Later On

Kim Murphy in the LA Times:

Was it fate that brought the thief directly to her that day? Hubris? Malice, perhaps

It was impossible to know. Yet there was Michelle McCambridge, a 23-year-old JCPenney salesclerk, looking at the woman who not long before had stolen thousands of dollars worth of jewelry, video game consoles and other merchandise by claiming to be Michelle McCambridge.

As their eyes locked, McCambridge felt herself go numb, a mix of adrenaline and anger. The woman in front of her stood impassively.

"Oh my god, I can’t believe it’s her, I can’t believe she’s there," McCambridge recalled thinking. "I remember wanting to go and knock her out myself."

The odds of an identity thief trying to pull a scam that involves one of her own victims must be a million to one, federal authorities said. In this case, McCambridge not only clued into the doppelganger, but her quick response helped topple an identity theft ring that had targeted more than 40 victims around Washington state.

"These are some of the most difficult cases to work because they’re so . . . time-consuming. But when Michelle recognized her and pulled the [store surveillance] video, it gave us a fighting chance," said Joseph Velling, the special agent for the Social Security Administration who led the investigation.

Identity theft is one of the fastest-growing frauds. Last year, the Federal Trade Commission received 313,982 complaints. But law enforcement authorities said that an estimated 65% of identity theft victims, probably mindful of the dismal odds of catching the culprit, never even call police.

McCambridge’s ordeal started in January when …

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Ethan Ham’s blog has a link to a great set-up for creating fun. Check it out.

I realized this morning, feeling my face and thinking, “What a great shave,” that I never had such a thought when shaving with cartridge razors.

The Grosvenor badger-boar brush did a fine job of working up a lather from Creed’s Green Irish Tweed shaving soap. (I’ve read that the cologne of that fragrance was Cary Grant’s favorite.) Three passes with the Mühle razor and its previously used Astra Keramik Platinum blade, and I have a totally smooth face with not a single nick. Stetson Sierra was a great finish.

Take a look.

Take a look.

This recipe sounds like just the ticket for a cold wintry evening. Ingredients:

2 tablespoons olive oil
4 bone-in pork chops (1-inch thick)
Coarse salt and ground pepper
4 strips bacon, coarsely chopped
1 medium onion, cut into 1/2-inch slices
1 head green cabbage (about 2 1/2 pounds), cored and cut into 8 wedges
3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
3 cups whole milk

I’ll make a half-recipe, which will do for lunch and dinner.

UPDATE: I just bought the stuff for this dish, and it occurred to me that a sliced Granny Smith apple would work very well for half a recipe (two apples for the full recipe), so that’s what I’ll do.

One of the odder cries from the Right was that allowing gay marriages would cause heterosexual married couples to get divorces. (I can’t explain—ask a conservative). That fear is not substantiated by events. Amanda Terkel at ThinkProgress:

One of the most common arguments advocates use against marriage equality is that it will threaten the institution of traditional marriage. In April, Iowa’s Supreme Court unanimously overturned a 10-year-old ban on same-sex marriage, which the far right decried as an undemocratic decision anathema to the views held by the majority of America. But a new Des Moines Register poll finds that despite the histrionics from conservatives, 92 percent of Iowans “say gay marriage has brought no real change to their lives.” The poll also shows that residents are evenly split in their views toward same-sex marriage.

What does seem to be the case is that strongly fundamentalist religion causes divorce:

Barna’s results verified findings of earlier polls: that conservative Protestant Christians, on average, have the highest divorce rate, while mainline Christians have a much lower rate. They found some new information as well: that atheists and agnostics have the lowest divorce rate of all.  George Barna commented that the results raise "questions regarding the effectiveness of how churches minister to families." The data challenge "the idea that churches provide truly practical and life-changing support for marriage."

Seems like an interesting piece of software for teams that work together.

Fascinating series by Alan Berlow at Salon.com:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 1 begins:

Here’s a not very tough question of legal ethics to ponder over the morning coffee: Let’s say you’re on trial for murder, and the judge and the prosecutor in your case have been having an affair. Is it possible for you to get a fair trial?

In the case of Charles Dean Hood, the short answer is, "Don’t bet your life on it."

Hood, who was sentenced to death for a 1989 double murder, is scheduled to be executed by the state of Texas on June 30. Unfortunately for Hood, in the 15 years since he arrived on death row, the issue of the strange and not-so-secret relationship of State District Court Judge Verla Sue Holland and Collin County District Attorney Tom O’Connell has never been raised in a single state or federal court.

Now, it should be stated at the outset that the private affairs of public officials, including extra-marital relations, should under all but the most extraordinary circumstances remain solely the business of the parties involved.

But when a person is charged with a serious crime and his life hangs in the balance, such a private relationship may well become a matter of public interest, because the public has a right to know that the judicial process that prosecutors and judges swear to uphold will not be compromised.

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Good question that stimulates a good column by Kevin Hall at McClatchy:

More than a year into the gravest financial crisis since the Great Depression, millions of Americans have seen their home values and retirement savings plunge and their jobs evaporate.

What they haven’t seen are any Wall Street tycoons forced to swap their multi-million dollar jobs and custom-made suits for dishwashing and prison stripes.

There are plenty of civil and class-action lawsuits from aggrieved investors angered by the losses in their mortgage bonds, hedge funds or pensions. Regulators have stepped up their vigilance after the fact. But to date, no captain of finance tied to the crisis has walked the plank.

There have been some high-profile arrests and federal convictions of financial giants — such as Ponzi scheme king Bernard Madoff and Stanford Financial Group chairman Robert Allen Stanford. They weren’t among the causes of the financial meltdown, however, just poster boys for an era of lax enforcement, weak regulation and devout faith in free markets.

