David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
So 105.7 morning DJ Donnie Fandango was distressed this morning over finding a gray hair. At 31, he’s convinced (so he says) this means he’s dying.
I say get used to it. I’m 32. I started going gray in the sixth grade. Since I have gray hairs that are old enough to vote, I have a hard time feeling sorry for him.
I have other worries. Like whether those gray hairs vote for Ron Paul or not.
I was talking to a new coworker today and of course the topic of our first PCs came up. It was Cyrix-based. I didn’t mention my first PC (it seems I’m about four years older–it was an Am486SX2/66).
With only a couple of exceptions, I’ve always bought non-Intel PCs. Most of the Intel PCs I have bought have been used. One boss once went so far as to call me anti-corporate.
I’m not so much anti-corporate as I am pro-competition.
I’ve been writing a lot about personal finance lately. I make no apologies for that; it’s what’s on my mind. Something that happened this weekend reminded me of why it’s hard to get on the personal finance treadmill to begin with.
The numbers are big. They’re intimidating. You can’t possibly fix it all right now.
So don’t try to fix it all right now.I had an unplanned incident this weekend. It was unplanned, avoidable, and expensive. Some people will spend $400 at the drop of a hat without flinching, but my wife and I aren’t among them. I wouldn’t let myself get upset over it, but truth be told, I thought about it a lot over the weekend.
Mainly I tried to formulate a plan to make the money back quickly. And making $400 is certainly doable, but most people don’t come up with a way to make an extra $400 in just a day.
And that’s when it hit me. Don’t try to do it all in a day.
It’s like in baseball, when a team is losing by 8 runs the way the Indians were against the Red Sox for most of last night. Usually when a team is down by 8 runs, they’re going to lose because everyone’s going to go up there and try to hit an 8-run home run. But it’s physically impossible to hit an 8-run home run.
The way you win a game when you’re losing by 8 is by getting on base any way you can, and then getting around and scoring any way you can. If enough people manage to do that, they can chip away at the lead and soon it’s a close game again.
And that’s the way I have to approach this unexpected expense. Look for the opportunity I normally wouldn’t bother with. Take snacks to work so I stay away from the vending machine for a while. Chip away at it, whether it’s a dollar at a time or ten.
That trick works with big debts too. I once used a mortgage calculator to figure out the smallest amount of extra money you could put toward your mortgage and still see a benefit. On my mortgage, the amount turned out to be $10. Just paying $10 extra per month every month would pay the house off a full month early. Ten lousy bucks. Up that to a hundred and you can start talking about years.
So that’s the key. Nickel and dime your way out of debt, and then you can be on your way to nickel and diming yourself into prosperity.
So I got this Xbox really cheap. When I got it home, I found out why–the DVD drive wouldn’t open. Here’s what to do when an Xbox DVD drive sticks.
It’s a good thing I didn’t pay much for it.As it turns out, there’s an emergency eject hole below the drive, about an inch and a half to the left of the console’s eject button. Turn the power off (this is important) and then straighten a paper clip and poke that into the hole to release the tray. Provided there isn’t anything obstructing the tray, it will come out.
Hopefully it’s a temporary problem, but as a drive ages, apparently the teeth on the tray or the gears that mesh with them can wear down, making it hard for the drive to eject its tray. Supposedly you can also cause this problem by leaving discs in the system while it’s powered off.
Whatever the cause, the problem with my Xbox seems to be permanent. After I manually eject it, it will usually work a couple of times after that, then it starts sticking again. I can live with it, since I bought it mostly to experiment with. I probably won’t play Xbox games with it very often.
If you dropped your Xbox and now it won’t open, there’s a good chance something broke off and is obstructing the tray. In that case your best bet is to replace the drive. The best source for replacement drives anymore is eBay, at a cost of $35 and up depending on the vintage. Thomson drives tend to be the cheapest. Samsung drives, which are the most desirable, cost more. If you’re adventurous, read this Xbox repair page, but be careful. Once you open an Xbox, there is an exposed power supply inside, and if you touch the wrong thing, it will ruin your day at the very least. At worst, it really can kill you. I don’t think that page stresses that enough. The power supply sits under the hard drive. Don’t touch anything over there.
If any of this makes you nervous, you’re probably better off calling around and seeing if you can trade in a broken Xbox for one that works. Call your local game shops, or look on your local Craigslist for someone advertising Xbox repair or modifications.
