farmdevil.net

In order to get my car registration renewed in Arizona without getting the emissions test, I had to have a police officer here sign a paper saying that the car is here in Kansas. I went down to the Wichita police station to get it signed. When I first gave the paper to the lady at the desk, her exact word were “I’m going to have to go get a real officer.” I was about to burst out laughing but thought it was better to remain quiet. Anyways, she ended up coming out of the back and telling me that the city police can’t do that. She said some B.S. about the Kansas Highway Patrol taking care of inspections and all of that. I told her that the Arizona law says that I can have any police officer sign it. Apparently Arizona places faith in police officers as being responsible and honorable enough to take care of it. But the Wichita police apparently don’t think of themselves as real police officers able to sign such a paper. When I was starting to get angry she told me she had worked there for 22 years.

When I went to the highway patrol station the next day, a very friendly and professional officer took care of it for me in about 1 minute. I asked him about the Wichita police and he said it sounds like they just didn’t want to do it and pointed out to me that it says right on the paper that any officer could sign it.

The whole thing was a waste of my time and gas and it was all because of the police shirking their responsibilities.

Jeff called me earlier and he mentioned that Springfield has had four dead prostitutes in under a year. Springfield is starting to have big-city crimes. It’s too bad the police are too busy playing small-town games.

Whats the deal with Verizon having only lousy phones? They’ve always handicapped the bluetooth on everything but now they also have nothing with WiFi. I want a good PDA phone but I won’t buy a handicapped piece of junk.

So Judge Nevius rejected my appeal in the case I previously wrote about. I’m sure that a lot of it has to do with my lack of legal ability. I have no doubt that a lawyer could have made it happen with how obviously ridiculous this case was. The system needs to shape up right from the top. I maintain that I shouldn’t need a lawyer to argue against an officer who is ignorant of the law in question. It’s all about the money.

Also last week I had a debate with a guy here who used to work with the police. He was so obviously indoctrinated. His grounds for why cops should just pull over people without grounds is that they often catch them for other criminal things. Sorry, but that just isn’t in the spirit of the constitution. The ends aren’t supposed to justify the means. Besides, if that is true, why do they always write tickets? Also I realized that I tend to come off as anti-cop. That is not at all what I mean. I think we need cops and laws. I just wish that the police would focus on the laws that actually affect people. I don’t think that police officers are evil people. I just think that they are part of a severely broken system that no longer serves the needs of the people. I believe that they really think they are doing good because they have been so brainwashed that they actually believe that speed laws are set for safety. In Ohio at least, that is simply not true.

Finally, it doesn’t matter if I’m right. What matters is that there is a whole group of people who agrees with me. These people are not allies of the system. We don’t trust it. If the police plan to fight real crimes, they will need to have the support of the public.

As some of you know, I’ve moved to Wichita, Kansas for a summer internship. I am working at LSI, a company that normally only computer people know of. They make enterprise-grade storage solutions and my internship is with the User Experience Group. I’ve already started on my first project, designing a software interface for a piece of functionality, and hopefully later on I will get to run a user study. It’s been really interesting because my knowledge about storage arrays has doubled in the past week.

The company is really good to it’s employees. I’m full-time but my hours are somewhat flexible. They are paying me really well and putting me up for a month in an extended-stay hotel. On Monday, my manager took me to lunch and on Thursday he took the whole group out. On Friday, the company paid for many employees to see the new Indiana Jones movie in the afternoon. Since this is Memorial Day weekend, I get a paid holiday on Monday, which is also nice.

There are a couple of Iowa State undergrads staying at my hotel that I have been hanging out with sometimes. Every night so far, I have been working out at the hotel or at the YMCA (I get 3 days a week free through the hotel). Then I’ve been trying to read school stuff for an hour or so every night. On the weekends, I plan to read and work on websites. I have a lot to accomplish this summer. Also I hope to spend some time up in Lawrence, visiting my University of Kansas friends.

Overall, Wichita is nice, though I’m very disappointed at the lack of coffee shops. Today I made the 20 minute drive across town to a pretty nice place and that’s where I am now. This place seems to be Turkish. The music is good, the coffee is decent, and there is free WiFi. I had a delicious gyro for lunch. Near my hotel, there isn’t really any place to work except Panera Bread.

I think I was too easy on officer Melchi in the last post. I realized that a large part of why I lost was because officer Melchi decided to write 800 block on the ticket even though he verbally told me 900 block at the scene.

I’ve been trying to look at the bright sides of this, mainly that there is no way they prosecuted this case for the $138 I paid. The only way we will curb needless tickets is by impacting the economics behind them. On the other hand, it is unfortunate that I had to do this and waste all of that government money and time. I would rather have seen officer Melchi out on the town preventing a murder or something than having him be paid to sit in court. But he probably would have been ripping poor college students off instead. I make about $1600 a month (pre-tax). I don’t have a lot of money to throw away on this sort of thing, but the system doesn’t understand that. There is no way I could have been more innocent than I was today, so what can a person do when they are wrongfully accused and the system places such little value on personal testimony?

The other good news is that my last post is already the #1 search result for “officer Melchi” or “Brian Melchi.”

I ended up fighting the speeding ticket that I wrote about in a previous post. It turned out that the officer was wrong about the speed limit on the road. There was no speed zone in either direction, which meant that I was doing 55 in a 55 zone. I went to court today and ended up being found guilty anyway. The good news is that the magistrate liked my defense and he suspended the fine so all I had to pay was court costs and I got 2 points on my license. That was still a high price, but I’m confident that the system lost money wasting their time on me. Also I’m uncertain if my Arizona license will ever see those points.

