This morning’s arrest of Daniel Joseph Griffin got me to thinking about so-called “ex cons” and payment of a debt to society.

First, some details of this present case (from the first link):

34-year-old Daniel Joseph Griffin is believed to be with 19-year-old Christina Harrison. Witnesses tell police on Monday, he stabbed Harrison’s mother to death, tied up her sisters, then kidnapped Christina at gunpoint.

He is also said to have sexually assaulted one of the girls before taking off with Christina (his girlfriend).  According to the local news reports, he has a criminal history that includes theft, burglary and escape.

In the past I’ve written that I thought that once you’ve served your time you should be a full member of society again (of course, this presupposes that punishments are severe enough to fit the crime).  Theoretically, our system is supposed to be this way, but we all know that it isn’t.  There’s a stigma that follows these people around, often making it difficult for them to work and integrate back into society.  And then we have the case of the “sex offender,” who we brand for life and require to register so we can keep him under a microscope.

Cases like this one only serve to make me wonder if it’s hopelessly naive to think that we could ever trust or reintegrate some offenders back into society.  The problem is determining which ones should be considered an ongoing threat and never allowed out.  Griffin’s history doesn’t appear to have any crimes against persons, just property and financial crimes.  Still, common social stigma against consorting with ex-cons might have been very useful in this instance in keeping at least one person alive.  Is that unfair?  Probably so.  But on the other hand, it’s simply another factor to keep in mind when making the decision to break the law.  If someone has shown themselves as being unable to live in polite society once, it’s going to take a lot of good behavior afterward to regain any semblance of trust.

This also ties into recent proposals for the death penalty for child molesters.  I know some hand-wringing types get the vapors at the idea, but it doesn’t bother me.  It seems preferable to the strange legal limbo of registration.  That type of system seems to acknowledge that these people are dangerous, yet it still allows them out.  If someone is so dangerous that he has to be watched at all times, maybe he shouldn’t be allowed out in society again.  If not the death penalty, at least give them life in prison.

Oh well… there are no simple answers here.  Just bad situations.

An AMC theater in Arlington is sending a message to teenagers who use text messaging during movies.

Talk may be cheap, but text messaging could cost you the price of a movie ticket.

This past weekend, teenagers who were using text messaging were escorted out of The Parks at Arlington mall’s 18-screen AMC theater by off-duty police officers.

“All we’re promoting is a distraction-free environment,” said Nate Reid, the theater’s general manager. He added that the policy has been enforced since the theater opened in 2002. “We have a very high teenage audience. It really is a problem with the teenage audience.”

..

Reid said many movie patrons find lights from cellphones, which are used to send and receive text messages, distracting.

AMC enforces a “Silence is Golden” policy. According to AMC’s corporate Web site, this is a “proactive national program aimed at providing a distraction-free moviegoing experience … Employees actively monitor auditoriums to ensure a quiet moviegoing experience. An entertaining pre-feature trailer is also in place to remind guests of the importance of this message.”

I’ve noticed this sort of thing a few times during my infrequent visits to theaters.  Given the price of going to the movies these days, I’ve always wondered what point there was to going to a movie if you aren’t going to pay attention.  But more importantly, the lights can be annoying as some phones are bright enough to be used as flashlights. 

I’m glad to see a theater taking a stand on this.  Perhaps if more theaters began taking action to crack down on the texters, phoners, loud talkers, and babies/small children at inappropriate movies I might consider going more often.

The Gecko was kind of “cute” when it first came out, but it’s just annoying now.  But worse than the Gecko are the commercials with the “celebrity” and the “real person.” 

Although, in their defense, I’ve always kind of wondered what that movie announcer guy looked like: 

Link to YouTube video of Geico commercial

Update:  Moved the YouTube inline player to the Extended Entry, since it was doing funky things in Firefox.

There’s a husband/wife couple that I see on the trails fairly regularly along with their dogs.  It’s one of those cases where Boots immediately took a liking to them and their dogs.  She ignores most people, but she goes fairly crazy when she sees them.

Until today I hadn’t seen them for a month or so, but I didn’t think much of it, since they had previously said something about taking a long trip in August.  However, when I saw them today I was almost tempted to ask the wife if she was pregnant, as she had the characteristic belly (which she didn’t have the last time I’d seen her).  But, fortunately, my thinking brain kicked in before my impulse brain had a chance to get the question out. 

