Quickies: June 5, 2013.

June 5th, 2013

Omar Bradley will not be the new mayor of Compton. (Previously.)

Former NYPD officer Ali Oklu could have had…

…a great career and a good future,” he said in a recent phone call. “I’d be studying for the sergeant’s exam right now.”

What happened?

Mr. Oklu is to report to prison on Wednesday to begin a 46-month sentence, in part because of accepting that “side job”: transporting an array of contraband — including from untaxed cigarettes and guns — at the direction of undercover F.B.I. agents. The resulting arrests were ultimately hailed as one of the largest corruption cases involving city police officers in years.

Posted in California Über Alles, Clippings, Cops, Law | Comments Closed

Alive.

June 4th, 2013

Just busier than a one-legged man in a butt kicking contest.

I did get to shake Larry Wall’s hand and say thanks to him. (For those of you who are not Perl people, this is like an observant Jew meeting Moses.)

I also got to spend some time with Bill “whump” Humphries, who was in town presenting “Perl Meets Modern Web UI”. I thought it was a great talk, but I’m biased: I’ve known Bill since our days in the CIA spying on student organizations at the University of Texas, though I haven’t seen as much of him as I’d like in the past few years.

More as time permits. The “Hack Your Mac With Perl” talk is about to start.

Posted in Admin, Apple, Perl, Programming Languages | 4 Comments »

Stuff and things.

June 2nd, 2013

Last week was not a good week. This coming week is shaping up to be pretty hectic (though I am hoping not as personally unpleasant), so there may be a blogging slowdown.

I spent all day yesterday at the 2013 edition of the Texas LINUX Fest. I haven’t been since 2010, but that had less to do with my frustrations with the 2010 organization and more to do with personal issues. (In 2011, that just turned out to be a bad weekend, with having to get my car inspected and deal with other things. Last year, it was in San Antonio; while that may be a welcome change of pace, the schedule wasn’t compelling enough to make me drive 150 miles round trip.)

I thought about doing detailed summaries of each session I attended, but frankly I’m a little worn out and a little lazy. I’d rather mention a handful of panels I did like. (There were some others that I went to, but don’t feel I can fairly evaluate because they weren’t what I was expecting, or I was distracted by other issues (see below), or, in one case, I just think it’d be a jerk move to badmouth the presenter.)

I really enjoyed Theo Schlossnagle’s “Scaling: Lessons Learned and Their Applications to Apache Culture” keynote speech, which covered a lot of good points about complex systems. He sees commonalities between building scalable systems and building communities to support them. Many of the points he made may not be hot news flashes but are worth repeating. Among those:

  • People get so caught up in how awesome it it to build stuff that they forget what the real world looks like.
  • Code is just a tool. It isn’t a child or a family member. You don’t have loyalty to it.
  • Engineers have a tendency to focus on the technology they love instead of the actual problems they face.
  • At the core of things, your job is to tell the computer what to do.
  • Unbalanced hyperspecialization leads to poorly constructed solutions.
  • The biggest challenge is that increasing scale and increasing performance demands lead to increased complexity.
  • Technological complexity is an emergent property of complex and changing business problems. This complexity has to be understood and managed, which is difficult for specialists.
  • If you don’t provide value, your [stuff] doesn’t matter.
  • In order to survive, we need generalists. Schlossnagle didn’t quote Heinlein, but he might as well have.

David Stokes from Oracle did what I thought was an excellent talk on “The Proper Care and Feeding of a MySQL Database”. I’ve mentioned before that I’ve been dabbling in MySQL, so I got a lot out of this. Some of it may have been obvious (more RAM, more disks, good things. Use decent hardware, not something you scavenged from the admin assistant because it was too slow to run the latest Office), but the two things we learn from history are that too many people don’t learn from history, and that the obvious often isn’t.

