Just Ducky!!!!!

Okay, the powers-that-be are all excited because they just spent some taxpayer bucks and set up some video conferencing equipment so now we can have parole hearings hopefully without having to transport inmates much or spend money paying travel expenses for the officers. Now the kicker. For the most part, my office doesn't have that many parolees. We are a field office serving 15 counties. To use the equipment, the only rule so far is the officer must travel over 100 miles to get to the hearings. Now most of the prisons are over 100 miles from the office, so that sounds good. However, we didn't get any equipment, so if I set up a hearing, I would have to travel to an office that has the equipment, the nearest of which is about 100 miles away.

One of my fine Americans was picked up recently. He was a probationer who had disappeared 10 years ago. He was recently picked up by federal marshals. His wife and mother wander in wanting to know what is up. They claim they thought this was all taken care of. I point out that he had an 8 year suspended sentence from 1991. He moved without permission in 1994 and had not seen a probation officer since.
"Well, he wasn't really guilty, he was set up."
He pled guilty in court.
"But a friend gave him the money. He bought the cocaine for a friend."

Apparently it isn't a crime if you break the law for a friend.

"Wait Your Honor, you can't convict him of murder, a friend asked him to chop that man's head off."

"Oh, if a friend asked him to do it, it is alright."

"Officer, I wouldn't have raped that woman, but my best friend, Charlie, asked me to."

"You're free to go."

Sometimes life just sucks

Okay the week started good, but then kind of went downhill. First off, my wife sold some of her prize chickens. She got rid of 20, 14 of them just chicks, and was paid reasonably well for them, but the lady who wanted them lives on the other side of the state from us, so we ended up agreeing to meet them roughly half way. If you've never ridden in a compact Toyota car with 14 peeping chicks and 6 caged chickens taking regular craps on the cardboard you've put down just for that reason, on a cold day with the car heater going, you need to try it. Course we were paid and we needed the money, so I count this as good, except for the smell of roasting chicken turds of coarse.

On the way back we stopped at an outlet mall so my wife could spend part of the chicken money. Then we were stopped by traffic. About 30 miles from home a wreck on the interstate stopped traffic for over an hour. This is bad. After about 20 minutes we managed to get to a turn through and went home the back way. Autumn is in full swing and the trees are beautiful here, and this was a very scenic drive, even if longer and out-of-the-way. So I guess this is good.

Then she had to tell her father that we were going to be close so we had to stop and I had to remove some spyware from his computer. Should have hid for the rest of the week I think. Most definitely not good.

I found some sort of virus on my computer despite the 312 different anti-virus, anti-spyware, and firewalls I have installed.

Monday, I had court in a county so small and poor that the courthouse doesn't even have indoor bathrooms. The DA got his wires crossed on my case and instead of getting a new date and leaving at 11:00, I was stuck there until almost 3:00. On the way there, the bank calls and someone has attempted to charge over $100 onto my debit card. Fortunately my overdraft protection is not included on my debit card, so when the money runs out the card doesn't work, so only 1 purchase went through. Apparently from the virus I found. I was able to get a promise of a refund on the purchase of a webcam site membership, but if I ever find Mike with a g-mail account, look out. Anyway I cancelled the debit card and credit cards. New cards with new numbers will be issued but I won't get them until the middle of next week. I get paid by autodraft, so I never have any cash. Now I have no cards, and I am waiting for them to put money back into my bank account. This sucks.

Domestically Violent or Violent Domestically?

I hate domestic violence cases. First off they are never neat, always messy. They are almost never resolved, usually dropped, but if a probationer or parolee gets a domestic assault charge, I have to take a warrant. That means that in addition to the new charge they now have a violation warrant. But I have to do it, because the potential for violence is there and they could be a danger to someone, so I need to get them locked up. After all we would want to see the following on the news.

"Jerry Jerkov, convicted felon currently on probation, was arrested 3 times for domestic assault, before finally killing his girlfriend Nancy Nobrain, by repeatedly striking her on the head with an ironing board. Mr. Jerkov had displayed his fondness for blunt force trauma three times previously by assaulting Miss Nobrain with a waffle iron, a baseball bat, and a crowbar respectively." Mr. Jerkov was arrested all three times and Miss Nobrain arranged bail each time and refused to press charges. Each previous time a probation violation warrant was filed, but dropped when no charges were pressed. Why wasn't this violent offender behind bars? The probation office obviously isn't doing its job."