As far as Xbox reliability goes, I don’t have any solid statistics. Whether the Xbox or the PS2 is more reliable depends on who you ask, but I see (and hear about) more broken Xboxes than PS2s. If you buy a used first-generation Xbox, make sure you buy it somewhere that gives you some kind of a guarantee.
Usually the manufacturer sells its consoles at a loss, hoping to make up for it by selling games, which are extremely profitable. Microsoft seems to cut more corners on its consoles than Sony or Nintendo, and the result is that the Xbox and Xbox 360 aren’t as reliable as they could be. I don’t usually recommend extended warranties, but if I were buying an Xbox 360, I would get one. (The original Xbox is discontinued now, so buying a new one of those isn’t an option, unfortunately.)
Buddy Bell resigned his job as Royals manager at the end of the season to spend more time with his family, then promptly took a minor-league job with the White Sox. Given their last-place finish, it’s not much of a loss.
They named a replacement today.His name is Trey Hillman. I know little about him, except that he managed in the Yankees system and he turned around a poor team in Japan. He’s won everywhere he’s been.
I see this as a good thing, since Buddy Bell hasn’t won anywhere he’s been. And Hillman has experience as a turnaround artist, which is what the Royals need.
The best Royals managers (Dick Howser, Whitey Herzog) had big-league experience, which is a knock on Hillman, but neither was what you could call distinguished. Herzog was nobody before coming to KC, but then the Royals went on to have several of their best seasons under him. Howser won a championship with the Yankees but didn’t bring home the World Series title that Steinbrenner wanted, so he axed him. The Royals hired him, and they never finished lower than second place with him at the helm.
In this ESPN piece about Tillman, he says all the right things: Work ethic, develop in-house talent, pay attention to the team atmosphere and adjust when you feel it drop.
If he does half those things, I know he’ll do better than Buddy Bell did with his all-veterans-all-the-time approach.
I’ve been waiting with anticipation for flash-based SSDs to come out. If you’re unfamiliar with these, they’re hard drives with no moving parts, so their life expectancy is 10 years, and they’re quiet, run cool, and they have virtually no seek time so for some tasks they’re lightning fast.
The best drives on the market, from what limited information is available, seem to be the Samsungs.The problem is that these drives have a sustained read speed of 50 MB/sec and write speed of 27 MB/sec. Under ideal circumstances, a conventional hard drive can exceed those numbers–especially the write speed. So what’s going on?
The main reason is that these drives have no cache on them. Conventional hard drives have a small amount of RAM that acts as a buffer between the computer and the platters. Today a budget drive has 8 megs of RAM. A lot of high-performance drives have 16, and I’ve even seen some that have 32.
The most frequently used data can come off this buffer at high speed. Writes can go to the buffer and the computer can get on with life, and the drive can write the data to the platters when it gets less busy. The other advantages of a solid state disk often can make up the difference when reading data, but if you’re writing a lot of data, the conventional hard drive wins the race most of the time.
SSDs could benefit from cache for one good reason: conventional RAM chips are still much faster than flash memory.
Now for the good news: I’ve read reports that the Samsung drive can boot Windows in 15 seconds and most common applications have single-digit load times. So if you don’t do a lot of writes, these drives can give you a performance boost.
The other complaint is capacity. You can pay $400 for a 32 gig SSD, which is more than you’d pay for a full terrabyte of conventional storage. For some people, this is a problem. Given the work I usually do these days, 32 gigs is plenty for me, and I could probably find ways to get by with 8. I just don’t keep a lot of huge data files around. But if I needed acres of data storage, I could load the operating system and my most critical apps on the SSD, and use the conventional drive for storage.
The old knock on flash memory was its finite lifespan. Put Windows’ swap file on a flash drive and let it run, and theoretically you could wear out the memory in a matter of days. And that’s always one of the first comments that shows up when the topic of flash drives comes up on sites like Digg and Slashdot. But today’s flash memory sustains more writes than the old stuff did, and newer drives use a technique called wear-leveling, where it distributes writes amongst the available chips. This technique makes the chips last a lot longer now, to the point where one respected tech journalist, Dan Rutter, actually recommends putting flash drives in old laptopos with maxed-out memory for the express purpose of holding a swap file. And Macintosh users have been using flash disks to soup up old Mac laptops for several years now. Flash disks give obsolete laptops a boost in both speed and battery life while reducing noise and heat, and it’s pretty safe to say that current technology allows a flash drive to last 3-5 years when used for this purpose, which is about as long as a conventional drive.
