Year: 2005

Jury Duty — Almost Fun

Ashley Bischoff6 Comments

As I mentioned earlier, I received a summons for jury duty for today. And, it was almost fun (well, as fun as jury duty can be, I suppose). Before even getting there, my first decision was how to get there. Mike mentioned that I could make use of the free DART pass included with my summons and that was tempting. As I saw it, if I didn’t have to pay for parking, that meant I’d have more money left over from the jury check (all of six dollars, I know).

So, last night I went to the Trip Planner on DART’s site and typed in both my address and the address of the courthouse. The trip-planning software worked fine; it told me a valid route which would get me from my apartment to the courthouse in time for jury duty. Unfortunately, that trip would have taken just over an hour (yikes). I then checked MapQuest to see how long that would take to drive — and that reported about ”11 minutes”. Since I really didn’t feel like getting up in the middle of the night just to make it to court by 8:30am, I opted to drive.

I did leave a little early, knowing that rush hour would probably add to that “11 minutes”. But, I found the garage easily and got there in plenty of time. I went in through the main doors and, after passing through the metal detectors — which involved taking off my watch and emptying my pockets of my iPod, my Palm and my car keys — I headed to the central court room (or some room with a similar name). I handed in my information slip to someone at the door and walked in to the auditorium-like room. There were rows of movie theater-style collapsing seats and I sat down as they lowered a screen to play an informational video.

After the video, an official stepped up to the podium at the front of the room and explained the basic process for the day: they'd call out groups of numbers, corresponding to our juror numbers, and they'd send each group to a courtroom elsewhere in the building. Within the first few minutes, the group containing my number was called and we were sent to one of the courtrooms on the third floor. Once my group got there, a bailiff called role to make sure that we were all there; and, after that, we were asked to wait outside the courtroom. I deduced later that we were waiting for the lawyers to arrive and prepare.

After about half an hour of waiting, the bailiff took role again and called us into the courtroom by name (to ensure that we’d have a specific seating order). Once we filed in, the judge explained that we were here for a DWI case. He introduced the prosecuting and defense lawyers and explained that both the prosecution and the defense would each have a set of time to ask us questions.

From there, the prosecuting lawyer stood up and started by explaining the conditions which define DWI within the state of Texas. And, after that, she went around the room and asked us questions such as whether we trusted Breathalyzers and on what level we trusted police officers (on a 1-5 scale).

She finished her questions and the defense attorney began. Not surprisingly, he asked questions about whether we would feel comfortable finding someone guilty based on a single person’s testimony (which Texas law allows and, in this case, would most likely refer to the police officer). He also asked if any of us had been personally affected by a drunk driver in the past which would prevent an impartial perspective if we were to serve on the jury. He finished his questions within maybe 20 minutes and the judge dismissed us for a short break while the lawyers made their strike list. (A “strike list”, I presume, is the process where each side crossed of jurors which they would not like to appear on the jury.)

After our fifteen minute break, we found our seats again and, as it turns out, the lawyers were still making up their lists. But, within a few minutes, the bailiff (I think) read off the names of those chosen to serve on the jury; I wasn’t one of those names. Those of us not selected were dismissed and allowed to go home. So, that was my adventure with jury duty — I was expecting government’s usual red tape and bureaucracy but it actually went fairly smoothly.

Sure, there was some waiting involved — I got through a third of The Tipping Point — but we were always treated respectfully by the officials and they made sure to let us know how long each waiting period would be. I don’t know if I’d say it was a ton of fun, but it went a lot better than I expected.

Adding Link Manager Tags to Your WordPress Templates

Ashley Bischoff3 Comments

It's fairly common — well, almost universal — to feature links to your friends’ blogs in a sidebar of your own blog. And, WordPress has a “Links Manager” which makes this even easier (if you’re already running WordPress, you can get to this via the “Links” option across the top of the admin interface). The Link Manager provides an interface for adding and categorizing links; you can set display properties for each category, including how many links to display, whether to display a description, and how to sort the links (such as by name or even random order).

Say you want to add a blogroll to your site. There’s already a “blogroll” category by default and you can add or delete links as you like. Then, it’s just a matter of adjusting your templates to display the links in your sidebar. Now, depending on which theme you're using, this may happen automatically. But, if not, it’s not hard to edit your templates to have it do that.

