Follow-up to the drunk driver who smashed our car.

In total, 5 vehicles were involved:

• driver's Ford Explorer (totaled)
  
• neighbor's Ford Ranger (totaled)
  
• our Honda Civic (totaled)
  
• our Subaru Outback (at least $3k in damages)
  
• neighbor's Nissan Murano (at least $2k in damages)

We still don't know if the guy had insurance, but officer's told us on the scene that he had a previous DWI conviction. The penalty for 2nd offense is 30 days to 1 year in jail.

I found the police report online today, it shows the driver's name (Paul Keenan) and that he's 19 years old.

So he's got a 2nd DWI on his record, while being underage, possibly without insurance, and he just destroyed 3 cars + wreck a young woman's face.

Nice going, dumb ass.

Click to enlarge

Last night around 2am, a drunk driver (some dumbass kid) smashed 4 cars right in front of our house, including my Honda Civic. The cops told us he has a previous DUI conviction on record, so it's not his first time. The whole situation is ridiculous in so many ways, and all I can say is it's a damn shame the driver wasn't injured (or worse) in the accident. He certainly deserves it.

First time offense is one thing, but this guy has already been busted for drunk driving, so now he's just an irresponsible jerk. He was driving a Ford Explorer, none of the airbags deployed, and the front passenger smashed her face into the dashboard in the collision. Her jaw is broken, she lost a bunch of teeth, and bled all over the place (her friend came to our house today, gave us an update). Last we heard, she had gone to the emergency room for surgery. I guess they'll try to put her face back together.

Why do we allow drivers like him back on the road?

Now that he's had a second DUI (the cops showed up and took him to jail), how long until he's behind the wheel again?

How long until he smashes up another 3 or 4 cars?

What if he gets in another wreck, but instead of killing himself in the process, what if he takes someone else's life instead of his own?

Here are some photos from last night, taken within an hour or so of the accident.

I went to a user group meeting tonight; I won't say which one, because I don't have anything nice to say about it. It was my first time to attend, wasn't really sure what to expect. Maybe I would meet some people with similar interests? Maybe learn something new? Anything's worth trying once.

After 2 ¹/₂ hours I was kicking myself that I didn't walk out early. I kept thinking it would end! I've since vowed to never again attend a meeting for this particular group.

What a waste of an evening.

... but sold it a few hours later.

The Wii is still pretty hard to find in stores, so when I found one today I was both happy and torn at the possibility of selling it for a small profit. The console itself retails for $250, and after sales tax the total comes to $270.

I ended up finding someone on craigslist who was willing to pay $350 in cash. We met up earlier today, done deal. So I no longer own a Wii, but have an extra $80 in my wallet.

Click to enlarge

I'm looking at getting a new rubber sheet for my ping pong paddle (yeah, I know, what kind of nerd owns his own paddle? And buys upgrades for it? Well, I do.)

So I was looking for info about the "Hammond Pro α" by Nittaku. I found their website, and it includes this super-informative graphic (which explains, um, something... in Japanese...), and this awesome product info.

This sure helped me make up my mind! No more questions from me! I can't stand the "durability to become bad", and want to ensure that "seat and sponge invent big repulsive force".

"Rubber and medicine are combined at the time of rubber generation"... what?! Rubber and medicine?? This shit sounds like magic!

A rubber seat was 20-30% in the past rebellion became so good that the ratio of the rubber substitute to natural rubber became high but for the durability to become bad. A seat of a HAMMONDseries is to set rubber substitute to about 2 times of 60% while maintaining the durability, and high repulsive force is being shown. Highly precise rubber generation will be possible by nanocomposite technology, and Hammond-Xis also combining rubber substitute 70% in a sponge. (In the past, for rubber substitute 0, HAMMONDand professional ?, 50%) these seat and sponge invent big repulsive force. (More energy losses will be small.) if the batted ball process is expressed, flexibility of the natural rubber (catches a ball tightly and makes) them rip, and the ball repulsive force of rubber substitute caught is driven to the batted ball direction, said, it'll be (figure 1 referring).

* Nanocomposite technology (figure 2 referring)
A raw material of rubber and medicine are combined at the time of rubber generation. Perfect dispersion was fact possible which disperses difficult medicine to the nano level (1 n = 1/1,000,000 mm) in the past, and rubber generation which is high-quality and excellent in elasticity became possible by a more efficient chemical reaction.

I just read "Why affordable housing at Mueller will fail" and it makes a lot of sense.

Affordable housing is supposed to provide opportunity for lower-income home buyers, that part's fine. But once a home has been sold to lower-income family (basically at a discount, funded by the city government), there is nothing that prevents that family from turning around and selling their home at current market prices. In the above post, he argues that within 5 years, that's pretty much what will happen.