Quite frankly, the domestic violence charges are almost never followed through. The victim usually drops the charges and if that is the only basis for the violation, that warrant is usually dropped also. If the only violation listed on the warrant is a rule one, basically " I won't commit any crimes while on probation." Then the warrant will be hard to pursue. On the other hand, we now have a rule 14 about abusive, assaultive, intimidating behavior. If that rule is listed and the behavior can be proven, the warrant might stand.

I currently have 2 violation warrants out on new charges of domestic. I expect one to be dropped, but the other will go to trial. This genius picked up a charge for choking his girlfriend. He was granted a bond, but an order of protection was taken. Then my warrant got him, but for some reason, the judge placed a bond on it. Then the day before his probation violation hearing, he gets liquorred up and goes to where she is staying. Fakes being a police officer to get admission, then chases her up the stairs and chokes her again in front of witnesses. I get his bond revoked in court and get an ammended warrant on him.

Then I got to listen to another officer's case where the gentleman had decided to demonstrate true love by forcing his way through the door, hauling his woman up the stairs by her hair, slinging her onto the bed. The climbing on top of her and holding a knide to her throat while telling her he will take her out, then kill himself so they can be together forever. That's romantic!!

Windows Dead Messenger

My wife and I met on the internet. We lived in the same town, but did not know of one another. I saw her on a match up website, answered her ad. She replied and we emailed. Then IM, then telephone. Much of our early relationship could be traced to MSN messenger. I worked third shift as a computer operator, and she would often sit up and we would talk while I worked. It would have been long distance over the phone, but thanks to messenger we could talk a lot. Of course we had to type, but still.

Anyway, messenger has evolved and added many features since those olden days. Now I remember from my sales days, one of the methods of selling is called features and benefits. Basically you tell a customer one of your features, then explain what benefits that would give your customer. Well if you've been living under a rock until recently, an instant messenger is a program that connects your computer to a network service. You have an indentification with the service provider. When you log your computer into that network service, the service notifies everyone that has your identifier listed as a contact that you are online. It also tells you which of your contacts are currently signed in with the service. You can then instantly contact any of those people.

You can also use the messenger to transfer files to a contact. Some firewalls may balk at this though. This feature is probably the single most hated feature as far as corporate IT guys are concerned. This has proven an excellent virus spreading feature. On the other had, if you want to send multiple files, or larger files, it beats the heck out of email. I've transferred reports to coworkers, pictures to family and mp3's to friends this way.

Another feature that people like is the voice call, where you can use microphones to actually talk. You can also transmit webcams to whoever you are talking to. Now you can keep as many typing conversations going as you can keep straight, but you can only voice talk to one contact at a time. You can also only view and transmit one web cam at a time. Otherwise Netmeeting might be in danger.

Microsoft's latest version of messenger is called Windows Live Messenger. It has all the basic features plus a lot of cute new stuff, mostly minor but nice. It is also tied into some other projects that fall under the Windows Live banner, such as Live Spaces, ect. Unfortunately it is also fairly buggy. Last Tuesday, both my and my wife's messengers went out. They didn't give any errors, just refused to connect. Our older accounts still worked fine from the computer, but the current ones would not connect. After about 3 days, I finally found a site that had a link to reset the options in the registry which fixed it like a charm. Very aggravating in a product that is fairly nice otherwise. Apparently this affect not only our 2 computers, but a great many other as well as I was about the 50th person to thank the guy for the fix.

Bigger Equal Not as Good

Okay, what is with the current trend that bigger is always better. A long time ago, I became interested in creating web pages. This was a long time ago and things were much simpler. I search the mostly free internet on my V90 modem and then bought a book on HTML. My first couple of pages were done on notepad and were fairly simple. Later, my brother-in-law, who is a computer programmer by profession gave me an older copy of MS Frontpage and I found a simpler, although sometimes just as frustrating, way to do things. Now at that time there were not a lot of people around doing webstites, so I was able to pick up a little spare cash helping people with this. Anyway, I eventually bought an expensive suite of programs to make ever larger and more complicated interactive sites and although I seldom do a webpage anymore, even a personal one, I have kept the programs pretty up-to-date incase I ever want to.

