MichaelRunyon.com – All Things Geek

Well, yesterday was the conclusion of the burglarly/theft case against the juvenile that broke into my house. The short story is that he was found guilty on two counts of Felony C burglarly and theft (one of each). I found out that he’s already been on probation since the incident, since he tested positive for marijuana at the time of the arrest, and that he’s been failing school, etc. Kinda a sad story, according to his probation officer, he’s actually a pretty smart kid that ended up in the south side gang. More on that in a bit.

He won’t be formally punished from the court until the middle of June. That’s how far back the trials for that court stretch out. But, I am just happy to be done with this process. Including the two prior times that I went to the court and waited for the trial with no result, this trial took up about 10 hours of my work time. The prosecutor that I was working with had 9 hearings concerning the case (not all of them neccesarily trials, but prior arguments, etc). He was also very happy to get “the W”, and that all of his witnesses showed, and that the judge allowed into evidence all of his stuff.

We discussed with the probation officer what the probable steps for punishment might be. The first and most likely step is an upgrade in probation, where he has to meet with a counselor for a session and a drug test 3-4 times a week, including during school. Any infractions met during this period will warrant a further punishment upgrade to option #3 (we’ll get to that). He’ll also have to enter a drug testing/rehabilition facility to check for other long-term signs of drug addiction.

Possibility #2: a costly, 18 month boot camp experience in Arizona, where the boys are disciplined but also given vocational training, etc. The probation officer mentioned that this was unlikely to happen for most individuals, because it costs the state $50,000 to send a kid there. Yes, that’s a whole bunch of money to rehabilitate a juvenile for 18 months. They typically only send kids there that show signs of promise if they are removed from their environment.

Option #3: boys town/juvy/prison, whatever you want to call it. It’s a prison for male children (up to 18). According to the prosecutor, the state DOC (juvy) is probably the 2nd worst prison in the whole state, that many kids are violently killed or what have you there. He said the state would only recommend that facility to an individual with repeat or more serious offenses. There is another facility more local to South Bend that he would likely go to if that decision is made.

The trial was strange. It was terrible and kinda cool at the same time. The terrible part: I had to sit in the prosecutors office for nearly 2.5 hours waiting for the trial, and every 10-15 minutes there was an initial financial hearing for each and every child support case, where the parents told how much they made, whether it was hourly/salary, whether they had insurance, whether they had other children, and if they supported them, etc. Not a single one of the people that I heard (more than 10 cases) had insurance, and 9/10 had goverment health care of some type (medicaid, etc). Also, the waiting. Like I said. I got there at 1 and the trial didn’t start until 3, and the trial didn’t end until 4. Long time.

The trial felt a bit overblown. There were two physical witnesses and a taped witness/cross-examining that was played back for the court. The public defender tried to play every trick in the book, sometimes asking the same question about 10 different ways. The arresting officer had a bit of a problem with remembering exact details, but was allowed to refresh his memory from his report. The defender attempted to play the race card, the fact that he didn’t run when approached, that no one actually saw his enter the house, no one saw his carrying the stuff, etc. But the judge ruled that the circumstantial evidence was great enough to convict him of both. (Basically, no one saw him in the house and with the stuff, but my house was broken into, and the neighbor saw those kids in my back yard, and they were found with the stuff, from my house. The logic train does not require an eyewitness every step of the way). More or less, this kid didn’t plead guilty because his grandfather though that he could beat it, and they were essentially counting on one or more of the witnesses not showing up to court.

Very interesting to actually be involved in something that you see on TV and in movies all the time. But, essentially, the system is broken. That kid is in a gang, and if probation gets in the way of getting high or being with the gang, then I’m guessing that the gang is probably going to take precedence. I mean, really, are they going to chase a juvenile parole violator very far? I don’t have much faith that what happened will more than ornamental consequences, but I feel that I did my part to bring to justice someone who might possibly do the same to others, and it feels good to enact whatever justice is possible, effective or not.

