I have some comments and thoughts about last night’s library town hall meeting.  I’ve got a post brewing, but it might be late in the day, as I’ve been stealing moments during the five hours of conference calls that are on my calendar for today.

I came across this ad in today’s Keller Citizen and have to admit I was a bit taken aback when I first saw it.

Perhaps I’m misinterpreting the image, but it looks a lot like some sort of white power/neo-nazi advertisement rather than something for a church.  Just to clarify, I’m not talking about the name of the church, but rather the upraised fists.  Am I being overly sensitive?

If someone out there really wants to save the planet, they’ll come up with a way to stop phone books from being dumped on your front door.  I don’t think that I’ve looked in a phone book in the last two or three years.  Yet I get three or four of the damn things, all from competing companies.  Some even come in multiples (like the company that sends a large book and a smaller satellite book for “your convenience”).

I did some searching to see how one might politely decline the avalanche of unwanted paper, but it turns out that getting them to stop is harder than you might initially think.  Once you understand the economics of the deal, however, it all makes sense.  The deliveries are actually done by a subcontractor who gets paid for each book delivered (typically some tiny amount like $0.15 per book).  So it’s in the best interest of the subcontractor to deliver as many books as possible.  On top of that, the companies that print the books base their ad sales rates on their coverage, so they have absolutely no incentive to take you off their lists.

What we need is some sort of sign that indicates to all and sundry that the resident doesn’t want marketing material, phone books, promotional newspapers, or any other such nonsense.  I added those other categories because I’ve seen that some companies don’t seem to understand that “No Soliciting” also means not to leave any marketing junk on my door.

I’m currently sitting on a conference call that started at 7:00AM (Central time).  Starting a few minutes ago I started hearing a strange sound.  At first I thought that something was interfering with my headset or perhaps the VoIP adapter was malfunctioning or experiencing congestion.  But someone eventually commented on it and we figured out that it was someone snoring! 

I suspect it was one of those poor schmucks in Tucson.  They’re currently two hours earlier than us, so that means this meeting started at 5:00AM their time.

So you’re out and about, running errands and minding your business, when Deputy Friendly saunters up and hands you an envelope.  Congratulations, you’ve just been shanghaied into jury duty.

Madeline Byrne was making a quick trip to the grocery store to buy some cheese when a sheriff approached her car in the parking lot and slipped something through her open window.

Byrne didn’t get the cheese, but she did get a jury summons.

The 64-year-old woman was ordered to report for jury duty a little more than an hour later at the Lee County courthouse in Sanford, N.C. When Byrne protested, the sheriff told her: “Be there or you’ll be in contempt.”

“I wasn’t too happy,” said Byrne, one of at least a dozen people handed summonses at random in March outside a Food Lion and Wal-Mart.

This would cheese me off no end.  Not that I want to shirk jury duty.  But that there’s no warning. 

I have no problem serving on a jury, and in fact I’ve done so before.  But at least the normal jury summons gives you a chance to get your schedule in order before you go.  Having only an hour’s notice would be a major PITA. 

The article goes on to decry how people today won’t serve on juries.  And I’ve no doubt that it’s a serious problem.  But picking random people in the shopping center parking lot and disrupting their lives isn’t going to make things better. 

At least they realized that it’s not the right way to do things:

Ann Blakely, the clerk of Superior Court in North Carolina’s Lee County, said sending out sheriffs to find jurors at random is done very rarely, and only when a judge is about to begin a case and there are not enough jurors.

“Not again in my lifetime, I hope,” she said. “We got a lot of complaints from people. You do not make friends like that.”

I’m not sure what the solution is for getting people to serve on juries, but I’m fairly certain that this isn’t it.

I received an interesting letter from some company called Certegy yesterday informing me that information they were holding about my checking account was stolen and sold to direct marketers.  My first thought was, “Who the hell are you and why do you have my data?”  My second thought was unprintable…

Anyhow, it appears that Certegy performs check authorization for a lot of merchants.  But I don’t recall writing a check in a store in the past five years or more.  I have a debit card that is faster and easier to use for that purpose.  In fact, I only write two checks a month, and those are to a house cleaning service (which, as far as I know, doesn’t use any sort of authorization service).  So I’m really curious as to where and how Certegy got my data.  I suppose it’s possible they got it before I started using the debit card, since I’ve had the account since 1993 and used to write a lot of checks.

But if the data was that old, it really bugs me that they’re hanging on to it.  They really have no business need of data that old.  And it only adds to the problem when their systems get breached.  Which, it turns out, happened from the inside:

The employee was a senior level database administrator who was entrusted with defining and enforcing data access rights. To avoid detection, the technician removed the information from Certegy’s facility via physical processes; not electronic transmission.

