Archive for February, 2013

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Administrative update.

Friday, February 8th, 2013

In the approximately 24 hours I’ve had WP-Ban in place:

  • It has blocked 874 IP addresses associated with spam. One specific IP address associated with spam attempted to access my blog 211 times, and there are two others that made well over 100 attempts.
  • I am still getting some spam comments, but the total in the past 24 hours was probably just under 100, as opposed to the 600+ I had yesterday. I can manage that. I’m also still actively adding spam IPs to the WP-Ban list, so I am hopeful that the count will go down.
  • I have not had anyone complain that I am illegitimately blocking them from accessing the site.

Posted in Admin | Comments Closed

Emu meat!

Friday, February 8th, 2013

The one thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history:

In 1998, there were some 5,500 farms and ranches across the country raising emus, the gawky, five- to six-foot-tall flightless birds; now, the best guess is that there are 1,000 to 2,000. Once, emus were viewed as a potential growth industry, a godsend to struggling farmers.

…

But several years ago, word started getting around about the oil. The birds, like the ostrich, evolved to store a lot of fat to survive in the outback of their native Australia. Processed and rubbed into a person’s skin, the oil is hailed as a treatment for wrinkles, burns, acne, arthritis, psoriasis and eczema, among other things. It is used in shampoo and cosmetics. Taken orally, it is used to treat cholesterol, symptoms of premenstrual syndrome and allergies.

Posted in Clippings | Comments Closed

Banana republicans on trial: February 8, 2013.

Friday, February 8th, 2013

Yesterday’s developments:

Former councilman and assistant to the food bank administrator, Victor Bello, wasn’t just a rat. He’s also crazy, at least according to his lawyer.

It has been mentioned previously that Bello was banned from City Hall. But the reasons haven’t been discussed until now:

…an incident at a city affair at which Bello thought city manager Robert Rizzo made a derogatory statement about him, the defense attorney said.
“He came up to Mr. Rizzo and confronted him,” Moriarity said. “He got very, very angry. There was yelling back and forth.
“Some people say Mr. Bello grabbed Mr. Rizzo by the lapels. Others say that didn’t happen,” he added.

It could also have had something to do with the condom incident. Moving along, the first witness for the defense was Teresa Jacobo, one of the indicted council members.

…Jacobo testified she made $500 a month when she came onto the council in 2001 and continued selling real estate.

And then one magic day, according to Jacobo, Robert “Ratso” Rizzo and Edward Lee, the city attorney, called her in and told her…

“…I would be able work full time and devote all my time and effort to this community of Bell and I was now getting a full-time salary.”

But Jacobo testifies that Ratso didn’t tell her how much she’d be making. I’m sorry, but if someone told me I could devote all my time and effort to the community and I’d be making a full-time salary, I’d freaking ask what that salary would be.

Much of the defense has been that the council followed Rizzo’s lead, that the city attorney never said anything was wrong with their salaries, and that their positions were really full-time jobs. Jacobo bolstered the portrayal of Rizzo as a control freak who didn’t want council members to speak to city staff or to question him.
“He said I asked too many questions,” she testified.

Posted in California Über Alles, Clippings, Law | Comments Closed

Who would have thought it?

Thursday, February 7th, 2013

You can get botulism from prison wine, aka “pruno“, aka “that stuff that’s frequently fermented in a cell block toilet or other places just as disgusting”.

(You know where else you can get alcohol from, with less risk of botulism? Sourdough starter. No, really; the liquid that separates out and rises to the top if you leave it sit is somewhere between 12% and 14% alcohol. I haven’t tried drinking any of it, but I suspect it tastes a little better than pruno.)

Posted in Bread, Clippings, Food, Geek, Mixology | Comments Closed

Let my people eat bread.

Thursday, February 7th, 2013

My mother sent along an article from the WP that I had missed, “Better bread starts with a sponge“, which discusses some sourdough techniques for home bakers.