It’s also still so lucky that my neighbor was outside and had the good sense to call the police so quickly. Leah and I should have done a better job with rewarding them for that, though I’m certain that they were vindicated by the detention of one of the kids, and I’m sure that they’ll be happy to hear of the conviction as well (if they remember it, as it was 7.5 months ago).

So, last week, while tending to the yard (futile task though it may be…) the neighbor from two doors comes into the yard and apologizes that she got a piece of my mail and forgot to give it to me 2 weeks ago. I’m not sure where most are coming into the story of the ongoing saga of the burglary of my house in September, but the basic rundown is as follows:

- Two 15-year old (black) teenagers break into my house, presumably through the window above my kitchen sink (facing the backyard, where no one would be able to see them. They take 2 laptops and a larger folding knife that I have and then exit through the back door (the 3-seasons room and leaving the locked door to that room wide open, and the screen door that is locked from the inside open as well.

- Leah comes home and discovers our cat sitting out on the front step, comes into the house, realizes there is a note from the police by the telephone that they have been through our house and to call regarding a case number

- We drive down to the police station and wait in line with a bunch of other people, mostly waiting to get their settlement checks from car accidents and the like. We have to pay $5 to get the report and the details of the report, and still don’t know what’s going on.

- The report tells quite a bit about what happens. They arrested one individual, property recovered, estimated values, who called it in, etc.

- We call for days trying to get a hold of the arresting officer or someone who knows more information about the incident. Never a call back, never able to get a hold of the officer.

- The neighbors from across the street catch us leaving for dinner a few days later and fill us in the rest of the details. She was walking her mother (in a wheelchair) down the sidewalk across the street from our house and saw two (black) teenagers that she’d never seen before kinda getting a scope on our house. They go to the back and came back down the driveway, then to the back again and then are in the house for about 2-3 minutes. At this point, she gets out her cellphone and calls the police. The cop who responds is parked just about 1/4 mile down the street, and catches the two kids before they even get one block away. They attempt to shove the computers in a backpack under a vehicle, and he cuffs one, and the other runs.

- We get subpoenaed about a month later to appear in court about the trial for the kid that they caught. We are coming from my sisters wedding early that morning and then get up early to the courthouse, where we are supposed to be having a pre-trial meeting. We wait for 2 hours for anyone to show up. No one does. The arresting officer finally shows up, and then an hour later, the prosecutors show up. That’s both prosecutors for the JJC, 3 hours late. Then, we sit for another hour, before we finally go in and find out that there aren’t going to be any trials that day, and they claim that someone should have left a message on our machine. No messages. We talk to the other prosecutor, he tells us that no one knows anything about the trial, and the prosecutor that I talked to on the phone previously has dropped the case, and the kid has been released from custody nearly 3 weeks prior.

- Trial #2: I get a summons about 2 months later, and I show up to court. This time, I talk to another prosecutor, she gets some information, and tells me that the neighbor who called in the incident has made a video deposition, as she could not be there because of her mother’s illness. I show up and wait an hour or so.

The prosecutor informs me that the defendant is pleading not guilty, and saying that the owner of the house (me) is a friend of his, named “Taekwon” and that I gave him permission to take those items from my home. I respond that I don’t know him, that I’ve never seen him before, and that I didn’t give him permission to take those things. I talk to his attorney, and she asks me the same questions. She is rather despondent about how easily I am able to reject his claims. I presume that she is either a public defender or a lawyer hired on his behalf.

After waiting for another hour or so, the prosecutor briefly goes in the courtroom and then comes back out, telling that she’s very sorry, but that the case has been continued, until April 29. I ask why (obviously). She tells me that the judge asked about the witness who made a video deposition, and when attempted to play back the tape for the judge (before the trial) the playback device broke, and so the judge delayed the trial, as there was no way for it to be played back (the other device was in session at the other courtroom). I am speechless, and can’t believe how ridiculous all of this is thus far.

