Lee.org

The House voted to bar Planned Parenthood from federal funding on 2-17-11. They cut funding for HIV tests, cancer screenings, birth control, and more, putting millions of women and families at risk. We can’t let it go unanswered. It’s time for you and me to stand with Planned Parenthood. Sign the open letter to the reps who voted for this bill — and to the senators who still have a chance to stop it.
http://www.istandwithplannedparenthood.org/

Yes, this is real. The National Right to Life Committee and StopTheAbortionAgenda.com is strongly in favor of this amendment. Nuff said. I signed the Planned Parenthood petition.

Though it’s doubtful the bill can really stand… Here’s some snippets from OpenCongress Blog. Read the whole article there.

…
First, the Senate, which is still controlled by Democrats, will never agree to this. Some Republicans – namely Sen. Olympia Snowe [R, ME] and Sen. Susan Collins [R, ME] – have even said that they would oppose an attempt to block Planned Parenthood from receiving funding. Senate Democrats are confident they have the votes to block this.

The second problem is that it is clearly unconstitutional. Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution forbids Congress from passing bills of attainder, i.e. laws that punish a specific individual or group that have not been given a judicial trial. The Republicans passed a similar bill of attainder last year against the community organizing group ACORN that resulted in the federal government being sued. The Republicans may want to repeat that, but nobody else does.

One more thing to be clear on here. Planned Parenthood does not receive federal funding for abortion services. That has been against the law since 1974. They currently receive funds for other health care services, like cancer screening and family planning. But abortion services are subsidized exclusively by private donors. This amendment is about killing Planned Parenthood, not about blocking public abortion funding. That’s already blocked.
…

I just sent this email to info at crimespotting dot org.

I’ve noticed that very few murders are reported on http://sanfrancisco.crimespotting.org. From May 2010 to today I only see 3 murders, all in November. The San Francisco Police reported 50 murders in 2010 (http://informant.kalwnews.org/2011/01/san-francisco-sees-murder-spike-despite-crime-drop-in-2010/). http://oakland.crimespotting.org doesn’t seem to have the problem of underreporting murders.

Do you know why this is? It would be good if something could be done about it. I’d appreciate a response.

Thanks

For a while I thought that San Francisco’s murder rate was MUCH lower than Oakland’s, like 10 to 1. It appears that the Oakland murder rate is twice San Francisco’s (.21 murders per thousand vs .11 murders per thousand)

I’ll keep you, fair reader informed as to the results of my query.

I’m on a plane back to the mainland. That was a whirlwind, exhausting trip! Jumping on cars for 6 hrs a day in 87 degree, humid and no wind never felt so… umm.

That said, the night hike (almost) to Manoa Falls was pretty awesome. Discovering a 100 ft tall wall of a tree by spotlight is pretty awesome and spooky! And at one spot, right near the entrance t the park, the trees above looked like the sillouette of an incredible circulatory system, wow!

I have 2 tickets to see Robert Ballard in San Mateo Wednesday night. Want to join me?

Undersea robots, adventure and Leonardo Dicaprio!

Call or email. More about Robert Ballard.

This note is so I can remember this for myself. Brent at work tells me that if you need to put a rack on a vehicle and you need it to be done right, especially if it’s a difficult install (ie. drilling holes in the roof of your car), these are the guys to do it.

http://www.racknroad.com/

Their nearest locations to me is San Carlos and San Jose. A bit of a trek, but worth it for tricky installs.

I just got an Android phone, AT&T Samsung Captivate SGH-i897.

What are the essentials for this phone? Here’s what I’ve got so far to change the phone from PITA to awesome

Google Voice – ($free) to avoid the ancient “You have 2 new messages. To listen to your messages, press 1” and replace it with visual voicemail on my phone and computer. Installing it was ridiculously easy after spending an hour hunting on the forums. I went to my (pre-existing) google voice account online and clicked Settings | Voice Settings | Activate Voicemail next to the description of my phone. I typed a few characters into my phone to enable forwarding and Tada!

