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I went to a friend’s birthday party at his house in Dallas on Saturday night.  I got back home around 2:00am Sunday morning.  On Sunday I became acutely aware that I seem to have misplaced my “stay out late and get up the next day without any ill effects” card.  Does it get revoked at 30 or something?

Anyhow, I will say that my friend knows how to put on a party.  He hired a bartender and had a good portion of the country’s strategic liquor and beer reserves on hand.  Unfortunately, the buzzkill neighbors objected to the noise and a couple of Dallas’ finest showed up around 11:30.  He promised them that he would tone things down, but I suspect the freakin’ MARIACHI BAND queueing up behind the officers at the gate didn’t exactly give them a warm-and-fuzzy.  In order to at least try to quiet things down we piled about 50 people and the mariachi band into his garage and closed the door.  It went pretty well, considering, although I think the blaring trumpets rearranged some of my brain cells (or perhaps a portion of “The Glenlivet” and a great honkin’ CIGAR* had something to do with this as well).

Isn’t there some sort of unwritten rule that you don’t call the cops before midnight on a Saturday night?  Or at least that’s how I tended to treat noisy neighbors when I had to deal with them.  Here in Keller none of my immediate neighbors seems to stay up past 10:00 pm. There are some houses with high schoolers (and a couple of college students) up the block, and there is occasional nocturnal activity there, but so far nothing noisy.

* An A. Fuente Canones (8 1/2 x 52, Madura) I picked up at Ole Grapevine Cigar & Tobacco Shop on a whim.

The NEA for some reason seems dead-set against any sort of accountability, and has filed suit against the “No Child Left Behind” act, which the President was quizzed about last night.  Setting aside the socialist tendencies of the NEA and the constitutionality of federal funding for education, I want to consider the notion of accountability.

My work is constantly checked and reviewed to guarantee that my designs will work and that they will result in a usable system.  There are reviews of the design, reviews of the physical architecture, reviews for standards compliance, etc all along the way.  Finally, the system itself has to be run through an acceptance test by the customer.  These checks can be a pain in the ass sometimes, and you have to try to maintain a certain humility during the process.

Anyway, all these checks and reviews are there for a reason.  These projects have the potential to cost the company millions of dollars if they don’t work right.  Being prudent about their spending, they don’t want these things to be implemented willy-nilly.

So why is it when it comes to education we get all this mushy feely crap about how we should “use our hearts” and not be so cold as to demand accountability?  Whenever I hear this sort of emotional tripe I immediately start looking under the bushes to see what they’re trying to hide, because it’s usually a smokescreen to divert attention from some sort of shenanigans. 

I’ve heard a lot of emotional horror stories about how people are teaching to the test or spending too much time on the test.  I’ve also heard how it’s putting too much pressure on the students.  I call bullshit on the lot of it.  If the students are actually learning the material, then they should pass the test without spending classroom time “teaching to the test.”  If teachers are spending time “teaching to the test,”  then it indicates that the students are not learning the material.  I also don’t buy the crap about the test being unfair to minorities.  These minorities have the same curriculum as the other students.  It’s up to them whether they want to learn it or not.  But spare me the racist crap.

Ultimately, education is a business and we spend billions per year on it.  If we truly want an education system that functions, then accountability is a must.  Fighting against accountability means that someone has something to hide and we should pay especially close attention to anyone who does so.

I can’t help but be grimly amused at times by the current “debate” over financing public schools in the Texas legislature.  The very same school administrators who are clamoring for more state and federal money can be seen later (sometimes on the same newscast) complaining about onerous state and federal rules and the “loss of local control.”  I’m tempted at times to wonder how people could be so dense, but then I remember these are public schools…. 

Those who continually clamor for more state or federal money would be well advised to remember that he who controls the purse strings controls how that money will be spent.  If they really want local control they’d be better served to abolish the federal department of education and tell the state to get out of the funding business.

One of the things we studied in class when preparing to get our amateur radio licenses was the ITU phonetic alphabet.  This is also the same alphabet used by the US armed forces. 
In order to keep in practice, I’ve taken to using it to recite the letters I see on license plates of the other cars I see while I’m driving. 

As a side note, I’ve learned that our local police department uses a completely different phonetic system.  During our session on dispatch operations we were given a copy of it.  I’m curious as to why the police use a different system, though.  Perhaps it’s just inertia, but you’d think they would move to an international standard, especially now that so much attention is being paid to cross-department and cross-jurisdictional operations due to homeland security situations.

I caught this report on WFAA last night and I couldn’t help but wonder about it.

It can happen in a matter of seconds: a child’s innocence lost at the hands of a sexual predator.

More alarmingly, children who become victims usually know the people who sexually or physically abuse them.

But this News 8 special report focuses on a disturbing trend in Collin County. Stranger-on-stranger abuse is growing, especially at places where parents least expect it.

The man in the golf hat and glasses was clearly visible on the surveillance tape. A store employee thought he looked suspicious, shopping in the women’s section of what used to be Galyan’s Sporting Goods, uncomfortably close to three children. So, the store’s security zoomed in with its surveillance camera.

“He bends down and touches her buttocks,” said Frisco Police Detective Nelson Walter. “As she passes him, he thrusts his pelvic area forward.”

The children’s mother, who we’ll call “Jean”, was trying on clothes just a few feet away. When Jean watched, for the first time, the video of her six-year-old daughter being molested, she said it was nothing short of “scary”.