Well the other day, two of the programs in the suite stopped working. The acted like they had never been completely installed, but I could not install or repair them. There was a little project I wanted to do with one program and after 3 days of fighting and cussing, I finally discovered that I had a conflict with another program and which program the conflict was with.

So I uninstalled both programs and reinstalled, and uninstalled and reinstalled and bashed my head against my desk and repeated, but it seemed that the two sets of software could not be on the computer at the same time and have both work, even though they were doing that exact thing last week. AAAAARRRRGGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!!!

To shorten it some, after adding about 6 million hits to Google I was able to find the 79 individual folders, well maybe only 52, that the programs installed in various places and with various names, on my pc and many of which the uninstall feature did not even touch, and manually delete them all. I also found that the conflicting program shared files with a completely unrelated program by the same company and of course that program had to go also.

I then reinstalled my suite of programs which worked. I then reinstalled my other program which also worked. Then I tested my suite of programs again and they still worked. The third program I just left off until I need it again. That was a lot of stupid work, I do not understand why it is necessary to spread components of applications all over my computer. And why change the names of the installation folders. Some file names were related to the applications, some named after the parent company, some named after the company that owns the application manufacturer. For all I know some of the folders are named after the thirdshift janitor's pet iguana.

Why is it now neccessary for a computer application to do everything in the world. We have operating systems with built in word processors, data base programs, spreadsheets, image editors, video editors, dvd burning software, animation software, and they even mow the lawn and cook supper. I remember when you had an operating system and then you had a different program for every function. For instance you had windows, navigator, word perfect, lotus 123, and d-base. Then internet explorer came out and fought with navigator. MS Word took on WordStar and WordPerfect. Eventually the programs would import other types of files, then sharing files. I remember when buying a "suite" of related programs was bad. You were supposed to use the best program for the job then fight to get the next program to work with the file. You might use lotus to organize your data then fight to get it into d-base. Eventually MS Office won because you could bounce the same file between all the applications without loosing a half day of work figuring out how to import and export in the proper format. It even included a personal organizer and email program.

Store are doing the same thing. I used to like Walmart. I could pick up toothpaste, a cd, a bag of dog food, underwear and a hammer in one stop. This was cool. It also made the hardware store,
clothing store, and music shop go belly up, but it made life easier for me. Then Walmart decided that people needed to buy more stuff from them so now they want me to buy my groceries, tires, mufflers, get family photos made, my dental work done, and buy my contacts there. It's now too big and a pain in the ass. You can't park in the lot during the day. You have to take a shuttle to the store to make it there and back on the same day, and the store is so big that first you need to rent a scooter to get through it and second, you can't find what you were looking for. They need a medium size army to staff the place, but they are only willing to pay a small size army so don't expect to actually find any help if you need it.

Judges

I haven't felt like blogging much lately, but an event yesterday ran a random thought through my brain and I am going to explore it just a little.

You see yesterday was inservice training for the month and I was trying to get actual work done on my breaks. One of the things I did was write a violation report and warrant and my boss signed off on it. I ran it to the judge's office on my lunch break so I could lodge it today. Well part of the warrant request states something along the lines of "before me, Joe Blow, Judge of the Criminal Court in and for X county, TN, personally came Jack Meoff, who, being first duly sworen, says that ........" Anyway, we don't usually see the judge and have always just signed the warrants and the judges sign them and let them go. If there is a question they usually call or send the report back with notes. Anyway, in the last couple of years, some of the judges have reconsiderred. With one judge we sign our stuff, but he calls us and swears us in over the telephone and then asks if each individual warrant request is true. Another, one of my judges who is no longer with us, started having us have the affidavit and warrant notorized before we submit it. The other judge found out and he started doing it. Well the new judge apparently wants to follow suite, and I forgot to have the secretary notorize it before I left. The judge was in the office, but his secretary would not take the unnotorized warrant in to him. Now the sole reason to notorize the note, is because we do not usually catch the judges in and it is a confirmation that it was the officer who signed the report swearing to the facts. If I was there in person and the judge was there, why would I need it notorized? I could swear to the report in person in his prescence as the affidavit states.

Anyway judges come in several flavors around here. City judges are elected or appointed. Their authority extends to strickly the city and they usually hear traffic court and city ordinace violations. They tend to be local attorneys.

