Earlier this week, my wife reported a “sulfur smell” in parts of the house. I was busy, so I didn’t do much more than check in the basement to see if there was anything obvious.

It smelled bad, nothing obvious.

Yesterday, the smell was gone. It seemed like it had gotten better as the rain stopped.

I’m at my desk working, trying to get stdObj’s to do the right thing in the right places, when I expect arrays, and I am getting something else. A frustrating day of digging through my code, trying to finish things up so that everything gets easier.

In perspective, as a programmer, there are things that I know that computers do better than me. I also know that teaching them how to do those things is sometimes painful and time-consuming. When I started doing the legal analysis articles, I would use the <quote> element. But that was designed for something else, and it made everything bold and italic.

This made it hard to read and almost impossible to indicate proper references to cases. I started adding “inline CSS” to each paragraph in a quote to make it look “ok”. It wasn’t great, still it was better.

After a while, I got tired of having to type a long line of stuff each time I wanted to use a quote. I figured out the WordPress methodology for handling site wide CSS. So now I use <div class=”quote”> to get my quotes. I reworked the CSS for the <aside> tag and added a <div class=”aside”>. This has made it much faster to do my articles.

Back to the frustration, I’m writing a plugin for WordPress that does the things I want it to well. Lots of good code to work from, documentation is acceptable. But a new framework for me.

It is frustrating but ok.

Back to the smell, I’m deep in thought, trying to make things work when a pump comes on. That’s to be expected, we have the sump and the pooper shooter (sewage ejector). The pooper shooter is only a couple of years old. We paid a couple of grand to have it replaced a few years ago. It should be just fine.

It isn’t. Normally, it fires off, you hear it. And less than 15 seconds later, it stops.

For those that don’t understand, shit flows down hill. It doesn’t like to go up hill. There are specifications to make sure that the people who install the pipes in your home have all the sewage pipes pointing down hill.

If there isn’t enough slope, things will get stuck in the pipes. Not fun.

The sewage connection point for our house is in the southeast corner. Nice flow from the master bathroom and where the old kitchen used to be. The new kitchen is in the middle of the house, about 50ft from that connection. The slope is a little weak, but it gets the water out of the house.

The “new” bathroom is further west of the kitchen. It is also down three steps from the kitchen. There is no way for the shit to flow down hill from that bathroom to the other side of the house.

The fix for this is a sewage ejector. These are also used if your basement is below grade for the city sewage.

Regardless, this is a plastic/rubber tub, about 40 gallons in size. Poop flows into this. When the tub fills to about the 1/3 or 1/2 level, a pump comes on. It eats whatever solids are in there and shoves it up a 3 in PVC pipe to the floor joists. There it can flow down hill to the other side of the house and out.

The damn thing stopped ejecting.

This means that it filled up.

It filled up with yucky stuff.

When its pump fired off, I had to rush downstairs to figure things out.

It sounded bad. I turned it off and realized that the smell was coming from the fact that the damn thing had overflowed. Not horribly, but enough.

So, this afternoon and evening I was down in the basement with my son trying to get things to work. It is just so much joy when you know that pulling a pipe apart is going to release gross water. It is a dark gray. Not only that, but it has plenty of suspended solids. It stinks. And it splashes.

My son and I did get splashed. It is gross. We tried to pull the check valve. That failed because they did not leave enough space to remove it when they installed it. None of the pipes from the ejector outward are stopped up. It is inside that nasty tub.

Oh, did you notice this is Memorial Day weekend? I can get a plumber out here tomorrow on an emergency call out. Those start at around $300.

For the moment, we’ve put half the house off limit for water usage. Tuesday we’ll get the plumber out here and see what they can do.

The good news is that the stink will go away. The bad news… Yeah, it still smells, and we are washing dishes manually to make sure nothing goes down that pipe.

Hopefully, I’ll get some success today.

In Oregon Firearms Federation, Inc. v. Brown I wrote:

As CS pointed out to me, I got it wrong.

They are correct. I did get it wrong. I’m sorry, all of these bills and cases are starting to run together in my head. Furthermore, I don’t have my tags set correctly on the different cases yet, either.

Measure 114 was a ballot initiative. The anti-gun people in Oregon had been working on multiple infringements within the legislative body. They did not get the votes. Most politicians realize that gun control is often times the third rail of politics.

The anti-gunners don’t like loosing. They went and started the Ballot Initiative. This is the method that the people of Oregon use to get laws passed via direct democracy. Mob rule.

I remember reading that there were a number of things wrong with the process that was used, and there were a number of questions about the legitimacy of the initiative.

According to Ballotpedia, they needed 112,020 valid signatures to get the measure on the ballot. Bay June 23, 2022, they only had around 90,000. This was not enough. By July 9, 2022, they had 159,000. This was barely in time to get the measure on the ballot.

Please note, I’m working from a very fuzzy memory, Oregon wasn’t my state, and it wasn’t of major interest to me, at the time.

