Jefflog

Did you know you can search the Seattle/King County records on restaurant sanitation online? Me neither, but it’s pretty cool! Of course, if I told my wife about this, she probably wouldn’t want to eat at half the Chinese restaurants we went to (like this one).

As a side note, the software that powers this search is done by a company I used to work for way back when I was 17 years old. It was a summer job, just working out of the owner’s house in Fresno. Worked full time, rode my bike there every day. What do you know, I’m still doing the same thing 12 years later.

I returned home last night from jury duty after spending five days in Terre Haute, much shorter than the two weeks that we were originally told. I’ve archived the news stories covering the event, beginning with the jury selection below.

• Day 1: Ketner trial to begin today
• Day 2: Jury seated for Ketner trial
• Day 3: Emotional start / Attempted murder trial for Marty Ketner gets under way
• Day 4: Witness links Ketner to shooting / Woman testifies she saw pieces of gun
• Day 5: Tanoos testifies / Prosecution relying heavily on circumstantial evidence
• Day 6: Jurors survey scene / Police captain takes stand as prosecution’s last witness
• Day 7: Ketner not guilty / Jury deliberates for five hours

They called me up for jury duty again, and this time I’ve been chosen. What’s worse, the case is a high-profile one in another county, so I’m being shipped off to Terre Haute for the next two weeks without much access to media. You won’t see any updates for a while here.

Mail-order husbands.

Actually, I recognized the picture of the fellow “from Nova Scotia” from AOL Geek of the Week, a site I last saw a few years ago. It’s scary to think how that image has been burned into my memory forever.

Take a look into the seamy world of cheating UK fruit machines, or slot machines as we call them here. These folks hooked up a slot machine’s ROM to an emulator and was able to determine that, among other things, the things are deterministic. In other words, when you put your quarter or dollar in, the machine already knows whether you’ll win or lose.

On a lighter note, I like the sound of the phrase “fruit machine” much better than “slot machine”. I think I’ll work that into my vernacular.

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