Snowball attack

Possible two-year prison term for throwing a snowball at a coworker.

When (Michelle) Oehlert reported the incident to deputies the following day, she said Thistleton and two friends were "taunting her" just before she was hit with the snowball. She complained that the snowball "caused her pain due to a prior injury" — a car accident several years earlier.

The DA is calling it an 'iceball' to try to make it sound like he's not a complete idiot.

Schools prescribing birth control?

A middle school in Maine has made the decision to prescribe birth control pills to its female students without requiring parental consent.

The school in question is one of the few schools in the district to have an on-site clinic, apparently because of the high percentage of students eligible for free and reduced lunches. I discussed the ramifications of the nanny state in the school and the slippery slope of allowing the government to offer additional, non-education-related services to students a few days ago. This is quite clearly another case.

I went to middle school and high school in an urban area - the high school I attended was over 60% African-American, and was gang-infested. I understand the problems many kids have coping with that environment, the tremendous amount of peer pressure, and goodness knows I made quite a few stupid choices myself during my middle school and high school years. Many of the students are not going to have two positive parental role models, and many of the students will be lucky to even have one. And sure, an eleven-year-old is not emotionally mature to make choices about sex and birth control, although she's probably going to be already making some choices about sex at that age. But putting the schools in the position of providing birth control to students is opening too many cans of worms.

First, there are the implications of having the school step in as an authority that may be circumventing parental wishes. I think it's likely that at least a few parents who don't want their child receiving birth control will refuse to sign the parental consent form allowing their child access to the clinic. This will decrease the student population that is served by the clinic. For instance, if Catholic students attend King Middle School, it's possible their parents will no longer allow them to seek health care from the school clinic. I'm pretty 'liberal' when it comes to birth control, but I think I'd be furious if my child went to her school clinic and was offered birth control. Offering a kid birth control is going to lead at least a few kids to think they need to use it, maybe earlier than they would have if it wasn't shoved in their faces.

Second, does the school really not have educational needs to spend their money on?

And third, can the school afford the financial and political ramifications if a student has medical problems due to taking birth control pills the school has prescribed? I don't think that when my daughter is eleven I will have discussed the medical reasons I had to stop taking the very birth control pills the CNN article uses as a graphic, or how taking the pill made both me and my mother so hormonally insane that it almost ruined our lives before we each clued in (at about the same time - my mother was on the pill as a hormone replacement late in life) that we were poisoning ourselves with birth control pills.

I know that denying a young girl birth control probably won't stop her from having sex - if anything, it's likely to make her act out even more. But schools have to stop trying to take over every aspect of parental responsibilities. If the Portland School District feels so strongly about having birth control available to students, maybe they should ask Planned Parenthood about putting offices near existing schools. This would allow the school district to continue to provide health services to in-need students without parents having to worry about whether birth control is being offered to their children against parental wishes, the school won't be opening themselves up for a lawsuit when a girl drops dead of a blood clot or starts acting out because the pill made her crazy.

How disturbing is this?

Got this letter from MadLibs's school today.

Dear SchoolName parents:

Today about 12:30 PM today (sic) there was a safety concern in the area around the school.

The office staff was in constant communication with district security and the CityName police. Every precaution was taken to ensure the safety of all students at SchoolName.

Thank you for your support of the safety and security of SchoolName students.

Sincerely,

PrincipalName

Way to put parents' minds at ease!

Let him die, already!

CNN reports that the ACLU is sticking its nose in where it's not wanted again. They've filed to have all executions in Nevada halted until the Supreme Court decided on the 'cruel and unusual punishment' status of lethal injection.

The lucky guy who had his life saved beat a little old lady to death with a tire iron. What's more, he hasn't filed any appeals. He's ready to go. I wonder if he's grateful to the ACLU?

Opt out of having your info shared by Verizon

PeenieWallie has an important public service announcement if you're a Verizon customer and you place any value whatsoever on your privacy.

And they wonder why the district thinks they can send these out...

Denver Public Schools recently got itself into some hot water by sending a sealed letter home with a student informing the student's mother that the student was overweight. Of course, the child opened it and supposedly became distressed - perhaps she wasn't aware she had a weight problem?

I've seen comments on some blogs asking why in the world Denver Public Schools thinks they can engage in this sort of personal life interference. I'm guessing some of the same people who are up in arms over this are also up in arms in favor of the proposed expansion of the S-CHIP program.

