Despite it’s name, the Marketplace Fairness Act is not about fairness. It is about making it harder for small businesses to compete online and easier for companies with huge infrastructures to come in and take over local markets.

Oklahoma already has a “fairness” law in place that has had a similar effect: the Unfair Sales Act. The Unfair Sales Act was originally advertised (and still is by some who don’t understand retail and simple economics) as a measure to keep behemoths like Sears, Wal-Mart, Target, etc. from running the mom-and-pop stores out of business when they came to town. But it actually does the exact opposite and makes it easier for the big boys to rule the playground. Let me explain a bit…

No, really. Is it?

I get to do what I love everyday, which is awesome. I get to solve problems, push limits, and make computers do what I want them to do.

It’s been nearly three years since I left my last job to start VM(doh) and do Drupal development full-time on my own terms. And I must say, I don’t recall a single day since that I’ve got out of bed and said “I don’t want to go to work today.” I’ve spent each of those days excited to go to work.

Perhaps too excited…

I might enjoy doing this a little too much. I have no problem getting started at 9AM one day and working through 4AM the next. The time just seems to fly right on by. Of course, that’s a bit unhealthy.

That’s why even though I am branching out into a second business (Anrhizan) providing Drupal hosting, I’ve decided to make a promise to myself. By the end of the year, I will have my work day limited to absolutely no more than 10 hours a day, and with a target of a 5-day work week.

I’m sure my wife will like that. Right now, my routine is pretty much to get out of bed, walk into my office, and get started. I take little breaks here and there throughout the day, including trips to civilization to do the essentials like checking the PO Box, but for the most part I sit in my office all day surrounded by screens giving me access to more data than most sane people care for. Eventually, I make it back to bed, making time some days for little things like movies, NASCAR, Thunder games (and I’m not even that big of a basketball fan), or a few moments to relax with a fine cigar and glass of single malt Scotch.

Most likely, though, the changes won’t start taking place until after Drupalcon.

After spending the past week fishing Sardis Lake, Clayton Lake, and Nanih Waiyah Lake in Southeast Oklahoma with my dad for a much-needed vacation in an area where I absolutely lacked cell phone service, I headed south to Dallas for the DrupalCamp. I definitely wasn’t disappointed and must thank LevelTen Interactive for putting on a great low-cost event. One of my businesses - Anrhizan - was a bronze sponsor.

I attended several sessions throughout the day, but the two that I took the most home from was “Automating and Testing Drupal with Zombie.js” by Travis Tidwell and “How to Recruit and Retain Top Talent” by Glenn Hilton.

Being an automation freak and a big fan of testing tools, the Zombie.js session was a blast. I haven’t played with Node.js before, but I’m definitely looking forward to setting up some tests with Zombie.js and running them via Jenkins. The theme of the presentation was rather entertaining, and I might be strange but I liked the zombie graphics right before lunch.

After lunch, I attended the session on recruiting and retaining talent. With some of the work with my development business - VM(doh) - I’ve been able to bring in freelancers to ease some of the load. However, as a Drupal developer I am simultaneously loving and hating the supply/demand curve when it comes to Drupal talent. Currently, there is a lot of demand for Drupal, but not a lot of truly talented developers on the market. That means more business for me, but it makes it harder to get the extra help.

That session was perfect for me because I am looking to move away from freelancers and hire full-time employees. I definitely gave Vim a workout during that session taking notes. While about half of the session seemed to be “common sense” for any business owner, the other half revealed several things that I had not thought of or need to define before hiring. Of course, much of the information could also apply to hiring freelancers.

I’m glad I took the extra time to head to Dallas. It meant a couple of more nights of not sleeping in my own bed, but I’m sure my wife also enjoyed her weekend getaway with me.

The Hill reports that the Manchin-Toomey Amendment is close to getting 60 votes in the Senate. But David Kopel notes that two provisions which are being sold to the public as enhancements for gun rights are in fact advancements for more gun control.

Please contact your U.S. Senator and ask them to oppose this amendment.

“But wait! Aren’t you a Drupal developer?”

Yes. But I also believe in using the right tools for the job. I’ve been meaning to upgrade this blog from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 for quite some time, but there were a lot of issues I kept running into due to my newbness when I started it. This was my first Drupal site, flying by the seat of my pants, and there was a lot that was done the wrong way.

