Kansas City Groove

Well, I'm back in the city. I've moved over to Independence because it is much closer to work in Liberty and the housing is pretty inexpensive. In the last three months since my last post, I've handled cases all the way from Jackson to Harrison counties. In the grand scheme of things, I probably haven't closed as many as I would have liked by now, but I'm still trying to get used to how things work around here.

All in all, I love it here. Yes, the deck is still stacked in the State's favor, but for the first time in years, I feel like I'm really helping my clients get real justice. I know that if I go into court with reasonable arguments backed up by good theory and caselaw, I actually have a shot of winning. It's amazing the difference in your day when you know that you really might help someone go home instead of automatically going to prison. Being recognized as an asset to the system rather than an inconvenient necessity to the streamlined railroad to the department of punishment and university of higher crimes makes the move all worth the effort.

We'll see how long this honeymoon lasts...

Homeward Bound

So I'm moving back to the Kansas City area. I have accepted a position with the PD office in Liberty and will be starting April 1. This was a position I'd interviewed for back in November, but due to the statewide agency hiring freeze, I wasn't offered the job until last week.

I do have mixed emotions about leaving Poplar Bluff. I enjoy the people that I work with and the familial aspect of our office relationships. Lately I have felt that my actual family is more important to me than the relationships I have formed down here. Maybe it's because of the end of my relationship with Jen, or maybe it's because I've been around a lot of death lately and I just want to be closer to my family. In any case, I am very happy to be moving back to civilization, especially with Starbucks and Chipotle. I am also incredibly excited to be closer to my longtime friends from college and I hope that I will find the time to spend with my friends that I didn't have two years ago.

Things are going to be different than they were four years ago when I returned from Omaha, or even eight years ago when I first came down after Graceland. I've been looking at houses online and trying to figure out how long it's going to take me to save up for a real home. Probably a couple years out. All I know is that I'm returning to Kansas City a stronger, more confident person than I ever thought I could be. The last two years have been a forge for my legal temperment, and I've learned to trust my instincts and unique approach to solving problems.

The future is wide open.

Disaster Area

Well, we had a bit of an ice storm down here a few weeks ago. On my third day without power, I packed it in and headed back to KC. Poplar Bluff is fully powered now, but quite a bit of southeast Missouri is still without power. Two couples I go to church with are still without power. My assistant's husband, a lineman, is still working 15 hour days all over the 8 county area of Missouri still affected by the storm.

What really burns me about this whole thing is the fact that the federal government has done NOTHING to help. FEMA has been nonexistant. People are still seeking shelter in schools and community centers all over the five state area. Meanwhile the new Democratic governors of Kentucky and Missouri are falling all over themselves praising Obama for encouraging phone calls. If this had happened under Bush, the media would have crucified him for not responding fast enough. The National Guard wasn't even called out for five days, and they didn't even have chain saws or work gloves to help clear down trees and utility poles!

I guess when you live in flyover country and your state overwhelmingly voted for McCain, you can expect to fend for yourself. Sounds like a good reason to keep clinging to our guns and religion.

New Computer and Back to Linux

Over the holidays in Kansas City, I found myself at a big sale at Micro Center. I decided to go ahead and build up a new system because my old Dell laptop has been making funny noises and running slower and slower lately. Not to mention that it's now a seven-year-old computer that was beat to death everyday in law school.

Not wanting to spend big bucks, I decided to put together a modest system around an AMD Athlon x2 5200, 2 GB RAM, MSI motherboard, and Western Digital 500 GB Caviar Blue hard drive. The hard drive was a steal at $60, and I wrapped it all up in an Antec 300 case.