My next major system upgrade will probably be a Samsung SSD for at least one of my computers. It’d make a fantastic upgrade for my laptop, at the very least. The laptop will run faster (the hard drive in it is several years old, and I think it runs at 4200 RPM) and the battery life will improve considerably. I also like the idea of having a super quiet, cool-running desktop for the family room. But I definitely hope the second-generation SSDs will include some cache. Otherwise, there’s not much advantage to them over the old trick of buying a large, high-speed Compact Flash card and an IDE-CF adapter (Addonics is one source of these), as long as both the card and the adapter support UltraDMA.
An old idea hit me again recently: Why can’t you use the memory that’s sitting unused on your video card (unless you’re playing Doom) as a ramdisk? It turns out you can, just not if you’re using Windows. Some Linux people have been doing <a href=”http://hedera.linuxnews.pl/_news/2002/09/03/_long/1445.html”>it</a> for two years.<p>Where’d I get this loony idea? Commodore, that’s where. It was fairly common practice to use the video RAM dedicated to the C-128’s 80-column display for other purposes when you weren’t using it. As convoluted as PC video memory is, it had nothing on the C-128, where the 80-column video chip was a netherword accessible only via a handful of chip registers. Using the memory for anything else was slow, it was painful, but it was still a lot faster than Commodore’s floppy drives.<p>
So along comes someone on Slashdot, asking about using idle video memory as swap space. I really like the idea on principle: The memory isn’t doing anything, and RAM is at least an order of magnitude faster than disk, so even slow memory is going to give better performance.<p>
The principle goes like this: You use the Linux MTD module and point it at the video card’s memory in the PCI address space. The memory is now a block device, which you can format and put a filesystem on. Format it ext2 (who needs journaling on a ramdisk?), and you’ve got a ramdisk. Format it swap, and you’ve got swap space.<p>
The downside? Reads and writes don’t happen at the same speed with AGP. Since swap space needs to happen quickly both directions, this is a problem. It could work a lot better with older PCI video cards, but those of course are a lot less likely to have a useful amount of memory on them. It would also work a lot better on newer PCIe video cards, but of course if your system is new enough to have a PCIe card, it’s also likely to have huge amounts of system RAM.<p>
The other downside is that CPU usage tends to really jump while accessing the video RAM.<p>
If you happen to have a system that has fast access to its video RAM, there’s no reason not to try using it as swap space. On some systems it seems to work really well. On others it seems to work really poorly.<p>
If it’s too slow for swap space, try it as a ramdisk. Point your browser cache at it, or mount it as /tmp. It’s going to have lower latency than disk, guaranteed. The only question is the throughput. But if it’s handling large numbers of small files, latency matters more than throughput.<p>
And if you’re concerned about the quality of the memory chips on a video card being lower than the quality of the chips used on the motherboard, a concern some people on Slashdot expressed, using that memory as a ramdisk is safer than as a system file. If there’s slight corruption in the memory, the filesystem will report an error. Personally I’m not sure I buy that argument, since GPUs tend to be even more demanding on memory than CPUs are, and the consequences of using second-rate memory on a video card could be worse than just some stray blips on the screen. But if you’re a worry wart, using it for something less important than swap means you’re not risking a system crash by doing it.<p>
If you’re the type who likes to tinker, this could be a way to get some performance at no cost other than your time. Of course if you like to tinker and enjoy this kind of stuff anyway, your time is essentially free.<p>
And if you want to get really crazy, RAID your new ramdisk with a small partition on your hard drive to make it permanent. But that seems a little too out there even for me.
I saw a link to a short story on Get Rich Slowly called What to do during a recession.
I think I can do a little better. So I’m gonna try.You might not lose your job, so don’t become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The story states that most people don’t lose their jobs when the economy goes south. That’s important to remember. I lost not one, but two jobs in 2005, not the worst year on record but certainly not the best for either of those two employers. I was pretty certain in both cases that there would be cuts and I would be one of them. I couldn’t do anything about the second case because an edict came down from a new CEO to get rid of all contractors, and I was a contractor. In the first case though, yes, I probably made myself a more likely target for downsizing. I wasn’t as bad as the guy in Office Space who got hit by a truck, but if management thinks you think you’re on your way out, they have an excuse to not feel as bad about letting you go. After all, if you saw it coming and you’re not prepared for it, it’s your fault if something bad happens, right?
