aubreyturner.org

Speaking of dogs, I’ve always been curious about the algorithm that runs in a dog’s brain when looking for a spot to pee.  I bet it’s got all sorts of interesting weighting factors about scent input and the dog’s internal state. 

If you’ve ever watched a dog, you know that they have to sniff around for a bit before taking care of business.  They have to find Just.  The.  Right.  Spot.

I just finished squeezing three weeks of work into a two week bag and I feel like something my dog dragged home and threw up on the carpet.  Anyhow, it doesn’t help that I had a cleaning and adjustment to my braces yesterday.  If you hear your dentist tell the ortho assistant to “ligate” something, you should know that it means little wires are tied from the bracket to the main wire.  In this case, whatever verbiage she said after the word “ligate” also meant crank the bejeezus out of the tie wire such that the patient’s head feels like it was put in a vice the next day.  Although they did warn me to take some Advil when I got home to get a head start on it.

I was fidding around looking for a printer stand and came across something interesting on the Staples website.  Take a look at the highlighted GET parameter in the URL of the search results:

http://www.staples.com/catalog/search/Search_Sum.asp?
PageType=2&SearchPageType=2&cromulent=
&Keywords=printer+stand&image1.x=0&image1.y=0

Looks like one of their web coders is a Simpson’s fan.

Update: had to break that URL because it was breaking the blockquotes.

A Dallas business owner seems to have accidentally shot a police officer who was investigating a possible robbery.

A Dallas police officer investigating a burglary report was shot and wounded by a business owner early Wednesday near Baylor University Medical Center.

The officer, identified as John Berka, was bandaged at the head and right arm as he was rushed into the emergency room just before 6:30 a.m.

Berka’s facial injuries from a shotgun blast were described as non-life-threatening.

Police said the officer was on the roof of a business in the 4000 block of Elm Street responding to a burglary call. According to the report, the perpetrator was attempting to steal an air conditioning unit.

Investigators said the owner of the business was on the ground and apparently opened fire on the officer when he peered over the edge of the roof.

“The person who was involved that shot the shotgun is talking with the officers now, and is coooperating with the officers,” said police spokeswoman Lt. Jan Easterling.

Police seem to believe it was all an accident; they didn’t arrest the man who fired the shot, but they are filing an aggravated assault on a police officer charge. It will go to a jury, where a group of citizens will decide if the case should be dropped or go to trial.

Neighbor Vanessa Pollack said the business owner who fired the shot deeply regrets what happened.

“He just feels really bad for the officer and the family,” Pollack said. “Of course, if he had known it was the officer, he definitely would not have shot.”

This is a perfect example of why target identification is so important.  If you don’t know what you’re shooting at, you’ve got no business shooting.  It’s fortunate that the officer will recover.  This could have had a much worse outcome. 

I started a new project at work yesterday that promises to take up a lot of my free time until the 18th.  It looks like I’ll be busier than a one-legged man at an ass kicking contest until then.

I’m hoping that I can actually get it done a bit sooner by spending the coming weekend on it so I don’t have to get into a nasty crunch at the end.  Anyhow, updates will be sporadic at best until I get this thing knocked out.

Of late there has been quite a bit of public discussion and back-and-forth over whether the City of Keller should replace or upgrade the current public library.  Several years before I moved here a proposal for a new library (at a cost of approximately $10 million) was put before the voters and soundly rejected.  The current proposals are to either expand the existing library (at a cost of approximately $7 million) or build a new one in Keller Town Center (at a cost of approximately $8 million).  (A little background can be found in this recent opinion piece.)

There are several things about this whole “debate” that irk me, but let me start with the top one.  The proponents of the new library want the city council to “just do it” and approve issuing bonds to build a new library.  The council is making noises about sending it to the voters for approval.  I had an interesting discussion with one of the supporters who said that she was going to work against the reelection of any council member who voted to call an election on the issue.  I was a bit stunned to hear this.  Her rationale was that the opponents of the library would be able to influence the public campaign too well and the supporters would lose an election.  It seems odd to me to deny the public a voice in something this big.  The other rationale that the supporters use is that the council voted for bonds to fund the new City (Taj ma)Hall and several other large projects without voter input.  It seems to me that instead of decrying sending the library for a vote they should be decrying the fact that the council didn’t send the other issues for a vote.  If anything, I’d be inclined to vote against any council member that decided to spend that kind of money without a vote.

The second thing that bugs me is that I think the supporters of the library are being disingenuous by claiming that a new library in Town Center would help drive new business there.  It turns out that this is related to a serious problem brought about by the city council in previous years when they decided to create the Town Center using a special taxing district.  Unfortunately (for us), their grand scheme of emulating Southlake has failed, leaving the city with the potential for having to make up all those unrealized tax revenues.  Anyhow, I’m not sure how they expected to build an upscale shopping experience around a freakin’ Tom Thumb.  It’s basically a strip shopping center with a nice façade and an integrated overall look, but not much more.  There are some basic things over there that I use, but nothing that couldn’t be found elsewhere.  In fact, I find the place a bit hard to navigate because of the traffic flow patterns (and the insane drivers who tear through there).

Frankly, I just don’t see how a library would drive much new business to the existing stores, other than perhaps slightly increasing traffic for Starbucks or the BankOne.  But even if they are right, it seems dubious to me that it would be enough to help, considering the size of the problem.

…
The special taxing district needs an $81 million property value increase by 2007 to pay off debt used to build roads and the Town Hall.
…

That gives us two years to come up with $81 million in property development.  A library just isn’t going to do that.  Further, the amount of crap that a company has to go through to build a new business in Keller will make it difficult to get even a tenth of that amount in new development.