70.7% of Centennial K-8's students were eligible (PDF warning) for free or reduced lunches in the 2005-2006 school year. To be eligible for free or reduced lunches, a student's family must be at or below 130% of poverty level. To qualify for the state CBHP health plan (PDF warning again), the student must be at or below 200% of poverty level.

What this means is that well over 70% of the students in Centennial K-8 qualify for state-funded health care.

With the government providing lunches and health insurance to a large portion of these kids, is it any wonder that the government feels a well-meaning obligation to do what they can to reduce those insurance costs?

Years ago, I did volunteer work at an HIV-testing clinic that also provided services to disabled people who needed mental health, physical health or housing services. My work there was a big part of what turned me from a bleeding heart into a conservative - seeing people use food stamps to buy pork rinds and candy bars and then asking for more more more because their food stamps were gone by was disenheartening. Even more disenheartening was taking a poor mom who had no food for her kids grocery shopping a few years ago and having her get mad and yelling at me in the grocery store because I wasn't willing to add twelve-packs of soda to the grocery bill.

I understand that there are many families out there who use their state and federal provided funds as wisely as they can. But parents who don't spoil it for everyone and make the government act as a nanny state to reduce the poor use of government funds. If we keep expanding government-funded health care, don't be surprised if we start seeing more and more cases where Big Brother is telling us how to raise our kids.

Fun with databases

The Washington Post has a website where you can look up congressional votes since 1991.

But wait, there's more!

You can see votes sorted by several categories.

• Political party


• State/territory


• Region


• Boomer status


• Gender


• Astrological sign

Surely some statistics geek out there can run some numbers on whether we should be voting for Scorpios or Aquariuses...

Nothing good can come of this

John H. Lee, a Korean director with only two films to his credit, is planning a remake of one of my favorite films ever, John Woo's The Killer. From what I can glean from the article, the remake is apparently being done with Woo's production company's blessing.

I understand that John Woo feels an enormous debt to those who mentored him in his early career, and has carried on that tradition by acting as advisor or executive producer on many young directors' projects, but a remake of The Killer seems to be a setup for failure. Either John H Lee will try to follow closely in John Woo's footsteps, and will fail because he doesn't have Chow Yun-Fat in the leading role, and can't recreate the incredible interpersonal dynamics and the amazing battle sequences, or he will try to make the film his own, in which case it will have to depart significantly enough from the original film that it shouldn't be called a remake.

And in a worst-case scenario, Hollywood will insist on a happy ending for the film, which will completely ruin it.

Colorado Friends of Fred

The Colorado Friends of Fred Thompson website is up at www.colorado4fred.com.

One hundred million hits

PostSecret is quite likely going to reach one hundred million hits this week. That's about fifty thousand *times* more hits than this itty bitty blog has gotten. Way to go Frank! Both for the PostSecret project and your bang-up job raising awareness of Hopeline (1-800-SUICIDE).

The Truth Laid Bear managed to pick up on the fact that PostSecret was down for about a day a few weeks ago, but has not yet picked up that it's active again. I'm disappointed.

Nuance is everything

This is not a post about Fred Thompson, this is a post about CNN.

In a story on CNN today:

Still, most say that despite a few gaffes -- such as his statement during a Florida trip that he didn't "remember the details" of the 2005 Terri Schiavo right-to-die case -- Thompson is still a favorite to win over the values voters that dominate the primary.

'Right-to-whatever' carries the implied meaning that the whatever is being applied to whoever is exercising that right. In this case, it seems to imply that Terri Schiavo was exercising her right to die, rather than the actual facts of the case: her 'husband', who was shacked up and had produced two offspring with another woman, pulled the plug on Terri Schiavo despite the protests of people who obviously cared more about her well-being. Can anyone really argue that a man engaged in a long-standing adulterous affair has the best interests of his wife at heart? But CNN refers to this as a 'right-to-die' case, implying that Terri Schiavo herself expressed the wish that she wanted to die and exercised that 'right'. No documentation exists that Terri Schiavo said that she didn't want heroic measures to save her life implemented, and Michael Schiavo didn't bring up that she might not have wanted heroic measures taken until seven years later, after he had won lawsuits due to her condition totaling well over a million dollars. He waited until everyone had been bled dry.

This should be more accurately termed a 'right-to-kill-so-I-can-marry-my-concubine' case. Or if one wants to be more sensitive to a cheating husband, a 'right-to-kill' case. But in no way is Terri Schiavo's death a 'right-to-die' case.

