It wasn’t democratic Governor Ted Kulongoski. It was Republican State Senator Bruce Starr. He wrote it, and brought it up before the state legislature. Starr was the principle sponsor of the bill, but when legislative leaders blocked a vote on it, did Starr get help from Kulongoski? Not really.

Jessica’s Law mandates convicted molesters of children 17 years of age and under serve a minimum prison sentence of 25 years.

Bruce Starr drafted a ballot measure and began collecting signatures. Only when it became clear that the public overwhelmingly supported Jessica’s Law, was the bill brought up in a special session of which Kulongoski urged the Legislature to “limit its attention.”

Finally, it passed and Kulongoski signed Jessica’s Law into law. And now Kulongoski wants to take credit for the whole thing.

Please read this excellent editorial, about just how offensive it is that Kulongoski wants to take credit for Jessica’s law, when true credit should go to Bruce Starr.

I’m considering buying an HP 1320 LaserJet printer. The printer specs say that it will do up to 22 pages per minute, and it will also do two-sided printing.

Now here is my question:
How many pages per minutes can be printed in two-sided mode?

If the duplexing was completely costless timewise, then it should be 11 pages per minutes. However, I’ve seen duplexers work, and it often takes extra time to move the paper around, so it really should be less than that. But how much less?

I’m not sure what I think about all these “The” movies. I think they should come out with a movie called, “The Blogger” or “The Insomniac.”

The Prestige was one of those movies which tries to keep you in the dark about some fact only to reveal it to you in the end. Of course, I’m not going to tell you what it is, but it is a little better than, “Oh, the aliens don’t like water.” I figured some of their secrets out a little early, which either makes me think that they were too obvious or that I’m still missing something.

Overall, the movie was interesting, but it did some of that time jumping that I thought was overly excessive and confusing. It was so bad that I’m still not exactly sure the order of some of the events.

Two thematic elements of the movie are secrets and obsessions which I’m concluding are both bad.

This movie is not scary, not overly exciting during parts, but makes you think a little bit. Watch it with friends because you will probably want to talk about it when you are done. A movie to see, but I wouldn’t recommend haste to see it. I can’t remember any musical score, which probably means that it wasn’t exceptional. It is PG-13, probably because there is hatred and death in the movie.

A friend of mine about a week ago got her wallet stolen by a black man going door to door soliciting donations for Hurricane Katrina victims.

This happened in University Villa. Myself and other residents at University Villa remember seeing this guy come around last summer. Apparently he is looking for “donations” but also looking for opportunities for easy theft as well. It wouldn’t surprise me if he has been spotted at apartment complexes all over Provo.

If you see this man, use discretion. In this case and other similar cases, it may be appropriate to call the police immediately and alert them to suspicious individuals. Never let a stranger access into your apartment. Maybe if we can keep ourselves and our neighbors alert about this guy and other dangers that occur even in Provo, we can help prevent another victim.

For a previous talk in a church meeting, I need to come up with a definition of wisdom. I looked around the Internet for hours and read just about everything I came across, and when you added up all the different views and thoughts about wisdom, I’ve decided to define wisdom as this:

Wisdom is the product of the application of faith in the things we know to be true.

Maybe sometime I’ll give a more complete discussion about wisdom.

After almost two months of work and waiting, I finally found out today that Portland State has recognized me as a resident of Oregon, which basically means that I pay less tuition. I’m glad they were so wise. I would hate to have had to use a picture of my webbed toes in an appeal.

So my main blog at http://jacob.peargrove.com/blog now seems to have a Google pagerank of 5. Google gives each page in its index a score from 0 to 10 depending on many different things. For a personal blog to be given a pagerank of 5 is pretty significant. Ever since I’ve been checking the pagerank of my site with the Firefox Google Toolbar it has been at PR-4. Having a higher pagerank might also explain the increased amount of traffic I’ve been seeing to my site. October (already, so far) as seen more unique visitors than any previous month.

Oregon Measure 43:

Requires 48-hour notice to unemancipated minor’s parent before providing abortion.

Currently in Oregon, anyone 15 years or older may consent to and obtain an abortion without parental notification. So let me get this straight. If you are 15 and miss a day of school, the school phone robot calls home to let the parents know. If you are 15 and want to get a body piercing, you have to have parental consent and accompaniment. But if you are 15 and want to get an abortion, the parent doesn’t even need to be notified.

I’m voting in favor of Measure 43. It just makes sense that a parent of a minor should at least be notified before their child gets an abortion.

I’m taking a solid-state physics class at PSU, and I just got the results back for the first mid-term exam today. I got 83% right before “the curve” and 93% after the curve, which means that I got an A. This is really good news because I could really enjoy an A grade in the class.

The thing though is, the exam wasn’t that hard. At BYU professors had the attitude of “Why should I test you on anything you’ve seen before?” This exam was fairly straight forward and mostly stuff that was familiar from the lectures or the homework. I really liked the straight forwardness of the exam and I wish my classes at BYU could do that.

Although Firefox 2 isn’t officially released from Mozilla until tomorrow (Oct 23, 2006), I found that the files are on the FTP server ready to be downloaded. Of course there is an official list of changes, but here is a list of small little things I’ve noticed.

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