The voting denarius of L. Cassius Longinus

Image copyright Andreas Pangerl, www.romancoins.info used with permission.

A silver denarius of the Roman Republic dating to approximately 63 B.C.E.

Obverse (not shown): veiled bust of Vesta facing left, kylix behind.
Reverse: Male voter dropping a tablet inscribed with a v into an urn

Reference: Seaby Roman Silver Coins Cassia 10, Sear 295

This coin commemorates the passing of the lex Cassia tabellaria, a law related to the method of voting in Roman elections that was passed in 137 BCE by and ancestor of L. Cassius Longinus, L Cassius Ravilla.

L. Cassius Longinus was an ancestor of C. Cassius Longinus, he, the Shakespearean Cassius of "the lean and hungry look" who was one of the assassins of Julius Caesar.

A very timely coin post, given how important elections were in the Roman Republic and now that this coming Tuesday we face a momentousness election in troubling times, times of troubled money markets and financial and political crises.

Take your time to learn and understand the issues and candidates, and vote your conscience, calculations or political beliefs accordingly.

HP and Vista is a neverending adventure in reboot and reformat

Of course the destructive recovery done last week didn't last for long and didn't fix the problem.

After backing up all my data and doing a destructive restore things started off rather auspiciously.

Programs installed without issue. I restarted after each program was installed to see if a certain program was at fault. No problems. Everything went on great, it looked like I had all my data back and programs rinning fine.

The HP update ran. I foolishly accepted installing the updates it recommended for the computer.

You can guess what happened next.

Yep, after the restart, straight to the black screen of death.

Every program installed since, every Microsoft update installed since causes the same thing.

So I called HP support again.

Of course, they have no record of the online chat assistance or the service call I made last week.

After discussion with the tech, they've decided since I already did a destructive software recovery from the partition they will ship me the recovery by disc.

So I get to do a whole new reformat.

Anybody want to place a bet on whether this fixes the problem?

Given that I had XP running on a system for about 7 years without having to reformat without this kind of trouble I certainly can't recommend Vista 64 for anyone at this point as in less than 2 months its been causing all sorts of issues. On the upside, I'm getting really good at backing up and restoring my data grrr.

A very sweet litigation victory

Often when dealing with Pro Se litigants one has to tread carefully so as to not take advantage of them.

When the Pro Se litigant is an attorney and quite possibly deranged it gets real interesting.

I get brought in on the tail end of a case. The plaintiff, the attorney in question, has sued the client institution for some very weird allegations that get thrown out at the Circuit level. She appeals, gets some issues reversed, it gets sent back to the Circuit Court, she loses again, she appeals and loses the appeal. Case evaluation sanctions of over $24,000 are imposed and I'm assigned to enter the judgment against her.

I do a motion to convert the sanctions order to a judgment which is granted, after she does a response with just about every other word in bold or underlined or both, and appears to argue and makes some real oddball arguments.

We win and I set a creditors exam. We then fight in court about the exam - I win and the judge has the exam conducted immediately in court.

She gets annoyed and sends me and my client a threatening letter complete with "people have been killed for less, and its easy to find where someone lives these days -- but this is not a threat" Cute.

Not to be dissuaded, and a little offended that an officer of the court would stoop to veiled physical threats against opposing counsel, I then start garnishing her bank account and her employer and she gets really annoyed, which is really too bad.

She then files a motion to set aside the judgment on some very specious grounds that have no bearing to reality, facts or law, including a weird claim that the court lacks jurisdiction to enter the judgment against her, and the judge sees right through it and denies the motion.

After losing to me again in Circuit Court she then appeals.

The appeal is rejected by the Court of Appeals as it is filed untimely to be as of right - she missed the deadline, thus raising the question as to whether an attorney representing themselves can sue themselves for malpractice.

Not to be dissuaded however, she refiles, a 40 page plus exhibits magnum opus complete yet again with every other word either bold or underlined, rehashing the case from the very start, including the previous appeals and her losses to me on the post-judgment proceedings. Again she makes the same really oddball arguments regarding the judgment.