It's been a while since I put together a new computer, probably since college, so it took a minute to get around the changes over the last eight years. Video, audio, and networking are all integrated on the mobo, BIOS auto detects CPU, memory, hard drive, and the CPU now has its own power supply cable. There's also the SATA cable for the hard drive that I haven't used before. Everything went together quite well, especially because of the high quality Antec case. However, the cheap Coolmax power supply I went with didn't have a CPU power cable long enough to reach the mobo connector. Micro Center was sold out of extensions and all of the computer shops in JoCo I called told me I needed to buy a new power supply. I finally called a shop in Lee's Summit and they had what I needed.

So the machine is put together, starts up and runs the WD hard drive software. I decided to give the Ubuntu 8.10 distro of Linux a try. My whole philosophy of this build was to keep simplicity and budget first and foremost. I've used various flavors of Linux and one stint with BSD in the past. I've evolved from Slackware in '99, SuSE in '00, FreeBSD in '02, and finally RedHat in '03, shortly before the Fedora switchover. Linux has always been kind of an experimental hobby thing for me and a way to keep old iron alive. This time I decided to give it a shot as my primary OS for daily use at home.

I settled on the AMD64 version of the distro simply because my new machine has true 64-bit processors inside and memory utilization is better. Most of the software I'm using has already been compiled for the 64 bit version and others have easy workarounds. Installation of Ubuntu was the fastest and easiest OS install yet, although the partitioning system still needs work. The system boots up and runs like a scalded dog, even with only 2 GB of RAM.

On software, I use Firefox and Thunderbird for web and email. I was using iTunes and iTMS on my old Dell, but Apple does not have a version for any type of Linux. Seems rather silly to me since it probably would take less effort to port iTunes to Linux than it did to port to Windows, but Apple is still Apple. Anyway, the Ubuntu distro includes Rhythmbox, which can access and write to my iPod, plays all of my old iTunes music and podcasts without DRM, and runs even faster. Amazon MP3 has seen the light where Apple has failed and has a version of their download software which does work on many Linux distros. However, the Amazon software is compiled for 32 bit systems only and you have to do a few workarounds to get it to work right. If you've used Linux in the past, the workaround is nothing to sneeze at anyway.

I'm looking forward to using software that is stable and virus free. Ubuntu is definitely ready for prime time. I transferred all of my old files off the laptop yesterday and OpenOffice can open and read everything I've written in Word or WordPerfect. Time will tell, but I really think this is the future of personal computing.

The End of 2008

Do you ever get the feeling that something BIG is about to happen? I've been so restless the last week or two, even after finding out that I'm not moving back to KC anytime soon. It just seems like everyone around me has been restless too. I just can't explain it.

I have worked for the public defender system now for almost two years. January 8 is the anniversary day. At church yesterday, someone asked me the same question I've heard over and over for the last two years. "Have you ever represented someone you really thought was guilty?" I thought about it for a moment, like I always do, ready with a quick reply like "Sure, everyone's guilty of something but innocent until proven guilty." Instead, I answered, "I think a more appropriate question would be, have I ever represented someone I really thought was truly innocent?"

It's during this time of year that I often wonder what lies ahead in the new year. Will I still be doing this same job a year from now? How will my personal and career life change? Where do I want to go this year?

I am beginning to see that my career has become less of "just a job" and more of a lifestyle. Since Jen and I broke up and she moved away, all I really have is my job again. I've been putting on more weight, which sucks, but I think I've found a gym here in town I can afford again. I see a lot of people, more and more everyday, getting married and having children, and I feel kind of left out. I wonder how much longer I'll be able to hold on to my beliefs, including my unique church and religion, before I really have to compromise or give up on everything just to be happy and fulfill my dream to have a family of my own. Seems like all the girls in my church have been dropping like flies to the marriage swatter lately. I have tried hard to make myself a better person with my education and career choices, but I wonder if it ever really mattered to anyone. Of course, moving away from the "center place" certainly didn't help in that perspective, so there's really nobody to blame except myself.