General Sessions judges are elected by the county, their authority is county wide, but most decisions are valid statewide. They run the general sessions courts and here preliminary hearings and a lot of civil matters. They also often tend to be local lawyers, who maintain a local practice.

Circuit Court Judges are elected by the judicial district they preside over. They are state judges and are full-time judges with no private practice. They tend to either handle civil or criminal court, although if a criminal court judge is ill, a civil court judge may sit in for him. These are the judges I am dealing with.

Federal judges are appointed and hear federal matters. I have only had to deal with a federal judge twice and I like it like that.

A Tribute

We didn't meet Roxie until she was already about 2 years old. She was to become our third Saint Bernard. Our first Bernard was Missy. We took her into our home while she was about 3 months old. We raised her from a puppy and spoiled her rotten. Her official name is Mozart's Mysterious Mistress. We got her because friends had a male Saint and we intended to breed them, unfortunately the friends decided to divorce and our stud was going out the window. We ended up getting the dog, Beethoven's Baby Baker, or Baker. Since we wanted pups, it was going to be a while. Baker was about 14 months older than Missy, but we were told not to breed until the female was at least 2 years old. Now I had an old Rottie named Angel, who adored me beyond reason and who was my girl. She was old and developed some health issues. At 6 months, Missy was already larger than Angel. When Missy was a little over a year old and came into heat on November 1, Baker took matters into his own paws and went through a hole he shouldn't have fit through and bred Missy. This was litter of pups #1. Despite a vet tech attempting to give us the evil eye for allowing underage doggy sex to take place, everything went well, the pups were beautiful, and we placed them all. The money paid for our wedding and honeymoon.

We decided pups were lots of fun, but we didn't want to breed Missy too often, as that isn't good. So we thought we needed another female. As look would have it, we shortly received a phone call from the breeder Missy had come from. They were getting out of the Saint business, but knew of someone who had a grown female saint they wanted to get rid of. We went out and met our beautiful girl Roxie. Roxie was chained up and paid very little attention too. When she got loose she chased cattle and the owner was afraid she would be shot by a farmer. We made arrangements with the owner who had never registered her. We took possession and registered her complete with late charges.

Roxie was a half-sister to Missy. She was from an earlier litter and was 6 months older, but they shared the same father. Roxie was darker, larger, and had a more squared head. She was strong as an ox, but had no idea how to play. She couldn't fetch or play tug-of-war. All she could do was bounce on you. She was no were near as bright as Missy, but she didn't have the streak of mean in her either. Roxie was the sweetest dog in the world.

Well, her life changed. We were dog fanatics and our family went places. She went on walks, went to the creek and to the river. She went to parks, went camping, went swimming. She wore costumes for Halloween and got Christmas gifts. She went to visit family and go on picnics. She had two litters of pups and was an excellent mother.

On October 2, 2006 at 5 years of age, Mozart's Foxie Roxie departed from our family courtesy of a intentional overdose of anesthetic courtesy of a veterinarian. She had bone cancer and survived approximately 6 weeks after the first symptoms were noticed until my wife and I could no longer justify being selfish and keeping her with us. She was the sweetest dog in the world and god made her last few days on earth beautiful autumn days, for which I am grateful. Perhaps I am stupid, but the dog gave us unconditional love and affection and the last week with us, she could barely get around. She was a shadow of her wonderful self, in pain, and yet, never snapped, never complained, hardly whimpered. She bore her discomfort bravely and I hope she didn't suffer too much. We brought her in and spent a lot of time with her those last 3 days. She ate ham and hotdogs and other treats. She got to sun in private and the nieces and nephews came by to see her and say good bye. She got one last ride in a truck, which she enjoyed.

God provided again in that a man with a bobcat stopped by the vet while we were there and my mother-in-law spoke to him and he graciously agreed to help with the burial for what amounted to fuel money. The ride back was horrible and I remember only trying to drive and cry.

After words, neither of us felt like cooking so we went to get something to eat in town. We passed a billboard that quoted "Blessed are the meek, for they will surely inherit the earth." Then the stupid radio started in with that "Lips of an angel" song and I lost it. Up to that point, I had kept it pretty low key, but I couldn't any longer. The animals are our lives. They make up such a large part of it. I feel bad enough when one of the chickens die, but man, when it's one of the dogs or cats, it's like loosing a member of the family. Roxie isn't the first pet I lost, but it doesn't get any easier.