So if you think you might be on the short list, don’t let anyone know you think that way, and be quiet and discrete about finding your next job.
Work your contacts. When I lost that job, I knew some people who’d asked me at one point or another if I might be interested in opportunities elsewhere. Of course I called them within 24 hours. None of that panned out for me, but at least I got some practice interviewing and some good resume advice out of the deal.
I think it’s a very good idea to ask your friends once a year or so if they know of any openings. In the event of an emergency, it gives you a much better idea of what might be out there.
Build an emergency fund, just in case. Having an emergency fund is also important. When I got hired on at my current job, my boss told me to try to have half a year’s salary in the bank. Some vote of confidence, huh? But the reality of our business model is that we can be forced to make cuts at any time, with no warning. It even happened to him once a few years ago. The upside is that the pay is pretty good and we get at least one or two opportunities to make some extra money each year, so we put up with it.
Six months’ salary can be hard to save, but you should have at least two, and more is better. Sometimes I can find a new job in less than two months, but I can think of two times in my career where my new employer dragged the hiring process out by a month. That was fine the first time it happened, because I still had my previous job, but it really stank the last time, because I’d been out of work a month.
Make a bare-bones budget. I also suggest having a bare-bones budget. Make up a spreadsheet listing the non-negotiable expenses that happen every month (mortgage or rent, car payment, utility bills, car insurance). Then figure the cheapest you can feed yourself for a day. I have a coworker who might try getting by on three packs of Ramen noodles and feed himself for 30 cents a day, but for most people, $3-$4 per day for food is about as low as they can go. Multiply that number by 30 and add that as a line item. Then add a few bucks for gas (it costs money to drive to the store and to job interviews too). It’s much easier to make a budget like this before you need it than when you need it.
You don’t necessarily need to kick into the emergency bare-bones budget the day you lose work, but I did. It helped my savings last longer.
Start saving money now. Knowing where to get things cheaper will help you build your emergency fund faster, and it will help you when you can’t afford to pay full price. Find out where the nearest day-old bakery is. If there’s a thrift store near you, wander into it sometime to see if it’s any good. If there’s a farmer’s market near you, check it out and compare its produce prices to your regular grocery store–and prepare for a pleasant surprise.
Don’t bail on your stocks. This might be the most important thing. When the stock market takes a dive, a lot of people hop on the phone and take their money out. Unless you own marginal stocks, that’s exactly the wrong thing to do. You don’t need to know what to do with marginal stocks when a recession hits. If you own stock in companies that can’t survive a recession, you should sell them now and buy stock in companies that can. I had a relative who made himself rich by investing in boring companies like General Electric and Coca-Cola–companies that sell things that people buy no matter how much money they have–and holding those stocks for several decades.
That money vanished after a generation (and no, I don’t have any of it), but that’s another story.
There’s a financial cliche that poor people run to buy when stores have a sale, but when Wall Street has a sale, they rush to sell.
The thing to remember is that stock prices are purely theoretical unless you sell. So when they go down, you don’t lose anything. If the company still has decent products to sell, its price will rebound if only because vast heards of rich people will come in and buy more of the stock while the price is low. If you have some savings and you know how to stretch it, there’s absolutely no reason for those rich people to be buying that stock from you.
I saw a particularly ignorant comment on Digg today in regards to Christianity (blaming evangelical Christianity for G. W. Bush’s misguided tortue policies). I know I really shouldn’t dignify ignorant comments on Digg with a response, but this time I have to. I responded there, and I’ll respond with more detail here.Here’s the quote:
Evangelicals love torture, they are taught it in spectacular detail in the Bible, and they are taught from a young age to abhor nudity and sex, but crave blood and sacrifice, any form of violence really, as it signifies the “end times”. So, the logical extension is, a state where torture is encouraged. The real problem is, like a cult being lead by a twisted, violent leader, Evangelical christianity needs to be treated as a sickness in society.
I (somewhat reluctantly) fit the definition of an evangelical Christian and I take issue with this comment. I say reluctantly, because I don’t like being associated with this stereotype.
