It started out like a typical Wednesday. Its chore day for me. Time to take out the trash and clean the litter boxes. If there’s any odd ball chores left, I like to include them in Wednesday routine. Wednesday’s special: mowing the lawn with a side order of edge trimming.

I completed everything and decided to tackle the trimming using a weed wacker instead of the hand trimmer. It was working out ok. I was making a good bit of noise. My neighbor across the street (who has the BEST lawn on the block) was out tending to her grass and garden.

A bunch of kids, I’d say about high school age, start merging at our corner. I’d probably say there were 10 or so kids, plus or minus a few. We have a park, and for one reason, they didn’t go to the park, but hung out in the street across from the park.

This happens every now and then, but tonight, they were loud. How loud? I was 4 houses away, running a weed wacker, and I could still hear them. I turned to the neighbor across the street and she’s shaking her head and telling me they’re too loud. I walked over to talk to her. She said she was just thinking about calling the cops. As she complained about the kids, 2 cop cars immediately pull up. Then a 3rd one comes in a hurry. Apparently someone else called the cops. The cops are there and for 5 minutes, you can still hear yelling and profanity (I’m thinking directed towards the cops).

After 10 minutes, the cops clear the group out. I ended up talking to the neighbor for a bit and a 3rd neighbor came out. I got all sorts of neighborhood info from them. Word is the city plans to close the park down the street. They don’t have enough man power to patrol the park and the park has been taken over by older kids. Its a shame. The park is kind of nice. No one knows what will happen if it does close.

About 20 minutes later, one of the cops pulls up towards us and talks with us. The officer was nice. She was genuinely concerned. She was concerned for the neighborhood as a whole, which was cool. I learned that if you have someone trespassing in your yard, and your big angry dog gets them, the police don’t mind.

Also, the neighbors want to setup a block watch. The officer said another section of Maple Heights had setup a block watch and ended up driving 2 bad families out of the neighborhood.

The general conclusion from everyone I talked to was the neighborhood was going down hill. The cause of the down hill (they feel) is: parents don’t care about their kids (no control, no discipline – kids and their parents feel its acceptable to mouth off to the cops!) and Maple Heights is letting in too many section eights (government program that helps people with housing/rent).

Also, if you’re on Warrensville Center Road, south of 480 and north of Rockside, there’s drug dealing going on at every corner down Warrensville – from what the officer said. Ugh.
Continue reading “Maple Heights Park to close?”

I’ve wired the garage to a Linux box. I found some code and instructions on how to persuade Linux to monitor the parallel port. I tweaked the code some and got it to run as a service. Then I tapped the phone line that runs to the garage and plugged it into the parallel port. Its a pretty clean install and didn’t require any additional holes into the garage. From the phone jack, I made an RJ-11 connector which branches out to a magnetic switch. When the garage opens, the switch opens and the Linux box records it.

In the end, its all kind of silly, but it is mildly practical too. We often leave the house and forget if we remembered to close the garage. Now we have a way to check from our cell phones or from the ‘net. I have NO plans to connect a garage door opener to the computer (although it wouldn’t be that hard at all to do).
Continue reading “Garage wired”