Working from home today has really made me appreciate the equipment that my employer has invested in, especially when I started looking around to find something to duplicate that here.  I use a noise-cancelling binaural headset with an amplifier/adapter from Plantronics at work because I spend a lot of time on the phone.  Since we have to share an office, they won’t let us use speaker phones, and I’m not very fond of them anyway.  I spent a large portion of today using a speaker phone and it convinced me that I need a decent headset.  Together, the above products cost $240, so I guess I’ll have to settle for something a bit less. 

My main requirement is that it be a corded phone with a headset.  I have never had much luck with wireless phones, even ones with headsets.  My main problem is that I can’t hear very well on them.  I can never get the volume high enough to clearly hear the caller.

This product looks promising, since I found an online dealer selling it for $49.95, but I hate buying phones because you never know how they’re going to perform until you get them home (and returns are often a big hassle with some online retailers).

My aunt sent me this via email today:

This really caught my attention, since this is the main theater that I use.

HICKORY CREEK — It could have been a scene from one of the action movies that typically show at the Rave Motion Pictures. On Tuesday, a SWAT team and dozens of officers searched the 16-screen motion-picture complex in a fruitless hunt for a masked man who stabbed an employee of the theater earlier that day.

It’s a little ways south of Denton, so it’s not the most convenient theater, but they don’t have a stupid “no guns” sign like the one at the mall (even though their sign has no legal value for me, I know when I’m not wanted).

Mainly I liked their seating.  They have stadium seating so you’re not stuck watching the back of somebody else’s head, and the seats are big enough for an adult (unlike those crappy little seats at the mall).

Maybe I’ll postpone seeing a movie this weekend (although I was interested in seeing Gods And Generals).

I’ve never cared for birds as pets, but this might change my mind.

Kevin Butler loved animals of all sorts, and he gladly took in strays and pets that his friends couldn’t keep.

His family says it’s fitting that his pet cockatoo provided the evidence that helped Dallas police track down the men accused of killing him – one of whom was convicted of capital murder Tuesday and sentenced to life.

A Dallas County jury deliberated less than 25 minutes Tuesday before convicting Daniel Torres of killing his Pleasant Grove neighbor after Mr. Torres and his half-brother went to Mr. Butler’s home on Christmas Eve 2001 to settle a disagreement.

“He acquired the bird via a roommate who had to move,” said Kathy Butler, the victim’s sister. “All of his animals were strays. He treated his pets with love, and in doing so, his pets loved him back, and that was certainly the case here.”

Lead prosecutor George West told jurors that the bird – an 18-inch white-crested cockatoo – flew at Mr. Torres in an attempt to aid his owner. The bird, named Bird, helped police obtain enough evidence to get an arrest warrant for Mr. Torres.

Mr. West said that the bird’s beak bloodied Mr. Torres’ head and that Mr. Torres wiped the blood and then touched a light switch, leaving his DNA at the crime scene.

The prosecutor noted that Mr. Torres’ DNA had been found on the handles of two knives used to attack Mr. Butler. One of them was found under the victim’s body, Mr. West said.

Now that’s a good bird.  He may not have saved his owner, but at least he did enough damage to identify the suspect.

Out local ABC affiliate, WFAA, has been following the case of some serious allegations against the Haltom City jail and a municipal court judge.  I commented on the complaints against the judge earlier.  A new complaint was filed yesterday against not only the judge, but the entire city council

The lawsuit makes charges of a widespread pattern of unconstitutional pratices and conditions. It repeats complaints, first reported by News 8, that jailers had sex with inmates. But, named in this action are seven city council members, Haltom City itself, and 36-year-old municipal judge Jack Byno.

Judge Byno, who made his last municipal court appearance in January, was known as Max Jack for the tough fines and sentences he handed out. The lawsuit alleges that Byno violated people’s civil rights, and that the city council is responsible for the system he used.

Cited in the case is an unnamed 18-year-old male, charged with truancy, who allegedly appeared before Byno. The judge fined the 18-year-old approximately $24,000. After he’d served five weeks, the suit said, his grandparents had to take out a home equity loan of $16,000 to pay the city to get him released.

Attorney Everett Newton tries dozens of cases in Dallas Municpal Court each week.

“I’ve never seen a municpal judge make that type of decision,” Newton said. “Most people have an expectation that the judge they appear in front of is going to be famailiar with the law, and is going to be judicious, and use good judgement and be reasonable when dispensing justice.”

But, the attorney suing Haltom City, Michael Pezzulli, said that in Byno’s case, that didn’t happen in perhaps thousands of cases.

“If you cannot pay the fine, you’ll sit it out for $100 a day,” Pezzulli said. “And the law has been clear for years: you simply cannot do that.”

The suit said Byno misuesed what’s called a capias warrant.

“It’s not appropriate to say, ‘I’m throwing you in jail unless you give me all the money I want from you’,” Pezzulli said. “That’s where he stepped over the Constitutional line. That’s the problem.”

(The above text is copied directly from the link above, all typos are from the original).

Wow!  $24,000 for truancy.  That’s way over the line.  Clara Harris only got a $10,000 fine (although she did get prison time) for murder.  I guess the old saying about power corrupting is true.  This judge sounds like a petty tyrant who got off on exercising extreme power over the people who came before him.

Seen on the back of a vehicle in the parking lot at work:

Vegetarian: Indian word for lousy hunter

As I’ve noted before, I’m easily amused. 