Philip Ballew’s “Ubuntu; Where We Were, and Where We Are” presentation was…amusing, shall we say, mostly for the level of skepticism directed at Ballew from the audience, many of whom seem to be skeptical about recent Ubuntu decisions like the replacement of X. I’m becoming increasingly skeptical of Ubuntu myself; I just upgraded to 13.04, and now I’m running into the “The system is running in low-graphics mode” error, which I haven’t had time to fully debug. The worst part is that I’m getting this only intermittently; I think it may be a timing issue, possibly with some Virtual Box kernel extensions.

Owen Delong’s “IPv6 – It’s Easy on LINUX” presentation was also very good. I haven’t even started to configure my systems for IPv6 (and I’m not sure everything supports it: I’m sure about the Mac and Project e, but less sure about some older gear), so I found Delong’s talk useful. I was surprised, though, that there was even more hostility and skepticism from the crowd than there was at the Ubuntu panel. Why is IPv6 an issue in 2013? And many of the questions from the crowd seemed to boil down to “How do I emulate this particular thing I do in IPv4 using IPv6, even though the reason this is needed in IPv4 is because we have a limited number of IPv4 addresses available, where in IPv6 we could give every single atom in the universe a unique address and not run out?”

Okay, that was a long question, but you get the point.

Brad Richardson’s “GPU based password recovery on LINUX” lightning talk is worth checking out. He was able to do the talk in about five minutes, instead of the allotted ten, and the subject is interesting; using reasonably priced GPUs, you can rapidly break MD5 hashes, orders of magnitude faster than throwing a general purpose CPU at the problem. (Richardson’s slides give specific performance figures: try 16 hours 46 minutes to brute-force a “8 character password with lowercase, uppercase, and numbers”, versus an estimated 36 days for a CPU based attack.)

Anyway. Tomorrow is the start (for me) of Yet Another Perl Conference 2013. (I registered for the conference itself, but couldn’t afford any of the training going on over the weekend or after the conference. Plus the training conflicted with the LINUX Fest.) I expect to be pretty tied up Monday through Wednesday, though I will try to blog from YAPC as downtime and network connectivity permits. I may even try to blog YAPC 2013 itself, but I can’t promise that.

Edited to add: Why did I not have a “Perl” category on this blog, but did have a “Python” category, given that I use Perl more often than Python? Fixed.

Edited to add 2: Thinking some more about it, it made sense to have a “Programming Languages” category and make Perl, Python, and others sub-categories below that. I’m still thinking about whether it makes sense to put the languages category under “CompSci”, but that way lies TJIC madness.

Edited to add 3: I realized there were two other points I wanted to make.

  1. I was much more favorably impressed with the organization of TXLF this year than I was in 2010. Of course, they’ve had four of these, so you would expect them to have the bugs fixed. Still, I was impressed at how smoothly almost everything from registration onwards ran. The only problem I saw was an unexplained 20 minute delay in the start of the lightning talks, but I didn’t feel that was a major issue.
  2. The quantity of tchotchkes available at TXLF? Very high. The quality of tchotchkes available? Still evaluating that, but I’m decently impressed. Favorites: the microfiber cleaning cloths from OrangeFS, and the SavvisDirect USB/12V adapters. Special mention goes to Hostgator, who were giving away a much wider variety of tchotchkes than any other single vendor.

Posted in asus_eee, Geek, linux, Perl, Programming Languages, project_e | 1 Comment »

Bad week for the APD.

May 31st, 2013

Another one down,
Another one down,
Another APD officer bites the dust…

Second firing in two days. Why did this one get the ax?

Police detained Officer Manuel Garcia about 7:15 p.m. on Feb. 2 at Fiesta Gardens on Comal Street in East Austin, where his car was parked in a dark, unlit parking lot known for drug use and prostitution, the memo says.

…

The woman told police that she and Garcia had “dated” several times and that they had agreed she would perform oral sex for $10, the memo says. Garcia was arrested for prostitution.

…

During an interview with internal affairs, Garcia said he lied to officers when he told him he knew the woman, and that he actually had never seen her before when she suddenly jumped into his truck and refused to get out, the memo says.

But he denied having an arrangement for the woman to perform oral sex on him, “despite evidence to the contrary, including but not limited to, the ten dollar bill that was found folded up in the air conditioning vent of his truck when he was arrested,” the memo says. Garcia said officers “put that into” the woman’s mind and led her on.

