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When I came home from work tonight, I saw this little guy sitting on the border between my lawn and shrubbery. It's the California subspecies of the Western Toad. It started walking for the shrubbery when I got close, but I managed to grab a couple of photos before it made its retreat.

This is the second Western Toad I've seen on my property this year (or the second time I've spotted the same toad). It's a bit late in the season for them to be active, but that's probably because of our mild weather. It'll probably be hibernating soon.

It's kind of neat to see a little bit of nature right in the middle of the city. Just thought I'd share the experience with folks who want to have a pleasant diversion from the acerbic blog atmosphere of late.

More info on California Toads: www.californiaherps.com/frogs/pages/b.b.halophilu s.html

I know how much some people around here admire Sheriff Joe down in Arizona. I wonder what you all think about his recent forced takeover of the Maricopa County computer servers used for email by the Sheriff's Office, Superior Court and County Attorney's Office?

In brief, there is an ongoing lawsuit to give the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office their own computer system(s) fully under their control so civilians won't have access to crime databases and the email of the Sheriff's Office. Currently, the servers that provides those services are managed by civilian employees of Maricopa County and are shared among the above county offices. Rather than wait for the outcome of that lawsuit, on Wednesday, several sheriffs raided the server room of the county and forced out the civilian employees. They then changed the administrative passwords on the servers, so the county employees responsible for those servers cannot access them anymore.

Here's the full story on the take-over:

A judge on Friday has ordered them to reveal the new passwords or be held in contempt. Chief Deputy Hendershott  is refusing to provide the passwords. Full story on this part: www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2009/08/14/200908 14computers0815.html

My personal take as a techie is that the Sheriff's Office handled this inappropriately. They had a legitimate claim that they needed their own servers under Sheriff control because of the laws governing management of crime databases. Had they waited for the lawsuit to progress, it is very likely a judge would have found in their favor given the federal laws on this matter and they could have forced Maricopa County to seperate off the Sheriff's functionality onto other servers that the Sheriff's Office could manage. However, I think that the Sheriff's Office has no right to take over the servers while the servers also manage the Superior Court and County Attorney's Office systems.

They crossed the line when they forcibly took over these systems before the Sheriff's Office functionality was shifted off onto its own servers. They have now declared themselves the system administrators for the Superior Court and County Attorney's Office without the consent of those agencies. They are refusing a court order to hand control of the systems back over to Maricopa County, so they are in essence holding the servers of two other county agencies hostage. While they have a legitimate claim to their own systems, they have NO claim to the systems of these two other agencies. Since all three agencies are sharing the same physical hardware, the Sheriff's Office cannot say only they can access the hardware. They need to wait for the systems to be split onto different physical servers, not sweep in and take over the current shared servers.

What do you think? Did they cross the line?

I'll keep this brief since I'm more interested in other's reactions than ranting on at length. Does anyone else feel like the Governor and certain unions are trying to coerce us into voting for those propositions next week? First we get the "sky is falling" ads for 1A and 1B about elementary schools, police and fire. Now we have Arnold quoting large budget deficits that he claims will increase if the propositions are not passed and saying he released the press release now to "inform as quickly as possible".

Yeah right, I'm feeling like they're trying to railroad the passage of these propositions. I suppose they're hoping people don't realize the majority of them are essentially robbing Peter to pay Paul. And how that can reduce our projected budget deficit for next year as Arnold claims is beyond me, since the tax increases in 1A are already in effect for the next budget year and the rest have no new revenue streams, just move money from one pot (lottery, mental health services, etc) to another. I'm frankly getting quite disgusted with all the appeals to emotion over this special election. How do the rest of you feel?

I got a letter in the mail today claiming to contain "Important Property Tax Information" which I immediately grew suspecious of upon seeing it came from Los Angeles, since any official property tax notice would come from Kern County. Upon opening the letter, there is a very official looking form saying my property is overassessed and I have not filed for a reassessment. Indeed I haven't since the county reassessed my property automatically last year and their assessed value was accurate for last year. Further, the county plans to do that for all properties this year, with notices mailed out in July.

Yet the letter "helpfully" offers to fill out a reassessment for me, as long as I pay them a "discounted fee" of $179. If anyone has gotten a notice from "Property Tax Reassessment" in Los Angeles saying they will fill out the reassessment forms for a fee, dump it in the trash. It's not official and you can do the exact same thing on your own for free. The procedures for doing an assessment dispute are at the bottom of this county website: www.kcttc.co.kern.ca.us/secprop.cfm. Note that you can't even file for a reassessment until July 2nd, so yet a further indication that this letter is a scam. If anyone has fallen for this scam, call the police to file a report about it and cancel the check if it hasn't cleared.

It seems NASA decided to ignore the online poll almost entirely. They did name a treadmill in that node COLBERT (Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill). But alas Firefly fans, there is no Serenity....

You can read more about it over at SFGate.com: www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi

Does anyone know what was causing the foul odor in the southwest area last night? I first noticed it shortly after 11pm when I went outside to take some trash out. It was so strong of a bad smell, that I can't even ascribe any attributes to it other than "yuck". At the time, the inside smelled fine, so I caught up on the blogs here and went to bed. When I got up this morning however, there was a definite chemical odor inside as well. This was much milder (although still nasty) and I'd describe it as a mix between pesticides and rotting lawn clippings.

Since it was smelling fine outside, I've opened windows and doors to air the place out. Good thing I don't need to be to work until 10:30 this morning. I live about halfway between Rosedale Hwy and District Blvd, so, depending upon prevailing winds, I can get odors from Big West or the factories along District. This really didn't remind me of a Big West sort of odor (I grew up downwind of it, so pretty familiar with oil refinery smells), so I'm assuming it wasn't them. Any news about the source of the foul odor or anyone else smell it?