The WordPress wiki lists plenty of Links Manager-related tags (well, five tags, but you might think that there’d be only one, “display links” or something). They’re actually very similar, and are largely separated based on whether they follow the settings in the Link Manager or whether they override those settings, and whether you need to specify the output-category by-name or by-category-number.

  • get_links_list — This disregards the settings in the Link Manager and displays links from a number-specified category.

  • wp_get_links — This follows the settings in the Link Manager and displays links from a number-specified category.

  • get_links — This displays links from a number-specified category and allows the user to customize the output of the tag.

  • wp_get_linksbyname — This follows the settings in the Links Manager and displays links from a name-specified category.

  • get_linksbyname — This displays links from a name-specified category and allows the user to customize the output of the tag.

Unless you’re using a PHP-based code to feed numbers in, it’s probably easiest to make use of the tags which support categories specified by name. So, I’ll focus on the two tags which support name-based category references (“wp_get_linksbyname” and “get_linksbyname”). And, chances are, you’ll want to go along with the settings which you applied in the Links Manager, so you can use “wp_get_linksbyname” for that.

To make use of that, just open up your sidebar file (sidebar.php) and add a reference to that line, enclosed in <ul></ul> tags. Assuming that the category you wanted to display was “Blogroll”, the code could look something like this:

<ul>
<?php wp_get_linksbyname('Blogroll') ?>
</ul>

You may also want to add an additional header above that as that code only produces the list itself. You can follow along with the surrounding code within your sidebar.php — it’s probably an <h2></h2> tag or such. That’s it — just upload your new sidebar.php to your appropriate theme directory.

Footnote: Apparently — if you’re using get_linksbyname — you can set a parameter so that it includes each link’s update time next to the link (based on its most recent ping to Ping-o-Matic). And, if you set the sorting to [last] updated, you can have your friends’ blogs listed in the order that they updated along with the time that they updated.

This all sounds nifty, but I haven’t had any luck getting that to work. I tried the no-www fix and I manually ran /wp-admin/update-links.php, but I just couldn't get the update-times to show up. So, I’m just making use of a random listing for now. But, I’m open to any ideas there.

So, Your Nixon Watch Is Stuck in 24-Hour Mode?

Ashley Bischoff6 Comments

The other day, I was fiddling with my Nixon watch (yes, that’s the company name with no relation to the dead president). I was just trying to resynchronize its seconds-hand (“seconds-LCD”?) with my computer’s clock which I had just synced with an Internet time server (not literally an atomic clock, but yet kinda in an A-to-B-to-C sort of way). As I was pressing buttons, trying to remember how to get to the time-setting screen, I ended up putting my watch into 24-hour mode. Yeesh.

Thus the saga began. I ended up finding the watch’s manual on their website and I read over about how to set the time. Much of it was fairly straightforward, but the section on setting 12-hour vs 24-hour time simply said “You can set for 12 hour or 24 hour mode while setting the hours”. Well, that didn't really help much. I fiddled with the watch for about ten more minutes until I figured out how to do it.

Most (digital) watches support both 12-hour time and 24-hour time. And, they generally swap between the two modes with a 12/24-hour selector within the time-setting screen. That’s where the Nixon guys decided to be different. Rather than do something that I expected — an explicit 12/24 mode selector — they just built 24-hours time right into the hour-setting sequence. A normal watch might have the hours cycling from 12:00am to 12:00pm through to 11:00pm and, after switching to 24-hour mode, 00:00 to 23:00. But, in this case the sequence was just one long loop: 12:00am to 12:00pm to 11:00pm to 00:00 to 23:00 to 12:00am (and so on).

So, if you have a Nixon watch and you end up getting it stuck in 24-hour mode, don’t worry — just keep advancing the hour and eventually you’ll get back to normal time. Or, I suppose that you could be the type that likes 24-hour time but ends up getting stuck in 12-hour time (which could happen too). Still, you should be able to use the same steps to get back into the time you’re used to.

Jury Duty Next Tuesday

Ashley Bischoff6 Comments

I’m flying off to England tomorrow as my cousin Jenny is getting married. I’ll be flying into London (Heathrow) but the wedding itself is in Beaconsfield (map). As it turns out, I’m flying there by way of Miami (yeah, I didn’t expect that one either) and after the layover plus the time change, I end up getting there on Thursday morning. Yeah, I’m sure I’ll be wiiide awake after that one ;).

