Big day here today, as our very first-ever hate crime trial begins. Dwight DeLee is accused of murdering LaTeisha Green (nee Moses Green) back in November. It’s apparently the first murder trial for a hate crime involving a transgender person in New York state and, if found guilty, DeLee would be just the second person in the US convicted of a hate crime in the murder of a transgender person. LaTeisha would have celebrated her 23rd birthday last Saturday.

Speaking of hate, all those grumpy old Republican white men in the US Senate can start taking their official cracks at Sonia Sotomayor beginning today. Her confirmation is pretty much a done deal, but they have to show their “base” how tough they are first (and hopefully show the rest of us just how racist they are in the process).

The town water department has been going around painting all the fire hydrants, changing them from yellow to red. I don’t know if they just had some extra red paint lying around, or if some town genius had an epiphany. Back in the olden days, the firetrucks were red, but then some study cam out saying that yellow was more visible than red, so they changed ’em to yellow. But later on, they found that, while yellow might technically be more visible, the color red draws people’s attention much more quickly. So, back to red they went. As for fire hydrants, I dunno; maybe they just didn’t want them blending in with all that yellow snow.

Been feeling the urge to build a new computer lately – especially since my aging 2.4 Ghz P4 desktop with a mere gig of RAM (which was pretty hot back in October of 2003, when I put it together) is having a tough time transcoding video while running my media server). Plus, it can’t put out 1920 x 1080, so I can’t quite take advantage of my monitor. But, since I tend to use my aging laptop more than I use my aging desktop anyway, I decided I’d try and squeeze a little more life out of the old one. So I’m bumping up the processor to a 3 gig one (my mobo doesn’t support a dual core one, sadly), adding a couple more gigs of RAM, and a getting a new video card (not exactly a screamer, but it ought to do a bit better than what’s in there now). Hopefully that’ll help.

Oh well, running late for my appointment with destiny.