We file a response that the Courts should deny her leave to appeal as she has no basis in fact or law and dissect her arguments to show that.

We received a notice from the Court of Appeals:

The delayed application for leave to appeal is DENIED for lack of merit in the grounds presented.

Given her conduct and threats in the case, it has been decided that we are going to continue these garnishments until the client gets their judgment paid in full.

Dive #102 I can haz back kick and findz boat

Sorry for the LOL Catz title but yesterday night I had a great dive.

A boat had sunk (deliberately it seems) in Union Lake last Tuesday and we were determined to find it. We had a general idea as to where it was so off the 4 of us (Chad, Jerry, Rob and myself) went.

After a bit of a search, diving well spread out with our lights probing the cool 53 degree darkness -- the dive took place at 9pm at night and visibility was about 10 feet or so -- we found it, looming out of the dark, a nice speedboat without a zebra mussel on it and looking like it had freshly sunk, which it had.

We each finned into the cockpit of the speedboat and back kicked out - including me. Yes! So I had a good effective back kick, and am finally getting more pin-point buoyancy control.

We then after admiring the boat from all angles swam off to the far line and went past an old lawn chair sitting by its lonesome on the bottom. We then returned to the boat dock after passing by some older sunken boats and after a careful safety stop.

We saw plenty of fish including some really huge carp and pike and some decent size crayfish.

This was an excellent dive with a bottom time of 55 minutes, max depth about 40 feet.

Corned Beef, Cabbage and Computer rebuilds

Yesterday after being inspired by Alton Browm's show on Corned Beef decided to follow his recipe for Corned Beef and Cabbage. It involves careful preparation and hours of nice slow cooking.

This was a good thing as I used the time to completely rebuild my computer.

As I related before, ever since purchasing it my HP Pavillion with Vista 64 has been everything but stable. HP technical support suggested a destructive rebuild was in order, so after spending hours backing up my system I began the rebuild process.

After work today I have the restore just about done and it does seem more stable (it hasn't crashed yet after multiple restarts).

On the upside the Corned Beef and Cabbage was out of this world fantastic, so it made up for the fustration of having to rebuild the system from the bottom up.

CPR and AED training today

In a nice break from the billable hour (break hell -- I had to go work late to catch up) the firm I work for offered CPR and AED (Automatic External Defibrillator) training this afternoon.

I signed up, one of only two lawyers in the session, the rest being IT, secretarial or administrative personnel. I guess the other attorneys wanted to keep their billing up. One of the people in the firm is a certified Red Cross trainer and she led the sessions -- very ably I might add.

Very useful stuff to know - helping a conscious or unconscious choking victim, performing CPR and rescue breathing and using the AED properly (it was more a familiarization - learning how it worked and some procedures and combining it with CPR. Really its pretty simple stuff to learn, and they've made it easier to remember - chest compressions on an unconscious choking victim or heat stopped victim is the same pattern only with an occasional check sweep to try and clear the airway on a choking victim is different. Simple, effective and it leaves you prepared to render assistance in an emergency.

The class made sense for both the firm and the participants - training in how to be a first responder is never a bad thing, and incidents can happen even at placid law firms, so having trained and able employees is a good thing.

Just another bit of preparedness to have and hope to never have to use for real -- but again certainly better than if something happens to known what to do rather than just stand around uselessly.

I strongly recommend everyone at least take the basic CPR / First Aid course - not very time consuming, very informative and the life you save may be your own or your friends, family or colleagues, hopefully until the professionals can arrive.

Tomorrow the firm is offering CPR for infants and kids -- having kids I am confirmed to attend -- I'll just make up the billable hours another time.

Democrats wanting to get their hands on your 401k

In the continuing battle between savers and spenders, taxpayers and tax-takers, independents and dependents the Democrats look to be making a move to push more of us into the later of each.