Touch Calendar Free – ($free) so I can look at my entire calendar at a glance. I can’t navigate around it smoothly but it’s better than the default calendar

RealCalc – ($free) stupid Samsung put the buttons on their calculator in the wrong places! It’s stupid! RealCalc has the buttons in the right places and a lot of bells and whistles that don’t get too in the way

Hi-Q MP3 Recorder – ($3.00) the built in voice recorder sounds like crap and has a mediocre interface. This one is a lot better.

Screen Filter – ($free) The phone is blindingly bright at night. Even at the lowest brightness, it is an excellent flashlight. It is dangerously bright when trying to use the GPS in the car. Screen filter works well to put some kind of “software filter” in front of the screen. Sometimes it turns itself off but it mostly works great.

No fix yet – The AT&T Samsung Captivate (SGH-i897) has 4 buttons at the bottom of the screen. Actually they are “soft” buttons with no tactile feedback. Well, after 3 seconds of inactivity, they turn off, making it impossible to find the buttons in the dark! I don’t have a fix for this yet. I heard of an app called something like “Keep the Lights On” or some such but I lost the reference to it and I have to root my phone to install it. PITA.

I’m still not ready to switch to Gmail as my primary email but it’s working well enough. I’m not switching because: 1- last week the gmail at the office was running slow a while due to Google’s fault. 2- Also last week Google switched our office’s Google Docs interface to something newer and betterer. I wish they had asked/told us before doing that!! I don’t care how new and exciting the new whatchamacallit is, not mentioning that things will be changing freaks me out. It reminds me of the absolute power they have over my email.

NoLed – ($free) when you miss a call, there is no blinking light on the phone telling you that you missed it. Uncool. NoLed fixes that. It might draw too much battery, the jury is still out.

3G Watchdog – ($free) It is difficult… impossible to tell what apps are doing on the phone. They could be downloading porn, burning up your monthly data quota. This should tell me if that happens. The ethos of the platform is pretty much that programs can run in the background whenever they want. That kinda freaks me out.

Battery Graph – ($free) I’m a program to keep track of my battery usage because I haven’t really figured out what drains the battery the most. Some users see 5 hours of battery life, some 30. I really really want to have 30 and not have to think about it.

Installing programs is nerve-wracking because so many apps want access to my data. Does Facebook need access to my Contacts list? If I give that cute new game the power to read and write to the SD card, will it be able to steal data and send it to Russian spammers? The “community” is no help because as of yet, I haven’t come across any group that has recognized malware; there is no procedure for dealing with malware!

The places to look for help appear to be (in decreasing order of usefulness)
http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/
http://androidforums.com/
http://www.xda-developers.com/
http://www.appbrain.com/
http://www.androidcentral.com/
http://www.androlib.com/ ??
http://www.samsung.com/us/support/owners/product/SGH-I897ZKAATT

So, dear reader, what am I missing? Comments welcome.

It’s a beautiful sunny day in the mission, 72 degrees or so. It’s been snowing in Dallas for the Super Bowl. That reminds me of the energy saving, time saving, easy-read, handy, dandy San Francisco thermometer Jon Foote built:

Computer running slow. Virus? New Android drivers? Jury is still out.
New girlfriend maybe not girlfriend.
Fancy Android phone still a PITA… though getting better.
Boss yelled (yes, yelled) at me for no good reason.
Feeling very ungrounded.

I’ve still got my friends though.

I’ll be teaching a class with the Institute of Urban Homesteading in Oakland on the evening of May 18th :-) Wanna learn how to make bread the EASY way?

Here’s the description.

Making bread is easier, faster and more flexible than you thought. You can make fantastic bread every day inexpensively with less than 10 minutes effort, including cleanup! In our class, you’ll learn a set of techniques that will let you minimize the ordinary and maximize the extraordinary parts of making bread at home.

Some things we’ll talk about: instant yeast vs sourdough, refrigerated dough, crust, crumb, shaping, amendments, the chemistry and biology of bread, and the thousands of varieties of this staple food. Once you have the foundations, you’ll see bread recipes as suggestions instead of steps to be followed. The sky is the limit! We will eat and bring home what we make in class.