Letter Never Sent

A few months after I bought my Mustang, I received a couple speeding tickets. Being naive in certain aspects of Life, I had a few things to learn about owning a sports car. Namely that it takes discipline to drive like a normal person when you don’t have to, and that sports cars make you more conspicuous to law enforcement. These were expensive lessons that I have fully incorporated into my Way of Life. As a result, I’ve become a slow and cautious driver. Now, whenever I cruise past the highway patrol I wince like a pyromaniac who has suffered 3rd degree burns.

One thing you notice when you get a traffic ticket is that there is a thriving business in traffic law. The week after you get a ticket your mailbox is deluged in come-ons from every traffic attorney in the county. Normally, I would just pay the fine and kick myself for throwing good money away. But as I received letter after letter, I figured there must be something to it. If it was a scam or useless to hire an attorney for a speeding ticket there would not be a thriving business around it, right? I wanted to find out for sure.

The next time I was downtown I stopped by one of the “firms” lodged like ticks near the courthouse. I asked what I needed to do to get a lawyer to handle my ticket. For the two tickets I had they charged $200 for representation. Even though I was concerned about spending money for what could turn out to be worthless, I was dying to know if this was a better option than just paying the fines, which I had no problem with aside from the considerable expense.

Using an attorney I might be able to keep the tickets off my record and maybe not pay the fines at all. After talking to an older gentleman who told me he always uses a lawyer for traffic tickets, I signed up, wrote out a check, and left the clerk with the tickets. The clerk issued a bond later that day to cover me until my court date and a few days later I received a note explaining what I needed to do next (just show up and say “Here” when they called my name at the docket) and that I would have to appear in court in 6 months. A few months later I received another letter that my court appearance was rescheduled another six months after the original date. Basically, this meant I would not appear in court until over a year after I had received the tickets. My guess is the traffic lawyers like to do this as a delaying tactic, especially since my court appearance was scheduled for the week after Thanksgiving, which might be inconvenient. The delay was also a good thing in that it allowed me to put off an unpleasant trip downtown, although it took everything I had to remember to go.

When my court date finally approached, I got up early and was down at the Courthouse for my 8:30 AM appearance. If you’ve never been to court for a traffic violation, you’re in for a treat. The whole thing is a remnant of bygone days when you had to interact with other people and wait patiently like cattle. It was fun to observe the random cross-section of my fellow Dallas citizens. Although, I imagine more higher-income people would not waste their time challenging a ticket. You’re more likely to see the lower and middle classes represented. People for whom a few hundred dollars and an increase in auto insurance premiums can cause a serious hardship and a cascade of negative consequences. This is one of the unpleasant realities of the criminal justice system. The penalties sufficient to encourage compliance from the bulk of the populace are often an extreme burden for those living paycheck to paycheck.

When you go to your assigned court room, the judge comes in, explains a few things, then proceeds to do a roll-call from the docket. This determines which cases will be handled. In Dallas, they use a stand-by system where they don’t call the witness (the police officer) in until they know you’ve showed up. The judge goes through 40-50 people to determine which cases will be on the second docket call. If you show up the case goes forward, if you do not, the judge would likely issue a warrant for your arrest. About 30% of people on the docket were not present. When they call your name, you say “Here” and the prosecutor tells the judge whether the state is ready to proceed or not. Generally, the state is ready pending arrival of the witness. After the docket has been cleared, the judge declares a recess until the second docket call an hour later where the real business begins and the attending officers make their appearance.

When you come back for the second docket call, they do another roll-call and the prosecutor announces whether the state is ready to proceed. If the witness (the officer) is unavailable, the case is dismissed. If the witness is available, you or your lawyer will generally make a deal with the prosecutor: dismissal for things like “no proof of financial responsibility” (no auto insurance) if you can prove you had insurance at the time, or “deferred adjudication” if you plead no contest for something like speeding. Deferred adjudication basically means they dismiss the ticket if you can go six months with no other offenses, but you still have to pay court fees, which can be equivalent to 50-75% of the original fine. And if you fail to keep your nose clean for six months, you would have to pay the fines. Besides pleading no contest, another option would be to plead innocent. But this is generally a bad idea as it wastes everyone’s time and suggests that you might be a prima donna who doesn’t want to play ball.

In my case, both tickets were dismissed because the witness was unavailable. Dismissal means it never happened. No fines, no court fees, no increases in your insurance premiums, no six hours watching “comedy” defensive driving. Could I have achieved the same result without a lawyer? Only if I could be certain the witness would be unavailable. Otherwise, you would have to be prepared to make your case with the prosecutor pro se (representing yourself). They hand out deferred adjudication like candy and I probably could have received it by working directly with the prosecutor. So, the jury is out on whether it was a good investment. I’d be curious to hear of anyone else’s experience.