House Democrats Contemplate Abolishing 401(k) Tax Breaks

Brilliant really - confiscate the accumulated wealth of Americans who have conscientiously saved their money, and redistribute it to all whether they saved or spent their way through life, thus securing your position as distributor of largesse.

Then give only a 3% annual return so that no one can really get ahead or be self-sufficient and guarantee even more people will be dependent on, and thus in support of, government programs in their old age -- and of course heavy taxation on those still working.

You knew the Democrats couldn't stand the thought of billions of dollars growing untaxed and out of their control now could you?

Yet another reason to vote to stop a one-party Democrat rule in Washington - if you thought you had it bad now, just wait until there is no holding them back.

Free speech for the One but not for Thee

Thoughts on The coming Obama thugocracy

Given that McCain seems to be running his campaign as if he is Bob Dole II, and given the Media are servicing on bended knees the Obama tank, this election sadly seems like it is Obama's to win.

Given that we've seen Obama's supporters follow his exhortation to get in his opponents faces and block their speech, as noted by Michale Barone's article an Obama presidency, combined with Democrat control of the house and Senate seems like a sure recipe for disaster.

Between the Obamajugend and the cult of personality of Obama along with the unfettered left belief in "free speech for me but not for thee" this is very likely going to be a rocky next four years.


This timely image is courtesy of Future News Blog.

It certainly seems like its time for an anti-drinking advocacy group such as Mothers Against Dangerous Democrats to stomp on this kool-aid drinking, but no such luck so far.

The Obama Kool-Aid can be dangerous to your First Amendment and other rights.

Blog Renovations In Progress

As you can see, I just made some renovations to the blog and cleaned it up some. I will likely continue tweaking it for a bit, but it now looks a bit cleaner at least than the old version.

Comments are welcome, so do let me know how you like the new look - good, bad or ugly.

Economic advice for today's troubled times

Given the daily feed of bad news we've been getting about the financial crisis, stocks losing value, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria, I thought this clip was most appropriate:



The clip is from Gremlins 2 - the famous shotguns and canned goods line.

McCain pulling out of Michigan?

Yes, this state has been going down the tubes since it started going seriously Democrat - between a Democrat governor and its major city mismanaged to death by Democrats its easy to say that Michigan is again a lock for the Dems this election year.

So McCain is pulling out resources from our state to try and fight in areas where he might win.

Mind you I believe McCain did have a shot here - if he had kept the pressure up and noted that if the State goes Democrat again, we're doing more of the same and the state can expect the same result - economic doldrums mixed with goofy social policy.

Michigan and Detroit in particular is an example of Democrat dominance in microcosm.

He should have stated that voting for "change or hope" got Michigan into its current mess and its time for Michigan to vote for someone who actually knows what he's doing and can offer more than empty promises of change and hope.

Michigan, especially with the rest of the state outside the urban areas and along with the rational Macomb County Democrats this state could be a place the Republicans could fight for and even win.

Hopefully this is just a strategic redeployment and McCain hasn't written the state off yet.

Dive #101 - Got the back kick!

After a long diving season trying, I finally got my back kick and actually could move backwards underwater in this dive.

Diving with my friend Rob, we got entered Union Lake and just worked on kicks and buoyancy control.

This time I decided to try something different. I swapped fins with Rob and instead of using my ScubaPro JetFins, I used Rob's Power Fins.

It made all the difference - they don't look very different but there is a very real performance characteristic variance between the two fins. The Power fins are shorter and not as flexible or "snappy" as the Scuba Pros, and are much more forgiving when learning the back kick and have much better control from the foot. The Jet Fins apparently have the advantage with the frog kick, and the back kick once you have it mastered -- which I do not.

I'll tell you though it was a great feeling to actually move backward nice and easily after struggling with the skill for so long.

Now that I know I can do it, it is time to refine it and get the rest of the skills in good shape. Rob has graciously swapped fins with me for awhile so I can get this skill down and not be stuck learning it in the jets, for which I'm quite thankful.