Fortunately, my flight back is only on Sunday — the wedding is on Saturday — and so I have at least a few days to get acclimated to the time change. On the other hand, I get back Sunday evening and (surprise, surprise), I have work on Monday. But, I’m not going to look forward to spilled milk (or something). I'm just determined to relax and have a fun time. My whole family will be there and I’m looking forward to seeing all of them and spending some time with my extended family as well.

Then, on Tuesday, I have jury duty. I received notice for this a couple weeks ago and I counted my lucky stars that it didn’t coincide with this wedding. For any Dallasites reading, it’s at the Frank Crowley Courts Building which I believe is kinda in the West End. And while I'd normally reserve such trite commentary for its title attribute, that page for the Frank Crowley Courts Building has some truly hideous web design. What, are we still living in 1995?

I’ve never been to jury duty, so I don’t have much of an idea about what to expect. Interestingly enough, the jury summons includes a tear-off form asking for various information about me. Much of it is ordinary and expected — “name”, “date of birth” and so on — but why do they care about my “religious preference”? And, for that matter, my race? The form does appear mandatory, but it does make me a bit uneasy that they’d have any use for some of those tidbits.

From what I gather, there’ll be a lot of waiting around, so I’ll be sure to bring a book (perhaps my copy of The Tipping Point, unless I bring it on my trip to England and finish reading it there). And, I was about ask about whether I’d be allowed to bring my iPod (filled with NPR, natch) but I just ran across this D Magazine blog entry on jury duty which says that it’s apparently ok. And besides what I should or shouldn’t bring along, I’m also curious about how long it lasts — assuming for a moment that I’m not selected for the jury, I’m guessing this would this be an all-day thing? Anyway, if you’ve already been to jury duty, I’m open to any suggestions on what to expect or other tips.

I’ve Setup a Del.icio.us Account

Ashley Bischoff4 Comments

You may have heard about the social bookmarking site del.icio.us but, if not, you wouldn’t be the only one — I only wrapped my head around it a couple weeks ago. As you may have guessed, the basic idea is that you can store all your bookmarks on a centralized website and assign them keywords or “tags” as they’re called in del.icio.us-land.

Then, all the links and usernames are linked together :). So, you can:

  • ... click on one of that tags which you've given a URI (say “CSS”) and see all the other sites with that tag.
  • ... click on a link and see who else bookmarked it
  • ... click on a link and see what tags other people gave it

But, other than linking everything together, del.icio.us is fully RSS-capable. A quick primer on RSS, in case you hadn’t heard of it: RSS allows subscriptions to websites and with an RSS reader (such as the web-based Bloglines), you get a notification when that site/blog is updated.

So, you could “subscribe” to a tag if you wanted to (such as “steelers”) and you’d receive a notice in your RSS reader every time someone tagged a link with that word. Or, each user’s account is also RSS-readable, so you could subscribe to subscribe to (say) John Smith’s account (or my account) and see each link that he added.

Of course, you could subscribe to your friends’ accounts and view links as they bookmark them. Or, you could follow a tag for one of the links which you added to del.icio.us, see who else bookmarked it, and then subscribe to his/her links — for instance, if you like motorcycles, could click on one of your links which had the tag “motorcycles” and then click through to one of the accounts of someone else that bookmarked that link. And, maybe you'd find some useful links of interest on that guy's page (even if he didn’t tag them with “motorcycles”).

As I wrote this entry, I also looked around to see if anyone else had given a straightforward explanation of the del.icio.us concept. I found this thread at Ask.MetaFilter and there, gwint lists quite a few advantages of del.icio.us in one of his posts, but I didn’t want to paste all of that here without his permission.

There were also several recommendations in that thread for this article entitled “Us.ef.ul — A beginner’s guide to The Next Big Thing” and I would have quoted a few bits of that but that article ends up rendering about 2000 pixels wide in my browser and I couldn't really make my way through it. (Then again, I’m running the Firefox build from two days ago, so the odd layout may not necessarily be the authors fault.)

At any rate, I’d recommend giving del.icio.us a try. For what it’s worth, my account is “handcoding” there and there are several Firefox/del.icio.us integration tools (in addition to a del.icio.us-supplied bookmarklet which works just fine as well).