Posted in Clippings, Cops, Law | Comments Closed

Random notes: May 31, 2013.

May 31st, 2013

Obit watch: Catholic priest and author Andrew M. Greeley.

“Sometimes I suspect that my obituary in The New York Times,” Father Greeley once wrote, “will read, ‘Andrew Greeley, Priest; Wrote Steamy Novels.’ ”

Also:

His niece Laura Durkin confirmed the death, saying he had died overnight in his sleep. She said he had been in poor health and under 24-hour care since suffering severe head injuries in 2008 when his clothing caught on the door of a taxi as it pulled away and he was thrown to the pavement.

I was not aware of this. What a lousy way to end your life.

Also: LAT obit for Jack Vance.

Julian Dawkins, a shuttle driver for “PBS NewsHour,” was found shot just before 1 a.m. on May 22 on Lynhaven Drive in Alexandria.

Police have made an arrest and filed charges in the case. The twist: the accused is a deputy sheriff.

The law of unintended consequences, continued: the city of Austin banned single-use bags effective March 1st.

Store managers and police say the ban, which went into effect March 1, has made it more difficult for them to distinguish between customers and shoplifters. They say people place items in their reusable bags while shopping and walk out of the store without paying.

(It is worth pointing out that reusable bags were common here even before the formal ban, and that there are no actual statistics as of yet showing an increase in shoplifting.)

Posted in Books, Clippings, Cops, Law, Obits | Comments Closed

Said it before. Say it again.

May 30th, 2013

If you’re going to scam, make it worth your while. Seven figures in front of the decimal point is a good start.

Don’t lose your job as a police officer for something stupid, like trying to scam free movie tickets.

(Especially at the Regal Westgate Stadium 11. But, as I’ve said before, I’m an Alamo Drafthouse snob.)

Posted in Clippings, Cops, Law, Movies | Comments Closed

Please excuse me. I’m having an Ambulance Driver moment.

May 30th, 2013

From the Austin American Statesman:

Amid concerns that STAR Flight is being underused, Travis County officials have asked Austin-Travis County Emergency Medical Services to review why a ground ambulance was dispatchedinstead of a helicopter to take patients to the hospital in a handful of incidents.

It isn’t clear to me exactly who these “Travis County officials” are. However:

According to emails between county and EMS officials obtained by the American-Statesman, [STAR Flight program manager Casey] Ping aired concerns to EMS medical director Paul Hinchey and other EMS and county officials in February about “multiple cases” in which he said STAR Flight had responded to a call and was overhead when it was canceled. Meanwhile, he said, additional ambulances were requested or it took an ambulance a long time to get to the hospital.

Is there any evidence that these decisions compromised patient care?

Ernie Rodriguez, who heads EMS for the city, said he doesn’t know of any situations in which STAR Flight, which provides air ambulance service for the agency, should have been called but was not.

Let us consider some of the situations in question:

The county has made written requests to the city to review six incidents or issues regarding what resources were used to respond to a call, Ping said.

That’s six out of how many?

STAR Flight has flown patients in the county and the city about 600 times since fiscal 2009, according to county data, with the number of flights dropping slightly over the years. In fiscal 2009, STAR Flight took patients about 170 times. In 2010, there were about 160 such trips, about 130 in 2011 and 120 in 2012.

Let us talk about specific incidents.

One such incident, [Danny] Hobby [“who runs emergency services for the county”] said, was a lightning strike in Bee Cave on April 29 that injured three people. Medics took the three patients, two in critical condition, to University Medical Center Brackenridge, about 30 minutes away not accounting for traffic. He wondered why multiple EMS units stationed in the county were dispatched to respond to the call when STAR Flight could have been used.

This is kind of useless without knowing the actual transport time, as opposed to the 30 minutes without traffic estimate. I’m not an EMS guy; what I know about EMS I’ve picked up from reading AD’s blog and listening to “Confessions of an EMS Newbie“. But I’d be willing to bet that by the time you get STAR Flight dispatched, it gets on scene, you get a safe landing zone cleared, STAR Flight lands, loads up, leaves and gets to the hospital…you’re probably looking at close to 30 minutes, at least.