It's about time.

Bailout deal apparently reached

You know how the Democrats are the evil party and the Republicans are the stupid party? How when they come together and do something both evil and stupid its called bipartisanship?

Here goes: Deal reached on financial markets bailout From the Detroit News:

Congressional leaders and the Bush administration reached a tentative deal early Sunday on a landmark bailout of imperiled financial markets whose collapse could plunge the nation into a deep recession.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the $700 billion accord just after midnight but said it still has to be put on paper.

"We've still got more to do to finalize it, but I think we're there," said Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who also participated in the negotiations in the Capitol.

The report is very short on details and hopefully we'll find more about what we've just had done to us shortly (likely too late to do anything about it), but for now hang on its going to be an interesting ride.

Housing crunch causes and bailout follies

Speaking of crashing like the housing market, here's a decent video as to one of the causes of the current mess.



The cause outlined in the video -- the Democrats revamping of the CRA and pushing banks to lend to those who could not really afford home loans in the first place is not the only reason, but it does seem to be the spark that began the fire. Once the CRA and government led housing boom started, then coupled with the irrational belief that houses would always go up dramatically in value encouraging both quick flips and people buying homes they couldn't afford hoping the increase in value would let them refinance and have massive equity growth, we got to where we are today.

Once this irrational belief was fixed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac encouraged ARMs and 100% loans to get more people owning houses causing values to rise as demand went up. Investment bankers went along, coupling this with quick sales of loans and then repackaging them into securities that were sold to others and it got worse from there as they then leveraged these securities beyond any rational limit.

In short, the government and high-finance wizards played with our money, got rich on bonuses (or campaign contributions and sweetheart loans in the case of the politicians), and we're left to clean up the mess. Sorry but the bailout is ridiculous in its current form, and even more ridiculous that Frank and Senator Dodd (both recipients of Fannie Mae / Freddie Mac largess and proponents of the policies that caused this mess)are inserting into the bill that 20% of the returns from the bailout does not go back to the taxpayers (or even the government) but to housing advocates such as ACORN - you know the people who helped start this mess in the first place. Nice.

More fun with Vista

This computer is crashing like the housing market -- with no bailout in sight. Everytime Windows does an automatic update, on the next shutdown and startup it fails to boot, requiring a hard turnoff then it starts windows repair and then works.


In search of a remedy I contacted HP technical support. After describing the issue here was their "brilliant" solution -- turn off windows automatic updates.

Anyone see the problem with this "solution"? While it will stop the system from crashing on a weekly basis, now if I manually update I expect it to crash again.. its not a solution but a problem avoidance technique.

I beginning to think the problem is Windows Defender update as that seems to be what was updated yesterday before the system crashed again. Anyone know if Defender updates are known for this problem?

Fun looking back on finances

Its always interesting to look at the financial prognostications of yesteryear in light of the present.

Take Start Late Finish Rich for example. Itsa a good book and I'm reading it now. Written in 2004 it was a darn good book for the time, full of good advice in lots of ways some of which still hold true, such as not being wasteful in your spending, money management, general targets in terms of how much to save, the importance of tax sheltered retirement accounts, but wow, some of the info:

Such as: the investment return projections are based on 10% annual returns from the stock market - good luck with that. We haven't seen that kind of return in a long time. He also fails to point out that when you have a 50% loss in the market for example, you need a 100% growth to just get back to where you started from.

The real estate advice was great pre-crash but he sure didn't anticipate this mess. His book is full of 0 down mortgages, buying houses for flippage etc. Ie buy it and watch the ridiculous amount of appreciation make you wealthy. The problem is that kind appreciation was anomalous - great if you were doing it then and got out, but otherwise once the music stops you're in trouble. Combine this with banks and mortgagees all doing the same approach on this belief of unsustainable returns as normal, couple it with a little regulatory capture from Freddie Mac and Fannie May and you get the mess we're in now.

