aren’t designed to stay liveable without central heat and air.  I’ve found that even in early spring or late fall that there were times I had to run the air conditioning because I just couldn’t get good airflow through the house, even with all the windows open.  Like most houses in this neighborhood, it only has one window facing the front.  All of the others are on the sides and back.  I didn’t really notice this when I bought the house, but it’s something that I’m going to pay more attention to should I buy another house in the future.

Update:  Looks like I’m going to be “confined to quarters” for a while.  They can’t send anyone until Wednesday (!).  I guess the heat has been a real killer for North Texas AC units…

I think I may have an idea for how the people who are up in arms about the proposed QuickTrip in front of Hidden Lakes can resolve the issue.

Hidden Lakes HOA should just go ahead and buy the land.  That way, instead of depriving the rightful owner of the land’s value, they can exercise the control over that parcel that they so desperately seem to want.

I bet they could get it for a good bargain, too, since I hear that the neighbors make a big fuss if you try to build anything there…

I’ve been a bit under the weather the past week, so I haven’t really felt like I had anything to say.  But the situation in the UK with the arrests of the potential bombers and the new security restrictions have given me a couple of thoughts.

First, I think CAIR needs to sit down and STFU with regards to the President calling the terrorists “Islamic fascists.”  People may quibble over the actual meaning of the word, but I think that’s rather silly.  I think it’s a fairly apt term, especially as I think it’s come to have a meaning beyond that of a specific political party.  As for the “Islamic” part, I happened to notice in the list of those arrested that there weren’t any people named “Bob Johnson…” 

Secondly, I don’t see this ban on liquids as being sustainable.  I would think the traveling public, especially the “road warriors,” would soon become weary of it, especially as frequent travelers often try to get by strictly with carry-on baggage.  This is in part because it’s faster and that most of them don’t trust the airlines with checked baggage.  I certainly travel defensively in that I carry a small kit of essentials as well as a change of clothes in my laptop carry-on so that I won’t be completely out of luck should the airline “misplace” my checked bag. 

Another angle I didn’t think about until I heard someone from DFW mention it this morning is the issue duty free shops.  Unless these restrictions are lifted, I would think that they will pretty much shrivel up and die, since the most commonly purchased items in these shops are liquor and perfume.