In my case, I never even met with my attorney. His clerk showed up to make sure I was there as they are responsible for the bond if I was not. Then I never saw him. Luckily, the case was dismissed, so I didn’t need him anyway. Aside from moving the dates, I did everything else myself. I got the impression that the attorneys are there mainly as backup and to ensure that you get a crack at deferred adjudication. I’m not convinced they do anything else and some of them seemed pretty useless and just as seedy as you might expect. One lawyer had silver hair in a ponytail AND crutches for a broken foot. Another in a tired brown suit looked like he just crawled out of a whiskey bottle.

Even though I spent $200, it was a good experience and preferable to the $600 I would have had to spend in fines. I am still not sure if hiring a lawyer made any difference, but I would probably try it again.

Things I learned:

• As bureaucratic and imperfect as it seems, the legal system works pretty well. At its most basic level, the Law aims to define negative behaviors and prescribe remedies. There is something comforting about this emphasis on creating order from the general human chaos. This is no small task. There are rules and then there are the ways we carry out the rules. Reason is a necessary basis for Justice. Justice guarantees our freedom and harmony by theoretically ensuring that all men are treated equally in the eyes of the Law.
• Traffic offenses are criminal offenses. As a result, you are protected by the Constitution. Pretty cool, huh?
• As the judge put it, the aim of the law is generally to encourage compliance. In other words, while the measures may be punitive, the goals are noble. This is a good distinction as people often attribute a nefarious dimension to the role of Law in Society. As I have some experience with people and their failings, I prefer this imperfect system to the law of the jungle.
• When it comes to motor vehicle violations, unlike in other areas of criminal law, intent is irrelevant. You are responsible for what you do in your vehicle, even if you did not mean to do it.
• Drive the speed limit.

Although I’ve had this domain name for a while longer, today marks the 7th anniversary of this humble little blog. I’m amazed at how mainstream this form of public expression has become, however I’m not surprised. People want to participate. People want to talk and listen and share with others in an endless conversation between themselves and the rest of the world. The old world of one-way communication through newspapers, radio, and TV seems so alien and backward. Connection is our cultural reason for being.

Eventually, we will all be blogging in some form, although we may call it something else…streaming bits of our little lives out through Flickr, twitter streams, blog entries, Facebook wall posts, YouTube videos, etc. It will be interesting to see what new social practices develop as everyone becomes attached to The Network and plays around. We’re still at the very beginning and it is important to remember how much more change we have in store. It is exciting to be alive when so many new things are happening. It makes me wonder. If we can count on so many things changing, what should we hold on to? What should we try to preserve as a culture? What have we learned that we should not forget?

Walt Mossberg makes some good points on why it’s important to open up the mobile telephone industry. The carriers argue that they have to force long-term contracts and lock down access in order to offer subsidies. As Mossberg points out, this is a trap for consumers. I’m sure we’ve all seen those prepaid wireless phones they sell at Target and Wal-mart. They usually run about $60-$100 per handset with the expectation but not the certainty that they will get more money out of you. This price point is not far off from what the carriers charge even if you get a one-year contract. If the FCC mandated handset portability as they have in Europe, carriers would adapt their product to meet the market demands.

But the problem is even worse. The government didn’t require the CDMA companies to include a removable account-information chip, called a SIM card, in their phones. So, unlike people with GSM phones, Sprint and Verizon customers can’t keep their phones if they switch between the two carriers, even though they use the same basic technology. And, the government allows the GSM carriers to “lock” their phones, so a SIM card from a rival carrier won’t work in them, at least for a period of time. Techies can sometimes figure out how to get around this, but average folks can’t.

The carriers defend these restrictions partly by pointing out that they subsidize the cost of the phones in order to get you to use their networks. That’s also, they say, why they require contracts and charge early-termination fees. Without the subsidies, they say, that $99 phone might be $299, so it’s only fair to keep you from fleeing their networks, at least too quickly.

But this whole cellphone subsidy game is an archaic remnant of the days when mobile phones were costly novelties. Today, subsidies are a trap for consumers. If subsidies were removed, along with the restrictions that flow from them, the market would quickly produce cheap phones, just as it has produced cheap, unsubsidized versions of every other digital product, from $399 computers to $79 iPods.

QR-Code (quick response barcode) is a 2-dimensional printed barcode-like system used to encode information such as URL’s, phone numbers, text, and other data. The code image can be read by a scanner or decoded from a photographic image of the printed code.

From the QR Code web site: “QR Code is a two-dimensional barcode, used widely in Japan. The advantage of QR Code from well-known barcode is larger data capacity (more than 100 bytes, typically) and error correction.”