I think it’s likely that she’s pregnant, but if she isn’t, asking the question would have been A Bad Thing™.  I think I’ll leave well-enough alone and wait for her to bring it up…

I sent out an announcement to the DFW Gunshow list about some updates I’d made and someone replied to ask if the current demolition of Big Town Mall would affect the exhibition hall.  I haven’t found anything definite yet, but it appears to just affect the mall.  The exhibition hall and the farmer’s market are separate buildings located on the outskirts of the mall.

What amazed me was that while I was looking up information about Big Town in Google I came across a Wikipedia entry for it.  It really floored me that someone would go through the trouble to write up an entry about Big Town Mall of all things.  Even more amazing is that there is a Wikipedia project to document dead malls and that there is a website, Deadmalls.com, that tracks defunct malls.

Did you ever have a word or phrase that you just couldn’t get right unless you concentrated on it?

I was a bit amused by KRLD’s business analyst, David Johnson, this morning as he consistently called ATI “AIT” in his coverage of AMD’s purchase of ATI.

I always have to remind myself to say the letters when talking about SAP, as I always get the impression that SAP users don’t like it when you say “sap.”  Fortunately I rarely have to deal with it. 

The Mugato is a creature from an episode of Star Trek (the original series).  The creature was originally called a Gumato in the script, but DeForest Kelley (the actor who played Dr. McCoy) had such a mental block about the name and so consistently called it the “Mugato” that the script writers just gave up and changed the name.

I recently ordered a new shirt online.  When I got the shirt I was a little annoyed to see on the tag that it was supposed to be washed in the “delicate” cycle.  The description on the website just said “machine care,” and I didn’t think about delicate when I saw that.  But perhaps that may be related to the machine that I have.  My 10 year-old washer doesn’t do delicate.  It only seems to have two settings:  Beat Me, and Beat Me Harder. 

Anyhow, I guess I’ll just have to have this one dry cleaned.  I do that with some of my shirts, even if they can be laundered, since they last longer that way.  But it’s a lot more expensive.

While I’m on the topic of laundry….  I’m of the considered opinion that whomever designed those stupid pictogram care guide symbols should be dragged off and shot.  I can’t make head or tail of those things.  Usually, when products resort to symbols it’s to allow people to understand some important bit of information without knowing any particular language.  But these symbols make absolutely no sense at all.  What the hell is a box with a circle in it with a dot in the circle supposed to mean?  If I have to resort to a laundry symbol guide to understand them, I think they’ve failed their purpose. 

From the guide I see that they’re trying to tell you temperature using dots (one dot = cold, two dots = warm, three dots = hot), but I’ve also seen a few that listed a temperature inside the little “washing” symbol.  Unfortunately, the one I saw said “40°C”, which does nothing for me.  Rather than dig out my calculator to do the laundry I threw the shirt to the side and left it there.  One of these days I guess I’ll figure out what that means in real temperature units and wash the damn thing.

Amongst the spammers in my daily referrer report I still see a lot of wanna-be thugs at MySpace hotlinking my pictures.  You’d think they’d learn by now, since all they end up with is a picture of Boots instead of the expected guns. 

Anyhow, just out of curiosity I sometimes follow the link back to their profiles.  I’m almost inevitably assaulted by their piss-poor musical selections.  I’ve learned to do a quick scroll to try to catch the player before it has a chance to stream the song (or video, in some cases).  But sometimes I’m too late, or they’re in the comments area and really hard to find.

I need a Firefox plugin to silence MySpace (perhaps it could be called “QuietSpace”?).  Actually, what I really need is a plugin to silence the web in general.  Or perhaps have one that asks my permission before a sound is emitted (kind of like Firefox’s pop-up blocker:  “This site has attempted to play a sound.  Do you wish to allow it?”).  Of course, most of this crap is done with Flash, which makes it technically challenging.  I’d ask for a setting in Flash for this, but we end-users are not the ones who drive the requirements for the Flash player.  If we were, we could stop those annoying Flash animations without resorting to blocking Flash altogether.  That function used to be there in older versions of the player (Right-click and uncheck “Play” or hit “Stop”, depending on the version).  I’m sure the advertisers hated it, though, so it’s no longer there.

