Published on Monday 24th December 2007 .
In Lewiston, Idaho, a surveillance camera caught video of a man stealing a woman’s wallet from a convenience store counter. The man could not be identified, and a news story was published on the front page of the Lewiston Tribune, complete with a frame from the security camera footage. On the same page of the same issue, the newspaper ran a photo of a man decorating a store window.
Unfortunately for the unidentified man in the surveillance footage, he was wearing the same clothes as the man decorating the store window. The newspaper accidentally identified the thief!
Published on Monday 24th December 2007 .
It’s that time of year again: buying lots of stuff, eating lots of holiday goodies, and dealing with lots of stupid people.
There once was a time that I looked forward to Christmas shopping. The pleasure I got out of weaving in and out of holiday traffic (both on the road and in the mall) has long since been replaced by the feeling of dread about the holiday traffic. I was reminded of this the other day as we ventured into Woodfield. The floors were crowded with kiosks where kids were hocking the wares of shady vendors. People stopped in the middle of the walkways to talk on their cellphones, despite the foot traffic obviously inconvenienced by their social exercise. I did find it humorous that Woodfield has replaced their normally ginormous lighted tree with a much smaller one and an inflated snow globe advertising Fred Clause. Last year, the mall had a little problem when some decorations caught fire near the tree.
On Penny Arcade today was this comic about Gabe’s stolen deer. This is more of what I was expecting to see happen to the six teenagers who were caught after vandalizing a Hoffman Estates man’s Christmas decorations. They didn’t just steal his lights, they caused about $1,000 in damages and dragged the man from their car. Instead of death by holiday spirit, the man chose to not press charges against the teens.
Published on Thursday 15th November 2007 .
U.S. District Judge Robert Gettleman ordered the Illinois State Board of Education to not enforce the recently amended Silent Reflection and Student Prayer Act that I posted about earlier. Township High School District 214 is the only district under a preliminary injunction prohibiting it from implementing the mandatory moment of silence at the start of the school day. From the article:
So for the moment some 860 Illinois districts can essentially do as they wish under the current law, lawyers in the case said.
"District 214 is the only school district in the state that has clear instructions," an attorney for the district, Brian McCarthy said. As for the rest of the districts in the state, "who knows what they’ll be doing tomorrow morning."
It will be interesting to see how this plays out in District 211. As I have stated earlier, I am not a fan of the recent amendment for multiple reasons. Besides the ambiguity of the act itself, there are better things to spend time and money implementing than a moment of silence that takes away from the already limited class time.
Published on Sunday 4th November 2007 .
I just read that third year teacher Kaleb Tierce has been put on paid leave in Texas because the parents of one of his ninth grade students filed a police report alleging that Tierce distributed harmful material. The alleged harmful material? Cormac McCarthy’s 1974 novel titled "Child of God." Here is the book’s description from Amazon.com:
In this taut, chilling novel, Lester Ballard — a violent, dispossessed man falsely accused of rape — haunts the hill country of East Tennessee when he is released from jail. While telling his story, Cormac McCarthy depicts the most sordid aspects of life with dignity, humor, and characteristic lyrical brilliance.
Continue reading ‘This still happens’
Published on Friday 2nd November 2007 .
It will only cost you $10,000 to buy my winning lottery ticket worth $3.7 million. Or at least that is what a scam artist (and I must say that this was pure artistry) told a suburban man in Schaumburg. The victim was told that by the scam artist that he could not redeem the ticket himself because he is an illegal alien. The victim went to his Hoffman Estates bank and gave $10,000 to the scam artist. Shortly thereafter, the scam artist fled with the lottery ticket and the cash.
Police Sgt. Jim Campbell warned residents to be cautious of such deals, saying, "If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is." I don’t know what I am more surprised at: the fact that anyone would fall for such a story, or that someone who had $10,000 put away in the bank would so easily hand it over to a total stranger.
Published on Thursday 1st November 2007 .
Ars Technica has a post about a recent ruling from South Carolina that states that some bloggers are journalists. Blogs and their content had not previously been considered journalism in any legal sense, and this ruling sets a precedent that allows bloggers and the content they create to be protected as journalists and journalism, respectively. It is important to note that the ruling does not by any means declare all bloggers to be journalists. From the article:
The most important section of the ruling is the one dealing with Smith’s status as a journalist. The court admitted that it was impossible to determine in advance whether a blogger was a journalist and so used a "functional analysis" that "examines the content of the material, not the format, to determine whether it is journalism."
So, if you blog, I wouldn’t go posting whatever you want assuming that it will be protected as journalism in court. There are some things to consider when trying to determine if a blog post should be protected as journalism, such as whether a post is backed by researched, whether a post is balanced in its presentation of facts and whether a post is informative in nature.
As a blogger, I try to have a fair and balanced tone, even when it is quite obvious where my opinion lies with respect to a particular topic. In fact, sometimes I wonder if I cloud my own stance by playing devil’s advocate in posts and comments. At any rate, I doubt that there are many posts on this blog that would lead to legal troubles (*knocks on wood* — yes, Brad, I wrote it).
Published on Monday 29th October 2007 .
This is relatively old news on the internet, but Google is now offering IMAP connections to Gmail accounts. IMAP allows you to view your e-mail on the server from various IMAP-enabled mail clients, keeping it synchronized among the different clients. POP3 had been the only other way to view your Gmail account outside of the Gmail site, and that would require downloading your e-mail to a POP3 client or webmail service (e.g. Hotmail, Yahoo!, etc.). However, if you were to check your Gmail from multiple POP3 clients, the clients would not necessarily remain synchronized.
Lifehacker has a quick tutorial on how to setup Thunderbird to take advantage of the Gmail IMAP goodness. You will want to follow their directions to quickly make use of your Gmail tags as Thunderbird folders. Then dump the automatically created Thunderbird folders for Junk, Trash and Sent, in favor of the Gmail folders for Spam, Trash and Sent Mail, respectively. The LH article even shows you how to get Gmail keyboard control in Thunderbird using the GMailUI Thunderbird extension.
I have already started moving my e-mail archive, with messages that date back to 1999, over to Gmail from Thunderbird. Gmail’s lack of IMAP was the only thing that held me back from doing this when I dropped Outlook for Thunderbird earlier this year. Now I can have my archive wherever I check mail. I’ll have to look into Google Apps for Domains for ask-mark.com to complete my Google circle.
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