Its a good read but the current state of the market and real estate fracas just made large chunks of the book historical curiosities.

The wild vistas of Vista

So after 8 years of my home computer I decide its time to upgrade. The olde computer was built by Scott Reschke of Frag Center (If you're ever in East Lansing and like to play computer games his place is the place to go). It gave great service but lately is developing an atittude and it is getting slow.

Unfortunately he's not building custom machines anymore and he gave me a few suggestions as to what to get.

I end up purchasing an HP Pavilion, AMD Athlon dual core with 4gb ram, 500 GB hard drive and a monitor that came with the package that is ridiculously big in size. Looks nice. It also comes with Vista 64 Home Premium on board. So far so good.

Plug it in and go, and we start having problems:

1. Adobe flash player if installed as a plugin to Firefox 3.0.1, or even downloaded direct from Adobe's website and then installed crashes Vista completely - we're talking the black screen of death, Vista repair runs and removes it and the computer restarts. This was not a fluke as I tried it multiple times and same result each time - install flash player and the computer gets it. Interestingly, and weirdly enough, flash player exists and works just fine in IE with no ill effects and it is not removed in the repair. Since I really like Firefox, this is a major annoyance.

2. Thunderbird - Vista seems to pluck Thunderbird's feathers, I install it, copy over the mail, and it looks like its working, after some tweaking. I then upgrade Thunderbird from 0.7.2 to the latest version and it stops working cold. Still have not resolved this one and my mail archive is stuck in it, which is not good.

3. Vista 64 is not backward compatible with a lot of my programs - my old, paid off, lovingly functional Photoshop 7 and Premiere 6.5 will not work so I'm going to eventually have to buy replacements for what was some darn nice and comfy software, and I hesitate to try and install my old reliable Microsoft Office 2000.
Thankfully Canon is on the ball and their camera software has an upgrade you can download as the software that comes with the SD1000 flips out on Vista 64, so that critical bit works for the pictures at least.

4. Every so often Vista does an automatic update of some Microsoft Vista or related product in the background and without notice, the machine restarts and bamn - back to the black screen of death with a required manual shutdown, windows repair and it sometimes repairs it and sometimes it takes everything short of lethal force to get it back to rights. I can find no log entries of these errors so it is a pain to track down what is causing it. In short this operating system is way less stable that XP and that is simply unacceptable and aggravating.

On the upside:

A. It is much, much faster than my old machine. I can actually multitask without slowing everything to a crawl. Working with video I've shot is a lot quicker. There is a real speed difference and it seems to handle memory leacks much better.

B. Installation of hardware is real nice, great ability to pull drivers, my Suunto Vyper Dive computer USB cable was recognized no problem, which is a huge improvement over the install process for it in XP. Wireless setup is a snap, adding peripherals like the camera, USB Hard drive is similarly easy etc, they've clearly improved the driver architecture.

C. Most of my applications and data transferred over with no issues.

So its a toss up. The lack of stability is the real killer though and certainly adds to the discomfort level as you never know for sure that when you turn it off you can get it back on again. If it was stable with a few issues is one thing, the instability however is not giving me warm feelings toward Vista 64.

Democrats Panicking over Palin

McCain made an inspired choice when he selected Sarah Palin as his Vice Presidential candidate.

In one fell swoop he energized Republicans and made them excited about the campaign, after being unenthusiastic having McCain the ultra-moderate in charge. He not only succeeded in exciting Republicans and naming a very capable first woman as the first vice presidential candidate of the two major parties, but he also was able to have the Democrats collectively and figuratively wet their pants in panic.

An erudite, capable, conservative and Republican woman? suddenly Barack's "safe" and uninspired choice of business-as-democrat-usual Joe Biden lost its appeal and any gains Biden brought to the ticket were well and truly blasted away. Democrats see the race, which is by any reasoned analysis theirs to lose, beginnning to well, lose.

This of course brought out a series of quite nasty attacks on Palin.

