US city sets time limit for how long a dog can bark

A city in New Jersey has got so tired of complaints of people against dogs barking that they are going to outlaw it. That's correct, the city is planning to pass an ordinance that will make it illegal for dogs to bark more than 30 minutes over 2 consecutive days. Right now, they are not planning on defining the type of instrument that will be used to measure and identify the dog that is specifically barking. DNA for dogs to uniquely identify their barking, anyone ?
The city already has nuisance laws that could be used to curtail annoying barking, but they are difficult to enforce. I guess this new law will be easier to enforce. Fines for an offence against this ordinance could be upto $250.
And just so that you know that I am not making this up, read the original story.

Police officer tickets himself

In an interesting touch about honesty, a police chief in Wisconsin (US) had committed a traffic violation by driving past a stopped school bus that had lights flashing. No one seemed to notice, except for this guy's honesty, since he wrote himself a ticket, fined himself $225 and docked some points off his driving record. And the way the story seems to originate is through court records and getting slowly picked up by the media.
This has naturally put a lot of people interested in such a honest person. He has got emails from far and wide, and got offers by people to pay off the fine as well. Read the full news here.

Man slathers vaseline in hotel room

Get this. A man was arrested for covering everything in a hotel room with vaseline. Robert Chamberlain, a resident of Virginia, US was charged with mischief for damaging a Motel room. He did not break anything in the room, instead, he used 14 bottles of vaseline to cover every single thing in the room - mattresses, pillows, sheets, furniture, TV, everything. When this was discovered by a motel clerk, the motel filed a complaint with the sheriff's office. The police found Robert in a nearby Econo Lodge, covered head to toe with vaseline.
Read the original story here.

Older software to cause meeting problems

In a scene reminscent of the Y2k issue (where computer were not able to move from 2 digit years of the 90's to the 4 digit years of the 21st century), the change in Daylight Savings time (decreed in a 2005 law that changed the daylight savings time period) will cause problems for those users who use the calendar in devices to do transactions, set meetings, etc. For example, if you using Office 2000 and have set a meeting for the last week in March, you will run into problems because the software has not automatically rolled over to the new DST, while in the real world, this change would have happened.
What can you do ? Examine your meetings more carefully, and live those weeks more carefully. And read this article more carefully.

Following in the footsteps of parents

A teen tried to do exactly that, but it led to some rather painful lessons. The boy wanted to copy his dad's tradition of trying to run around the garden when the Super Bowl game is in halftime, barefoot. One minor point, this was in Buffalo (Minneapolis), 17 below zero. So this hero went outside, took off his shoes and socks and ran around the garden barefeet for 5 minutes. At the end of 5 minutes, he came inside, and his feet start burning and blistering. Doctors pronounced it as a case of frostbite which would take a few weeks to get fully cured.
Now he believes that he has learnt a lesson, and will not try such stunts again.
Read the original story here.