So, back to the beginning. Now, I’ve been served with two subpoenas (the first was found in my bushes about a week and a half after it was submitted). There are no signatures of delivery on the subpoenas, no names given of deliverers, nothing certifying their delivery. The 2nd one was delivered to a house with the 2nd number different than mine, and to someone with an entirely different name. And, to top it all off, if I hadn’t shown up and the court would have needed my testimony (as I am the property owner), I could have been punished by the court.

So, Tuesday, I go back to court, to hopefully end this trial for good (223 days after the incident). It’s no wonder that many have no faith in the justice system. I know that this trial is only for a somewhat minor incident, and that it’s a juvenile, and probate court (no possibility of incarceration, barring contempt or something), but you’d still like to feel like people are taking it and you seriously. You’d still like to feel like justice might be done, and that you could sleep a little better at night, knowing that kid is probably thinking twice about doing that kind of thing again. At least once this trial is over, there will be record that individual has committed a crime, and the next time they hopefully won’t be so easy on him.

I typically use uTorrent for my torrent downloading purposes, and stopped pdating it a while back with the advent of uTorrent’s acquisition by BitTorrent, Inc. But, with Comcast doing hardcore packet resets for torrent traffic of all types, I was major problems using torrents (especially with DHT). My upload rates sucked and I was never able to login to DHT trackers. At all.

Enter the pact with BitTorrent and uTorrent, working on encryption to help defeat the RST packets that Comcast is sending out. I was previously using uTorrent 1.6.1. After installing uTorrent 1.7.7, and enabling all of the outgoing encryption and DHT settings, I am immediately logged into DHT and my upload/download speeds have dramatically increased. Certain torrents whose access to trackers was totally blocked are now working just fine.

So, if you have Comcast and are having trouble with BitTorrent, give the new version of either uTorrent or BitTorrent a try. I’ll have to ignore my uneasiness about the agreement with PeerFactor in light of this new development in actually working torrent-ness.

So…

Yesterday, during a particularly bad day for things going wrong already, AT&T (whom we get business DSL services from) went down and stayed down until the early morning hours. After playing around with the settings on the router/modem, I went home (where I have comcast) and tried to get some of the critical work done. Turns out that the client we were working with, however, also lost Internet, and so their internal server couldn’t connect to webserver to synchronize databases anyway. Gr…

So after all of that, I come into work today, where the line is thankfully back up, and find out that all of that trouble (the outage extended to the entire Northwest Indiana area) was caused by the theft of copper by a single individual. Ok, now, from an economic viewpoint, copper is ridiculously easy to obtain for its value. Copper, driving most of the cable market, especially in the emerging world, is just one of the commodities that has skyrocketed in the past 12-18 months. A fairly serious amount of copper (50-100 pounds) is worth nearly $400-500. Some people, who are desperate to make money, know that a huge amount of copper lies in the wirings of the telecommunications industry( fiber and copper trunk lines).

The loss of productivity/business for local area businesses easily numbered in the millions, possibly billions, if you consider that the entire regional area for AT&T was cut, that’s nearly 400,000+ people, with businesses unable to process credit card transactions, look up account information, read email, etc. The loss of time and money goes through the roof. Aaron and I were at Jersey Mike’s (an area sub shop) went the cable was cut, and didn’t know it at the time, and thought it strange that the other customers with only credit cards weren’t able to pay for their food. Jersey Mike’s lost $50 worth of business in just the few short minutes that we were standing in line. Magnify that to a much larger area (as Jersey Mike’s is pretty small) and you can see what I mean.

Most businesses in the area don’t have much other choice besides AT&T, as AT&T is hell-bent upon recreating Ma Bell through a vast array of mergers and acquisitions. There is no other cheap DSL alternative in the area, with Comcast Business Cable being the only other major network, aside from regional carriers and Point-to-Point connections. Every single one of those lines went dead.

