Brian Reilly’s other weblog

This is a strange story. Only in San Francisco…

(06-30) 19:49 PDT San Francisco — An effort by San Francisco to shield eight young Honduran crack dealers from federal immigration officials backfired when the youths escaped from Southern California group homes within days of their arrival, officials said Monday.

The walkaways are the latest in a string of embarrassments for city officials who are protecting illegal-alien drug dealers from federal authorities and possible deportation because of San Francisco’s 1989 declaration that the city is a sanctuary for undocumented immigrants.

Until recently, San Francisco flew juvenile illegal immigrants convicted of drug crimes to their home countries rather than cooperate with the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, a practice that drew national attention when The Chronicle reported it Sunday.

It’s hard to figure out why anyone thought this was a good idea.

Someone over at the American Family Association’s OneNewsNow site needs to fix their auto replace algorithm. When Tyson Gay won the 100 meters at the US Olympic trials, OneNewsNow ran an AP story about it, but changed “Gay” to “Homosexual”. You can’t always trust technology.

Trade shows are always entertaining as the companies with the booths try so hard to outdo each other while they seek your attention. Whether it’s the stuff they give away or the fancy booths or the friendly people working in the booths, those trade show events can be memorable. If you’re like me, you may wonder where the booths and all the stuff in them comes from. The Godfrey Group is a trade show display company with anything and everything you could possibly need to dazzle people at a trade show. They have displays of all kinds and everything else you’ll need for a top notch booth that attracts a crowd.

My site was down yesterday and part of today. Another mysterious outage courtesy of Vizaweb. These have been more frequent lately and have not always been resolved too promptly.

And then Vizaweb sent me a domain name bill for a domain I cancelled a year ago and no longer own.

I missed the first half of the Euro 2008 final, but the second half was still pretty good. I thought Spain would win when I saw them earlier in the tournament and they really dominated today. Germany had few chances and especially in the second half they didn’t do much.

I check out bbc.co.uk every day, mostly for the soccer stories, but I like to get a different perspective on world news also. They make use of video in many stories, but in some cases, the site figures out where you are located and lets you know that the video is not available to you. Why it’s not available, I don’t know. It may have to do with the funding for the BBC, but it seems odd not to allow it to be played online.

A story today about a US murder trial of a British citizen does have video that I can see. This guy’s defense/defence seems very implausible.

Gonzo Sandoval spent a couple of days with us last week. One thing we did while he was here was to update the Armored Saint page on Wikipedia. We corrected a few things and added some new information. The funny thing was that Gonzo had never seen the page before.

Gonzo and brother Phil have a couple of songs available on iTunes and Armored Saint is playing at the Rocklahoma festival later this month.

I’m coming up next month on two years of doing paid posts on my blog. Almost all of those have been with PayPerPost. It has generally been a pretty good deal for me, although there have been some slow times, but they’ve eventually picked up. However, the past two weeks have been the slowest ever. I think I’ve only done 1 post in that time, mostly because there were usually none available. Right now there are only 3 listed as qualified for me, and two of those have no spots available. I can’t remember a dry period like this in the past. I would spend more time on the new site, SocialSpark, but I find it much harder to use and not very fruitful in terms of the time it takes to try and get something to work on. Most of the time I’m on there, I come away empty handed, or if I’m lucky I get a place in line for an opportunity and never hear back about it. The times I have heard back, it has been in an email at an innopportune time letting me know I have 12 hours to do it. When I get one of those at 9 PM, I usually will not have time to do it. I think I need more than 12 hours notice with a system like that. 24 hours seems more reasonable to me, but there must be a reason why it’s only 12.

One thing I don’t like about my house is the lack of shutters on the windows. I have them in the front, but not on the sides or back. It looks strange to me when there are no shutters. A nice set of exterior shutters, like the ones you can find at Larson Shutters, really makes a house look nice on the outside. Larson offers a huge range of shutters, including vinyl, composite and authentic wood, so whatever kind of look and color you need, they have something you’ll like. Larson Shutters were even used on the Extreme Makeover Home Edition television show!

The Celtics proved they were the better team. They played better defense and shut down Kobe Bryant. They also outhustled the Lakers most of the time. The Lakers should be better next year, so maybe the outcome will be different.

The one thing I never got used to was the lack of calls on moving screens. Boston did this all the time, and it was almost never called. The one time it was, at the end of game 5, it seemed the wrong time to finally do it. I think they need to decide if that is a rule or not because it isn’t called the way it should be and not just in this series.