Woman doesn't understand fanboy tax

"A New York woman is so angry at Apple Inc. for lopping $200 off the price of the iPhone that she's filed a lawsuit seeking $1 million in damages."

The gal is also suing AT&T, saying that the two-year contract is unfair. Waaah. Someone held a gun to this woman's head and made her buy the iPhone and sign the service contract. Oh wait, they didn't?

More Network Solutions fun

Network Solutions still hasn't told us the IP address and the date when our client's site was hacked. They essentially said that the server logs were too big and there was too much traffic on the ftp server for them to track down the info we needed. I pointed out that it was a two-week window that we were looking at, and ALL traffic logging in to our client's ftp during that period of time should be regarded as suspicious since the only people with access were us and the client, and neither of us logged in during that time. I was told I would get a call back within 24 hours.

That was Thursday. No call back yet. I've got to assume at this point that their servers are compromised, otherwise why would they be so gosh-darned reluctant to hand over the info?

Google's Custom Search is spam

I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

If it hadn't been a Google-owned blog, I wonder how long it would have taken to wrest control back from the spammer?

Who's sponsoring the DREAM Act?

The DREAM Act is the latest attempt by Congress to give illegal immigrants a pass, by giving in-state tuition to illegal immigrants and awarding legal status to any immigrant who claims to have been in the country before the age of 16, no matter what their age. Then illegal immigrants who receive amnesty under the DREAM Act can petition to have the rest of their family receive amnesty too. This is receiving quite a bit of press on conservative blogs, but I'm not seeing anything about it on major news sources.

What interests me a lot about this is the list of sponsors and co-sponsors of the bill, which doesn't seem to be getting ANY attention outside of Durbin's sponsorship. Here's the list of co-sponsors:

Hagel
Lugar
Leahy
Obama
Lieberman
Feinstein
Kerry
Feingold
Clinton
Bayh
Menendez
Murray
Boxer
Cantwell
Salazar
Dodd

Lieberman is the disappointing one to me in this list. The rest of these I expect to see trying to self-destruct the country. I don't understand why no press is being given to the fact that two Democratic presidential candidates are trying to spend federal money to educate illegal immigrants, providing money to them that citizens can't receive if they are a resident of another state.

Hannity is having Lieberman on in about fifteen minutes. I wonder if he's going to ask him about why he co-sponsored the DREAM Act? Unfortunately, I've got to go get MadLibs from kindergarten, so I can't continue to listen.

WTF happened to PostSecret?

In case you're not familiar with PostSecret, which seems pretty hard to fathom, the wikipedia entry is here. It seems unlikely that PostSecret just went away, since Frank Warren (the guy who takes the time sift through hundreds of postcards each week and post them) has several speaking engagements coming up, and hasn't shown any indications of stopping.

If you're interested in any of the books that Frank Warren has compiled of postcard secrets, here are some links:
the original PostSecret book
The Secret Lives of Men and Women
My Secret
A Lifetime of Secrets

Part of the proceeds from the books (Frank doesn't say how much, but it's been enough to keep Hopeline afloat) go to support Hopeline, a national suicide hotline with the phone number 1-800-SUICIDE that has taken over 2 million calls. Frank has also done several fundraisers for Hopeline.

I really really hope that whoever 'nicole' is, she tried to visit PostSecret, discovered that for some reason there was nothing there, and parked it until Frank can reclaim it. It was up last night - I usually visit it on Sunday mornings because that's when the new secrets are posted, and Saturday afternoon/evening to read peoples' responses to it. It's a handy place to visit if I've been spending too much time comparing my insides to other people's outsides, too.

UPDATE:
Just got an email back from Frank. Blogger apparently took down his site, which has been around since 2005, because they decided it was a spam site. Frank is asking people to email Blogger to allow him to put PostSecret back up. I don't have an email address yet, but as soon as I hunt one down I will post it.

AND A BIT OF SNARK:
Is this part of Google's "Don't Be Evil" campaign?

ANOTHER UPDATE:
Blogger has taken down the blog that 'nicole' posted. Hopefully this is on the way to getting PostSecret back up.

Google should think about making a hefty donation to Hopeline as part of fixing this aggregious mistake.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE:
Google/Blogger has unlocked PostSecret enough to let Frank make one post, with the following message:

(Blogger sent me the following message late last night. Please email them to unlock the PostSecret Blog ASAP. PostSecret has not been fully unlocked by Blogger yet. Sorry, I know this is frustrating for you - it is frustrating for me too.)