I appreciate her sending that along, and have already sent her some comments. But since they’re easy blog fodder, I’ll repeat them here. I don’t really have any problems with Marcy Goldman, or her article; I want to try her “Favorite French Bread“. But there are some questions I have and comments to make.

  1. Goldman quotes Cook’s Illustrated as saying home bakers should “forgo a starter to save time and simply add vinegar for that characteristic acidic taste”. This is, so far, the dumbest thing I’ve read in 2013. To her credit, Goldman does not endorse this, but I expect better from CI and that tweedy little bow-tied jackass.
  2. Why is this dumb? Because anyone can make a starter. It is not the nuclear rocket brain surgery. It isn’t hard. I have made starters and baked with them, and I’m not Thomas Freaking Keller in the kitchen. All you need is flour, water, and time; that’s how the original Alaskan sourdoughs were made. Yeast is a possible addition, but isn’t strictly needed. (I’ll touch on that in a minute.) As far as time goes, you can get a starter going in 72 hours, and it will keep indefinitely with reasonable care.
  3. Goldman’s stater recipe calls for a cup of spring water, 1 1/4 cups of unbleached bread flour, 2 tablespoons each of whole-wheat and rye flour, and 1/2 teaspoon of instant yeast. The starter recipe I’ve been using calls for 3/4 cup of milk, “heated to a simmer and cooled to 100°F”, 1 cup flour (white, whole-wheat, or rye) and 1 1/2 teaspoons of yeast. Both make enough starter for one loaf in their respective recipes; I’ve doubled the recipe amount for my starter, and am feeding it with 1 cup heated milk and 1 cup rye or whole-wheat flour whenever I pull some starter out. That way, I always have enough starter. (I keep it in a crock on the back of my stove.)
  4. Here’s the thing, though: if you’re starting your starter with yeast, aren’t you just…growing more of the same yeast? I mean, if I want Fleischman’s, I can go buy that stuff all day long at the HEB. Or do the natural yeasts in the air eventually overwhelm your starter yeast? I have heard it said that’s what happens with packaged sourdough starter, like you might get as a souvenir in San Francisco or Alaska; you may get it home and bake some bread, but eventually the original strain will get overwhelmed by your wild local yeasts. (That doesn’t mean I don’t want to try baking with one of those starters; I do.)
  5. The one starter I’ve found that doesn’t call for added yeast is Nancy Silverton’s in Breads from the La Brea Bakery. I’d like to try that, but it takes 14 days to get to the point where you’re ready to bake with it, and it seems very fussy. While I was looking up Silverton’s starter, I found this starter recipe from Michael Ruhlman, which doesn’t take 14 days, doesn’t call for added yeast, and also looks like something worth trying.
  6. Speaking of Ruhlman, he’s probably worth a post of his own at some point. (I’ve been reading Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking and The Making of a Chef: Mastering Heat at the Culinary Institute of America, the latter of which I paid $1 for at the Austin Public Library bookstore. At one point in Making, Ruhlman mentions a CIA chef who has a starter he’s kept going since 1985; the book came out in 1997, so that was at least a ten-year-old starter.)

Posted in 2013, Bookmarks, Bread, Clippings, Food, Stupid | 2 Comments »

Administrative note.

Thursday, February 7th, 2013

The volume of spam comments has gotten out of control again; there were more than 600 waiting to be cleaned out this morning. Akismet does a fine job of stopping the spam from being posted (and I can count the number of false positives since I started this blog on the fingers of one hand), but I still have to go through the queue and empty it at least once a day.

In an attempt to mitigate this problem, I have installed the WP-Ban plugin and will be configuring it to block IP addresses, or IP address ranges, that are a source of spam. I feel slightly bad about doing this, but in the 30 minutes I’ve had WP-Ban installed, it has blocked 15 spam attempts.

If anybody runs into problems with this, please let me know. I’ve added my contact email address to the WP-Ban page as well. We’ll see if the Beats by Dr. Dre scumbags, or any of the other spammers, try to contact me.

