I know, you don’t want to hear about my personal life, you just want me to fix the damn thing.
Anyway, the new ownership of the Detroit Pistons has fired coach John Kuester.
It doesn’t exactly sound like the players were fond of him, either.
We’ve blown a Piston.
June 6th, 2011Sunday night cocktail blogging.
June 5th, 2011When the gin hits your nose
Like the smell that from pines arose
That’s a negroni…
I can see why people like this cocktail. You can tell there’s gin in it, but there’s a nice balance of gin against the Campari and sweet vermouth. I can’t detect any bitterness in mine, just a nice combination of sweetness with some bite from the gin.
(Campari, Nolly Prat sweet vermouth, and Plymouth English gin.)
Cops gone wild!
June 4th, 2011I don’t know why, but stories about cops committing particularly horrific crimes make me even more angry than I have any rational justification for. I’ve mentioned Antoinette Frank several times before; she’s a perfect example of the kind of thing I’m talking about, and I hope they get around to sticking a needle in her arm soon. I’m hoping for the same thing for the cops involved in the Danziger Bridge shootings, too.
But let’s move away from New Orleans for a moment. Let’s move to the north, and start with the DC area.
Richmond Phillips had a problem. He was accused of fathering a child with a 20-year old woman, and was scheduled to be in court last Tuesday for a hearing on paternity and child support. Phillips worked vice for the DC police, and he already had a wife and a 12-year old daughter.
What to do, what to do? Well, if you’re Phillips, you meet your baby mama in the park the day before the hearing, shoot her in the head, hide the body, load your baby up into baby mama’s car, drive the car away, abandon it, and leave your baby inside.
Let me repeat that. He killed the mother, and left a one-year old baby to die in a hot car.
I checked. Maryland does still have the death penalty, though it appears to be used rather sparingly (five executions since 1976, and five current death row inmates). Of course, Phillips is entitled to the presumption of innocence (though it seems like they already have a strong circumstantial case against him), but let’s hope the prosecutors don’t let this chicken shit asshole plea bargain down to life without parole.
There’s another recent incident that I’ve been meaning to note. Over the Memorial Day weekend, a sheriff’s deputy in Franklin County, Virginia, shot and killed his ex-wife, then led other police officers on an hour-long chase that climaxed in a shootout on I-81. This actually would not have come to my attention except that the shootout and resulting investigation backed up traffic for miles on the interstate: Sebastian from Snowflakes in Hell got caught up in the mess and blogged about it.
In addition to the cop gone bad angle, Franklin County is in the area around Roanoke, Lynchburg, and Bedford; my family has lived in that general area from time to time, so there’s a local angle to the story for us. The other interesting aspect to this story is the role of the rogue deputy’s department in the whole affair. Here’s the original Roanoke.com story on the shooting. Jake at Curses! Foiled Again! has been linking to the followup coverage: the sheriff’s phone call to the local police, holes in the timeline, and Jake’s first post, pointing out that the shooter had previous disciplinary issues but was still on the job.
According to today’s reporting, the sheriff apparently told a dispatcher “not to mention anything” about the deputy’s threats to kill his ex-wife. It’s looking more and more like the sheriff knew his guy was rogue, but thought he could calm the situation down and avoid public embarrassment. It’s also looking more and more like the embarrassment of having one of your guys taken off the street doesn’t compare to the embarrassment of having your guy shoot several people, and having the local citizens demand your resignation.
Obit watch: June 3, 2011.
June 3rd, 2011I’m really sorry, but I don’t have a damn thing to say about Jack Kevorkian. Not even snark.
I also can’t say much about James Arness. I want to say I’m a little too young for “Gunsmoke”, but it ran until 1975, when I would have been 10. I can’t understand why I don’t have any memories of it. It may have been something my family didn’t watch, but if so, I don’t recall why.
Elmer “Geronimo” Pratt has also died, and that’s kind of an interesting story. Pratt was a Black Panther leader who was convicted of murder in 1972. His conviction was overturned in 1997; the judge ruled that the prosecutors at Pratt’s murder trial had hidden evidence that could have pointed to Pratt’s innocence. (“Pratt maintained that the FBI knew he was innocent because the agency had him under surveillance in Oakland when the slaying was committed in Santa Monica.”) Pratt later settled a lawsuit over his conviction for $4.5 million.
Finally, by way of Popehat: Joel Rosenberg, author and firearms rights advocate, died yesterday. Condolences to his family.
What goes better with booze than politics?
June 2nd, 2011Long day, but I did want to bring you the latest development in the Shade-Tovo race.
The story is kind of confusing, perhaps because some people are obfuscating what’s going on. But the brief version is that a dozen bars on West 6th Street have put up signs offering drink specials during the early voting period (which starts next week.) The signs are also offering unspecified prizes and transportation to the polls. The signs also endorse Ms. Shade.