So far, the data has only been used for marketing purposes.  Or at least that’s what Certegy claims.  Not that I exactly trust them, given that it’s in their best interest to minimize the fallout over this.  While they claim to have taken steps to notify the credit bureaus and are working on contacting financial institutions, the letter I got seemed to put the onus on me to watch for fraudulent activity on the account.  It also pointed me to various government websites with information about identity theft. 

If I end up having to get a new checking account because of this I’m going to be red-hot pissed off.  Between my direct deposits, the automated house payment, the debit card, and all the online bill-pay information that I have in the current system, moving to a new account is going to be a right pain in the ass.

I can’t help but notice that their Q&A dances around but doesn’t answer the question of what they’re doing to prevent this from happening again.  Perhaps if there were severe per-account monetary damages attached to data privacy breaches, they’d be a little more serious and proactive about not keeping unnecessary data and policing their employees.

Back at the end of May there was an interesting news story about a house in Cleburne that exploded when one of the residents lit a match to light a cigarette.  The reason it was interesting was that the house was all-electric and there was no gas service.

Now, a report in the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram explains how the gas got into the house.

How the gas got into the house

There had been a natural gas leak in front of the house for an undetermined amount of time, according to Wright’s report. Because the ground was so wet from recent rains, the gas was unable to escape through the usual cracks and openings in the soil and dissipate. Instead, it moved farther underground, along a path next to a new waterline and eventually into a sewer line leading into the house.

The sewer line was made of clay tile, which is “by nature full of gaps and imperfections that would allow the gas to enter the line,” according to the report.

A condensation line from an air-conditioning unit had been dropped into an open sewer pipe. Because the line was not sealed properly, the air-conditioning unit worked as a pump, drawing the natural gas from the sewer line and distributing it through air-conditioning ducts, Wright wrote.

Why no odor?

Natural gas is odorless. For safety reasons, Atmos Energy adds an odorant to its product. The odorant, mercaptan, gives gas a sulfurlike smell.

The gas inside the Pawliks’ house didn’t have an odor because “after traveling that far through soil and water the mercaptan … could be washed or scrubbed out by the filtering action of the soil,” according to the report.

When the story first came out I was pretty sympathetic to the residents, since it sounded like this was an out-of-the-blue occurrence.  However, this doesn’t appear to be the case:

A homeowner who was inside his Cleburne house when it exploded—resulting in his wife’s death—had been told not to light any more cigarettes just 45 minutes before the explosion occurred, according to a city fire marshal’s report.

David Pawlik called the Cleburne Fire Department’s nonemergency number between 3:30 and 4 p.m. May 29, telling fire inspector Scott Oesch that “every time my wife lights a cigarette, a blue flame shoots up to the ceiling,” according to a memo written by Oesch on May 31.

Oesch said he would check out the situation and told Pawlik not to light any more matches.

Pawlik’s wife, Hazel, wanted to smoke “a quick cigarette” before the inspector arrived. Pawlik lit a match, Fire Marshal Bill Wright reported. There was a blue flash, and the match went out. He lit another match, and there was an explosion of blue flames throughout the house at 632 Woodard Ave.

Between 15 and 20 seconds later, after the fire penetrated the ceiling into the attic, there was a more violent explosion, ripping a huge hole in the roof.

Hazel Pawlik, 64, died June 2 from her injuries. Four other family members were injured.

Hmm….  a “blue flame shooting up to the ceiling” sounds like what I’d call a clue.  Sure, they don’t have gas in the house, but you’d think that if you saw flames in the house you’d get the idea that there was some sort of flammable gas involved.  If it had been me, I’d have gotten out of the house immediately and called 911 from somewhere else.  I definitely wouldn’t light another cigarette.

Last week woot! was selling the Nokia 770 for $129, which was quite a deal considering that it had previously been selling in the $200-250 range.  But given the recent release of the Nokia 800, it was probably inevitable that the price would drop.  I’d been eyeing the 800 since its announcement, but wasn’t able to justify the $400 price.

I’ve been playing with the 770 for the past couple of days and I’m fairly happy with it.  It’s a little slow, and it isn’t a PDA replacement, but it works fairly well for simple browsing.  It also makes a great little interactive remote for my Slimserver/Squeezebox combination.

It also does basic audio/video streaming.  I was able to listen to a podcast, and although I haven’t had any luck with YouTube’s Flash player, I have been able to view some video files.