Researching a bit on the net about copper theft in other instances shows that it is a 3rd degree burgulary, punishable by 1-5 years in prison (doubtful that they would serve at all on 1st offense, likely a number of months for 2nd offense). So, if you or I did something that would kill the business of the entire Northwest/central Indiana business operations, you would hope that individual would be charged and punished with a lot greater than a 3-6 month sentence. I know that a lot of local businesses would to get a piece of whatever guy did that.

Yesterday, I saw the first signs of life of the Hillary campaign in humble Indiana. I had remarked to some co-workers earlier in the week that I could not understand how Hillary was still doing so well in the polls, as I had likely talked to over 100 people about politics over the last few months, and absolutely none of them had mentioned that they were planning to vote for Hillary.

I saw a large group of supporters standing where the anti-war protesters usually stand, in front of the library. I nearly honked, as I always honk in support of the anti-war protesters, until realized that nearly all of the people were women (which seemed strange) and that they were holding signs that said “Hillary” instead of “F*ck Bush”. Close call.

Obama and Hillary both have made recent runs through the South Bend area, trying to garner suppport for the upcoming Indiana primary. Kinda strange to see any kind of attention being paid to the Indiana primary, as it’s so late in the primary season that nearly all of the candidates will have dropped out already. This is already the case for the Republican primary, as “100 Years” McCain pretty well has the nomination sewn up.

Ron Paul/Ralph Nader 2008!

So, after we talked some the last few months about how it would nice to get Niobe (our current cat) a playmate, and that it would be good for Nigel too, Leah found a free kitten in the paper, and we went to go pick it up today.

It was in Mishawaka, over by Fir and Clover, close to the train tracks. She is very, very little. She’s only about 7 weeks, which means that she’s just now ready to start eating solid food. We picked up some formula for kittens on teh way home, just in case she decides that she’s not ready for solid just yet.

Her mother was a coon-looking cat, like Niobe, but a bit smaller and short-hair. Her dad was apparently much larger, which probably makes him a coon as well, as Dahlia has the trademark 5 toes, just like NIobe did. She’s pretty feisty, unafraid of either the cat or the dad, despite aggressive licking from the latter.

She has yet to poo and eat solid food, and we’re looking to find her a place to live for the next few days/week, until she gets acclimated to the pets and the house. I’m thinking about putting her in the guest bedroom, but I don’t remember if Niobe cried all night, and i don’t want her to keep us up all night, like NIgel did.

More details to follow when I know more. We’ve named her Dahlia, and only tentatively, as we’re only about 90% certain that she’s actually a girl. When they’re that young, it’s really difficult to tell.

New Kitten – Dahlia

Here’s a link to my Picasa album with the pictures that I too tonight when we got her.

Yes, our pets look monstrous next to her, but that’s just because she is so tiny.

Wonderful day yesterday. Absolutely beautiful weather. I’ve got blisters on my hands from raking up leaves and dead grass from my yard all day yesterday, and seeding and fertilizing. But hopefully all of that work will results in some less patchy grass and more beautiful lawn. We shall see. I know that some of the neighbors have some great looking lawns. Maybe I will ask them what they are doing. And if the work is worth it.

I still have about 12 stones to dig up from the backyard, and more raking, seeding, and fertilizing to do. I think that I may have to get out there with a rake and rake in the seed for it to take root like I want it to. The problem with all of this is that I have to wait like 3-5 days to see any results, and by that time, it’s been a week of sunshine and early growing season, and it might be too late to do the right thing. In my little world of instant gratification (software either works or it doesn’t), I keep compiling and trying fixes until stuff works. But I can’t kick-start the init.d process for grass (/etc/init.d/grass start).

Maybe I need to try compiling in water or something. I should check the documentation for flags.