There are some interesting questions. For example:
- Is this an organized political action committee? Michael Klein, “president of the Texas Bar and Nightclub Alliance, which represents several downtown bars” says that the bar owners are acting independently, are setting up their own specials and prizes, and that the whole thing started with one bar owner who made his own sign, which was then copied by the others. This doesn’t quite pass the smell test for me…
- Do you have to vote for Ms. Shade to get the prizes and specials? Klein says no, but I’m not sure how he can speak for all 12 of the bars if they’re all acting independently. On the other hand, how would they make you prove you voted for Ms. Shade? Or even voted at all? Would you need to get one of those “I Voted” stickers to get a buck off draft beer?
- Is all this being done independently of Ms. Shade’s campaign? Reply hazy, ask again later. Seriously, there seems to be no evidence one way or the other; the sign showed up on Ms. Shade’s FaceBook page, but her people say it was posted by someone outside the campaign and they removed it.
- The article is curiously missing any quotes from anyone with TABC.
- Can I hope for an asteroid to come along and wipe out both the Shade and Tovo campaigns?
Quirks.
June 1st, 2011Bruce Malkenhorst was convicted of misuse of public funds last week.
Keep those numbers in mind.
Mr. Malkenhorst was the city administrator for the corrupt city government of Vernon, California, a city government so corrupt that the state legislature is trying to disincorporate the city.
However, Mr. Malkenhorst, as city administrator, is not an elected official.
Why does that matter?
Mr. Malkenhorst, as a non-elected official, gets to keep his retirement pension. California law only allows for the revocation of pensions for elected officials.
Did I say “retirement pension”? I meant, “his $500,000 a year retirement pension“.
He pays about $100,000 in fines and restitution, gets three years of probation, and still comes out $400,000 ahead just in the first year.
Nice work if you can get it.
Tinkering.
May 30th, 2011It has been a somewhat slow holiday weekend, and I’ve been spending a good-sized chunk of it messing with stuff.
I wanted to upgrade my existing wireless router to something that had dual-band (2.4GHz/5GHz) support, and would also run the dd-wrt firmware. So, thanks to the great Jeff Atwood, I went ahead and ordered a Netgear WNDR3700
I like dd-wrt in principle, and I think if you’re willing to put up with it, the firmware offers a very rich feature set. But the documentation could use a lot of work. I bricked the router several times (though I was able to recover it): the instructions on this page work just fine for flashing the factory_NA.img file, but the router would lock up and require a tftp reflash as soon as I tried to flash any other version.
Once I got past that, it took a little more skull sweat (though not quite as much) to get my Maxtor EasyShare NAS working as a CIFS device, and to get a static IP assigned to it. (The dd-wrt docs on assigning a static IP even admit that the assignment process is buggy.)
A little more skull sweat after that and I was able to get the 1 TB drive I’d attached to the USB port on the router mounted using Samba and accessible from both the MacBook and Project e. So now I have about 1.3 TB of network accessible storage, which is nice. Transmit power seems reasonable: I can get a signal on my Evo well out into the parking lot of my complex. (I haven’t tried tweaking the transmit power or other settings for the radios in the router, which is one of the nice things dd-wrt lets you do.) I also like being able to put in three DNS servers; again, acting on a Jeff Atwood suggestion, I downloaded and ran namebench, and added a tertiary name server based on its recommendations.
Ah, but there’s a problem. I want to run a closed network using the 5 GHz radio only (for maximum speed) and an open network using the 2.4 GHz radio (isolated from the main network). It turns out that, while the netbook does support wireless N, the adapter only runs on the 2.4 GHz frequency. So if I want to get top speed on the netbook, I need to get a USB wireless N adapter that supports 5 GHz and is supported under Ubuntu. (I don’t want to go through the whole ndiswrapper thing.) And I haven’t been able to find that yet…
Oh, yeah: I also upgraded Microsoft Office to the 2011 version: prior to all of this, I upgraded the MacBook to 10.6.7, and Office 2011 seems to run much better under 10.6 than the Office 2004 I was using. And I can get rid of the file conversion utility.
Still on my list of things to do before school starts up again, besides updating the Saturday Dining Conspiracy pages:
- root the Evo. But since 2.3 is rumored to be coming down the pike real soon now, I think I’ll wait for that update before rooting.
- upgrade Project e to Ubuntu 11.04. But given the things I’m hearing about the Unity interface, I’m having second thoughts on that. Apparently, you can disable Unity on 11.04, but it’ll be the only interface in 11.10.
- do a BIOS update on Project e. Which isn’t that big a deal, except for the part about preparing a DOS bootable USB disk under Linux or MacOS.
- I still want to work on improving my photo setup so I can take better gun photos. Mostly, I think that’s a matter of building a light box, and perhaps purchasing some additional lights and a tripod.