From Wikipedia:

Although initially used for tracking parts in vehicle manufacturing, QR-Code is now used in a much broader context spanning both commercial tracking applications as well as convenience-oriented applications aimed at mobile phone users. QR Codes storing addresses and URLs may appear in magazines, on signs, buses, business cards or just about any object that a user might need information about. A user having a camera phone equipped with the correct reader software can scan the image of the QR Code causing the phones browser to launch and redirect to the programmed URL. This act of linking from physical world objects is known as a hardlink or physical world hyperlinks. A user can also generate and print their own QR Code for others to scan and use by visiting one of several free QR Code generating sites.

The use of these types of codes allows more physical world interaction with our communication devices. For example, you could launch a URL directly from the code image printed on a show flyer or film showing. Or, you could print a QR Code on your business card to allow people to easily capture your contact information and copy to their phone.

Related stuff:

1. PHP and Perl scripts to generate QR Code.
2. Semanote: Tag the world This looks like fun.
3. QuickMark: Read barcodes and QR-code with your webcam
4. Web-based QR-Code generator
5. TED Talks: Jan Chipchase: Our cell phones, ourselves: Must watch video.
6. QR-Code processing library
7. QR-Code Wordpress Plugin: WP-QRcode is a highly configurable plugin that generates QR codes for your blog posts and lets you show them in specific places in your Wordpress website. The purpose is for mobile phone users to have easy access to your posts by capturing the QR code by the phone’s camera and then go straightly to your post from the phone’s web browser.

I would like to be able to photograph and read barcodes from my Blackberry, however most mobile readers do not support the Blackberry. If you know of any reader that does, please let me know.

If you have a Windows Mobile Device or Symbian device you can use the following applications: Kaywa Reader, QuickMark. Devices that support J2ME can use QRMidlet.

Great and funny piece on how nerds work over at Rands in Repose, The Nerd Handbook:

Your nerd has built an annoyingly efficient relevancy engine in his head. It’s the end of the day and you and your nerd are hanging out on the couch. The TV is off. There isn’t a computer anywhere nearby and you’re giving your nerd the daily debrief. “Spent an hour at the post office trying to ship that package to your mom, and then I went down to that bistro — you know — the one next the flower shop, and it’s closed. Can you believe that?”

And your nerd says, “Cool”.

Cool? What’s cool? The business closing? The package? How is any of it cool? None of it’s cool. Actually, all of it might be cool, but your nerd doesn’t believe any of what you’re saying is relevant. This is what he heard, “Spent an hour at the post office blah blah blah…”

Last winter I finished reading Moby Dick. When you read a book that is justly revered you cross a line into understanding what all the fuss is about, though maybe even further from understanding. Moby Dick is the kind of book you could never imagine writing yourself.

Melville has this ability to capture and convey existential feeling so that it is beautiful and tangible. In Moby Dick, he does it better than the best philosopher.

• Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off–then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish, Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship.
• There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.
• To enjoy bodily warmth,some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself.
• There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause:–through infancy’s unconscious spell, boyhood’s thoughtless faith, adolescence’ doubt (the common doom), then scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood’s pondering repose of If. But once gone through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, and men, and Ifs eternally. Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more? In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will never weary? Where is the foundling’s father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.

I’m looking forward to seeing “No country for old men“. Tried to see it last night, but there was a fire alarm at the theatre and they made everyone leave, which, as you can imagine, was very frustrating. As someone who loves both the novel “Blood Meridian” by Cormac McCarthy and most films by the Coen brothers, I am looking forward to seeing this adaption of Cormac McCarthy’s book by the same name. Friday evening I read an interview with McCarthy where he threw down a few nuggets:

1. “McCarthy’s style owes much to Faulkner’s — in its recondite vocabulary, punctuation, portentous rhetoric, use of dialect and concrete sense of the world — a debt McCarthy doesn’t dispute. “The ugly fact is books are made out of books,” he says. “The novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written.” His list of those whom he calls the “good writers” — Melville, Dostoyevsky, Faulkner — precludes anyone who doesn’t “deal with issues of life and death.” Proust and Henry James don’t make the cut. “I don’t understand them,” he says. “To me, that’s not literature. A lot of writers who are considered good I consider strange.”
2. “There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed,” McCarthy says philosophically. “I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.”
3. “Having saved enough money to leave El Paso, McCarthy may take off again soon, probably for several years in Spain. His son, with whom he has lately re-established a strong bond, is to be married there this year. “Three moves is as good as a fire,” he says in praise of homelessness.”

A long time ago when I was a courier for Fedex I had a dropbox on my route at the front of a vacant office building. While emptying it of overnight-letter envelopes one evening, I noticed the tiny body of a gecko tucked into the lower lip of the dropbox door. As I had to empty the box each day, I noticed that over the next few days the gecko started to rot. The stench was amazingly potent and widespread especially considering how small it was. It got worse and worse until one day the smell was gone. I popped open the door to empty the dropbox and looked down to find a naked gecko skeleton. A single fat maggot was curled inside the ribcage.

