Earlier today a 4 year old first degree murder case against Lisa Randall was dismissed by Judge Michael Kemp. The case has been cited as a leftover of the Andrew Thomas era of harsh and illogical persecution of Maricopa County citizens. Arizona Criminal Attorney David Michael Cantor was able to get the Capital First Degree Murder charges dismissed after showing the judge where the evidence of the case just didn’t back up the prosecutions assertion that Ms. Randall was responsible for murder of an infant.

Mr. Cantor has published the letter asking for Lisa Randall’s Murder case to be dismissed which he sent to Rick Romely on June 30th 2010.

The Phoenix New Times is running an in depth story on this case:

Phantom Murder: At the 11th Hour, Prosecutors Dropped a Murder Charge Against a Beloved Daycare Operator — Leaving the Death of Baby Dillon a Medical Mystery – Page 1 – News – Phoenix – Phoenix New Times.

The Phoenix New Times Journalist, Paul Rubin, who has been working on this for over two years also penned a blog post this morning.

The Phoenix New Times story is ongoing with more details coming out next week. Clearly this is a good sign for Maricopa County where Andrew Thomas and Sheriff Joe have been running amok for years creating more lawsuits for the county.

Get Charged | The Creators Project.

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important”.

via PageRank – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Maybe it’s the time of year what with the holidays, or maybe it’s the end of the year and things are catching me up. In the end it doesn’t matter what the excuse is: we all need to slow down and take stock on what’s real and important. For me this means my relationships with friends, family, and myself and how I keep them in balance.

Throughout our day, month, year, and life we go through a number of exchanges. These may involve money and/or other people. A lot of the time they involve neither. Taking time to appreciate non monetary exchanges is something easily overlooked in a busy day. Even more difficult can be the ability to look at the exchanges we have internally with ourselves.

What do you think? Do you practice giving and getting equally? Are you feeling the love?

This was a pretty easy shot considering it was right next to my car. I am more happy with the ladies reaction about 15 seconds in, ‘eventually’. =)

The break of dawn is only a figment of the imagination. At this point it’s so early it may as well still be yesterday. At least the roads are empty.

This early morning depature is necessary because we will be driving a few hours to the trailhead for Humphreys Peak just north of Flagstaff, AZ. At this rate we should be at the trailhead around 7am which means the trail should be empty.

My last trip up Humphreys was a number of years ago in May. When I pulled into the trailhead parking lot there was snow everywhere and some guy was getting his cross country skis ready to go. I had flip flops on.

This time is different, no snow and we have an EMD (Early Morning Doggie) which means we should move quickly and get back before dark. The climb was steady but not overly difficult. It took us 4 hours to summit and close to 3 to get back down. The dog pulled us all the way up and was ready for more when we got back down.

Here is the Flickr SlideShow:

Second week of sunrise hiking at South Mountain Park is in full effect. 4am came early but the EMD(Early Morning Doggie) got all the sand out of my eyes. He is like a thunderbolt once we hit the trail as well. Go Go Go Go! Squirrel!

Went to the Zoo last weekend with Kathryn’s Dad and Step Mom and it was awesome!

There has been a severe degradation in my posting frequency as of late. This is due to a few external factors that have thrown my routine off a bit.

The biggest shift has been away from cycling, at least for the time being. This is mainly due to the recent rash of severe temps seen in the PHX area. Over 10 degrees above normal temps along with some mild heat stroke a few weeks back have forced me to hold off on the bike for a while.

In its replacement I have started back into the yoga quite extensively. I have also found a new studio in the Central PHX area: www.gravitycenteryoga.com taught by Erica. This place rocks, it is literally just a studio, no lounge or retail action here. Just a floor and restroom. Erica is over 10 years experienced in a number of Yoga traditions and works well with novices as well as experts. She loves to kill the abs, which I need, and really adds a lot of variation to the routine everyday.

I am off to Vail for a wedding this weekend so there will probably be little coming from me till next week. So keep the rubber side down and hold them mudras!

Meet up with Jeff Moriarty this weekend (if you can reference the name then you know how cool Jeff is already, if not then please look up Sherlock Holmes and eat some soap) to discuss getting Ignite Phoenix started up. The catalyst was a post on twitter regarding yet another tech networking group for finding and funding projects in the area. The general feeling for tech people is that these are more of the same: boring presentations trying to sell us on something we might be interested in but since the presenter is so worried about offending possible funders they cut it down to something that is boring and predictable.

Ignite is an O’reilly concept with the intent of getting the presentations down to a minimum but throwing a bunch together for diversity and unpredictability. Then you let the audience congregate with the ones they like the most and take it from there. The focus is on the culture and if the projects succeed that is great, if not then cool people got together and laughed a lot.

Right now we are looking for venues to hold it at and presenters to present. Give me a shout in the comments there or at the projects website here.