Everybody I've read so far is focusing on whether or not the conviction on the charges was right or not, but that isn't the first thing that came to my mind when I saw the headlines flash up on the screen.

The Judge over-ruled the Jury?!?

The reason this bothers me is rather complex, so stick with me a moment.

In a trial, everybody has their part to play.  The judge explains the law, the lawyers present the evidence and the rebuttal of their opponents evidence, the jury listens to all this and decides how justice is best served.  Note that last part, because if you ask judge what the jury's duty is, he's gonna give you a different answer, especially these days.  The judge is most likely going to tell you that your job is to review the evidence presented and then tell him if you believe the law, as he's explained it to you, was broken by the defendant.  If so, he'll then decide the punishment.

Right about now you should go look up Jury Nullification, Wikipedia has a good entry about it.

Given my recent jury duty stint, and my understanding that the idea of Jury Nullification is one judges would just as soon you didn't know about, my reaction to the judge over-ruling the jury was, "You damned hypocrite!"

Now either Jury Nullification is a valid part of our Justice System (we don't have Lady Legal on our courthouses, we have Lady Justice), or it isn't.  If it is, then the judge should include information about it in his instructions to the jury, the way we did earlier in this countries history.  If it isn't valid, then when the jury returns it's verdict, the judge gets to set the punishment, but that's it, no sitting back and telling the jury they came to the wrong decision as far as he's concerned and he's decided to ignore them.

A defendant is entitled to a swift and speed trial by a jury of their peers, the goal being to see that justice is served.

If the jury can't overrule the law in the interest of justice, neither can the judge!

One of my vacation items is to clean up the archives of the various motion activated cameras I use.  Most of the images are just Peggy and I going through our weekly routine, the occasional package delivery, cats wandering through my yard.  I did catch a picture of a skunk in the backyard last year, but this series takes the prize.

Last January, I got ready to head to work one morning and discovered that the motor on the garage door had stripped its gears.  I got it fixed the same day without any problem.  It wasn't until I was reviewing the motion archives a few minutes ago that I found why the door was scared enough to do something like that. :)

Unfortunately, the driveway cam is a color camera, so at night it only has the garage lights to provide light for it, its normally a daylight only camera.  I almost missed seeing the shadow in the first couple of frames, and couldn't really tell what the hell it was until that last frame.  It's obviously a fairly young moose, an adult would have been large enough to block out the lights from the house in the background.  I don't think it was a deer either, that last frame is a reasonable profile shot and that doesn't look like a deers muzzle.

As people marked as "friend" will have seen, not the best beginning to a vacation I've ever had ...

Two weeks off, my boss called me last night to talk about work stuff and I ended the call with "have fun, let me know how it turns out when I get back." :)

Sleeping in!

I want to get some writing done, I've been slowly plugging away at the next Nas Kan story, maybe I'll get a bit more done the next two weeks.

Got myself a package of steaks and burgers at the store last night and the weather forecast is for clear and sunny for the next five days, BBQ weather.

Want to put some time into upgrading the PC that runs the house, the current system is a 400Mhz 586 clone from over 10 years ago that runs Windows NT.  Time to upgrade the technology a bit. :)

Got some reading to catch up on also, at least a half dozen books waiting on the Kindle for me to start reading

Did I mention sleeping in?

Take a day drive to a nearby college/artsy/fartsy town with Peggy, check out all the eclectic stores, dinner, stop in the middle of the state on the way back that night and actually get to see the milkyway.

More basement cleanup, I've been buying a couple of "some assembly required" bookshelves a week, lining/stacking the walls of the basement with them and unpacking boxes of old magazines and books to fill them.  I can finally see the basement floor in a few places that have been buried for the last decade. :)

I need to make sure I mention sleeping in!

A little work in the yard, I need to replace some old/busted landscape lights and dig a few clumps of crabgrass out of the lawn.  The drip system for the garden needs a bit of TLC also, the lines aren't matching up with where we put plants this year and a few of the things that returned on their own need some serious thinning.

I've been keeping my eye on an ebay store for a honest to ghod pocket watch to replace the one that died and finally found one I liked the looks of.  It's a railroad style watch, open face, just like my grandfathers pocket watch was.  This one was from the Ukraine, I'm guessing that the seller has a small business going in finding things like this, cleaning them up and selling them.  I got it yesterday and it's been keeping pretty good time for the last 24 hours.  It's not a lighting mistake either, the face really is yellowed with age and the original silver finish is worn down to the brass in places.  Not a problem for me, it's a working watch, not a collectors piece.