Again, note that there’s no indication that anyone believes patient care was compromised by the decision to use ground ambulances instead of STAR Flight.

In early February, Ping received an email from a STAR Flight paramedic wondering why it took 45 minutes to get a baby in serious condition to Dell Children’s Medical Center.

Man. Sick babies. That’s terrible. And 45 minutes to get one to a hospital?

Austin-Travis County EMS sent medics to the baby’s home at 5:11 p.m., according to the email, which doesn’t specify a date. When medics arrived, the baby’s condition was a “priority 1 trauma,” the email says. They left the home about 20 minutes after getting there, and 25 minutes later pulled into the hospital, where a trauma team took over.

Oh. So it was actually 25 minutes to get the baby to the hospital, not 45? And it sounds like the first 20 minutes were probably evaluating the baby’s condition and stabilizing it for transport.

(Again, no suggestion that patient care was compromised by taking 25 minutes instead of…well, how long would STAR Flight have taken, under those circumstances?)

Now this is interesting:

Considering rush-hour traffic, the STAR Flight paramedic asked the responding EMS medics why they hadn’t requested the helicopter, according to the email. They said it was because the computer-aided dispatch system EMS uses wouldn’t let them since it calculated the transport time — the time it takes medics to arrive at a scene — at less than 20 minutes.

In asking several EMS officials to review the incident, Ping said he was most concerned by “the perceived comments about what authority ATCEMS personnel have or do not have to make transport decisions. This is not the first time we have been told they aren’t allowed to request STAR Flight.”

This is a place where I’m on Ping’s side, and the side of the paramedics. As you know, Bob, I’m very much in favor of letting the guys in the field make decisions. If their decisions about whether STAR Flight is appropriate are being overridden because of decisions by some automated system, then let’s review that. But:

Jasper Brown, an acting assistant chief for EMS, said that the system recommends STAR Flight respond to calls flagged as having the highest and second-highest priorities if the closest ambulance is more than 20 minutes away from the scene of the call. But once medics arrive at the scene, they can request STAR Flight regardless of the call priority, Brown said, a decision that’s based on the patient’s medical condition, among other factors.

And, hey, who doesn’t love a cool helicopter ride? Buried in the final few paragraphs of the Statesman article is one good reason why paramedics may not want to call out STAR Flight:

A STAR Flight trip costs $3,400 plus $85 per loaded mile for Travis County residents and $7,500 plus $85 per loaded mile for people who don’t live in the county, Ping said. Insurance could cover those costs, he said, or patients can set up a payment plan, with some paying $20 per month.

Can I point out that you can get a decent used car for $7,500? Can I also point out that if I do some rough calculations based on someone I know who lives outside the county being STAR Flighted to UMC Brackenridge, I come up with a rough estimate of $8,945 for the trip? (I’m figuring about 17 miles by helicopter at $85/loaded mile.) At $20/month, they’d have that bill paid off in 447.25 months, or 37.27 years.

So that’s reason one why EMS may not want to use STAR Flight if patient care isn’t compromised; because it is freaking expensive.

Reason number two: helicopters are dangerous compared to ground transport. Kelly Grayson has been sounding alarms about the overuse of helicopters since I first started reading his blog, and that was a long darn time ago. Quoth the man himself:

I believe helicopter EMS is useful. I believe it saves lives. I also believe that it is vastly overused, inherently dangerous, and that the overhwelming majority of the people we fly don’t need a helicopter. I believe that a significant chunk of them don’t even need a trauma center. And I believe that we owe it to the HEMS crewmembers who make those flights, not to endanger them needlessly by sending them out for silly shit.

Going back to that lightning strike in Bee Cave, I don’t remember what the weather was like that day, but I suspect it was pretty sorry if people were getting stuck by lightning. Doesn’t do a whole lot of good to transport people by helicopter to get a better outcome if your outcome is that the helicopter is forced down by weather and everyone onboard dies.