All the Country is grist for the mill now. I thank all the readers that have sent us links and announcements about the interesting 2A things happening in their parts of the country.

The measure was written before Bruen being decided. The state should have looked at the Measure and declared it unconstitutional and made them go back and re-write it, and get another set of signatures. That didn’t happen.

Here are the links to prior articles I’ve written regarding Measure 114. I think my writing has gotten better, but not so much that I should go rewrite these articles.

• Reader Prompt: Oregon Measure 114 lawsuit
• Oregon gets some help v. Measure 114
• Oregon Measure 114
• Measure 114 Small Update
• Measure 114
• Measure 114 gets “Fixed”

JP is a comedian who has been making spoof videos for a number of years. His earlier videos were hard to watch because of his level of shilling. He is/was unusual because he came at things from a conservative point of view.

Telarc was one of the first publishers in the CD world. They were making new recordings from some of the less well known Symphony.

With good headphones, you can hear instrument noises, like flute keys being operated.

Enjoy some Battle Music.

I Am Not A Lawyer…. I am a computer scientist.

Yeah, an actual scientist. I didn’t study “Information Technology” or “Information Systems”, I studied “Computer Science”.

I’ve written in so many different computer languages that I’ve forgotten the names of some of them. My first language was PolySci basic, followed by Apple Basic. I quickly moved into 6502 machine code on an Apple II and a KIM. I learned 8080 and Z80.

I wrote my first interpreter back around 1978. It was written in 6502 machine code with the built-in assembler on the Apple II. It was designed for a custom op/amp system to control a model solar home heating system. The next major code I wrote was for the QC department at Planters Peanuts. This was at a time when the only computers in the plant were mainframes and the personally owned Apple II, the head of QC brought in.

Somewhere in that time frame, I learned COBOL.

Shortly thereafter, I headed off to University.

At University, I learned Pascal, FORTRAN IV, FORTRAN V, a couple of different assembly languages. I had the pleasure of entering a boot program into the boot panel manually. The CDC 6500, and 750 had a panel of toggle switches, you entered the boot program by toggling each bit on that panel. There was just enough space to cause the system to read a block of data from a mag tape and then execute that block of code.

I loved every minute of my time at University. As a broke collage kid I ate well, had all the stereo toys I wanted, had a new car. I even had a girlfriend from time to time.

I’ve never stopped learning. Likewise, I figure that when I stop learning, it will be three days after my funeral.

Computer stuff is how I make my money, it is how I spend my time. I do other stuff for a break and to have actual physical results.

This blog has become very important to me. I’m sure you all are tired of reading my IANAL breakdowns of different cases. 4000 words in part II last night. It was a hard battle to learn how to find the resources to write about these cases. Along the way, I’ve become obsessed with saving you from having to repeat that battle.

To that end, I had to find the right tools. I’ve paid for some of them. Some of them I’ve paid for by providing coding skills.

Let’s take a look at the current pile of crap I’m working with in an attempt to make my life easier.

First, I purchased “languageTool”. This is an open-source grammar checking tool, it is one of the reasons that my writing seems to have improved. It not only catches spelling errors, it also catches wrong words spelled correctly, as well as making me actually put commas in where they belong. It is a powerful tool.

If you don’t write 2000+ word documents, the free version will work for you, very nicely.

The next tool I started working with was PACER. I don’t use it anymore except as a source for CourtListener.

I’ve started providing code to CourtListener. It is written in Python using the Django framework. This has only required me to get better at Python, and Django. It also required that I go out and really learn BootStrap 3 and CSS.

CSS is a description language. You provide it with a magic selector, and it will apply different attributes to the selected item. I’ve had to become much better at writing good selectors and designing webpages to have the right types of selectors.

Of course, you don’t like boring pages. You want them to be interesting and responsive. That meant learning a bit of JavaScript.

JavaScript is a language designed to make webpages interactive. It is designed to allow you to do the simplest of things to a webpage. When a person toggles that check-button, display a hidden element with buttons. Except that those buttons are actually anchors that we’ve used CSS to make look like buttons. When you click on those buttons, it takes you to a new page.

This is the start of dropdown menus.

To make all of this happen reasonably, JavaScript was writing to be asynchronous. In addition, it was written for people that didn’t want to think about strong variable typing. This means that the variable “tmp” can hold a string and then later it can hold an integer, still later a floating-point number, and still later a complex object.

Oh, a variable can also hold a “function” so you can use a variable as if it is a function.

This sucks.

Historically, computer software was written to take input and produce output. If you wrote a program to add two numbers, the program would ask “First Number:”, “Second Number:” and then it would print “The sum is:” with the sum printed.

The software determined what was going to happen next.

This is no longer the case, you control what happens next. You are writing an email, you stop in the middle of a word, click on the insert image button, upload an image into your email, go back to writing, click on a different program, watch the cat video, reply to the video, click back to your email, decide to do some formatting, then go back to writing.