Anyway, I guess it's kind of a morose way to end the year, but this has been a pretty good year compared to what I've gone through the majority of my '20s. 2008 was the last full year of my '20s and I'd say it's ended better than I thought it would. It may also be the last full year of this blog. I'm not posting as much here anymore and with more and more employers checking up on blogs and such, it may be time to pull the plug when it comes time to renew the domain in April. We'll see what happens.

Merry Christmas and have a Happy New Year to all.

Save GM, Ford, and Chrysler

Enough is enough.

The message has been received, loud and clear. Your mother's friend's cousin from work bought a Cadillac Cimarron in 1987 and the transmission fell out. You bought a 1993 Grand Am and the radio stopped playing the Dirty Dancing soundtrack at 50k miles. You bought a new Accord and it's assembled in a factory in Tennessee, so that makes it "American". People who work on an assembly line must be brainless, lazy knuckle-draggers who can't cut it in a "real" job and should make less money and not have any retirement or healthcare perks. I get the rage and the anger. It's not enough to hate America anymore, you've got to hate anything made by Americans for Americans.

Here's my challenge. FORGIVE. If you're in the market, consider a car or truck made by the Big Three. Go drive one. They are really good cars made by really good people. Read GM's restructuring plan on http://www.gmfactsandfiction.com.

GM, Ford, and Chrysler employees have stepped up to save this country from enemies abroad and economic disaster many times in the last 100 years. Allowing these companies, their suppliers, and their employees to go out of business is un-American. Such an idea would never be entertained in Japan, Korea, or even Germany, so why are people so hateful here? Do we hate American cars or do we just hate ourselves? Do we hate America or just the American dream?

I've seen a lot of change in this country in the last few years that greatly worries me. This election cycle has proven to me that people are as cynical and selfish as ever. The Baby Boomers may be the ME generation, but I fear that we are now a ME country. We are in danger of becoming a forgettable nation again, written off as a "former world power". If we become involved in another world war and our manufacturing skill and capacity have been sent to the scrapyard, the controversy over English as an official language will be but an epitaph on the gravestone of a once proud nation.

Intelligence in Politics

Lately it seems that many people, including some dear friends of mine, have been questioning the intelligence of people like John McCain, Sarah Palin, and anyone who would consider voting for them. I have noticed that most of the people doing this are people who have never stood up for anything or even tried to push themselves to be the best at whatever they can be. Somehow they've decided that anyone who questions the group-think and socialism of the Democratic party must be "unintelligent", which I don't even think is a real word.

To my friends and others who believe that Republicans and social/economic conservatives are "unintelligent", let us do a bit of a comparison. John McCain graduated from the Naval Academy, received his commission as a naval aviator, completed numerous combat flight operations from aircraft carriers, lead the largest air combat squadron in the largest Navy in the world, and has served as one of the most respected members of Congress since before most of us were small children or even born.

Barack Obama went to Occidental College, then Harvard Law School, then rejected blanket offers to work for the most powerful law firms in the world to become a community organizer in Chicago. Granted, he was President of the Harvard Law Review, and that alone is an amazing and respectable accomplishment. Other than that, I can see nothing that compares with the responsibility of being entrusted with millions of dollars of military weapons and the command of the personnel assigned to work with that hardware.

The fact is, these men and their running mates are all very intelligent people. I am very suspicious of Big Government. That is why I'm a Republican. Granted, we have not seen much in the way of making government smaller or more efficient in the last eight years, but I believe that the fundamental principles of the party are sound beliefs in what government should be. I'm not the biggest fan of John McCain, but I'd rather have him trying to reduce the size of government rather than Barack Obama working with a friendly majority Congress to make it bigger again.

For the record on my intelligence, I graduated from Graceland with a degree in Business Administration with emphasis in Information Technology, Marketing, and a minor in Church Leadership. I then worked for one year with Sprint, formed a tech startup with some friends in Kansas City, then went to law school at Creighton University and graduated in 2005. I am a public defender, which you'd be surprised how many of us are Republicans, and I am undefeated in my jury trial record.