From what I’ve been able to gather, it was her advocation of violence against violent “peace” protesters that was the cause of all the hatred directed at Megan McArdle on her site.  I actually thought that she was being too nice.  She only suggested using 2×4’s on them.  I would have advocated shooting the bastards.  But then I’m not the forgiving sort when it comes to destruction of private property.  I have a negative sympathy quotient for scum who destroy the property of others, especially when those others have no involvement in their so-called cause.

I consider it a just response to respond to violence with sufficient violence to end an attack.  Those who use that old, tired saw that “violence just begets violence” are right in a way.  But I don’t necessarily consider it a bad thing.  If someone is violent towards me, I’ll be violent right back.  There is no reasoning with someone who wants to harm you.

I wonder if it’s a concidence that these destructive idiots don’t try their silly little games in heavily-armed states like Texas?  For example, ELF seems to like to set fires.  Texas law actually provides for the use of deadly force to stop arson.  Not that I would necessarily use it, but there it is.

Well, that went fairly well.  The only glitch I ran into was that I was upgrading from Movable Type 2.21 to 2.6.  The installation instructions indicated that since I was using MySQL I was supposed to run mt-upgrade25.cgi and then mt-upgrade26.cgi to update the database schema to the latest level.  Unfortunately, the mt-upgrade25.cgi script had a version check that checks for level 2.5 (rather than 2.5 or later).  I just commented that part out and all was well.

One feature that I’m glad to see in this release is the ability to close comments on old articles.  I have an old posting about Bushisms that seems to attract several visitors a day.  It’s now so old that I’m not really interested in getting any more comments on it.

Update:  It helps if you remember to upgrade the template for the individual archive pages.  Otherwise the handy new logic to turn off comments will be ignored.

I’m getting tired of the layout and color scheme on this site.  I’ve installed Movable Type onto my Linux system so that I can play around locally without screwing up the actual site (and without having to deal with network latency).  It may take me a while to get around to deploying the changes, since right now all I have are some basic ideas about what I want to do.

In the meantime, I’m going to upgrade this site to Movable Type 2.6, starting right now.  It should be transparent to people viewing the site, but if anything wierd shows up you’ll know why.

Bear with me, as my mind works in strange ways and sometimes in my more feverish moments I may overreach.  But two separate posts on different sites have created an unexpected neural connection (kind of like scratching a dog’s belly connects to his leg).

First, there was this post from Emperor Misha I that got me to thinking about hate crime laws:

For now, we’re happy to announce that Henry Earl Dunn, received on Death Row on 10/11/95 for the brutal murder of 23-year-old Nicholus West, was sent off to roast in Hell this past Thursday night.

Mr. West was shot several times by Mr. Dunn with a .357 for the “offense” of being gay.

It’s interesting to note that there was a tremendous furor over passing a hate crime law when James Bird Jr. was killed in Jasper, TX.  The Democrats tried to capitalize on the killing in their advertising against President Bush when he was running for office.  What no one seemed to notice was that all but one of these mutant killers were given the death penalty.  And the case that Misha mentions is also from Texas.

I am of mixed ancestry.  My mother is Hispanic and my father was white (he was of mixed European and American Indian ancestry).  While I have a white name, I still have brown skin and dark hair.  While I will be the first to admit that I’ve never experienced the level of racial animus that many blacks have, I have nonetheless experienced some.  Regardless of this, I would never want to be in the situation where an attack on me is treated differently than an attack on anyone else.  I refuse to trade on minority status for preferred treatment in anything.  I’ve never done it and I never will.  If I can’t compete for something on my own merits, I don’t want it (nor would I deserve it).  This is why I oppose hate crime laws (and affirmative action, quotas, and any other such schemes as well).

On the practical level they do nothing other than making the politicians feel good.  Who really thinks that someone who is so far gone as to drag someone behind a truck would give a rat’s ass about a hate crime law?  They’ve already commited murder.

It’s also possible that these kinds of laws will engender a false sense of security in some people, leading them to drop their guards.  I think that the most effective remedy for hate crimes would be if people finally stood up and said, “Enough!”  If enough of these bastards get shot and/or killed trying to kill minorities or bash gays the problem would begin to take care of itself.  We don’t need any more laws.  We just need to stand up and exercise our rights.  And it’s the exercise of rights that leads me to the next thing I read today.

I saw this comment over at Alphecca.  I’m going to quote it, because Jeff’s site doesn’t have comments with the articles.

02/08/03
“I am disgusted that as a queer you would be happy that shrub and his oil cronies now control congress. Every right we enjoy was given to us by the Democrats. You’re the idiot and your website is idiotic.”
  —Julius R.

Let me repeat part of that for emphasis: Every right we enjoy was given to us by the Democrats.  I’m always saddened when I see a horribly uninformed statement like this.  While I realize that the commenter was referring to gay rights, I think it points out a systemic problem we’re seeing more and more in our society.  Too many people today think that rights are “given” to the people by government.  Once again, the complete and utter failure of our public indoctrination centers (did I say that?  I guess I should have been PC and said “schools”) to teach even the tiniest thing about our Constitution and our form of government is evident.  Rights implicitly belong to the people.  We are not required to squat and lick the boots of some bureaucrat or politician to obtain them.  If government has encroached on our rights, then we must stand up and demand their return.

Where I see this connecting to hate crimes laws is in how some people seem to implicitly think that government is the only solution to all problems.  Simply passing a law will make the problem go away and government is the source of all rights.  I abhor this attitude and everything it stands for.  It both enrages and saddens me to see people squandering the legacy of freedom we were given by this country’s founders.