You all suck. If you would just do the things in exactly the right order to make the computer happy, life would be so much easier.

So back to the learning curve.

I wanted to have “good citations” to provide you with good links and the ability to look up other cases and references. CourtListener didn’t provide that. I added it.

But I found out that “they” don’t actually use citations the way I want to use them. KOONS v. PLATKIN, 1:22-cv-07464, (D.N.J.) has some 130 different docket entries. Somewhere between 50% and 75% of them are actual documents.

Consider this docket entry:

That is all there is for this docket entry. Translated, it says: the United States Court of Appeals has assigned case number 23-1900 to docket entry 126, the defendants’ Notice to the District Court that they were appealing. The circuit court considers that to be a restricted document.

At docket entry 124 it says:

This, though, has a document attached to it. A 254-page PDF full of dense legal speak. When I left off last night, there was still another 100 pages of the document to read. I’m not going to.

So, I’m feeling pretty good about adding better citations. Then the subject-matter experts let me have it with all 7 barrels from a mini-gun. It seems that I’m not doing citations correctly. This is absolutely true. Why is it true? Because there isn’t a “right way” to do citations, there are thousands. The tool I started using only has 43. Its parent project has thousands.

This led to another language to learn. “CSL” This is Citation Style Language. This is written in XML. I was keen to learn it because I wanted to have it create citations for me. Above is the citation as pulled from Courtlistener. Here is a citation pulled and formatted with a custom CSL program:

—KOONS v. PLATKIN, No. 1:22-cv-07464, Doc. 124 (D.N.J.),

If I want a different version, I can use the shorter version: —KOONS v. PLATKIN

If I want the shortest version, I do that manually: — Id.

The first one is a simple drag and drop. The second one is a drag and drop else where, then copy and paste. Yuck.

I started looking into how to do “fix” it and found a different thing. Zotero.org has an API that will provide me with a citation when I ask for one.

Except that I don’t use “Zotero”, I use “Juris-M”. The version I use has extensions specifically for legal citations.

They even have a plugin for Firefox and Chrome to allow you to click a button and download the citation and link to the document to Juris-M. Juris-M then syncs with Zotero to add your citation into the cloud.

But the plugin doesn’t work with CourtListener. So, I wrote a new JavaScript “translator” to make it work. Did I mention I hate JavaScript? JavaScript is now using “promises” which are new to me. Not the concepts, just the implementation. Which lead to me learning still more JavaScript. Now in the context of software that was interacting with multiple Internet servers, as well as scrapping the Document Object Model of the webpage.

I have things mostly working, except I don’t. I’m not pulling the correct stuff and putting it in the correct places. Close, but not good enough.

Here is the issue in a nutshell. Legal citations require you to use the correct abbreviations. You can’t write “Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit” in a citation, you must write it as “7th Cir.” It isn’t “District Court, D. Connecticut” it is “D. Conn.”. I have to extract that information from CourtListener and put it in exactly the right place. Which might require me to use the CourtListener API rather than scrapping the information from the WebPage.

It might be easier to add metadata to the pages from CourtListener, rather than scrapping for it.

Regardless, I can’t get things to work for me with Zotero because I don’t have the right CSL in Zotero.

Which takes us to what I really want to be able to do.

I aim to be able to add citation markers to my articles. I want them to be quick and easy to add. Instead of putting the citation in place, I put something like [Xcite item=”14815850/IBYFACFI” at=5]. There would be a different version for using a paragraph locator instead of a page locator.

I put that marker every place I’m citing that case. I don’t worry about short, long, or anything else. If the cites follow one another, then the following cites would be written as Id. with locator. If there was an intervening citation, it would use a short form. Then it would switch to using Id. again. It could then create a good bibliography at the end of the document.

With this goal in mind, I tried “ZotPress”. It almost works. Not well enough to actually use. This means that what I want to do is modify ZotPress to interact with my own Zotero data server. It’s open source! Except that it isn’t maintained for others to use. There are no instructions on how to use it. It is written in PHP. But the version of PHP isn’t exactly right. And it has a major dependency on a framework that is no longer being supported.

In the process of looking through this, I found something called a “citation server”. Well, wouldn’t you know, they don’t actually do any of the citation processing within Zotero. Nope, they make a network API call to the cite server.

The cite server is available as open source. I download it and created a Docker image. Another technology with its own language. It works great. Except it doesn’t like my Juris-M CSL because it isn’t the correct version.

Which meant that I had to make the cite server run in a docker container. Did I mention I dislike JavaScript? Did I mention that JavaScript was designed to manipulate a web browser’s DOM in real time? Did I mention that it is an asynchronous nightmare?

Cite Server is written in JavaScript. The citation processor, citeproc, is written in JavaScript. I’m not working on integrating their cite server with Juris-M’s citeproc. It isn’t going as well as I would like.

And that ends today’s rang.

Still too long at 2000 words. It didn’t take as long to write as I didn’t have to dig through as much legal speak. Hope you are having a wonderful weekend.