“There he is again,” she said. “He lurked around far more than I realized that he did.”

Collin County assistant district attorney Curtis Howard used the video to convince a jury that 51-year-old Robby Keith Pope was guilty of indecency with a child.

Howard said the tape shows Pope scoping out the store for more young victims, eventually following two girls to a rock climbing wall. He then puts his hand in his pocket and fondles himself as customers walk by without noticing.

“This guy doesn’t stand out,” Howard said. “He looks like every other shopper that’s shopping in this store.”

“To know he had access to my kids is even far more disturbing than I realized,” Jean said.

Robby Pope is serving a 50-year sentence; he declined to speak with News 8. However, Pope is among a growing number of sex offenders doing hard time for molesting children in public places.

They’d been hyping this story for the past several days as a “must see” for parents.  But is there really anything new here that we didn’t know, other than that someone actually caught the molestor in the act on video?  What parent didn’t already know that molestors are everywhere and will take any opportunity to go after a child?

I know that my sister is very vigilant about this with my nieces.  Although I wonder if her time in the L.A. area (and the high concentration of pervs there) didn’t have something to do with it.  Perhaps the people in Frisco somehow think it can’t happen up there in their nice upscale retail joints.  It often seems that people simply don’t want to think about these things.  As if that will somehow keep them from happening or by thinking about them they’re being overly paranoid.

I would say that when it comes to protecting kids from pervs, a bit of paranoia is a good thing.  But then I’ve become quite a bit less sensitive to being called paranoid since I’m a gun owner.  It’s a stone that is frequently cast by the uninformed and the GFWs and it no longer bothers me.  Perhaps more people need to be paranoid…

What is it?  A mob takeover?  Nope.  The city of Arlington is making some of its residents an offer they can’t refuse:

For property owners who might be eager to sell, the City Council approved a series of incentives in November. Renters would receive $5,250; business owners would be paid fair market value plus $10,000; and homeowners would receive $22,500 above fair market value.

To be eligible for those bonuses, which include moving costs, homeowners and businesses owners would have to move within 90 days and renters would have to vacate the property within 45 days.

For those who don’t accept the voluntary buyouts, the city would use its power of eminent domain to condemn the properties and buy them at a flat fair market value without the bonuses.

The option is to either take the “bonus” or have the land stolen by the city and receive “fair market value.”  Aside from the issue of government force, the sticking point here is what does the city consider “fair market value.”  $22K over “fair market value” isn’t very helpful if the “fair market value” offered isn’t really fair or market…

Anyway, I hope the voters of Arlington are happy now that they’ve successfully voted to point the government’s guns at the heads of their fellow citizens and steal their land.  Not to mention the higher taxes they voted for themselves.  All for the privilege of paying for a billionare to locate his sports team in their city.

I’ve not hidden my hatred for VRU’s (especially voice-recognition ones) and phone mazes in the past.  I will actively seek a way to break the VRU’s programming and escape to a live human even if the designers have purposely tried to prevent this.

So it was interesting to discover that there’s a small database out there of hints on ways to break out of the phone maze to get to a human.  The site is called “find-a-human”.  It doesn’t have a lot of entries yet, but it offers a way to sent your entries to the author for inclusion.  It’s also interesting to note that the database is actually hosted on Intuit’s servers.  I wonder how long it will take them to discover it and “discourage” this use…

This week’s flurry* of complaints about Best Buy and its constant demands for personal information reminded me of something I wrote a while back.  Specifically, we need a button or pin that indicates to nosy retailers and pushy clerks that we’re not interested in upselling, credit card offers, loyalty or discount cards, or giving up our personal information.  It could be as simple as a small button that says, “No Thanks!”  The button would serve as a readily identifiable indicator that this person will not respond positively to whatever the retailer is pushing and that the best way to satisfy this customer is to speedily and efficiently complete the transaction.  As I mentioned in the original post, it would serve as sort of a mobile “No Soliciting” sign.

* The flurry isn’t really a surprise, given the way Best Buy operates.  All you have to do is mention Best Buy to someone and more often than not you’ll get a horror story or at least someone who is unhappy with some facet of the experience. 

Some links:

• Will Collier (on VodkaPundit)
• James Lileks
• Kim du Toit
• GeekWithA.45
• SF Alpha Geek

In looking at the current status of HB823 I discovered that you can create a watch for changes to a specific bill.  You can have the legislature’s computer system email you whenever a bill on your watch list changes, and you can have up to 25 bills on your watch list.

If you’re interested, you can go here to register and add bills to your list (you can also add a bill directly from the bill’s status page).

Last night in our Citizen’s Police Academy we were visited by the department’s chaplain.  Although his primary mission is as a school resource officer at the local high school, he also works with officers in Keller and one other department as the chaplain.  In that role he is there to support the officers and their families.

But in addition to being a minister and the department chaplain he’s still a sworn officer and carries a .40cal Glock.  He tells the story of a man he arrested once who started mouthing off at the jail.  The arrestee told him that since he was the chaplain he couldn’t fight him or shoot him.  His response?  He told the guy, “I can pray for you, I can pray with you if you ask, or I can pray over you.  It’s up to you.”

I liked that response and his approach to the issue.  He says he is approached from time to time by ministers and preachers and asked how he can carry a gun and do what he does.  His response to that was that there’s nothing really that has to be reconciled there.  He also says that he tells these people to stay away from his officers, since their fear of guns could get one of his people killed by putting doubt into their minds.

Good for him.