One of the stranger attacks was brought by Michigan Governor Granholm's husband Dan Mulhern after stating "This girl is going to go through a lot and does she know what she's putting her family through". -- The old women with kids should stay at home canard -- brought to you by a Democrat no less. And not just any Democrat -- as noted by Michigan Republican chair Saul Anuzis "One wonders if Dan Mulhern forgot the fact that he's only got a job because he's married to the governor, who also happens to be a working mom," Michigan GOP chairman Saul Anuzis said. Oops. Its funny that it is the Republicans that are "breaking the glass ceiling" so to speak and the Dems, the self-proclaimed party of feminism that is coming forth with all the old chauvinist remarks.

For a darn good analysis of the reasons why the Dems are losing it over Palin. See this article by Victor Davis Hanson (who not only is a great commentator but is a fantastic classical historian -- if you like ancient history his books are must-read material) -- Works and Days: Target Palin.

This election just got interesting.

How em-Bear-rasing!

It must suck to be a pot-grower, especially in this situation. You put all that time into developing a major pot growing operation and a Black bear chases you away. Dude . . . . . (Must have been a Boulder U student pot growing operation):
Black bear busts secret Utah pot farm

Investigators say a large black bear raided a clandestine marijuana growing operation so often that it chased the grower away.
...
Deputies found food containers ripped apart and strewn everywhere, cans with bear teeth marks, claw marks and bear prints across the Garfield County camp on Tuesday.

...the operation on Boulder Mountain included 4,000 "starter" sacks of pot and 888 young plants.

"This particular bear apparently was not going to give up and basically chased these marijuana farmers away," (Sheriff) Perkins said. "Our county is so tough on drugs that even the wildlife are getting in on the action."

Apparently that Bear now has a serious case of the munchies....

Labor Day Weekend Saturday - Wreck Dives

On Saturday we awoke at 4:30 and piled in the car and were on the road by 5.

After stopping at an open diner in a small town on the way for a filling breakfast we drove into port Sanilac and the marina nice an early .

Once again we went with Rec and Tec Dive Charters - simply the best.

We first dove the North Star. A steel steamship that was 300' long. It was built in 1888 in Cleveland, OH. The ship is in two pieces but lies in an upright position. The pilot house is intact. The wreck is located about 5.5 miles SE of Port Sanilac and 10 miles NE of Lexington. The ship sank in 1908, after a collision with its sister ship the Northern Queen.

Visibility was bad, about 10 feet or so for this dive and my camera does not yet have external strobes so the pictures did not come out well at all.

Lagniappe's Keeper had a little issue and we had to break the dive off early and get back to the boat. A nice wreck and I hope to return again when there is better visibility to truly appreciate its enormity.

After a surface interval we went to the Regina. I had first dove the Regina earlier in the year.

This time we had company on the wreck -


Quite a few other dive boats came by to dive the wreck and after our surface interval we headed on down.

The visibility was considerably worse than it was back in May, again about 10-20 feet or so. There was also a nice current flowing from the stern towards the bow so getting back to the boat anchored on the stern (by the rudder for you non-nautical types out there) after the dive took a bit of work.

The dive however was worth it.

Here's Lagniappe's Keeper by the wondefully huge propellor and rudder of the ship.


Here he is right above the rudder -


A porthole by the stern -


We also checked out the huge smokestack lying beside the ship and peeered into the great crack in the ship's hull.

Here I am hanging out -


After making our way kicking back to the stern thought the very visible current (particles in the water were really flying by, sadly opposite to the direction we wanted to go) we did our nice slow ascent and returned on board without incident. A great way to end the day.

Simply an excellent couple of wreck dives,Rec and Tec has never disappointed yet. On the charter we met some very nice divers from the Ford Sea Lancers Dive Club that had the other 8 of ten spots on this trip. A good bunch of divers to be in the water alongside with.

Then the long trip back to my house for a festive BBQ with the family and folks.