That happens. More often than you might think.

So are “Travis County officials” worried that patient care is being compromised by paramedics avoiding STAR Flight? Or are they more worried that STAR Flight is not being used enough to justify the cost of maintaining it, for what may be very good reasons? You make the call.

Posted in Clippings | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: May 30, 2013.

May 30th, 2013

Noted SF author and SFWA Grand Master Jack Vance passed away on Sunday.

Tor.com. Statesman (by way of my mother). Lawrence.

(In case you’re wondering: nothing in the LAT, NYT, or on the A/V Club yet.)

Posted in Books, Clippings, Obits | Comments Closed

Random notes: May 29, 2013.

May 29th, 2013

The NYT is absolutely indignant that the ceremonial throwing out of the first pitch at baseball games has evolved from a…

…honor was extended only a few times a season to a rarefied group that included presidents, mayors and military veterans. These days, it is regarded as a marketing opportunity, a sweetener in sponsorship deals between baseball teams and groups that want a piece of the spotlight.

In other news, water is wet and fire is hot. More:

The rite, now carried out nightly, is handed to actors and reality television stars, sponsors’ representatives and contest winners, and people dressed as animals as well as actual animals.

A capuchin monkey carried the ball out for a San Diego Padres game in September. Twice in the last two seasons, the Los Angeles Dodgers have welcomed to the mound Hello Kitty, or, rather, a person dressed as Hello Kitty.

Sometimes, there are ceremonial second, third, fourth and fifth pitches. The day after making his major league debut this month, John Gast, a promising pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals, crouched up and down to catch five pitches. The honorees that day were Edward Jones, a financial planning company; the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency; the Washington University School of Medicine; a local radio station; and the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.

Question left unanswered by the paper of record: do the ceremonial second, third, fourth, and fifth pitches cost less for the sponsors than the first pitch?

Also in the NYT: Antoni Krauze, a Polish film director, is working on a feature film called “Smolensk” about the 2010 plane crash that killed the Polish president and 95 other people. But “some leading Polish actors have refused to participate”, and the NYT sees this, and other events, as reflecting deep divisions in Poland over the crash.

The range of conspiracy theories is dizzying. So-called truthers accuse the Kremlin of pumping artificial fog over the runway, planting explosives on the plane and doctoring and then sewing victims’ bodies back together in fake autopsies. Some even contend that the Kremlin murdered Kaczynski because he had traveled to Georgia in 2008 to support that country in its war with Russia.

Posted in Art, Clippings, Movies, Planes, Sports | Comments Closed

Band in Austin.

May 28th, 2013

Well, this is interesting: Nike is ending their relationship with the LiveStrong organization at the end of this year.

Thoughts:

  1. I wonder if LiveStrong wristbands will become collectable. I kind of doubt it, since “the Livestrong Foundation made more than 87 million of its Livestrong yellow rubber wristbands since May 2004”. But you never know…
  2. I was wrong, wrong, wrongity wrong! Just have to get that in there.
  3. Can anyone think of a faster and more spectacular public collapse than this one? Maybe Paul Christoforo or Judith Griggs, but those folks were only Internet famous, not real life famous.

Just last year, sources say Nike sold $150 million of Livestrong-branded products, its most ever. But industry insiders told ESPN.com that Nike, as well as Dick’s Sporting Goods, which sold the most product at retail, were ready to give up the business.

Things pretty much broke at the end of last year, so I’m wondering what 2013 to date sales are like. Probably not great, which might explain Nike and Dick’s being ready to “give up the business”. On the other hand, I don’t have a real high opinion of Dick’s, so it wouldn’t surprise me if other factors were involved.

Posted in Clippings, Cycling, Sports | 1 Comment »

Scanners live in vain!

May 27th, 2013

A comment by friend of the blog Jake over at Curses, Foiled Again led me to check out the Broadcastify web site. I think this had been bubbling somewhere below the surface of my conscious mind anyway, but Jake provided the kick I needed.