This entry was composed from my ‘comfy chair’ usng the 770.  Typing with the onscreen keyboard and stylus is a little slow, but manageable.

If I were going on a short trip and I just needed to check email and do basic browsing, the 770, combined with a phone that does Bluetooth DUN or a wireless hotspot would allow me to leave the laptop at home.

Update:  Added some screenshots.

The browser (showing EE’s control panel):

Controlling Slimserver (album thumbnail view):

Now playing view in Slimserver:

I installed Xterm and ssh: (yep, it’s running Linux under the GUI)

This past week was a bit hectic and stressful.  Our project manager broke her ankle quite badly and has been out of commission for several weeks.  This has meant that I’ve been wearing both the architect and PM hats.  So I spent a lot of time spinning my wheels dealing with cost and schedule issues, to the detriment of everything else.

But at least I have this week off to recover.  Now if it would just stop raining for a day or two.  If it doesn’t, you can find me on the soccer fields at Bear Creek Park.  I’ll be the one building the ark…

This all seems a little strange and sad:

A Trophy Club man has been arrested in the fatal shooting of his brother, a well-known peace activist, who was found dead in a pickup on U.S. 377, a police spokesman said.

The Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s Office identified the dead man as David Honish, 52, of Denton.

He was found at about 11:30 p.m. Thursday by a Flower Mound police officer who had stopped to check on the pickup parked along the highway with its engine running, said Officer Paul Boon, police spokesman.

Investigators “following up on leads’’ arrested Mark Francis Honish, 44, near his home in Trophy Club, Boon said.

I had exchanged a number of emails with David Honish when he was still associated with the effort to get the Tactical Edge shooting center off the ground (at the time in 2003 it was known as “H3 Tactical Edge”).  I also had some emails with his brother Mark regarding their membership plans and my thoughts on them.  And I had also met him and his brother on one occasion at a gun show.  Later, though (in June of last year), there appears to have been a rift between the two concerning the direction the range plans were going.  David sent me an email detailing the differences between the two and what he saw as the errors that Mark was making.

The articles that are out at the moment don’t offer any idea as to motive, but then it’s still early.  I can’t help but wonder if this project had anything to do with it, though.  Money and business can destroy families and relationships if people aren’t careful, and this range project has been troubled from the start.  I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

Update:  I suppose it was too much to ask for the media to not spin this in such as way as to insinuate that this was related to the shooting sports in general.  Here’s the take on it from the Dallas Morning News:

A man involved in opening a premier shooting range has been arrested in connection with the death of his brother, a Denton peace activist who was found slumped over the front seat of his truck with a gunshot wound to the head, Flower Mound police said.

Oh… and it appears they did a Google search on Mark and/or David Honish, since they quote an old post of mine (and my site happens to be the first hit you get for Mark Honish):

A firearms expert, Mark Honish was president of Tactical Advantage, which plans to open the nation’s largest indoor shooting range in Roanoke in the fall. The City Council voted in 2003 to approve the construction of the 40,000-square-foot Tactical Edge Performance Shooting Centers.

On the Web site Aubreyturner.org, David Honish wrote in 2003 about the pair’s plan to start the gun range. “Long story short, we need $400K in private investment to qualify for the loans to make this happen,” he wrote. “Will work out the details with my brother & have info on it in the near future for you.”

The comment on the old post is from David in reference to a later post I did regarding the life membership (which also spurred several emails).

Update 2:  It now appears to be some kind of ongoing feud between the two brothers that led to the murder.

A threatening e-mail found with the body of a Denton peace activist revealed a long-standing sibling feud and led to the arrest Friday of the man’s brother, according to an arrest warrant affidavit.

The printout of a June 6 e-mail from David John Honish to his brother Mark Francis Honish read, “You don’t roar at me and wag your finger in my face, EVER AGAIN IN THIS LIFETIME [obscenity]! I explained to you in Feb 2006 that I was finished taking [obscenity] from you. I meant it. There will be severe consequences for noncompliance … because of your own stupidity and your ongoing felony possession of firearms,” according to the affidavit.

…

Investigators stopped Mark Honish on Friday morning as he was pulling out of his driveway, according to the affidavit.

When he was told of his brother’s death, Mark Honish said, “He has been threatening me, but you probably know that by looking at the e-mail in his truck,” the affidavit says.

Blood was found on the running board of Mark Honish’s truck, and its tire treads matched the tracks left at the crime scene, according to the affidavit.

David Honish’s ex-wife told investigators that the brothers did not like each other and had been feuding for some time, the affidavit says.