I will include some names because I like my site to be in the Google results when people search for them. I was in front of magistrate Albert Stewart. The only witness for the prosecution was officer Brian Melchi and my witnesses were myself and Bruce Smith, the County Engineer.

I realized beforehand that I remember officer Melchi from my days at Clark State. He was one of the power-trip officers who would camp out by the stop sign waiting for people like me to intentionally run it. But that’s another story.

Officer Melchi testified completely accurately as to his beliefs about the speed zones and I can’t fault him because he never asserted that I was still back in the stretch before the speed limit changed to 55.

The assistant county prosecutor spent his time trying to get me to acknowledge that I had accelerated to 55 before leaving the speed zone. For whatever reason, he was successful at doing just that even though I never once said I was traveling faster than 35 in the 35 zone. He kept asking me to clarify what speed I was going at different points, but I never misspoke as he was hoping for. I thought I made it clear that I accelerated to 55MPH after leaving the speed zone. For some reason, those assertions were enough for magistrate Stewart to agree with him. It became very apparent that it was never about the truth to the prosecutor. He knew he would lose if they stuck with the story about the speed zones being different on each side of the road, since I thoroughly debunked that notion. The problem was that 2 houses in the 800 block rested in the 35 zone. Since my ticket says 800 block I figured I should try to convince the magistrate that I was on the right side of it before accelerating. I should have concentrated way less on that I guess.

The magistrate found me guilty because (he said) he weighted the officer’s testimony more than mine, even though the officer never asserted that I was in the 35 zone. Even at the scene, the officer indicated that he clocked me in an area that was 55 on the other side but 35 on mine. The good news was that the magistrate liked my testimony and professionalism when representing myself so he suspended the fine.

On the way out of the courthouse, I asked officer Melchi if it was ever really about the truth. He indicated that he has no problem with the prosecution’s tactic. That’s funny, since at the scene he said that I would not have been speeding if I had been in the other lane.

The whole experience wasn’t too bad. The magistrate was helpful to me. He even overruled one objection against me. The county engineer was great and I felt sorry that I had to waste his time with this. The prosecutor did his job, but he is scum as far as I’m concerned. He got me convicted not because of the actual crime but because of a notion that hadn’t been confirmed by any witnesses. At least officer Melchi didn’t actually lie on the stand, but it’s too bad that he isn’t more aware of the speed limits because none of this would have happened if it wasn’t for his mistake. Also I have a hunch that he will gladly pull people over for the same thing again. I have decided that I am always going to pursue tickets as much as I can from now on. If I’m really guilty, I might be less likely to go to an actual trial. People need to fight these things even if they might lose, just to make the system realize that we won’t just pay up. They just need to realize that the system is designed to raise money and there is no allowance for reasonable doubt.

As some of you may know, I am in Florence, Italy for CHI 2008. If anybody is unsure, that is the premier Human Computer Interaction conference. I am a member of a team that designed a successful submission to the CHI Student Design Competition. Only 12 out of 40 teams were accepted to the conference. Last night we had a poster session where those 12 teams were judged to decide who would advance to the final four. Our team was selected, so now we get to give a 10-minute presentation tomorrow morning to compete for our rank within the top four spots.

The conference has been great so far and I have met many people from all over the world. I have also been working as a student volunteer, which has really facilitated networking. Iowa State’s name isn’t really out there very much in the HCI community and it has been great representing our program. Carnegie Melon has about 40 students in attendance and we only have 2. Hopefully when I get back I can help drive increased attendance at next year’s CHI in Boston. I would like to get a submission accepted obviously but, since it will be so much closer and cheaper, I would like to go anyway.

The picture above features me with Thad Starner. For the many of you who may not know, he has been wearing a computer since 1993. That thing that I am holding is the display. After this picture was taken, I joined him and a couple hundred of his friends for the Georgia Tech GVU reception. I was shocked at how many people were present and how awesome it was. I met many new people and got to know some a little better. Tonight should be even better, since there are about 5 parties to choose from, including the infamous Google party. Unfortunately I can’t be out too late, since we have our student design competition final presentation at 9AM.

These guys need to stop this nonsense.

I just got another ticket. It was near Springfield and was a similar scenario to how a got a ticket when I was 17. I was driving on a road with a speed limit of 35 MPH while the other side was 55.

It was a Clark County Sheriff who pulled me over and he was one of the more friendly and professional cops I have encountered. But was writing me a ticket really accomplishing anything other than revenue-raising? Punishing people for crimes that they accidentally commit does nothing to deter future crimes. That cop could have instead spent his time preventing a murder or even pulling over somebody who was maliciously disobeying the law. Also I don’t want to imply that this happened, but it certainly fails to reject the hypothesis that Ohio cops target out-of-state plates (probably less chance of the cop needing to show up on the court date).

Further, it has always bothered me that the speed limit is 20 miles-per-hour different on each side of the road. It seems like this would rarely be necessary for safety and further supports revenue-raising theories. Particularly in the case of both roads that I am referring to, where the limit on the downhill lane of the road is lower than that on the uphill lane.

When I drive in Iowa, I never feel threatened by the police. I just drive at a comfortable and safe speed, mostly within the limits but no guarantees, and they never bother me. Here in Ohio, the only people who don’t get tickets are old people who just drive slow naturally. People who drive the sheer number of miles that I do every year (20,000-30,000), and aren’t old and slow, just don’t have a chance. Interestingly, these old and slow drivers are causing accidents too, but the cops don’t even notice them.