Broadcastify basically collects radio feeds from scanners and organizes them by location. So you can browse the site, find your local area, and (assuming Broadcastify has a feed) click the bunny to listen to your local police or fire department traffic. There are several player options, including web-based players as well as iTunes, Real Audio, Windows Media, and Winamp.

Not every locality is there; there are some large gaps in coverage for Texas, to take one example. There are feeds for Williamson, Hays, and Bastrop counties; however, there’s no feed for the Williamson County Sheriff’s Department or Round Rock PD. On the other hand, this is free, and you get what you pay for.

For reference purposes, here’s the Travis County feeds page, which includes Austin/Travis County Fire and EMS and Austin Police and Travis County Public Safety.

Back a long time ago, I was an avid shortwave and scanner listener; I still have the equipment, but my scanner isn’t capable of following the newer trunked radio systems. I’ve flirted from time to time with the idea of purchasing a newer scanner, but now I don’t have to.

Thanks, Jake!

Posted in Cops, Law, Radio | Comments Closed

More on Kimber and LAPD SWAT.

May 25th, 2013

Last August, I noted an LAT article about allegations that LAPD SWAT members were purchasing specially made and marked LAPD SWAT Kimber pistols at a steep discount and reselling them on the open market. At that time, it was unclear if this violated any regulations or laws; LAPD conducted one investigation, which was badly botched, and had just started a second investigation when the LAT ran their report.

Today’s update: the investigation has expanded to include LAPD’s Special Investigative Section (SIS), who also had custom Kimber pistols made for them. And the FBI is involved.

…the company unveiled a new edition of its model 1911 pistol that had been designed for officers in the Special Investigations Section. The weapons were emblazoned with the SIS insignia, and the company made the .45-caliber handgun to address specific requests made by SIS officers. The guns, for example, were lighter than those typically carried by LAPD officers and could be cocked and fired with one hand, in case the other was injured or otherwise unavailable.

Yeah, I remember the Kimber SIS guns. I thought they were kind of neat looking, but:

  1. I need another .45 like I need another hole in my head. Not that that stops me from looking and drooling, but
  2. I already have one Kimber (from prior to 2000), and…
  3. This was the period when I heard bad things about Kimber’s quality control, especially on the smaller guns. (I understand the person who was in charge at Kimber during this time has since left and gone over to Sig Sauer. I don’t know if Kimber’s QC has gotten any better.)

Kimber appears to no longer sell the SIS gun. However, it continues to sell another version of the pistol that it says on its website is “identical to the pistol carried by LAPD® SWAT.”

Yeah, see my previous entry for more details on the LAPD SWAT gun. As for the SIS gun, here’s an example from GunBroker. N.B.: I am not the person selling this, I have no connection to that person, and the GunBroker link is for illustrative purposes.

Andrea Ordin, president of the L.A. Police Commission, which oversees the LAPD, declined to discuss the specifics of the investigation but said the decision to alert federal authorities was probably made because they would be better qualified than LAPD investigators to assess whether any of the country’s often arcane, complicated gun laws had been violated.

I’m sorry. Did the LAT, which has been calling for more gun control, just refer to Federal gun laws as “arcane” and “complicated”?

And here’s a small note that amuses me: this month’s American Handgunner (July/August 2013) has an article on the new LAPD SIS gun: the Glock 30S, which was custom built for LAPD SIS, but:

Good news travels fast, however, and it wasn’t long before members of a federal law enforcement agency caught a glimpse of the unique gun and requested a run for their agency as well. Convinced they were definitely onto something, Glock’s plan for a small run of off-catalog guns soon evolved into a plan to make the gun available as a standard model — the G30S.

More from the Glock website. I suspect this won’t be quite as controversial as the Kimber, only because Glock seems to have eschewed adding the “SIS” logo to the slide.

(And is there anyone out there who can explain to me why Glock’s .380 pistols are law enforcement only?)

Posted in 1911, California Über Alles, Clippings, Cops, Guns, Law | 2 Comments »

Random notes: May 24, 2013.

May 24th, 2013

Obit watch: Steve Forrest. NYT. A/V Club.

