Bougie me

In yet another attempt to insure that I will be first against the wall when the revolution comes, today I purchased a subscription to the local musical society for the 2008-09 season. Some highlights:

• Soweto Gospel Choir
  
• Milton Nascimento and the Jobim Trio
  
• The Silk Road Ensemble feat. Yo-Yo Ma

At this rate I'm going to have to start wearing a kaffiyeh to lay claim to any radical cred whatsoever.

The Austin Police Department does twitter

It's true. I requested that they let me follow their twitt... twitting? Follow whatever it is, but I wonder if it's official police twittering only.

If I were the police, I'd have an account just in order to follow the SXSW stream, etc. But the APD seems to be following a variety of internet personalities as well. Don't know what to make of it.

That's Hedley!

"My mind is a raging torrent, flooded with rivulets of thought cascading into a waterfall of creative alternatives...My mind is aglow with whirling, transient nodes of thought careening through a cosmic vapor of invention!"

1927-2008

Those are terrible odds

(so-called facts via veegle, stupid smiley faces that are supposed to be "%)" via Apple's iChat)

Drivers Responsibility Program not run responsibly

car crash by zophonias.

So for several years I was driving a car with expired registration, no inspection, and no insurance. I'm not proud of this, but I thought it was interesting that the fines for these infractions added up to less than I would have paid to be driving legally all those years.

That calculation turns out to be incorrect, however, because of Texas's Driver Responsibility Program. In addition to the several hundred dollars I already paid in fines, the DRP thing means that I also owe 250 dollars a year, for the next three years.

I don't mind paying for my mistakes, but there is one key thing they forget to tell you when you pay your fines down at the municipal court: They forget to tell you anything about the DRP fines.

I had no idea that I was supposed to pay this money, and I received no correspondence about it until this week, when I got a letter from a collection agency. In fact, I suspect that this is the real reason Texas has not been able to collect these fines and has had to resort to the collection agencies. Nobody, including the clerks at the courthouse, actually knows about it!

Is anybody else familiar with these DRPs? Do they work better in other states?

UPDATE: Others share my woe.

In my particular situation, our fines were paid completely for the first year and we received no notification the second year. The deadline to pay had not expired and when I entered my information on the DPS website, it showed that I had paid my fine and owed nothing. However, when my future father in law, a 20year+ HPD sergeant, ran my license it said that it had been suspended for almost a year. Later I found out that DPS changed your identification number each year, so even if they fail to notify you, and as a good citizen you pro-actively go to the allocated website to pay a fine, the information you are given could be incorrect. Thus leaving you susceptible to being arrested and then paying hundreds, if not thousands of dollars to get out of jail for essentially driving; not because you didn’t pay for whatever violation occurred in the city you received, but because of an additional fine that the state has given you for the same exact violation in said city or jurisdiction. A fine that surprisingly, many drivers have no idea they owe. The financial and economic burden this is placing on hardworking citizens is outrageous.

Now that's stimulating!

Perhaps not the most artful expression of the sentiment, but hooray for this guy!

ens

[from Latin 'ens', a thing]

n.
1. In metaphysics, an existing or real thing.

2. In chemistry, something supposed to condense within itself all the virtues and qualities of a substance from which it is extracted. (obsolete)

To Wii or not to Wii

SVG:

But the reason I hate advertisers (while simultaneously maintaining terrified, Old Testament awe at their power) is because I'm a total hype sucker. I read somewhere, and I cannot recall where, that Nintendo spent more money on Wii Fit's marketing campaign than they've ever spent on anything. It seems to be working. It makes me excited, like when I call my Mom and tell her she ought to finally buy a Wii because she'll really like this game and she tells me, actually, she was thinking about it.

I'm sort of scared of Wii Fit. I mean, it'll know how much I weigh, and it'll make me look really stupid, like that lady in the picture up there. But everyone seems kinda scared of it, and kinda excited about it, and as much as I roll my eyes, hard, whenever I see news anchors "discovering" the latest game stuff on the morning news, it kinda, just a little, makes me happy.

So, are you getting it?

Yes, I'm getting one today.