I also saw my cat do something funny this weekend. I had a glass of water sitting on the longer side of the desk next to me. She jumps up on the desk, and then pokes her face in the water glass, trying to drink out of it. Normally, I would stop her, but don’t really care this time. Her tongue can’t reach the water, so she dips her paw into the glass, then cups it and licks the water droplets off her pads. She does this about 4-5 times, and then takes off. She does it again about 2 hours later. So strange….I’ve heard of Maine Coons doing stuff like this before, but I’ve never actually seen her voluntarily get any part of herself wet.

After talking to the next door neighbor the other day (who works for the city and hears nearly everything that goes on) about some drive-bys that happened about 8 blocks south and 6 blocks west of our house, and hearing that the neighbor on the other side of us had her house broken into, Leah and I weren’t feeling too good about the neighborhood crime situation. When we first moved into the neighborhood, the people told us that there were some issues with a couple individuals in the past, but that the police presence in the area has really stepped up and that the area seemed nearly totally clean.

Well, we had our house broken into in September, and two laptops taken. Granted, the actions were perpetrated by two very loudly dressed, stupid individuals, who were reported by the neighbors and caught immediately, it still violates the feeling of safety that you have when you’re in your house, especially at night. I know that Leah doesn’t sleep as well as she did prior to that incident (and we’re still waiting for the trial for that incident to get finished. He claims that I was his “friend” and I let him take stuff from my house all the time. Oh, and that my name is “Taekwon”. If you haven’t seen pictures of me, I don’t look like a “Taekwon”. ).

So, I was very dissapointed when going on a walk the other day, and found that the 2 stone markers at the corner (1 house away from us) had been spray painted with apparently gang slogans.

It’s just really irritating to share a community with people intent upon harming and damaging the property of ours so that they can benefit or feel satisfaction. What’s especially interesting is that those markers are kind of the dividing line into one of the most wealthy neighborhoods in the whole city (at whose north border I reside). For such audacious behavior to take place there is pretty strange, considering that there is nearly constantly cars sitting at one side of the light and cops going by about every 5 minutes.

So, Leah and I put a new desk in the office. We had both been complaining about the lack of space to do paperwork and other such things, and the desk that we currently have doesn’t have much room to spread stuff out on since most of it is taken up with the computer and related peripherals. So, we decided that we’d like an L-Desk, so that the computer could live on the short side, and the rest of the desk would be free for workspace.

After we searched most of the area brick and mortars for desks (and found them to be expensive), Leah eventually found a desk online at Staples for $89 (with free shipping, too). They delivered it the next day for free (Staples has proven to have awesome delivery, after multiple experiences with work and home). After putting the desk together, this is what the office looks like:

So, this is what we’ve decided to spend some of our tax return money on. Plus, a pretty solidly put together (if we do say so ourselves) L-Desk, at less than $100…can’t beat that. Not even with a stick.

We also contemplated finishing the ensemble with a duplicate monitor for the true productivity workspace, but I think that we’ll save that for the future. It’s quite nice to have 2 at work (neccessary, I would even argue), but 1 is sufficient for the home office for now. Were I doing more work from home that I presently am, I would be insistent upon getting another, but it’s not a big deal at the moment.

So, I’ve been trying my hardest to get Squirrelmail properly setup with virtual domains. This led me in the direction of the plugin, vlogin.

After configuring vlogin with what seemed to be the proper config (an array of the domains that are on the server), I can now customize the domains and their ability to login into the IMAP server, as well as look and feel of the application based upon their settigns. But the only problem that I continue to have is that of sending email from the correct domain.

when you first setup Squirrelmail with the included conf.pl script, you are asked what domain you want to send from. If you choose localhost, then any mail that you send from the server, despite having configured the virtual domain settings, comes appended with the primary domain’s domain appended to the sending address. This is because IMAP can’t handle the logins with the domain appended, and once the domain is stripped from the username in the initial login, then just the login is sent to the sendmail sub-process, and the root domain (not the virtual domain) is appended to the login in the outgoing “MAIL FROM:” tag.

More to follow when/if I can figure out how to arrange a login and proper sendmail configuration.