Posted in Admin | Comments Closed

LAPD watch.

Thursday, February 7th, 2013

I’m not going to snark here, because this first story is sad and awful.

Christopher Jordan Dorner used to be an LAPD officer. He was fired in 2009. Dorner claimed that his training officer kicked a suspect; the LAPD found that claim was false and terminated Dorner.

Dorner has apparently been nursing a grudge since that time, both against LAPD and specifically against one of the people involved in the review process that led to his firing.

Dorner is believed to have shot and killed two people at an apartment complex on Sunday; one of those people was the daughter of the review officer he had a grudge against. (The other was her boyfriend.)

Dorner is now also believed to have shot three police officers earlier this morning, killing one. He has not been captured yet.

But LAPD and the Torrence Police Department have been involved in two shootouts with “vehicles matching the description of the one sought in connection with Dorner”.

“Now it appears neither of them are directly related,” Chase said. “In both of them, officers believed they were at the time.”

In other news, the LA County Sheriff’s Office wants to fire seven deputies for their alleged involvement in a secret “clique” called the “Jump-Out Boys”.

In the case of the Jump Out Boys, sheriff’s investigators did not uncover any criminal behavior. But, sources said, the group clashed with department policies and image.
Their tattoos, for instance, depicted an oversize skull with a wide, toothy grimace and glowing red eyes. A bandanna with the unit’s acronym is wrapped around the skull. A bony hand clasps a revolver. Smoke would be tattooed over the gun’s barrel for members who were involved in at least one shooting, officials said.

The other side of the story:

One member, who spoke to The Times and requested anonymity, said the group promoted only hard work and bravery. He dismissed concerns about the group’s tattoo, noting that deputies throughout the department get matching tattoos. He said there was nothing sinister about their creed or conduct. The deputy, who was notified of the department’s intent to terminate him, read The Times several passages from the pamphlet, which he said supported proactive policing.

Posted in California Über Alles, Clippings, Cops, Law | Comments Closed

School’s in.

Thursday, February 7th, 2013

I’ve mentioned previously my belief that higher education will fundamentally change in the next decade, especially with the growth of online courses. The biggest thing that folks have been waiting on is college credit: almost all online courses that I’ve seen so far (with the exception of university specific correspondence programs) did not offer credit for course completion.

The LAT reports that Coursera, one of the major online course providers, and the American Council on Education have reached an agreement. ACE will recommend that colleges accept four Coursera courses for college credit:

It is usually free to take a course through Coursera and other similar groups, including Udacity and edX. However, Coursera charges students $30 to $99 for a completion certificate for a class taken under surveillance monitoring that includes individualistic typing patterns to prove a student’s identity. For an additional $60 to $90, a student will be eligible for the ACE credit by taking final exams proctored through webcams.

The four courses in the Coursera/ACE agreement are:

  • a pre-calculus class offered by UC Irvine.
  • a calculus class offered by the University of Pennsylvania.
  • two classes offered by Duke in genetics and biodiversity.

ACE is also recommending that universities accept an algebra course from UC Irvine for “pre-collegiate remedial or vocational credit”.

This gives me a chance to mention something else that’s been going on. I previously noted that I was taking the Stanford University/Class2Go online course, “An Introduction to Computer Networks“. The course wrapped up at the end of November, but I’ve been waiting on various things before I posted about it.

I’m glad I took the course. I learned a great deal from it, especially about the lower levels of IP, TCP, UDP, and routing protocols. There was a lot of sweat in this course; I am willing to say that it was probably more difficult for me than any course I took at St. Edwards. Part of the difficulty may have been the self-paced nature of the course; I got a little behind at a few points and had to work hard to catch up. I think the course would also have been easier for me if I had purchased the suggested, but not required, textbook when I started the course. I didn’t do that at the time because the text was going for more than $100; I found a used copy at Half-Price about halfway through the course and paid about $25 for that.