(and yes, I know it's a meanie that calls little girls "fat")

The times, they are a changin

RAPID CITY, S.D. -- Hillary Clinton joined the chorus of Democrats who have criticized President Bush's comments about Barack Obama, saying that his comparison "of any Democrat to Nazi appeasers is both offensive and outrageous."
|First Read|

Breaking...

WASHINGTON (AFP) - US President George W. Bush said in an interview out Tuesday that he quit playing golf in 2003 out of respect for the families of US soldiers killed in the conflict in Iraq, now in its sixth year.

"I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal," he said in an interview for Yahoo! News and Politico magazine.

"I don't want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander-in-chief playing golf," he said. "I feel I owe it to the families to be in solidarity as best as I can with them." |Yahoo News>|

Discipline and self-sacrifice truly are the watchwords of this President. In case you were wondering, mountain biking is still okey dokey:

Although Bush says he has given up golf, he is a mountain-biking enthusiast who has been photographed taking part in rides. He took up biking after an injury sidelined him from running. |Washington Post|

(via)

Alec Baldwin can read my mind

Inexplicably, we never got to our fourth big Who want's to be Shatner nominee, Alec freakin' Baldwin. We must return to this topic soon, but here is Alec racking up a few more Shatner points:

West Virginia, thy mighty voice hath spoken

FB: Well that sounds pretty good, Hillary Clinton, but what if I wanna vote for someone with even more experience, like John McCain or Zombie Strom Thurmond or Andrew Jackson's collection of antique spittoons? Those spittoons have been in the White House for a long time an I hear they got a formidable command of foreign policy.
CLINTON: Ha haaa! Well you know, anyone off the street with a scary black pastor can talk about change, but it takes a fighter to fight for change. And I'm a fighter. I'm tough. And if you lived my life you'd be pretty darn tough too. I mean, I had to go to Wellesley. That was my safety school. But I was strong anyway and I endured. And as president I'll fight the insurance industry and the pharmaceutical industry and the health care industry, just as soon as they stop giving me millions of dollars!
FB: That's that no-nonsense down-to-business style I like about you, Hillary Clinton! You don't just talk about change. You talk about how much you don't just talk about change!
CLINTON: That's just the way I am, I guess. Oh, hang on a second, I have to wrestle a hog in a giant trough of grits. It's just something I do!
|fafblog!|

Freaky

Via egg, this blog is entirely made up of photoshoppies where the heads of child and father are swapped:

holograph

[From Late Latin 'holographus', from Greek 'holographos', from 'holos' meaning whole + 'graphos' meaning written]

n.
1. A document written wholly in the handwriting of the person whose signature it bears.
2. A negative produced by exposing a high-resolution photographic plate, without camera or lens, near a subject illuminated by monochromatic, coherent radiation, as from a laser: when it is placed in a beam of coherent light a true three-dimensional image of the subject is formed.

Because I'm a sucker...

...I decided to pass along some viral marketing.

This link is worth following

Robot Screening Megathread

Meetings

Lately I've taken to watching a lot of the Community Television Network. Of the four channels CTN operates, my favorite is 16, which bills itself as, "The meeting place...where Ann Arbor watches its City government in action."

I haven't seen a full fledged city council meeting yet, but have seen all manner of commissions and the odd advisory board. If I had to pick a favorite, I'd go with the Commission on Disability Issues. It's broadcast live the third Wednesday of every month and then rebroadcast the following Thursday and Saturday.

Sometimes the subject matter of the meeting is itself interesting -- this is most often true of the zoning board of appeals, I think -- but even when not, I find myself taking an interest in various aspects of meeting dynamics. I remember one meeting in particular where the idea was to create a set of rules for an upcoming festival. One participant suggested that they base the rules on one or another set of widely accepted guidelines. Another launched the principled objection that no attempt to establish adequate guidelines can ever succeed, and kept insisting that no guidelines should be consulted even when it became clear that everyone else disagreed. The Chair deftly resolved the matter by creating a subcommittee.

Relatedly, there was a time when I thought of meetings as an impediment to getting things done. More and more, I tend to think of meetings as a very important kind of work in their own right, and that having good productive meetings is a key component in the success of just about any cooperative endeavor.