Jury Duty

Thursday, May 12, 2022

The trip from Reno was rather long and uninteresting. You’d think there’d be a direct route from Reno / Carson City to Las Vegas but there isn’t. We basically started off on 95 ALT, had to go through some towns, picked up 95 ALT again, went through some more towns until we finally got to 95 South. There wasn’t much to see because it was a dark, overcast, moonless light. We got to Las Vegas around 1:30 am.

I reported to jury duty at the appointed time of 10:00 am. There were about 50 of us in this group. They checked us in, validated our parking, and showed us a short video on what it means to sit on a jury. By 10:30 am they announced that we’d be taking a break for lunch and that we needed to be back by 12:30 pm.

At 12:30 pm they announced that at 1:00 pm we’d be going upstairs to a courtroom. After we were all seated the judge explained that we’d all been selected as candidate jurors for a capital murder case. The actual case would be starting over a month from now on June 16. We were then asked to fill out a ten page questionnaire; the prosecution, defense, and judge would all be reviewing these papers. Some of the candidate jurors would be notified to return for further questioning, some of the candidate jurors would be notified sometime before June 13, that they were not needed, and the rest would have to return to court on June 16 for voir dire. After we completed the questionnaire we were free to leave.

Are you kidding me? The court was putting a large number of people’s lives on hold for over a month? I was given a summons and I showed up ready and eager to serve on the appointed day – but to ask me, and the others, to put our lives on hold for over a month is just plainly abusive. I asked for an opportunity to speak to the judge but was told that would not be possible. Not happy in the extreme. Given that I made it very clear that there were no circumstances under which I impose the death penalty on anyone it’s likely that I will be excused – but you never know.

That evening we had dinner at Taco Bell and finished off the day with, what else, ice cream at Baskin Robbins.

Friday, May 13, 2022

The market has been on a severe downward trend. I spent the morning tinkering with our stock market portfolio in the hopes of avoiding the poorhouse.

For lunch we went to a restaurant with an unassuming name: Bros Breakfast Lunch and Dinner. My country fried steak was breaded with cornmeal instead of flour and the gravy had a distinctive Southwest flavor. Deborah had the chicken fajitas and said that they were very good. Mom raved about her strawberry chicken salad.

Mom’s kitchen is a disaster. The entire thing has been stripped down to the studs because of a water leak. She was planning on having it put back together the way it was but we suggested that this might be a great time to do a full remodel. We spent the afternoon at a home center checking out countertops, cabinetry, and flooring. It might just be too large and too time consuming of a project for her to take on right now.

None of us were really interested in dinner but we did manage to find a new ice cream place. Apparently it opened in March, shortly after we left Las Vegas. It’s called, “Sorry, Not Sorry”. Weird name but great, small batch ice cream in about a dozen unusual flavors. The two most interesting flavors were sold out so we tried the chocolate brownie (it was excellent), the honey lavender (interesting but wouldn’t choose it again), the butter cake (it was awesome), and the salted caramel (nothing special). We’ll definitely have to go back and try the flavors that were sold out.

Wednesday, May 18, 2022

I had yet another call with Apple tech support. They had no idea what the issue with the pictures was but I managed to find a support article on the web that was directly on point. The issue appears to be that Apple is considering emails from Bluehost (the blog’s hosting site) to be SPAM and so is declining to download the images. The tech agreed that I had found the issue, updated the case notes, and opened a bug report with the engineers. She said that someone at Apple may actually look at the bug report and may actually fix it but there was no telling when that might happen. As far as she is concerned the case is closed. If the engineers ever get back to her she will let me know.

This has been a very frustrating process. One day everything is working perfectly and the next it’s not. I’ve been wracking my brain for a good, long term fix. I think I finally stumbled on a decent solution. The emails don’t actually contain images – they contain links to the images on the website that then have to be downloaded – and it’s the downloading that’s at the heart of the problem. Could the pictures be imbedded directly into the email? I think that would work well. The only problem is that emails would go from several kilobytes in size to several megabytes in size; some email platforms might reject the emails because of the increased size. In the future we will have to limit the number of pictures we include and will have to drastically reduce their resolution. Still, I think this is the best practical solution. Implementing it will be another story. There is no standard way to embed the pictures in the WordPress universe. I will have to hack some code. I may not get it right at first but it’s doable. Wish me luck.

Thursday, May 19, 2022

We decided to hightail it out of Vegas for now. We’re going to head North and explore some of the National Parks in Nevada and Utah. If we have to come back to Vegas for Jury duty in mid June at least we’ll be fairly close.