"A lot of people who are responsible (for the crisis) seem to have gotten awfully rich in the process," said Barbara Roper, the director of investor protection for the Consumer Federation of America.

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Obama sometimes is extremely disappointing to liberals and progressives. From Paul Krugman’s column today:

… What’s wrong with financial-industry compensation? In a nutshell, bank executives are lavishly rewarded if they deliver big short-term profits — but aren’t correspondingly punished if they later suffer even bigger losses. This encourages excessive risk-taking: some of the men most responsible for the current crisis walked away immensely rich from the bonuses they earned in the good years, even though the high-risk strategies that led to those bonuses eventually decimated their companies, taking down a large part of the financial system in the process.

The Federal Reserve, now awakened from its Greenspan-era slumber, understands this problem — and proposes doing something about it. According to recent reports, the Fed’s board is considering imposing new rules on financial-firm compensation, requiring that banks “claw back” bonuses in the face of losses and link pay to long-term rather than short-term performance. The Fed argues that it has the authority to do this as part of its general mandate to oversee banks’ soundness.

But the industry — supported by nearly all Republicans and some Democrats — will fight bitterly against these changes. And while the administration will support some kind of compensation reform, it’s not clear whether it will fully support the Fed’s efforts.

I was startled last week when Mr. Obama, in an interview with Bloomberg News, questioned the case for limiting financial-sector pay: “Why is it,” he asked, “that we’re going to cap executive compensation for Wall Street bankers but not Silicon Valley entrepreneurs or N.F.L. football players?”

That’s an astonishing remark — and not just because the National Football League does, in fact, have pay caps. Tech firms don’t crash the whole world’s operating system when they go bankrupt; quarterbacks who make too many risky passes don’t have to be rescued with hundred-billion-dollar bailouts. Banking is a special case — and the president is surely smart enough to know that…

PayPal used to offer a good interest rate on your balance, but apparently those days are gone. current rate is 5/100ths of 1% per annum. So if your balance is $100, you would earn 5¢ per year on it. Not exactly a great deal.

Breakfast at Toasty’s is pleasant but is starting to add up, so I think I’ll eat there Monday mornings only: a good start to the week.

So I did that this morning, then walked across the street to the PG PO and mailed a couple of packages, stopped at FedEx/Kinko’s to ship back MBT shoes that didn’t fit, and now sit here all organized, more or less.

Megs, perched on boxes I must mail today, observes me closely.

The little mixed-bristle Omega did a fine job of providing lather for a three-pass shave. And  Honeybee Spa soaps make a great lather. The Cedarwood Amber has a very nice fragrance.

The Slant Bar did its usual great job—one teeny nick on my upper lip, but My Nik Is Sealed took care of that with no problem. And Floïd is always a good finish.

Ready for the day!

I was never successful in getting this idea acted upon anywhere I worked, but the evidence shows that it’s a very good way to work. Patricia Olsen in the NY Times:

I’m a programmer at Hashrocket, a Web development firm in Florida. Our style of working is called pair programming, which has been popular for years in some software design companies. Two of us sit side by side at a computer workstation to develop a program that is the backbone of an interactive Web site.

One person does the actual writing, or coding, and the other person checks it, corrects it and offers suggestions as it’s being written. Programmers, or software developers, refer to these roles as driver and navigator.

It might sound as if the person writing the programming code would find it distracting to work this way, but it’s not. It’s a collaborative effort, and that’s the beauty of it. Proponents believe it saves a company time and money. Bugs can be found more quickly, and the code is written more efficiently when two people create it simultaneously. In this case, two heads are definitely better than one.

Consider the game “Where’s Waldo,” in which a cartoon character is hidden in an intricate design. Most people can eventually find Waldo after poring over the drawing. Similarly, when programmers check code for errors, it takes time to examine the logic and find mistakes.

Now imagine if someone sat next to the artist from the very beginning. Obviously, the onlooker should be able to find Waldo more easily. The character would stand out. In the same way, one programmer looking for errors in code as another writes it can follow the logic in real time. Ideally, the navigator immediately catches anything that is incorrect. My colleagues agree with this analogy.

Part of our job is to attend design meetings with new clients so we understand what they want, but when we’re developing software programs we work in pairs 100 percent of the time. Teams are assigned at our daily 9 a.m. meeting.

We try to work together at least one full day and we often spend several days together. We switch roles, too, and we constantly change partners, which is called promiscuous pairing. People have different talents, and this way the expertise is spread around.

To me, pair programming is the only way to work. Writing code is not …

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I’ve always kept the venetian blinds securely closed in the study: it looks into the courtyard (and vice versa) and when I convinced the landlord to allow me to have a cat, it was the exception to a firm “no pets” rule the apartment building had always had. But I had lived here for 10 years, had unfailingly paid my rent a few days early, and I suggested that (a) I would keep Megs’s existence a secret and (b) if anyone complained, say that they also could have 1 quiet cat provided that they also had lived here 10 years with no late rent.

At any rate, I first got permission and then got Megs, and she has lived here in secret ever since. But then I happened to look at Craigslist and found an apartment for rent in this very complex with the notation: “cats are OK – purrr”.

So Megs is no longer an illegal immigrant, as it were. I was happy to get sunlight at last in here, and no longer to have to smuggle kitty litter and kitty food into the apartment.

Megs examines the scene of her Great Escape.

The Younger Daughter loves her chai, and this morning I got an email from YogicChai.com. The blends look interesting, so I’ve ordered a few (white tea and green tea chais). Once I try them, I’ll let you know.

Lately I’ve been using and enjoying this little double-walled Bodum teacup with infuser. It’s quite nice, once I learned not to overfill the infuser in the cup. The only problem is that a 6-oz capacity is too small for my taste. Still, it’s very little trouble to brew another cup.

Take a look at these babies.