I just got an order in for some memory for an old HP printer and in the envelope was a mailing label and flyer for a program to recycle memory chips.  Ok, before I thought about it for a moment, it sounds like a good idea, there's a lot of lead/etc in the solder on those memory sticks.

Then I realized who was sending the flyer, a company that deals with obsolete memory for systems that are long discontinued.  What a great scam!  Make people think they're doing something for the environment, when what they're really probably doing is sending you memory that you can check out and resell at a good profit.

Now I don't object to them making a profit, I do give them a sideways look for their methods.  If the flyer had instead asked if the customer had old memory sticks laying around that they might want to sell, I'd have been fine with it.  Hell, I've got boxes of memory sticks going back almost two decades from systems I've gutted for reusable stuff.  Offer me 25 cents per stick and I'd probably make money after accounting for postage, and I wouldn't feel like I'd been scammed.

We begin the renovation of a classic assassin unicorn, built in the late 50's.  This unicorn is still in pretty good shape, the mechanicals are sound though the plumbing could use some updating and repair.  The exterior paint needs to be redone, the original matte black has gotten a bit weathered over the years and the grey primer coat is showing through in a few places.  No serious structural defects were found during our pre-project examination, but the current owner has a few modifications in mind that we will try and incorporate into the general cleanup and renovation work.

So join us next time for a look at this rare gem, you don't see many of these any more.  We'll show you how to properly renovate and repair your unicorn, even if you don't happen to have the extremely rare assassin model.

What are people listening to?

I've started working my way through The Leviathan Chronicles (podcast), then I've got another Callahan's (spider robinson audiobook) lined up.

Ah, the wonderful smell of meat-type-loaf, heavy on the garlic and spices.  One hour and counting until I get to indulge ... :)

It's not a question of "If", it's a question of "How Often".

Those days when every single thing that happens just seems to piss you off even more than you already were, and you know it's happening.

The computer crashes because some programmer at M$ didn't think fixing that bug was worth the time.

Your newspaper didn't get delivered that day.

You stumbled coming down the stairs.

Some battery operated device goes dead and you don't have a spare handy.

Somebody didn't bother to reply to a message you sent a week ago.

Customer service appears to mean Customer Ignore in the Hope They Go Away.

The list just goes on and you feel the urge to put your fist through the nearest wall, except that you know the insurance company would drag you through hell for six months before the "might" pay the emergency room bill.

There are days it doesn't pay to chew through the straps holding you in bed ...

Normally I rant about stupidity I've ran into, but something Peggy has been fighting the last week tops anything I've dealt with recently.

She lives in an old 1890's home that's been divided up into four apartments, the owner decided that after the last few years of peeling paint that this spring was time to repaint the house.  Fine, there's nothing unusual about painting a house, except ...

The owner hired a friend who might or might not do this for a living, and who seems to have all the common sense of a rock.  Last week was our first real week of spring/summer weather, the temp was up into the 80's/90's all week long.  Around Thursday though, this idiot painter decides to begin prepping the house for painting the main body, by making all the tenants remove their air conditioners and then sealing every window with plastic.  Even if you opened them, you couldn't get any air circulating.

Then she decided to take a break for three days.

When I got to Peggy's place Friday evening, the heat was insane, so I opened the window, cut the plastic and reinstalled her AC.  Took me all of five minutes, and it would only take them that long to tape up the plastic again when they finally started painting on Monday.

Nope, they raised holy hell about it.  The painter doesn't have AC, so the tenants obviously didn't need it either.  Peggy was delaying and obstructing their efforts to paint the house, I'd damaged the window somehow, etc, etc, etc.

All I can think at this point is that the painter has spent too much time inhaling paint fumes, there obviously isn't a single working neuron in that brain at this point.  The owner of the house is of course siding with her friend, so Peggy's getting it from both of them, which just pisses me off even more.

How the hell can you seal up a building that people are living in during hot weather and expect them to just swelter in silence?  The stupidity of the painter and the insensitivity of the owner has set a new record in my book.