Unfortunately, the Class2Go presentation of this course was also very buggy. You’d watch videos of lectures, interspersed with multiple-choice questions. Except sometimes the questions wouldn’t pop up. You could also watch the videos without the questions, and answer the questions in a separate window; except even then, some of the questions wouldn’t pop up until the third or fourth pass through.

The actual lecture videos, for the most part, played back okay. There were optional guest lecture videos that you could download as well. I did that, but some of the videos are huge, and don’t have smaller versions available. The Jim Kurose video is 1.7 GB and 1:16 long; by comparison, the 720p version of Top Gear’s “The Worst Cars In the History of the World” is 1.24 GB and 1:13 long. This may not be so bad if you’re on the Stanford campus and plugged into your dorm room’s Ethernet, but over a DSL connection? Not so hot.

One of the things I’ve been waiting on is the final “grade”, for want of a better word. This wasn’t a for-credit course, but you could get a “certificate of completion” from Stanford if you scored above a certain point on the two exams for the course. The two exams had a total of 960 points between them; the final decision by the instructors was that a certificate would be awarded to anyone who scored over 500 points.

So I struggled and I sweated and I waited for the light…and I scored over 500 points on both exams. I won’t say how much over 500, but it was enough, and I finally got my certificate of completion a few days ago.

Having said that, I’m not completely happy with how well I did. I’m seriously considering retaking the course when it is offered again this fall, just to see if I can do better with a textbook in hand.

Posted in Clippings, School | Comments Closed

Banana republicans on trial: February 7, 2013.

Thursday, February 7th, 2013

Here’s a surprise from the Bell trial: former council member Victor Bello, mister “$100,000 a year as assistant food bank coordinator” was a rat.

Victor Bello had written a letter to the Los Angeles County district attorney with allegations of misconduct in Bell on May 6, 2009, but was not interviewed until 10 1/2 months later, district attorney’s investigator Maria Grimaldo testified Wednesday. She was not asked the reason for the delay nor what the allegations were.

Here’s a great exchange:

“Your monthly salary as a council member is how much a month? investigator Mike Holguin asks. “You said $3,900?”
“No, no, no, no,” Bello replies, according to the transcript. “It’s about $100,000.”
“A $100,000 a year?” Grimaldo asks.
“That’s as a council member for, uh, for Bell?” Holguin adds.

$3,900 a month is what Bello expected to receive as his pension from Bell.

According to the LAT, Grimaldo is the final prosecution witness, so I guess we can expect the defense testimony to start soon. I’d recommend popping a fresh batch of popcorn for that.

Posted in California Über Alles, Clippings, Law | Comments Closed

Your Austin nightclub trial update: February 6, 2013.

Wednesday, February 6th, 2013

Hussein Ali “Mike” Yassine, previously sentenced to 12 years and 7 months in prison for money laundering, has pled guilty to tax fraud.

The maximum term Yassine could get is three years in federal prison and a $250,000 fine.

Of course, that’s based on Federal sentencing guidelines and it is possible that he will get less time than the maximum term.. I don’t want to speculate on how much he will get; unlike the fairly straightforward case Ken uses as an example, “Mike” Yassine’s case is complicated by his previous conviction, and I suspect also complicated by the “offense level”. (I am assuming the government places a higher severity on cases involving drug dealing, as was alleged against the Yassines, than it does on cases involving whale meat. I’m also assuming the government will argue that “Mike” was the leader of the conspiracy, and not just a flunky.)

It is also unclear, until the judge rules, if “Mike” will serve the tax fraud and money laundering sentences consecutively or concurrently. Heck, at this point, it is unclear if he’ll even be deported after he serves his time:

Yassine, who has a green card, has been contesting the denial of his U.S. naturalization application since 2011. The case, which was on hold during his criminal prosecution, is set for a status conference next week in federal court.

And a couple of other updates that I didn’t post to keep from boring folks:

Posted in Clippings, Law | Comments Closed

Notes from the police blotter: February 6, 2013.