Forrest knocked around movies and TV for a long time, but he is perhaps most famous for this:

I am not ashamed to admit: I loved that show when I was a kid. And I still think it has one of the greatest themes ever, right up there with the original Hawaii 5-0 and Mission: Impossible.

NYPD blues, part 1:

A veteran New York City police detective once assigned to the mayor’s security team was convicted of attempted murder and reckless endangerment on Thursday for shooting a man while off duty, the Queens district attorney said.

Part 2:

“Opening 50 cases is a herculean task,” said Pierre Sussman, a defense lawyer who represents two of the men whose cases will be reviewed. “The first challenge will be culling information from files that are two or three decades old and trying to find witnesses who were hard to find even then. These are not people with bank accounts, library cards and Facebook pages.”

(Previously.)

And for Robert Hill to win release from his cell at the Fishkill Correctional Facility, prosecutors would have to reconcile why he told a parole board that he was remorseful for a murder he now swears he did not commit.

That part seems easy to me. In the wrongful convictions I’ve read about, a recurring theme involves the wrongfully convicted being offered a chance at parole, and being turned down or refusing because they are expected to admit their crime and show remorse. If you didn’t do the crime in the first place, but you’re offered a shot at getting out of prison, do you maintain your innocence even if it costs you that chance? Or do you tell the parole board what they want to hear?

Posted in 1970s, Clippings, Cops, Law, Obits, TV | 2 Comments »

Consumer note: Pocket Hose.

May 24th, 2013

You know the Pocket Hose, right? Extensively advertised on television?

My mother moved into a smaller place at the end of March, and bought a Pocket Hose around that time so she could water her plants without bucking around a big garden hose.

It lasted about two months. The hose now seems to have some sort of internal break such that, instead of water coming out the nozzle, it flows out from just below the faucet connection. It isn’t leaking at the connection, like it is improperly tightened or missing a gasket, but leaking in the hose portion below the connection.

Of course, this being cheap Chinese made crap imported by Telebrands, it doesn’t have any kind of warranty. Luckily for her, she bought it at Home Depot with her Home Depot credit card, and they’ve agreed to refund her money when she brings it back.

Seriously, guys, less than two months? Put that in your social media pipe and smoke it.

And just in case you think I’m being a crank, it sure looks like the Amazon reviews support my position.

Posted in Consumer | Comments Closed

Yo, Dog, we heard you like funerals…

May 23rd, 2013

Much of this comes from a story on the A/V Club; I recap here because I don’t think any of my readers read the A/V Club, and it hasn’t shown up on FARK yet as far as I know.

Once upon a time, there was a rapper named “Tim Dog” (real name Timothy Blair). Tim Dog was a little better than aspiring; he apparently had a minor hit with something called “F–k Compton” back in the NWA days.

Sadly, Mr. Dog fell on some hard times. He was supposedly working on a comeback album, but, in February, his death was announced and reported on by such news outlets as the A/V Club and The Source.

Earlier this week, a judge in Mississippi issued an arrest warrant for Tim Dog.

“What?” you say. “How do you arrest a dead guy?”

You don’t. Evidence is accumulating that Tim Dog actually faked his own death.

And why would he do that? Spending a year dead for tax purposes? Close: a woman he met online is owed $19,000 as a result of Tim Dog being convicted of grand larceny. This woman, as well as other women, claim that Tim Dog scammed them out of money, claiming it was to produce the comeback album mentioned above.

Apparently, there is no death certificate for Tim Dog. There is some question as to whether there was a funeral; one report says that there was, and that Tim Dog’s best friend refused to speak at it (the whole “no death certificate” thing). Another report says there was but that Tim Dog’s family didn’t even show up, and they don’t believe he’s dead either. If you’re going to fake your own death, I figure you pretty much have to show up at the funeral (heavily disguised, of course) so you can hear all the good things people say about you. I wouldn’t call that rule #1 of faking your own death, but it would be in my top ten list.

If your own family refuse to show up, however, maybe there’s no point.

Posted in Clippings, Law | Comments Closed

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