Six months?!
It's been a busy week here on the police and courts beat, so I'm a little behind on the blog. I started the week trying to find out more about the investigation into Kelly Huff's death. The Ocupational Safety and ...

blah

SUNDAY, SUNDAY, SUNDAY
There's roller skating at skateworld (behind the Sam Houston Post Office and the putt-putt) on Sunday. It's $3.50 (CHEAP!!) for the session, which starts at 2 p.m. You bet I'll be there. If you think you MIGHT be interested in roller derby, look ...

SUNDAY, SUNDAY, SUNDAY
There's roller skating at skateworld (behind the Sam Houston Post Office and the putt-putt) on Sunday. It's $3.50 (CHEAP!!) for the session, which starts at 2 p.m. You bet I'll be there. If you think you MIGHT be interested in roller derby, look ...

Six months!?

An update
It took less than 24 hours for the Jackson County auditor's office to get me the records I requested Wednesday. Thanks to Kim Vasquez, who's so fast it's just scary.

Not just infatuation -- it's love
I'm still in love with the FOIFT's records-request-letter template that I wrote about last week. This, despite of its faults, like the fact it's written in lawyer. So, yeah, I had to chop out a few words here or there for brevity's sake. Today, ...

Information mining
A Society of Professional Journalists FOIA blog  (FOIFYI --maybe I should change my blog's name?) linked to this story. Wow. Talk about patience and determination. I love this example reporting with the help of open-record laws. If you've got an idea for renaming ...

Get up, stand up
My dad sang from an unconventional lullaby play list. The Ramones got top billing, as did this song.   I don’t know if he meant it to become the anthem that runs through my head when I'm getting ready to ...

Cha-ching!
Mmmm....pie charts. The Texas Comptroller has this handy Web page to help taxpayers track their cash: http://www.window.state.tx.us/comptrol/expendlist/cashdrill.php. Nice as a roll-over pie chart is, I like the glossary best. In my pre-Victoria life, I reported on city government, so I ...

Doing the laundry
Now, I'm not one of those people who loves puns, but my (not so) inner nerd giggled when an editor assigned me this story: http://www.victoriaadvocate.com/805/story/180788.html. Yeah. I'd keep up with my wash if stacks of cash were involved. But back to ...

Debate with my coffee? Think I will.
I'll blog about this more later.  But this link http://www.foift.org/pialetter.html is shooting up to the top of my favorite-things list this week. If you need to request public records, start here. FOIFT is a great service. I wish I could bake ...

Two posts in one!
It's fitting that I delayed writing the first half of this blog for a few days. My biggest public-record concern this week is holiday backlog. "Emergency responders, their schedules never change," city spokesman O.C. Garza told me today. That means ...

On the records
Often, I start my mornings with a call to police to get an update of some incident or another. Here's the challenge: Information sometimes seems lost in the ether. Even if an investigation is ongoing, police have to release the ...

On the records
Often, I start my mornings with a call to police to get an update of some incident or another. Here's the challenge: Information sometimes seems lost in the ether. Even if an investigation is ongoing, police have to release the ...

Round two. Ding!
I'm in day two of trying to get an accident report from the Department of Public Safety. That means my day goes something like this: make a phone call. Wait. Repeat. Wait. Make a phone call. Repeat. And again. And ...

There ought to be a law....
But wait! There is! NPR had good news for me when I woke up (too early) Jan. 1. One of Dubya's last big decisions of 2007 was give the Freedom of Information Act a shot of performance-enhancing language. As a ...