As for MySpace?  I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a large collection of badly designed, badly implemented, obnoxious, content-free web pages outside of a spam link farm (which at least didn’t play music without my permission).

Update:  Google and ye shall receive!  A little searching turned up a handy utility called FlashMute.  It allows you to use a hot-key (Ctrl-Alt-M) to enable/disable muting of Flash.  It didn’t work quite right for me, though, as it didn’t seem to stop Flash.  However, it has a “mute entire browser” setting that did the trick.  I suspect there’s something about Flash 9 (9.0 r 16) that breaks FlashMute, since that version of the player just came out a few weeks ago (and I wouldn’t put it past the Flash developers to try to work around it).

It won’t give me warning that sound is coming, but at least I can easily toggle sound in the browser (and just the browser) now by hitting Ctrl-Alt-M.

An interesting email from toysrus@toysrus.rsc02.com just arrived in my Inbox.  It was addressed to my Amazon.com email address and was attempting to pitch their new e-store.

Toys R Us used to be an Amazon partner, but after winning a suit against Amazon, they started their own e-commerce site as of July 1st.  I have never done business with Toys R Us directly.  Instead, I used Amazon to buy some items from them in 2002 (!) as Christmas presents for my nieces. 

So you might understand why I am a bit miffed to find crap from Toys R Us in my Inbox.  Especially an email chock-full of bug-laden images and tracking links.  Further, I had set my email preferences on Amazon’s site to allow only transactional emails.  I am not supposed to get ANY promotional crap.

I see from the Toys R Us website that they’re migrating accounts from Amazon.  I find this obnoxious and more than just a little presumptuous on their part.  My business “relationship” was with Amazon, not Toys R Us.  Simply making a purchase through Amazon gives Toys R Us no rights to my account, or to violate the terms of Amazon’s privacy policy.

Worse still is the way the email (or at least the parts I could read, as I refuse to load the images that let them track the email) is worded:

You have been subscribed as ****@***.*** if you do not want to receive any more advertising or promotional emails from us (including emails on special savings and news), just click here.

It makes it sound as if I had somehow subscribed to their crap and puts the onus on me to unsubscribe.  Since I did not opt-in to this crap, it seems they should be the ones to remove me. 

I’ve submitted customer service requests to both Amazon and Toys R Us (which they both make difficult to do).  Not that I’m expecting anything much to happen.  But at least they will know I’m not happy about their assumption that they can “migrate” my account and start ignoring my preferences.

Really, this is what peeves me about marketing drones.  They seize on any excuse they can to spam you with crap you don’t want and that you haven’t asked for.  This is why I take a hard-line approach to my Inbox.  It makes it somewhat simple, though.  There’s one simple heuristic:  Did I ask for this to be sent?  If the answer is no then it’s spam.  Period.  End of freakin’ discussion.

You’re working at the local turbo cluck when one of your coworkers suffers second degree burns from hot oil. 

Which course of action do you think is best?

1. Call 911.  Get gauze wrap from first-aid kit and wet it before applying to the wound.
2. Apply first aid (see option A) and rush coworker to hospital.
3. Take coworker to CVS/pharmacy location several blocks away and ask the pharmacist about it.

I witnessed “option C” while I was waiting for the pharmacist to figure out how to log my Claritin-D purchase into The Book of Potential Criminals™.  As soon as I saw the young man I knew the burn was fairly serious and would need treatment.  I know they don’t always hire rocket surgeons at this place, but you’d think someone would know to call for EMS (while taking him directly to the hospital is an option, I’d probably go with EMS, since they can likely make him a bit more comfortable during the ride).

The lady in line behind me was a nurse who told them to apply a damp gauze wrap (which is what I’d also learned in first aid) to the burn.  The burn victim’s compadre then asked if they had any gauze, since he said they didn’t have anything like that.  That got me to wondering if they didn’t have a first-aid kit at the Chicken Express or if this guy just panicked.  It doesn’t seem to reflect well on management, though, as you’d hope they’d give their employees at least rudimentary training in what to do if someone gets hurt (which is always a possibility when working with deep-fryers and other hot kitchen equipment).