So I just saw a news bit on how Brighton, Michigan has passed a law that imposes a $100 fine on anyone who repeatedly says things that "alarm or seriously annoy" another person. Can you imagine how much people on this site would be racking up in fines if we had a similar law?

I also feel sorry for those who have to enforce the law as people try to use it to get back at those they don't like by registering complaints, hoping it will result in a fine. And Jason thought he has a big in-box on Mondays... just imagine having the job of investigating and enforcing this ordinance.

Link to an article on the law: www.livingstondaily.com/article/20081226/NEWS01/8 12260307/-1/NEWSFRONT2

Next time, remember to remove the toilet paper and towels from the bathroom before shutting the kittens in there for a meal....

They were only in there 15 minutes, but man was it a destructive 15 minutes. Opened the door to the sight of the whole roll of toilet paper all over the floor, partially shredded of course. At least the towels were just pulled off the rack and sat on, not shredded to bits.

This litter of kittens is like destruction on paws. I gave them a paper grocery bag the other day and after 5 minutes they already started shredding it to bits. They've chewed through two AC/DC adapter cords despite me spraying every power cord with Bitter Apple. They've pulled all the push pins out of my cork board and I still haven't found them all. At least I found my favorite pen, which they stole off the desk, while searching for the push pins. They've been banned from the bedroom after one landed on my face claws first while I was sleeping (talk about rude awakenings).

And all this hassle because my neighbor feeds the ferals but does not take advantage of the SPCA spay/neuter vouchers to make sure the ferals aren't reproducing. Silly me thought that the mother cat was the neighbor's pet until I tried to return the kittens to them. Well, at least the momma cat has been fixed on an SPCA voucher now and I know to keep the live trap handy for any other females that show up. I've also told the neighbors about the SPCA program and offered my live trap, but they've yet to borrow it.

Unfortunately, thanks to the animal population overload, finding homes for the kittens (which I have been trying to do for three months now) has been unproductive. As much as I hate having outdoor cats, I know when I've been licked. I already have 6 indoor adult cats of my own, half of which are special needs cats. I just don't have the space for 5 more (and I don't think the stress of so many cats is good for one of my special needs cats as he's been hiding a lot). Once the girl kittens heal fully from their spays, the outdoor training will commence. I've got enough 2x4s and plywood in the garage to build an insulated cat house for shelter and I'll let them in on bad weather days. On the plus side, once I'm putting food out for them, I should be able to lure in and trap any other unfixed feral females in the neighborhood and maybe nip this feral problem in the bud.

I have been having an apparently unique problem with my Smart Meter. No, it's not an issue with the bills; it's the havok it is causing with my battery backup unit (UPS) for the computer. I have an APC BackUPS RS1500 with an extra battery pack that I bought last year for a pretty penny. It was a great unit, until PG&E installed the Smart Meters at my house. Since then, the APC has been switching to battery power and beeping multiple times a day. The general consensus from APC and technological friends is that the meters cause "dirty power" when transmitting data back to PG&E over the power line. This makes my APC think that the power has gone out, when in fact it has not, and it switches over to battery power.

The problem is that this rapid switching on and off battery really kills the life of the batteries. This unit should have lasted me for about 5 years. Now I'll be lucky if the batteries make it to next summer. It was not a cheap unit to purchase and I bought it expecting to not have to replace the batteries for years. At APC's suggestion, I reprogrammed the low voltage threshold to the lowest possible for my unit, but it did not lessen the number of incidents. To further add to my aggravation, the beeping from the other room often wakes me up, even with my bedroom door closed. It beeps one to three times every night. It's gotten me into night-owl mode because if I wait until after the 1am beeping to go to sleep, I can often sleep through the other early hour beepings. This will work while I'm on vacation, but not once I go back to work. Then I'll be really sleep deprived.

Now here's where it gets really annoying (as if being beeped awake wasn't annoying enough)... As soon as my vacation started and I had free time to deal with this, I called PG&E about the issue to see if they could do something about the dirty power the electrical Smart Meter causes when transmitting data to PG&E. They sent out a technician who said "the voltage is fine", which wasn't suprising since he wasn't there when the Smart Meter was transmitting data. He said a supervisor would call me. I've been waiting for over half a month now for PG&E to call me back. I've called them about once every 5 days trying to find out what's up and get the run around. On the last call, I asked if they could put back my old meter since my APC unit was fine with that one. They refused to do that, saying everyone had to go to the Smart Meter eventually and then ended the call saying a specific person would call me back "shortly" (that was 2 days ago).

I'm getting at my sleep-deprived whit's end. I need backup battery power on the computer because I run programs that need to survive short power outages and be gracefully shut down during long outages. So I can't just turn the unit off. My co-worker has a more expensive UPS that does not seem to have the same issue with the Smart Meter, but it would cost over $800 to get the equivalent capacity in that model line. I can't seem to get PG&E to do anything about it even though it's their equipment causing the problem. I'll keep calling them, but I don't seem to be getting anything other than empty promises to be called back.

So, I'm griping here hoping that someone else out there is having a similar issue. PG&E only did something about the Casablance ceiling fan issue because multiple people reported having the same problem with Smart Meters and their ceiling fans. So if anyone else out there has an APC UPS (or any other brand) that has been a beeping fool since their electrical Smart Meter was installed, please comment. If you have a blissfully silent UPS, please comment with the model number so maybe I can find a quiet one for cheaper than $800. Any other ideas will also be welcome.