Your blog is disabled
Blogger's spam-prevention robots have detected that your blog has characteristics of a spam blog. (What's a spam blog?) Since you're an actual person reading this, your blog is probably not a spam blog. Automated spam detection is inherently fuzzy, and we sincerely apologize for this false positive.

We received your unlock request on September 16, 2007. On behalf of the robots, we apologize for locking your non-spam blog. Please be patient while we take a look at your blog and verify that it is not spam.


posted by postsecret at 11:57 AM

I'm wondering how in the world Blogger/Google thought that a blog with over 95 million hits (yes, that's right, 95 MILLION) was a spam blog. And what does Blogger/Google have in place to make sure that once a blog is determined to be Not Spam, this doesn't happen again?

ANOTHER UPDATE:
WOOHOO!!!! Looks like it's back up. Big donation for Hopeline, Google. Clean up your reputation!

Network Solutions doesn't care about security

We took over maintenance and development of a website for a client we've done software for for several years. Network Solutions hosts their website. Today I discovered that sometime between the last time I visited her site (about two weeks ago) and this afternoon at 4 pm, someone hacked her site and put malicious code in a hidden iframe on three of her pages. I called her, left a message, and fixed the webpages. By the time I fixed the pages, she called back, said she was out of town and didn't have her account information for her website with her and she needed to get back to her group. I told her I'd call Network Solutions and ask them to at least lock the site down so that no one, including me, could make changes to her website until she contacted them to change her FTP password.

After several phone calls, including:

• calling and speaking to someone who didn't speak English well enough to understand what I was trying to explain;
  
• calling back to be told that their support system was down and I'd have to call back in two hours to have the site locked down;
  
• being routed multiple times through their phone system to enter a password to retrieve voice mail for an account I obviously shouldn't have had access to;
  
• finally reaching someone who spoke some English, explaining the situation, and being disconnected when I was put on hold;
  
• finally reaching someone who spoke English and knew the difference between hold and disconnect, only to be told that they couldn't help us after all. At this point I asked to speak to a supervisor, and was told one would call me back within an hour. By this point it's 6:15 pm.
  

By 9:15, I STILL hadn't heard back from Network Solutions, so I called back to be told a supervisor would call me back within an hour. The supervisor finally called me back at 10:05 pm, to tell me that they wouldn't lock down the website. So my client's site is still hanging wide open, waiting for these guys to come back and hack it again. I asked for the supervisor's supervisor to call me back and was told it would be within an hour; I'm still waiting.

Hubby said he's tempted to call them up and tell them he's going to hack our client's website and see if they'd lock it down then, but we're worried about criminal repercussions. You'd think Network Solutions would be worried about the repercussions about having one of their customers' websites compromised and serving pages that could result in the loss of the customer's client base, but it's pretty obvious that they don't. Worst case if they locked the site down is that the person on the phone isn't really supposed to have access to it, and so they've protected their customer from a malicious attack and as soon as the customer notices it they'll call in. Instead, they'd rather contribute to the insecurity of the internet. I wonder if there's some service package they're going to try to pitch when our client calls in to try to secure her site.

The Denver Post needs a new proofreader

The Denver Post throws the kids to the lions. Mountain lions, that is. Fortunately, they recommend taking better care of yourself and your pets.

Maybe they are counting on the kiddos keeping the mountain lions sated enough that they won't eat the rest of us. Since, after all, you don't have to be able to outrun a mountain lion, you only have to be able to outrun the slowest person in your group.

Never forget

When a design team can't handle the truth...

The fellers over at Design Vitality posted an article about logo design, stating:

Your logo is the most important factor in your brand’s identity and it has a huge impact on how users perceive your website, or company.

I made the observation in the comments that their logo actually says "VD". Not that anyone really uses that abbreviation much anymore, it seems to have been replaced by STD. But if they want to be known as the design group you don't want to get too close to for fear of something rotting off, that's their prerogative. Funny, though, the comment disappeared, along with another comment I made inquiring as to where my previous comment went. The only comments that show up on the site now are unabashed praise.

I wonder what working with a design group like this would be like? IMO, the worst developers to work with are the ones that can't stand any sort of criticism, or who flip out and try to silence you when you point out their mistakes. Makes for unhappy coworkers and unhappy clients.