Bloody, old-testament-style sacrifices have no place in evangelical Christianity, or any Christianity. The ritual of sacrifice pointed toward Christ. It was replaced by Holy Communion (aka the Eucharist, if you come from a Roman Catholic background). The whole idea of Christianity is that GOD shed blood (HIS OWN blood) and suffered himself, so that we wouldn’t have to. Substitution. Period. Ritual sacrifice was just a ritual, because animal blood cannot attone for human sin, any more than cheap wine can. Both the animal blood and the cheap wine remind us of the blood of Christ. (If you’re Lutheran or Roman Catholic, it goes even further and you’re taught that the wine is the blood of Christ.)
A central point in the Bible is this: I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings. It appears in the Old Testament in Hosea 6:6, and in Matthew 9:13 and Matthew 12:7, Jesus quotes it when the scholars of his day lose sight of it. I would agree with the statement that many people today have also lost sight of these verses.
Few evangelicals I know look forward to the End Times, because if you actually read the Bible (and I have read it cover-to-cover), there’s nothing pleasant happening in the End Times. It’ll be nice when it’s over, but if we had a choice, most of us would choose for our lives to occur entirely before the End Times happen. Those who would like to live in the End Times generally crave it just because they believe there may be some position of honor in heaven for having lived through the End Times and survived it.
The Bible actually spends more time talking about money than it spends talking about what’s going to happen in the future. But that isn’t its main premise either. Most of what the Bible is talking about is the dual idea of “Love God with all your heart, soul and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself.” The bad things that happen in the Bible are illustrations of what happens when people don’t do those two things.
The Old Testament started with Adam and Eve having paradise and losing it because they got greedy. And it goes on down the line, telling the stories of people who did good and bad things and what happened to them. Read the newspapers today, and you’ll see that human nature hasn’t changed much since the time these books were written.
Do I believe that God punishes people, or uses other people as agents of his wrath? Yes, sometimes. But I believe usually there’s no need. The natural consequences of our actions are usually enough. If anything, I think God in his mercy often intervenes and lessens the blow of those consequences. You see it in the Old Testament, and I certainly see it happening today.
I believe the Left Behind books are partially responsible for the stereotype of evangelical Christians as blood-craving, eschatologically obsessed fanatics. But “Left Behind” is based on questionable theology, and the concept of a Rapture originiated in the United States and started to take hold roughly in 1837. It makes for much better sci-fi than traditional interpretations of scripture.
The ads for those books promote co-author Tim LaHaye as a Bible scholar, but he is not universally regarded as such. Sales of his books should not be interpreted as an endorsement for his belief system. From what I understand, Roman Catholics won’t buy them, period. Some Lutherans will buy them, but regard them strictly as fiction, as they would a Tom Clancy novel. Lutheran scholars vigorously oppose the theology.
I won’t get into the details here, because I’m not qualified, but I’ll sum up the problem. Most “End Times”-obsessed theology is based on overemphasizing the books of Revelation and Daniel. Revelation and Daniel are probably the two most difficult books of the Bible to understand. When Jesus was trying to make a point, he generally tried to make it very easy to understand. And when he didn’t, he took the inner circle aside and explained it to them, and the Gospels include that explanation.
The Bible isn’t the only book that’s fuzzy on some details. And what you do when, say, Shakespeare, is unclear is you read the unclear parts in light of the things that are clear.
And this is the reason I left evangelical Christianity for an evangelical-minded Lutheran church. I got tired of having a pastor whose college degree was in math, who had no formal training in theology and who would have difficulty picking out the finer points of Romeo and Juliet, telling me how to read the Bible. I hate to say this, but many evangelical preachers are in over their head, teaching on subjects that they have limited understanding of themselves.
It’s interesting to me that the most evangelical-minded denominations have too many pastors, so their ordained pastors have to have another full-time job. Meanwhile, the Lutherans and Catholics don’t have enough. One reason for this is that it’s really hard to get through Lutheran and Catholic seminary. While I’m painfully aware that the ability to pass all the tests doesn’t mean you have any people skills (and I’ll risk enraging some people by saying many people who make it through Lutheran seminary have no business whatsoever running churches), the fact is that if you manage to make it through a Lutheran or Catholic seminary, in the end you really do have a thorough understanding of the Bible.
