Followup[4]: Irony at Galloway Ridge

A criminal check could have been run on a woman charged with killing two retirement community residents

Two elderly victims of fatal beatings at Galloway Ridge retirement community in Pittsboro could have learned -- on their own or with the facility's help -- about the criminal background of the woman charged in their deaths, human services officials and Galloway's executive director said.

Jason Crunk, executive director of Galloway Ridge, said Thursday that policies there called for Galloway to run a criminal check on any employees hired separately by residents. Margaret Murta, 92, and Mary Corcoran, 82, died after an attack Dec. 5 in their Galloway apartment. A former employee of the women, Barbara T. Clark, 41, of Pittsboro has been charged in the deaths.

"The residents can hire people to do work for them," Crunk said. "There is a policy we have that we screen them, but they did not inform us that they had this relationship."

This is one of the better articles; the subject seems to have dropped off the radar at Google News, so this will be my last post on the subject unless something new comes up down the line, possibly at the trial. I've given this thread the tag murder at galloway ridge for convenience.

The Rediscovery of Cordwainer Smith

From thnidu via filkerdave comes a link to this comic-strip micro-review of The Rediscovery of Man by Cordwainer Smith. You'll probably also be looking for Norstrillia. These are the NESFA editions; they appear to have been recently republished by Baen Books in trade paperback form as When the People Fell and We the Underpeople.

You also want to look at these illustrations by Corby Waste. There's a reason why his first book of stories was called You Will Never Be the Same.

Weekend wrap-up: Puttering along...

Modulo my walks, a drive with the flower_cat last night, and a outing with the Cat and the chaoswolf this afternoon that I'll get to later, my weekend has mostly been spent puttering around the house. That's what I do when I'm trying to avoid, you know, real work.

I've reluctantly come to the realization that, if I haven't read one of those stacked-up magazines in the decade or so they've been sitting there, I'm probably not going to get to them in the next decade, either. And the ones that I have read, that are sitting in piles in the garage attic? Recycle time.

Note to self: it's time to stop when the dust starts making you sneeze.

Today was very pleasant. At the Cat's suggestion I went out this morning and got bagels and lox for brunch. Yum. House of Bagels might not be a real New York bakery, but it's close enough. Along the way I stopped at the nearby Whole Paycheck Foods to get some nose-watering salt. I asked for "uniodized" and got a blank look, but then I noticed the three-pound boxes of kosher salt on the top shelf of the salt section. Score! Less than $3 for pure sea-salt with guaranteed, God-gets-mad-at-you-if-you-cheat no additives. )Tried it this evening: works just fine.)

After brunch the Cat and I took the Wolfling to Stanford -- it seems she's been curious about the place where her parents met and fell in love, not to mention other places on campus she's been hearing about. As it turns out, the coffeehouse appears to be either defunct or being renovated -- what used to be the main entrance is now a bike shop; the tables are there but there's no sign on the door and the place looks far too clean to be in actual use.

Then she spotted the bookstore, so we took a side-trip. It turns out that, regardless of its total absence on their web site, they do have a shelf for alumni, student, and faculty music. I'll go back during the week when there's a manager on site.

We also stopped at the museum to wander around the Rodin sculpture garden (always one of my favorites), and looked at the Quad and its centerpiece, the Memorial Church. It was locked -- I don't remember it ever being locked during my time on campus -- but the mosaics on the front are as gorgeous as ever, and you could get a glimpse of some of the stained glass through the window on the front doors.

Did I mention the Golden Bough concert last night? I thought not.

Computer geekery a post or two upwhen.

Elsewhere in the blogosphere...

I don't think a real LJ exodus has started yet, but I've seen several people moving or preparing to move. I now have accounts on greatestjournal and insanejournal (where I paid $35 to become "permanently insane". So far I don't have any posts at either of them.

At some point, my plan is to post to an entirely local and personal blog on my home system, push it out to steve.savitzky.net, and push it from to the *journals, possibly with some filtering by tag. I expect that posts will be files with RFC822-style headers and HTML bodies -- this will give the same editing experience as the ljupdate (emacs) client, at least in its current hacked-up state, and an extensible place to put metadata.

The closest things I've seen are nanoblogger (which uses 822 headers), blosxom, and ikiwiki, but I'll probably end up stealing a little code from each of them, and doing the multi-blog stuff myself.

Cooking with gas

On the way home from Stanford we stopped off at our favorite local household-appliance pusher dealer and ordered a Caldera SSK365 36"gas cooktop. It'll be delivered and installed on Tuesday.

We've had our Kitchenaid cooktop for about 7 years now and it's given us a fair amount of trouble. Recently it's developed a gas leak somewhere -- not enough to be dangerous (yet), but enough for the flower_cat to notice. Out it goes. The Caldera looks easier to clean, too.

The irony of the name is not lost on me, but as long as they don't change it to SCO and start suing their customers I don't mind.

The geeky bits

The other main activity for the weekend has been getting ready to record the scratch tracks for Amethyst Rose. For quite a while I've been wanting to move the track directories from their present location in .../Tracks/ to under the album working directories they belong with, so that's a lot of what I worked on.

In my usual style, I wrote another make target (snarf-tracks) in album.make. That way, I could apply it in all the backup directories as well, and avoid rewriting some 40 GB of audio files. Mission accomplished.

Along the way I also wrote the script to push the backups to my dreamhost site. That's important not only because I'm paranoid, but because it's going to be the main collaboration site for working on the album.

One pleasant discovery in all this was that I actually have recordings of 11 of the 16 songs in the tentative tracklist. Many -- perhaps most -- will need to be redone even to have useable scratch tracks, but it holds out considerable hope that I can actually get them done in the next six weeks, i.e., in time for Conflikt.

Of course, I also discovered that there were more tracks on the tentative list than I had space for, even after some trimming. I pretty much had to go into "what can I drop without having somebody hunt me down and kill me" mode. So there will be at least three more albums coming along: Amethyst Rose (family and friends), Hackers' Heaven (hackers in space), and a to-be-named fantasy and space album. That's good: it will tighten up AR and HH around their respective themes.