I thought about moving to Wordpress as it is a more appropriate platform for a single-user blog, but the issues I saw with such a migration made me want to retry the D6 to D7 migration.

Then I remembered someone (I think Travis Tidwell) at the Oklahoma Drupal Users Group mentioned building a Github Pages site with Jekyll. So I did a little research on blogging with Jekyll, and came across Octopress. About that time, I was logging into the Rackspace cloud control panel to see if anything had changed recently (I normally use supernova to manage that stuff) and I happened to see an ad about the Rackspace Devops blog being Octopress served via Cloud Files (and thus via Akamai CDN), and I was sold. The fact that there was also a Drupal 6 to Octopress script available made it even better.

So about 30 minutes later, all of the posts from the blog were migrated into Octopress and pushed to a Cloud Files container. Over the next few hours (spur of the moment, so I hadn’t dropped my DNS TTLs), my DNS propagated the CNAME pointing to the CDN url. It’s pretty cool to go to What’s My DNS and see all of the different IP’s that are serving my site.

Previously, I had this site hosted on an old Hostgator (affilate link) account at $10/month. And I’ve been really happy with Hostgator over the years for this site that gets <100 hits per day. I got notices from them when my site would get over 1000 hits per day around election time (side effect about having a strong interest in politics and the law and blogging about it).

At Hostgator, the database was ~18MB, files were ~140MB, and data transfer was ~600MB/month. However, the Octopress site is ~8MB (and I don’t know yet how much data transfer there will be, although I’m sure it will be less than 600MB/month). Considering that Cloud Files storage is a max of $0.10/GB/month, and data transfer out is a max of $0.12/GB/month, I’m paying ~$0.05 per month to host this (give or take a penny). Plus, I’m getting the same kind of scalability and availability that my hosting business provides - except without the 3+ database servers, 3+ file servers, 2+ webservers, etc.

So far, I’m really liking this Octopress thing. It’s simple and easy, and I can serve my entire website off a CDN without any extra effort.

Pretty simple: it already exists.

The Oklahoma Personhood Act attempts to add a new section to Oklahoma law to define “unborn child” as “[including] all unborn children or the offspring of human beings from the moment of conception until birth at every stage of biological development.”

The puppets at the State Capitol and in the news media have the people convinced that such a provision does not exist and that this Act is a necessary means to fight abortion. Yet this definition of life beginning at conception already exists in Oklahoma law (and is what is currently used to charge someone who allegedly kills a pregnant woman with a second murder charge for the unborn child). It’s pretty easy to find - you just have to search for “abortion” in the statutes.

63 O.S. § 1-730(A)(4)

“Unborn child” means the unborn offspring of human beings from the moment of conception, through pregnancy, and until live birth including the human conceptus, zygote, morula, blastocyst, embryo and fetus;

Since 1978, it has been the law of Oklahoma that life begins at conception. Sadly, many Oklahoma politicians are trying to lie to you and convince you otherwise for the sole purpose of gaining and securing votes.

The Oklahoma Personhood Act is a simple waste of time and resources and is solely a means of political pandering by the Oklahoma Republican Party, much like the “Save Our State” Amendment of 2010.

The Oklahoma Nanny Association Public Health Committee voted 7-5 in favor of raising the minimum age for tobacco products to 21. (HB 2314)

So (if this actually passes) not only will you not be able to drink after going to war, but you also won’t be able to have a smoke in Oklahoma.

“While tobacco was once seen as a harmless vice, that is clearly not the case,” Coody said. “If we can discourage young people from smoking, it will benefit that young person’s health and ultimately benefit our state economy through greater productivity and lower health expenses.”

In other words… Don’t worry. It’s all because you can’t make decisions for yourself.

So far, three bills related to firearms (that I could find, at least), have been slated to be introduced when the session starts up again in February. As the session approaches and wears on, I will try to keep this updated.

HB 2193

HB 2193 by Rep. Jason Murphey doesn’t really need a whole lot of discussion. It simply proposes to amend firearm storage laws to include ammunition. This is presumably to prevent employers and other entities from being able to enforce policies that prohibit the storage of ammunition rather than just the storage of a firearm in locked vehicles in parking lots. What good is that gun that you carry without ammunition, after all?