- I’d like to get part three of “Talkin’ GPS Blues” up before I go back to school.
- I’d also like to get back into the MIT Open Courseware swing.
- I’ve got most of the parts for a dedicated NAS box sitting under a desk, and should probably start trying to assemble that. Missing: RAM, storage space for the FreeNAS OS, and storage drives.
There’s travel in there as well. And somewhere, Mike the Musicologist is snickering at me…
Script Ohio.
May 30th, 2011Jim Tressel out at Ohio State. The Columbus Dispatch says he resigned, but strongly suggests he was pushed.
Everyone was expecting this in light of Ohio State’s recent troubles, and I get the feeling someone thought it was good timing to do this over a holiday weekend.
Obit watch: May 30, 2011.
May 30th, 2011Former Texas governor William P. Clements, Jr.
I always thought Clements was an interesting character. He was the first Republican governor elected since Reconstruction; as a matter of fact, his campaign was the first (and only) political campaign I recall any of my family members volunteering for.
On the other hand, I wasn’t aware until many years later that Clements was involved up to his ears in the SMU scandal. (A Payroll to Meet
Time to do the happy dance!
May 28th, 2011I received an email from the Texas State Rifle Association fairly late in the day yesterday.
Senate Bill 321, aka “the guns in parking lots” bill, has passed both houses of the Legislature, and is on the way to the Governor’s desk for signature.
I haven’t been able to find much press reporting about this. According to the TSRA email, there are some limited exemptions involving people servicing oil and gas wells on leased property, and school district employees. Also, according to TSRA, people in the petro-chemical industry have to have a CHL, but are allowed to keep rifles and shotguns, as well as handguns, in their vehicles.
Everyone else, including those employed by college campuses, can now keep a firearm and ammunition out of sight in a locked personal vehicle.
I am both delighted and eager to see how this plays out. Well done, TSRA. Well done.
Darn it.
May 28th, 2011Apparently, I’m not getting invitations to the right kind of weddings.
(Seriously, I wanted to link to this post because it is excellent advice from Ken, and not the kind of advice that can be easily summarized as “Shut the hell up.“)
Books in brief: Boomtown DA
May 27th, 2011The population of Houston, Texas in 1960 was 1,364,569. By 1980 the population was 2,754,304, or slightly more than doubled in twenty years.
A reasonable argument can be made that the period from 1960 to 1980 marks the end of the Texas frontier era, and the beginning of the modern Texas era. My family moved to the Houston area fairly late in that period. I remember reading the daily newspaper (we were a Chron family), and it seemed that there were giants in the earth in those days. Carol Vance was one of them. Boomtown DA
Public service announcement.
May 26th, 2011Since this weekend is a national drinking holiday, the Austin Police Department would like for you to know that it’s perfectly okay for you to get totally trashed on booze and then drive and/or boat.
Can someone explain to me why you’d ever purchase a personal watercraft, at least if you live in Austin? It seems that personal watercraft are banned on the lakes every single damn holiday: if you do own one, when can you use it?
Ah, what the heck, I’ve been meaning to link this for a while, and the national drinking holiday makes it relevant: bonus Negroni related content just for Glen. I may have to pick up a bottle of Campari and some sweet vermouth this weekend.
Your May 25, 2011 bulletin from the Department of WTF?!
May 25th, 2011This by way of FARK: I’m breaking with policy because…it’s just so mind-croggling.
Four suspensions. Six incidents of insubordination.
Where is this going? Back in November, Officer Alvarado once again disregarded the orders of a supervisor and went chasing after a suspect: a 14-year old boy who punched a classmate in the face. Officer Alvarado ended up shooting the unarmed 14-year old.
And there are parts of his story that don’t add up:
“There is no evidence of close range firing of the wound,” the report concludes.
Quotes of the day.
May 25th, 2011One serious, one not so serious, both from Boomtown DA
(Background for young people and non-Texans: Vance was the District Attorney for Harris County from 1966 – 1979. More than likely, there will be a longer post about this book once I finish it.)
It is the duty of the district attorney in Harris County, Texas (Houston included) to represent the State of Texas in all serious criminal cases. That includes the misdemeanors carrying jail time which are tried in our County Criminal Courts at Law and the felonies tried in our District Courts.
It is the duty of the district attorney not just to convict but to see that justice is done. [Emphasis added. -DB]
The “Claude” in the next quote is Claude Langston, who was an investigator for the D.A.’s office. As Vance puts it, “Thirty years in the homicide division gave Claude a nose for finding witnesses and good barbecue.” (“Orange” refers to the glass bottled soda, not the fruit itself.)
Claude often said, “You know, even sittin’ outside in August in ninety-nine degrees isn’t so bad if a man has some good barbecue and a large orange. That’s just part of a good homicide case.”