But in the interest of fairness I tried to find some information on expected economic impacts of libraries.  Unfortunately, all I could find were cheerleading articles and studies that were started with the premise that a library had a positive economic impact.  I didn’t find anything that I trusted as being a scientific impartial study of the real impact of a library (it’s interesting that the first study I found claimed that this would actually be impossible, so they just went with surveying the users of libraries).

Here’s what a quick Google search turned up:

• South Carolina Public Library Economic Impact Study
• New York Library Association – Economic Impact of Libraries
• Mid-Hudson Library System – Economic Impact of Libraries

Some other links on the issue:

• ourKeller website—A group interested in open government in the City of Keller and Keller ISD.  Supports a public vote on the library (and has a petition to require a vote).
• Friends of The Keller Public Library—kind of self-explanatory.

The third point the proponents of the new library keep putting forth is that it won’t increase our taxes.  I haven’t had much time to research this issue, but I’m concerned about this claim, as it seems dubious.  Bonds have to be paid back as debt service out of our taxes.  This means that the city has to budget for this somehow.  It seems dangerous to me to take on more debt at a time when there is a high potential for a tremendous shortfall in revenues in the near term, and while basic city services (fire, police) are not fully funded.

Until someone can show me an unbiased scientific study (i.e. not one of the studies above) showing positive business impacts of a new library, I am going to remain sceptical. 

I saw an interesting post on Jay Allen’s comment spam weblog yesterday concerning what happens if you don’t take an active role in monitoring your weblog for spam.  It turns out that leaving spam on your site attracts more spam.  I hadn’t really given it much thought before, since I tend to be very quick to remove spam.  To me it’s a lot like online graffiti or vandalism.  I consider it a defacement to my site.

Anyhow, on further reflection, it makes sense.  The purpose of comment and trackback spam is to get the Googlebot to find it and index the links, thereby driving up the referrer count for the spamvertised site.  If you leave the crap in your weblog long enough for it to get indexed by Google, it shows the spammer that they were successful and they’ll come back to your site to leave more spam. 

An informal experiment run by one blogger showed that two spams left in one of her articles attracted 365 new spams within 24 hours.

Since I’ve been unable to reach Bitter by email, I’m despamming The Bitch Girls myself.  I’m doing it in batches, and so far I’ve removed 575 trackback spams.  I don’t know how many more there are to do, but it’s a time-consuming process, since the blacklist code rebuilds each entry as it goes.  After years of using MT, I have come to loathe rebuilds (in fact, rebuilds are the main reason I moved to EE).

Still, in the end it will be worth it to make the site less attractive to spammers, which should hopefully cut down the resources (CPU and bandwidth) being wasted by these scumsuckers.

Update:It looks like every trackback since 1/26/2005 was spam, for a total of 1030 bad trackbacks that I deleted.  There was also one comment in the last 500 that I removed (some sort of credit card spam).

I’ve come to the conclusion that dogs have a fairly decent observation and correlation engine in their furry heads.  My dog picks up on things pretty quickly and associates little actions on my part with other activities that she either likes or dislikes. 

For example, if I attach my cellphone to my belt she knows that it’s highly likely that I’m about to leave.  At this point she perks up and starts bouncing around in the hopes that I’ll take her with me.  In association with this she’s learned two phrases.  If I say, “I have to go out for a while” she knows that she isn’t going to go and sits down with her ears back (it’s actually kind of pitiful to watch).  On the other hand if I say, “Ok, you can go,” she practically starts vibrating with anticipation as she’s learned that she’s going with me.  It doesn’t seem to matter to her if it’s a walk in the park or just a ride around town as I run errands.  She’s happy to go.

It turned out that the bug that hit me the other day wasn’t the flu, which was good, but some sort of mutant cold-type thing.  It has affected my energy level and I haven’t really felt like saying anything on here.  In the meantime, though, I’ve been tinkering around behind the scenes.  I upgraded Expression Engine (as noted below) and installed the NoFollow and Acronym plugins.  I briefly considered this plugin as well, but ultimately decided against it (Argh!).

NoFollow automatically adds ‘rel=“nofollow”’ to URLs in the comments and trackbacks, which will cause Google to ignore those links for ranking purposes.  That, in turn, will eventually take the “profit” out of comment and trackback spam, since their main goal is to drive links to their sites to increase their page ranking.

The Acronym plugin compares your text against its internal list of known acronyms and highlights them on the page.  I’ve added some common ones that weren’t already included, but that would be encountered on my site.  That should reduce the user’s frustration level below the MAF when I mention NRA, GOA, TSRA, or dealing with silly CHL rules put in place by GFW’s.

I also installed MT-Blacklist on the old Movable Type installation to make despamming trackbacks easier.  I don’t use MT anymore, but The Bitch Girls site does, so I couldn’t just remove the trackback CGI module. 

I went to a NOAA SkyWarn class on Saturday morning.  It was held at the Richland Hills High School auditorium and several hundred people showed up.  Unfortunately, the guy in the row behind me spent the whole morning hacking and coughing.

This is exactly why I hate going out where there are big crowds.  You always get some shmuck who is bound and determined to attend the event despite being sick.  The rest of us be damned.  With both crowds and airplanes I seem to get sick about half the time within a few days of the event.

As expected, I feel like I’m coming down with the flu (or at least something similar) today.

Why can’t people have a little consideration for others and stay home when they’re sick?