Lincolnite

Look for a 5 percent increase in your electric bill from LES. That's lower than the 5.5% LES requested, but higher than the 4% and 4.5% requested by LIBA and the Lincoln Employers Coalition, respectively. What will LES do without the extra 0.5%? That remains to be seen. I wouldn't be surprised if we see a voluntary "support sustainable energy" checkbox on our bills in the future. I don't see such a thing being extremely successful. Why not? Because LES hasn't (yet) given us any concrete goals to work toward. "Help LES build five new wind turbines" sounds like something I can get behind. "Help LES make posters and billboards to tell people to be more environmentally conscious" isn't nearly as sexy.

Here's a nasty little adoption-related scenario playing out in Nebraska:

An adoption agency [Nebraska Children's Home] and birth mother want to take back a 3-month-old baby boy from a couple who wanted to give him a home, after learning that the adoptive mother was pregnant. The 22-year-old biological mother says in court documents that she wanted the parents who adopted her son to not have their own biological children. She wanted them to either raise her son alone or adopt more kids if they wanted to expand their family. But Jason and Angela Vesely say they didn’t purposely hide Angela’s pregnancy when they applied to adopt a child. They say they were never asked if she was pregnant by the private agency and didn’t know it had rules against applying mothers being pregnant.

Yikes, talk about a situation with no winners. It isn't unusual for Nebraska Children's Home to have a policy regarding an adoptive mother's pregnancy status or the adoptive family's number and age of current children. That's all par for the course. What would be unusual is if NCH didn't make its policies crystal clear. There was no mistaking our agency's policy: if The Missus were to get pregnant before the placement, we would be dropped from the waiting list. It's not intended to be a punitive policy, nor is it to prevent families with biological children from adopting. It's simply about ensuring that a newly adopted child receives the attention he deserves; it's very difficult to give that attention if two new children are battling for the parents' focus. Unfortunately, the LJS article creates more questions than it answers. Was it an open adoption? (The fact that the mother's name appears in the article leads me to believe that it was.) Has the adoption been finalized? (If so, that was very speedy.) I could go on and on. Child custody cases are rarely pretty, but they are often fascinating. I, for one, hope to keep an eye on this case because the end decision could potentially have interesting implications for all adoptive parents. Any case that is perceived to hurt adoptive parents has a chilling effect on adoptions. The biggest losers are usually domestic and open adoptions, two areas that most adoption proponents are trying to strengthen.

Are Lincolnites in a winter funk? Or perhaps we're just masochists? I ask because the third most-read HuskerExtra story this morning is this flashback to October. I'm not sure why anybody would want to relive those days.

The LJS editors have hopped on board the movement to change Lincoln's snow removal policies. Mayor Beutler has expressed interest in reviewing the city's policies as well. Then again, Mayor Beutler has also promised to review overall city spending -- with methods including an upcoming citizen survey of some sort -- so if the snow budget goes up, something else is probably going to have to go down. The Mayor is under a lot of pressure to keep the budget in check. And there's the rub. Is snow removal a service Lincolnites are willing to pay (more) for? I think it probably is ... right up until the new tax bills arrive. That's when folks tend to get cranky. I wonder what we could accomplish with the equivalent of, say, a buck a person?

Chief Casady spent some time reviewing his website statistics, which got me thinking about how it had been a while since I had looked at mine. A couple interesting items: First, I was extremely pleased to see that nearly 30% of Lincolnite's visitors use Firefox. Good job, folks! Some of you really need to upgrade, though. It's easy: Help -> Check for updates. Firefox takes care of the rest. Almost exactly half of the site's users use Internet Explorer, and of the IE users, half use IE7 and half use IE6. (And 2,500 hits came from IE 4.01. What?!) If you IE6 folks are able to upgrade, I strongly recommend upping to IE7. Well, actually I recommend switching to Firefox, but if you want to stick with IE, at least switch to IE7. Let's move on to locations. A surprising 2.5% of my traffic comes from France. Huh? I mean, thanks for coming, but I don't understand the draw. Obviously most of the site's visitors are from Nebraska, and 75% of those are from Lincoln. There's also quite a bit of traffic coming from California. Hi West Coasters! Search engine traffic is all over the board. But who cares about the normal items, I love the odd search phrases. Like these from January 2008:

• "Tori+Amos"+"To+Venus+and+Back" (47 hits)
• wrappers for hardshell tacos (2 hits)
• jennifer gray (32 hits)
• ferris bueller sloan (2 hits)
• keg prices in lincoln ne (4 hits)

