·:[ David and Claire’s Blog ]:·
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Further Details

Congratulations to my sister who gave birth to a healthy baby girl yesterday. While I’m dying to provide the relevant details, I have been told by Claire that I’m not allowed to steal their thunder. So you’ll just have to wait until they tell you the name, weight, time of birth, etc. on the appropriate social networking website (or via a good old fashioned phone call!).

Way back in July of this year just after a long road-trip up to Canada and back, I was just driving around local roads in Montclair when I got caught in a popular speed trap on Bellevue Ave. It’s on a downhill stretch of road where the speed limit is 25 MPH, but everyone drives 35+. That particular day I forgot to pump the brakes and a cop pulled me over and issued me a speeding ticket.
After some research online I found a lot of sites that offer techniques to beat speeding tickets and after reading some other articles online (like this one) I decided to try my luck in court.
I purchased the services of SpeedTicketBeaters.com. They gave me a set of instructions to follow and some case law to back myself up. Turns out that I didn’t even need any of this stuff since the officer, and at one point even the prosecutor, weren’t present for me to go to trial. So my case was dismissed. This apparently happens all the time, and is a good reason to always plead not guilty when you receive a ticket.

It’s unfortunate I didn’t go to trial though because I believe I still would have won the case. That is because the area I was ticketed really is a speed trap.  The law states that the township is supposed to measure the average speed of vehicles on every road every five years to determine the appropriate speed limit. This is called a speed survey. Montclair and Bloomfield have essentially violated this, putting a blanket 25 MPH speed limit all over the place, even though no one drives that slow. This is not lawful for a town to do so. They are supposed to put the speed at what 85% of the average drivers drive on that road. Thus practically the whole town is a speed trap, and then they rake in the money issuing lots of speeding tickets that almost everyone (except annoying pests like me) just pay. Resulting in revenues for not just the town but also the insurance companies that raise your rates.

So the next time you get a speeding ticket try fighting it. You may very well win!

Copying David here, I made a slideshow of our trip over the summer. We visited Cape Cod MA, Lexington MA, Ganoque ONT, Toronto, ONT and Chardon OH.

I used slide.com to make this slideshow. I recommend this site to anyone with a bunch of photos to display. I heard about them on Fortune.com in an article about how they’re hiring right now.

I have lots of photos to post to catch up, but it will have to wait a bit longer. Right now my computer is indexing, and performing facial recognition on my thousands of photos using Picasa 3.5. Quite a cool app, that I recommend if you don’t have it yet.

This kind of photo is only possible to take with an SLR.

This dish is as tasty as it is colorful.

I have a long standing project that I have been trying to do for more than 3 years now. For some reason I finally got the resolve to iron out all the kinks and get it working. Announcing my very own internet radio station:
David’s Random Radio Station
It’s just a bunch of random songs, and I do mean random- there was no selection criteria. But it’s out there and streaming for anyone who wants to listen.

Want to know how to do it yourself? Here’s the most helpful link of the bunch:
http://www.linux-noob.com/forums/index.php?/topic/1336-linux-shoutcast-server/

If you’re not technically minded then just go to shoutcast instead.