I believe some of the backlash against Christianity is due to the unpopular wars that this country is waging. Most Christians I know oppose this war too. We don’t necessarily talk about it a lot. But it’s about as easy to find a Christian who thinks this war is illegal as it is a non-Christian. I know some evangelical Christians who were bailing on Bush in 2004, voting for third-party candidates who had some of the same ideas as Ron Paul. My pastor certainly distanced himself from Bush, and any presidential candidate who ran on Christianity. He said that when things go wrong (and it will, because something goes wrong with every presidency), people will blame it on Christianity. And for that reason alone, it’s not a good idea to vote for a presidential candidate based solely on the faith he or she professes.
That’s obviously what’s happening here–noting that an unpopular president professes to be an evangelical Christian, and blaming the failings of his administration on his religious beliefs.
I’ll buy the argument that there are people in Arab states who dislike the United States because the majority religion in the United States is Christianity. Maybe they’re fighting an Islam-vs.-Christianity war. But we’re not. If it weren’t for the oil equation, we wouldn’t be in these wars.
Bush is more than happy to trade with China and Japan. They have things we want, and they’re happy to take our money. Neither of them are Christian nations.
Most South American countries don’t think too highly of the United States either. The majority religion in those countries happens to be Roman Catholicism, a form of Christianity. But they also happen to be willing to sell us the coffee and metals that we want at prices that we’re willing to pay. We aren’t actively waging war with them, but that has nothing to do with religion. It has everything to do with trade.
I wrote a couple of weeks ago that I’ve never had a traffic ticket. I spoke too soon. Thanks to the City of St. Louis’ new red-light camera scam, I have one.
It’s too late for me to fight it. But since I want others to fight it, here’s what I wish I’d known the day I got the ticket.First, when you receive your ticket in the mail, get a lawyer. Immediately. The scam works like this: They get the picture of you allegedly making a traffic violation (in my case, not making a complete stop when turning right at a red light, which is perfectly legal in St. Louis County). Then they dillydally around as long as possible. A few weeks or a month after your alleged violation, you get the ticket in the mail.
And there’s the problem. A lawyer needs at least three weeks to fight one of these things, and you’ll probably get your ticket right about three weeks before the court date. If you wait a day or five to mull over your options, you’re not going to be able to fight.
And here’s why I say "alleged"–do YOU remember what YOU were doing at 8:27 AM on Saturday, August 25? Without a photograph of you at the wheel (which St. Louis doesn’t have), they can’t prove it was you. And by waiting a few weeks after the alleged infraction, you may very well not remember if you were driving in that area on that day, or if you loaned your car to someone, or whatever.
In my case, the infraction happened in an area I rarely go. I can’t prove it wasn’t me behind the wheel, but I also can’t prove it wasn’t Francis Slay either.
That’s the reason St. Louis treats it as a non-moving violation. If it were a moving violation with points assessed, every attorney would fight it by saying the city can’t prove who was driving. And the attorney would win every single time.
In the meantime, if you don’t want to get nailed by cities changing right-turn laws on a whim (or by the car behind you if you stop at a yellow light instead of blowing through it for fear of a ticket), there’s a company that sells a $30 high-gloss clearcoat that supposedly causes the flash on the camera to overexpose, rendering your license plate illegible. I have no idea if the product works, and frankly, $30 seems a high price to pay for the fraction of an ounce of clearcoat it would take to cover four license plates. (Although it seems reasonable next to a $100 fine for not coming to a complete stop on a right turn with no other cars present.)
If you want to try to defeat red-light cameras and you don’t mind trying something that might not work, try taking off your license plates and giving them a couple of coats of either Future Floor Polish (which is really an acrylic clearcoat, not a wax) or Krylon clear gloss. I’d probably go with Krylon Triple-Thick Crystal Clear Glaze, since it’s glossier than the standard spray. A can of Krylon will cost about $5 and give you enough to spray your license plates and all of your friends’ plates also. And if it doesn’t work, you’re only out five bucks instead of thirty.
I hope it does work though. The City of St. Louis needs to find another way to raise revenue, other than making a stupid law, enforcing it by proxy, charging an excessive fine, and then stringing it along to make it as difficult for citizens to defend their records as possible.
I’ll see you at the hardware store.
And if you just got one of these unjust tickets in the mail, contact a lawyer immediately. A lawyer will cost more than the ticket, but the city is counting on honest citizens just paying the ticket because it’s cheaper and less hassle than fighting it.
And if you’re wondering where the red-light cameras are, they’re at the intersections of Hampton and Wilson (the entrance to The Hill) and Hampton and Chippewa.