I don't think I'm ready for Robbie to speak. In some ways it's great. I ask, "Robbie, what would you like for lunch?" And he responds, "Pea buh" (peanut butter). How handy is that? But in other ways, it's not such a good thing. I can't even think words like "damn" or "stupid", much less the fouler nouns, adjectives, and verbs, without Robbie picking up on them. Sure, it's hilarious for a few moments to see your son walking around the house saying "damn damn damn damn". But then you realize you're leaving for your parents' house in five minutes... It really is amazing how quickly his vocabulary is expanding. For a long time his only recognizable words were "uh oh" and "Daisy", not to mention the dreaded "No". Now he uses new words every day. Like "skiving" (Thanksgiving), which he uses to refer to a certain photograph on the wall. And today for the first time he referred to the hand mixer as "beats". Every time my mom watches him for us, she asks, "When did Robbie learn [some new word]?", and more often than not, we didn't even know he knew that word. It's incredible. It's also amusing to watch Robbie begin to test his boundaries. He might try to put his feet on the table while he's eating, for example. We'll say, "No no, Robbie. No feet on the table". So then he tests us. He'll hover his foot over the table, or he'll graaaadually lower the foot off the table until he gets the sense that he's in the safe zone. The little turkey loves to find the boundary between allowed and forbidden. Robbie is beginning to sing as well. So far "EIEIO" (Old MacDonald), "round round bus" (The Wheels on the Bus) and "ba ba BEANS" (Beans! by The String Beans) are his favorites. I especially love it when he tries to sing the Beans song. Unfortunately, it has not spurred an interest in eating beans. Physically, Robbie has been near the head of the class. He keeps up with older kids at the playground, at the YMCA, and elsewhere, and they seem to really enjoy playing with him. As a result, it's easy to compare Robert to older (2 and 3 year-old) kids. It's difficult to believe how much Robbie is going to change in the next few months. We're going down to Albuquerque in May for my sister-in-law's un-wedding (long story). Robbie will have just turned two. Even though it's only 3 months away, I can tell by watching other kids that Robbie will be much different by then. Grandma and grandpa will be shocked.

Mr. T, Moses, and I will be at Burrito Shack (approx. 9th and M) today at 12:45. If any of you would like to stop in and enjoy some tasty grub, I'd love to say hi. Also, The Missus, Robbie, and I will probably drop by Duggan's on Sunday to honor George Landolt's memory with some mass taco consumption. We haven't decided when we'll go, but it some of you want to go as a group, we'd be happy to meet up with you.

Chelsea Clinton will be in town today to campaign for her mom. She'll be on the UNL campus at the Union at 2:00pm, then she'll head to the Coffee House at 3:00. I could be wrong, but I can't help but feel like sending in her daughter isn't enough to get Clinton above the 30% mark in Saturday's caucus. Michelle Obama will be in town on Friday to campaign for her hubby. No details have been announced.

Chief Casady's squad is a little red-faced today after a lapse in judgment resulted in the Fourth Amendment helping to free a suspect in the Scheels robbery last October 1. Prosecutors were forced to drop their case against Jameal Gaines when a critical piece of evidence was ruled inadmissible because it had been acquired illegally. Mistakes like this happen now and then in every police department. The unfortunate thing about this situation for LPD is that the robbery was very high-profile. Losing one of the main suspects due to a violation of his Constitutional rights is very embarrassing. It'll be interesting to see if Chief Casady addresses this publicly on his blog. He probably won't (and maybe even can't) address this situation specifically, but it would be interesting to read his general perspective on suspect rights during evidence gathering. UPDATE: Indeed, Chief Casady has chimed in. An excerpt:

The probation order specified the conditions, and number 12 on that list was a requirement that the defendant "shall submit to search of his person, home, and school locker by the juvenile probation officer." The police officers spoke to the juvenile court probation officer via telephone, who advised them that they could search based on the court's order. The District Court, however, ruled that the probation officer can't transfer the authority of the Juvenile Court's order authorizing the search to a police officer.

Emphasis in original.

• Don't go to school today
• Don't park on the even side of the street
• Don't forget to take Mr. Wilson out for lunch

Looks like Time Warner Cable's Road Runner has taken another step toward the dark side. As of today (from my office, anyway), if you try to visit a domain that doesn't exist, you are redirected to a page that contains "helpful" suggestions and, of course, advertisements. Go ahead, try to visit this website and see what happens. At this stage you can still opt out of the service. To do so, either:

1. Click "Why am I here?", followed by "Preferences"; or
2. Click the "Opt In or Out of This Service" link at the very bottom of the page

On the next page, change your settings as appropriate. I personally recommend setting everything to "Disabled", but that's just me. Unfortunately, this may represent a tiny step toward a future in which internet service providers inject themselves more and more into your daily web browsing routine. The companies will promote this sort of a thing as a "service" intended only to help people find their way on the big bad World Wide Web. Fair enough, though the advertisements strewn across the page lead me to believe that altruism isn't their sole motivation. The average user probably won't bat an eye at this, and frankly, it's really not that big a deal at this point. I just don't like the notion that somebody is interfering with the steps between my action (requesting a website) and the expected outcome (either the website or an error arrives). Call me a pessimist, but I see this move as a foot in the door.

Richard Bagby of Lincoln is all in a lather over the Journal Star's advice:

Stealing wireless Internet service from a neighbor is suggested in “A few serious and not-so-serious money-saving tips” (LJS, Jan. 31). That’s outright criminal. It’s not at all funny to list criminal activity as a way to save money, even if tongue in cheek. ... You owe the community an apology.

This may be a stupid question, but is it actually illegal to "steal" wireless internet service from a neighbor's unsecured network? Unethical, yes, but illegal? Does Nebraska have such a law on the books? Does this all fall under the broad definition of wiretapping? Regardless, if you don't have your network secured, shame on you.

You might be interested to know that Mayor Beutler has endorsed Barack Obama in the presidential race. Beutler's decision doesn't seem too surprising to me. His style feels roughly consistent with Obama's -- at least to the extent that you can compare the styles of a mayor and a senator running for president. Of course, Beutler's endorsement means approximately nothing in the grand scheme of things. But hey, you should know for whom your local leaders are stumping.

I don't suspect too many people will mourn the death of Tobacco Hut, but it is interesting to note that it's probably the first business to close at least in part due to the West O bridge reconstruction. According to the Journal Star, it seems that most other businesses are hanging tough, with just a few layoffs or cuts in hours blamed on the bridge. Then again, we're only three months into a one year project. Have you changed your West O travel habits as a result of the bridge work?