Wednesday, February 6th, 2013

On August 27, 2011, Javier Benitez Jr. stabbed Octavio Olivarez, severely injuring him. Benitez shot and killed Cynthia Olivarez, Octavio’s wife.

Yesterday, Benitez was found “not guilty by reason of insanity”.

The law defines someone as insane if he or she has a “severe mental disease or defect” and “did not know that his conduct was wrong” at the time of the offense. On Tuesday, prosecutors said psychiatric witness experts had diagnosed Benitez with paranoid schizophrenia, one of the most severe mental disorders fitting the definition.

One of the reasons I find this significant is that insanity verdicts in Travis County are extraordinarily rare.

[State District Court Judge David] Crain, a district court judge for two years who served on the county court bench for more than 20 years, said the last person he remembered who was found not guilty on an insanity defense was Jackson Ngai, a former student acquitted by a jury in 2005 after he stabbed Danielle Martin, 56, his University of Texas piano professor.

Meanwhile, in California, Bobby Joe Maxwell is charged with killing three men. Why is this case interesting? Maxwell was originally charged with the murders back in 1984, but the jury deadlocked on those charges, and two other murder charges. The same jury acquitted Maxwell on three other murder charges, and convicted him of two murders. Maxwell spent a considerable amount of time in prison on those two murder charges, but the convictions were overturned in 2010.

At Maxwell’s original trial, the prosecution relied heavily on the testimony of Sidney Storch, one of a notorious group of jailhouse informants used by Los Angeles authorities in dozens of murder cases in the 1970s and ’80s. Storch told jurors that the defendant had confessed to the killings when they shared a cell in a Los Angeles County jail.
Storch, a career criminal, testified for the prosecution in at least half a dozen trials and received reduced sentences and other considerations for helping secure convictions. Other jailhouse informants said he taught them the art of “booking” fellow inmates in exchange for lighter sentences and other favors. The technique involved gaining access to high-profile defendants, finding information about their cases from newspapers and then contacting authorities to offer to testify against them, alleging that they had confessed.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Storch perjured himself at Maxwell’s trial, and that the DA’s office “failed to disclose to Maxwell’s attorneys Storch’s work as a sophisticated informant who had secured benefits from authorities in exchange for his help.” Storch was charged with perjury, but died before he could be tried.

Posted in Clippings, Law | Comments Closed

Banana republicans on trial: February 6, 2013.

Wednesday, February 6th, 2013

There was the local resident who was given a document with false City Hall salaries. There was the food bank coordinator who had no idea one of his volunteers was being paid nearly six figures. And there was the councilman who didn’t realize he was making just pennies on the dollar compared to his colleagues.

Among the witnesses: Bell resident Roger Ramirez. In 2008, Ramirez put in a public records request for the salaries of the mayor and council members.

Ramirez testified that he told [Rebecca] Valdez [the city clerk] the figures didn’t match what he thought was true and that the city clerk appeared worried someone would overhear him.
“The only thing I can tell you is the expression on her face was concern and she looked around with her eyes and didn’t say a word,” he said.

Also, Ricardo Gonzalez:

Ricardo Gonzalez testified that Rizzo hired him in 2005 as the director of business development and relations. He said there was no job description but that Rizzo told him his duties included coordinating Bell’s food bank, which operated as a nonprofit and relied on volunteers.
Gonzalez said all of the defendants volunteered at the food bank and he was unaware at the time that anyone was paid for such work.

The significance of this is that former council member Victor Bello was being paid $100,000 a year as “assistant food bank coordinator”.

And Lorenzo Velez:

Velez testified that he didn’t even realize the council position was paid until he received his first paycheck. He said that Rizzo told him the money was a stipend for expenses he might incur. Earlier testimony has revealed that Rizzo instructed the city clerk to prepare Velez’s salary contract to be a fraction of his colleagues’ pay.

Velez is the only council member who hasn’t been charged; his salary was $310 every two weeks.

Posted in California Über Alles, Clippings, Law | Comments Closed

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