Category: Burningbird

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Documents Legal, Laws, and Regs

The money game

One of the problems I kept running into when preparing stories for this site is the fact that Missouri’s Department of Agriculture seems to have abysmal data systems. Every Sunshine Law request, no matter how small, exceeded whatever amount of money I had set as a cap for the request.

Now it would seem the same problem occurs elsewhere in state government. When asked about Lt. Governor Kinder’s calendar, journalists were first told the entries were not available. Later, though, it was discovered that the entries were available, but the cost would be well over several thousand dollars in order to get the information.

I had turned in a Sunshine Law violation complaint to the Attorney General’s office and was told by the person who responded that my main concern seemed to be not that the information wasn’t available, but that the cost was too high. According to the AG office rep, high cost to access the information does not form a Sunshine Law violation. However, when the price tag is invariably high—too high for the average person—cost does form a barrier against transparency.

Either Missouri has the worst data systems in the country—in which case there’s another first we can’t take pride in—or cost is being used as a barrier to information.

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Just Shelley

Letter to Governor Nixon on SB 113 and Proposition B

Governor Nixon:

SB 113 should be on your desk and you’re now faced with a decision: sign or veto the bill.

It’s tempting to think that you should sign the bill and move on. After all, didn’t you work with the Agricultural Appropriations committee to get more funding for the Department of Agriculture to enforce existing laws? Hasn’t the same committee said that you’ll only get these funds if you sign SB 113? And if you don’t sign the bill, won’t you be facing the wrath of the people in your rural communities?

However, you can’t deny one thing: the people of Missouri have stated that we want Proposition B, and no matter how SB 113 is worded, it is a repeal of Proposition B. It is a rejection of the voters of this state.

Can we get by without the $1.1 million in new funding for enforcement? I truly believe we can.

Proposition B provides teeth where existing laws do not. I believe we will find that the worst of the licensed breeders will shut down rather than comply. The worst of the licensed breeders take the most inspector time–what with re-inspections and possibly legal action. Proposition B will, in effect, weed out the worst actors, even before it needs to be enforced.

In addition, other breeders who have over 50 dogs, including those with hundreds, will need to downsize. This should simplify inspections on their kennels, and again save inspector time.

The Prop B rules are more objective, easier to verify than the vague regulations outlined in SB 113.

I strongly believe it is better for the dogs, and for the state, to have Proposition B and no new Department of Agriculture funding, then to have SB 113 and any amount of additional funding.

Proposition B isn’t just a set of regulations and new rules: it is a pronouncement. With Proposition B, we told the world that no, Missouri no longer wants to be the Puppy Mill Capital of the US.

All SB 113 does is tell the world that yes, Missouri wants to keep our puppy mills. Yes, we want to keep this title.

—

Though I didn’t have the room to say more, there is something else for Governor Nixon to consider:

If he signs SB 113 into law, we will come back with another initiative in 2012 to replace what we lost. This initiative, and the initiative to provide a Constitutional Amendment to protect the citizen initiative process, will be on the same ballot as the one related to Governor Nixon’s re-election.

This is a decision that won’t be forgotten and will be painfully obvious on the ballot and in the months and weeks leading up to the election. We will hear, again and again, about representatives who let us down; who disregarded our vote; who disrespected the voters of this state in order to ensure continued cruelty for dogs.

On election day, on the ballot screen or in the ballot page, we will be reminded one last time that many of our leaders let us down.

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Burningbird

Discontinued Site (Realtech)

This site is no longer being updated. My new technology site is at Technology at Burningbird. My primary website is at Burningbird.

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Burningbird Standards

The unbearable lightness of new

I’m still delighted with my new Linode VPS. I added one button backup to my plan, and that’s made all the difference in the world. Now, when I’m about to try something tricky, such as setting up a site firewall, I can make a snapshot backup first. Then, if my site gets toasted, I can restore a good copy with a click of a button. Lovely.

After five years I finally broke down a bought a new laptop, a Toshiba. Not only am I trying to find my way around a new machine, but also a new operating system. My current older computers are a PowerPC Mac, and an old Dell running Windows XP.

I saw the writing on the wall about getting a new machine when first, Google wouldn’t create Chrome for the PowerPC, then Microsoft released IE9, but only for Vista and up, and recently, neither Opera nor Firefox would continue supporting PowerPC. Plus, my keyboard is failing on the Mac—forcing me to pound the space key, then the comma, and now the C, V, B keys. You don’t how hard I had to type just to create that last sentence.

What I wasn’t expecting, though, is finding out that some of the open source software I use has not been ported to 64-bit Windows 7. I now have to consider what to use for editing photographs that won’t cost me more than my computer.

Speaking of new, Drupal 7 has released. As I wrote recently, I ported Just Shelley to Drupal 7, but I’m still not ready to port my other sites. My existing theme won’t work with Drupal 7, and I’m not sure if I want to port it, or just continue to use the default or other pre-defined themes. In addition, not all the modules I use have made their way over to Drupal 7.

My new site, Puppies @ Burningbird is based in Drupal 7. I’m happy about using Drupal 7, but less happy about having to create the site.

Unfortunately, bills have been introduced into both the Missouri Senate and the House of Representatives to repeal Proposition B, so the battle has begun anew. If you all like dogs and don’t like puppy mills, I hope you’ll stop by from time to time and leave an encouraging comment. I’m using Disqus to manage the comments, having enjoyed using the services at other sites. I figured if I end up turning off comment support, people still have their comments. Plus, Disqus provides some nice editing and other functionality. I may end up adding Disqus support to other of my sites, over time.

I’m also writing a new change proposal for the HTML5 Working Group. Yes, the more things change, the more they remain the same. I’ll post the proposal when I finish it. And I’m still working on books —no rest for the wicked.

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Burningbird Weather

Happy New Year

As you can see if you’re reading this, the move to a new hosting company went very well. I’m already exceptionally pleased with Linode, not the least of which the dashboard the company provides makes maintaining the site so much easier.

The only real challenges I faced were setting up the email system, and porting my Just Shelley web site; the former is just plain cumbersome, and the latter did not like the move to a PHP 5.3 environment. After the move I discovered that Drupal 7 is PHP 5.3 friendly, Drupal 6 is not. There is something in Just Shelley that triggered problems, though luckily the other sites ported without any problems.

So, I’ve upgrade Just Shelley to Drupal 7, as well as having installed a new Drupal 7 account, and I’m finally getting a chance to take the new version for a run. I can already see I have a lot of work to do. Yes, a lot of work.

In the meantime, we had a exciting day here in New Year’s Eve. We kept getting tornado warnings, and I spent most of the morning hovering around the downstairs interior bathroom.

Just around noon, the siren went off again and the news said a funnel was spotted over Webster Groves or Shrewsbury. I looked outside, and the winds had suddenly reversed direction. There was a rushing sound, but not exceptionally loud. A few minutes later, the winds reversed back and things started calming down.

We didn’t get hit but the F3 tornado did a major amount of damage a couple of miles away. I don’t know if a tornado that far away could impact on wind in our area, or if there was another funnel cloud forming over us that didn’t form into a full tornado. Regardless, we lucked out. So did the people in Sunset Hills, because for the amount of damage done—and it is significant— folks only suffered minor injuries. Unfortunately, there were folks in other parts of the state not as lucky.

I haven’t been to my favorite walking place, since it’s on the other side of the damage path and I don’t want to add to the traffic. There have been a lot of gawkers, but the folks at Sunset Hills came up with the idea of borrowing firemen boots and taking up a collection for the tornado victims from the gawkers. Absolutely brilliant idea.