SB 1076

SB 1076 by Sen. Steve Russell adds a preclusion to the issuing of a concealed handgun license. This preclusion prohibits the issuing of a concealed handgun license to an individual who has previously been determined incompetent by a lawful authority. However, while it does not allow an exemption for most individuals who have successfully had their alleged mental illness treated, it does allow an exemption for veterans who have successfully undergone treatment for post traumatic stress disorder.

SB 1092

SB 1092 by Sen. Steve Russell allows NRA instructors or Oklahoma Self Defense Act instructors to issue a document to students that they deem qualified to carry a firearm openly. There are no fees attached, however, a prerequisite is that they have been instructed on the open carry laws of Oklahoma.

The bill does not state whether or not this instruction can be in conjunction with or must be in addition to the current course offered for a concealed handgun license. It does not require the document to be issued. It does not set nor does it prohibit a fee for the document.

I had the chance to read the opinion last night, so I should be able to offer some takeaways today.

First of all, I wholly agree with the 10th Circuit’s opinion that the “Save Our State” Amendment is likely unconstitutional under the Establishment Clause because it only prohibits the use of one form of religious law regardless of whether it is being called upon in civil or criminal court. It enshrines this notion into the Oklahoma Constitution that Islam is somehow an inferior religion which should not be allowed to exist in Oklahoma.

The Oklahoma Attorney General’s office argued that the word “cultures” in the amendment should be interpreted as “religions”. But as the 10th Circuit noted, making this substitution implies that religious law deemed to be part of Oklahoma’s local culture would be acceptable in Oklahoma courts, while the laws of other religions would not.

Now, I’m not saying that religious law should be an allowed criminal defense. Religious laws should not be singled out (especially by religion) as to whether or not they are a valid criminal defense. What the legislature should have done was offer an amendment to prohibit cultural defenses in general (which would prohibit such defenses as used in People v. Chen, People v. Moua, and People v. Kimura).

But the problem with SQ 755 is that it also prohibits the use of Sharia Law in interpreting civil disputes that arise from an agreement which is based on Sharia Law (such as a Will or a private contract), as well as prohibiting Oklahoma courts from enforcing a foreign judgment (such as Panama Process, S.A. v. Cities Service Co., 1990 OK 66, 796 P.2d) arising from an international contract calling for the use of the laws of another country for interpretation of the contract.

The only reason that “Sharia Law” was specificially cited in the text of the amendment was to play political games for the upcoming elections. Vote against it, and you’re accused of supporting criminal immunity for “honor killings”.

The Oklahoma Attorney General’s office argued that the compelling state interest furthered by the amendment is simply an “interest in determining what law is applied in Oklahoma courts.” But the State could not identify a single problem for the amendment to solve. As was pointed out by many of us who were opposed to SQ 755, this amendment was a “solution” looking for a problem.

Furthermore, the Oklahoma Attorney General’s office makes the claim that the “will of the people” outweighs any harms done to those affected by legislation. This is an argument that we see come up time and time again by the 70% of the voters of the state of Oklahoma that supported SQ 755. But I think that shallow, arrogant, and ignorant argument was addressed quite well in the opinion.

I believe that the 10th Circuit is right to uphold the injunction against SQ 755. What is important is that rights protected by the Constitution remain protected, whether you agree with those particular rights or not. Apparently, 70% of Oklahomans do not agree that the same Constitutional protections should apply to those whose religion they do not agree with.

But to say that the will of the people trumps liberty (especially when that liberty is already protected by “the will of the people”) simply because a majority of voters supported a measure is like having two wolves and a sheep take a vote on what’s for dinner.

By the way, as Jay Norton pointed out on yesterday’s post, there is a good analysis of the severability of the part about Sharia Law and if the Attorney General failed to adequately defend the amendment over on The Volokh Conspiracy.

The 10th Circuit has upheld the injunction against State Question 755. That is the amendment to the Oklahoma Constitution that resulted from politicians pandering to popular xenophobia.

I haven’t had the chance to completely read the 37 page opinion from the 10th Circuit yet. But I believe they are right to uphold the injunction, as it is a fundamental violation of liberty to prohibit people from entering into their own agreements solely because of their religious beliefs.