I was amazed at the transformation. The gecko had probably died a few days before after getting trapped inside. Then bacteria had gone to work digesting its dead flesh. Then a fly detecting the stench had come along and laid an egg on the corpse where this newly hatched maggot had made quick work of the remains. Now finally, this maggot was preparing to develop into a fly. It was the circle of life played out in miniature.

It got me thinking. Can we really call ourselves individuals? You can shave off some of your cells and grow them in a dish for years if they have access to enough food. Are those cells you? Where does your body end and you begin? Is it just that plants and animals evolved as intelligent vehicles for multi-cellular life? In other words, what if consciousness is just a highly developed system for protecting and reproducing life? What if we, our consciousnesses, are just an adaptation to better promote a lower-level biological imperative? What if our minds are just the pilots for a lifeboat of individual cells and creatures? A Portoguese Man O’War is a colony of organisms working together as one unit. Maybe we are not much different. In biology there is this theory that the individual organelles of our cells, like mitochondria, were once separate organisms who were taken inside other prokaryotic organisms to live together as endosymbionts. As a single organism. Did the separate natures of each creature disappear when they became one?

What are you? Consider that your body cycles much of its components on a monthly basis as your cells divide, tissues replenish, waste excretes, and nutrients move through your system. Physically, you are never the same person twice. If that is the case, what makes you you?

We know that a body can be kept biologically alive without higher-level brain function. I’m no atheist by any means, but I do have to wonder. As every dream and thought I have experienced has taken place within my body, what happens when my body ceases to function and dies? It stands to reason that whatever I am also dies.

(As I post this after midnight)

Being a morning person or a night owl doesn’t just determine when you start or end your workday; your internal clock may help define your psychology as well. A Spanish researcher found that our preference for engaging in activities earlier or later in the day shapes both our perceptions and our interactions. The author gave personality tests to 360 university students, whom he describes as a “proper sample,” noting that the circadian rhythms of students “are not much under the influence of time schedules and social patterns.” (Despite the occasional all-nighter, students presumably can follow their preferred sleep schedules more easily than working adults can.) His results offer new evidence that morning and evening types think differently. Early risers prefer to gather knowledge from concrete information. They reach conclusions through logic and analysis. Night owls are more imaginative and open to unconventional ideas, preferring the unknown and favoring intuitive leaps on their way to reaching conclusions. Social behavior diverges as well: Morning people are more likely to be self-controlled and exhibit “upstanding” conduct; they respect authority, are more formal, and take greater pains to make a good impression. (Earlier research also suggests that they are less likely to hold radical political opinions.) Evening people, by contrast, are “independent” and “nonconforming,” and more reluctant to listen to authority—which suggests that teachers may have several reasons to prefer those students who wake up in time for class.

—“Morning and Evening Types: Exploring Their Personality Styles,” Juan Francisco Díaz-Morales, Personality and Individual Differences

From Atlantic Monthly via Steve Sailer.

As I related in the previous entry, I spent some time at the library reading. Most notably: A Perfect Mess. The basic premise of the book is that a certain amount of disorganization is actually adaptive, efficient and beneficial. And, organizing may actually be counter-productive in terms of the energy required to stay organized. What a relief this is for disorganized people. I have noticed that it takes a lot of energy to keep things neat when it would actually be better to just accept a nominal amount of disorder so you can focus on more important things.

I took a few notes you might find interesting:

1. “Office messiness tends to increase sharply with increasing education, increasing salary, and increasing experience.”
2. On the questionable value of Jack Welch-ian strategic planning: “Managers import a raft of poor assumptions into the planning process…” Which results in useless or unfounded ‘planning’.
3. On comfort noise: Telephone engineers actually add a certain amount of background noise to telephone and especially cellphone conversations because people find total silence in conversation unnatural and confusing. Users hate the complete absence of background noise. “Adding background noise to telephone calls signifies presence.” Read more about ITU recommendation G.711.II.
4. On randomness and noise as a fundamental concept of existence. Example Brownian motion.
5. “Disorder creates connections.” Mess-driven invention.
6. Rather than focus on terrorist leaders, FBI / CIA focus on the productive nodes: “In a disorganized network the nodes in the middle carry the greatest workload.”
7. The cost of neatness: “Being neat requires constant expenditure of resources.”
8. Robustness of disorder: “Messy systems are more resistant.” Loosely woven.
9. The popular Noguchi file system is simply a pile shifted on its side. More frequently used items work their way to the front, just as in a pile. In other words, piles are intuitive expressions of higher order.
10. Messy environments provide useful cues.