For example, say home #1 normally sells for $150,000, but the affordable housing version (home #2) sells or $120,000. That's great, if you qualify, you can buy home #2 and basically save $30,000. But if you were to turn around and sell home #2 a few years later, you could easily sell it for much more than your purchase price. In fact, if home #1 goes on the market for $160,000 (up $10k from original price), why wouldn't you sell your home #2 for $160,000 as well? You would. And by doing so, you've basically converted the city government's charity from a housing discount into real money.

So what's wrong with that? Nothing, except that it won't take long before "affordable housing" home owners figure this out, sell their home for huge gains, and then... you're left with a housing development that looks a lot like what you would have if you had started out selling everything at current market prices (i.e., without any "affordable housing" homes at all).

Whatever your initial goals were (diversifying the home owners, creating opportunity for lower-income families, etc.), you'll end up with something different.

It would probably just be easier all around if the city held a random drawing among lower-income families and handed out $25,000 sacks of money.

Jan Ullrich: World Champion, Olympic Gold Medal winner, Tour de France winner, and... Cheater.

German sports news agency sid announced that blood bags from Operación Puerto have been proven as those of Jan Ullrich through DNA comparison. Public prosecutor Fred Apostel said the comparison shows "without a doubt" that the blood is Ullrich's.

Ullrich's team has fired back that the results have been manipulated, he didn't cheat, etc.

Several things stand out as important:

• Ullrich has repeatedly denied any involvement with Dr. Fuentes or Operación Puerto ("I have never worked together with Fuentes" - Jan Ullrich, May 6, 2006, cited at cyclingnews.com)
  
• his legal team tried repeatedly to block a DNA sample from Ullrich for use in comparison tests ("Ullrich's lawyers have asked a higher Spanish court to block the turn over of bags of blood to German investigators for DNA comparison." cyclingnews.com March 7, 2007)
  
• and then only weeks ago - when the DNA test results seemed imminent - Ullrich announced his retirement
  

Of course, there's always the possibility that foul play was involved as Ullrich claims, and he's innocent, etc., but I just don't see it.

Here's the full text from cyclingnews:

German sports news agency sid revealed on Tuesday afternoon that the blood bags seized in Operación Puerto and marked "Jan," "number 1" or "Hijo Rudicio" ('son of Rudy') have been confirmed to contain the blood of the now-retired German cycling star, Jan Ullrich. Public prosecutor Fred Apostel told sports news agency sid that the comparison with a DNA sample taken from Ullrich's saliva showed "without a doubt" that the blood seized by the Guardia Civil last year indeed belonged to the only German to have ever won the Tour de France.

"We found nine blood bags that we could compare with the DNA probes," Apostel told n-tv. For the prosecutor, this proves that Jan Ullrich had indeed been in contact with the Spanish doctor Eufemiano Fuentes. "This shows that blood bags were stored there [in Fuentes' offices]," he added.

The Ullrich camp has meanwhile reacted and posted a statement on the personal website of the former cyclist, janullrich.de. Attorney Johann Schwenn declared that "The defence will take a close look at the opinion of the Federal Criminal Police Office. After the irregularities in the Spanish procedure it is well possible that this finding is the consequence of manipulation. In any case, there is no reason to change anything in the line of defence of Jan Ullrich."

The public prosecutor in Bonn, Germany is investigating fraud charges against Ullrich, as well as his advisor Rudy Pevenage.

I just found Shirt-a-Day (www.shirtaday.com) - they sell a different t-shirt every day, and the price goes down in real-time as more people buy it. At the end of the day, the final price is what all customers are actually billed. Interesting pricing model.

Macs have great text-to-speech functionality, but I've only used it for fun. Specifically, if I want to "talk" to someone using my computer. As you might guess, this isn't too important but it sure can be fun.

The fastest way I know to make your Mac "talk" is to open a Terminal window and use the say command, like this:

% say blah blah blah

If you run that, you should hear a computer voice read everything after the word "say". If you don't have say available, maybe your path is screwed up. Mine's under /usr/bin:

% which say
/usr/bin/say


So that's part 1.

Part 2 is to make it easier to keep feeding speakable text.

To help, I wrote a small script that will wait for input (from you), send your input to say for speaking, then wait for another line of input. That way you can just keep typing text, hit return, rinse, repeat, and have some fun with friends, your cat, etc.

I made a file in my bin directory and named it "speak.command". (Anything that's a ".command" means you can double-click the filename in a Finder window and it will automatically launch a Terminal window using that script.)

% cat ~/bin/speak.command
#!/bin/tcsh
echo "start typing stuff to speak..."
while (1)
set input = $<:q
say "$input"
end

The full steps are thus....

1. Create a file somewhere (probably ~/bin/) named "speak.command".
   
2. Copy the contents of my script above, starting with #!/bin/tcsh
   
3. Either double-click the file "speak.command" in a Finder window, or run it directly from Terminal like this: % ~/bin/speak.command
   
4. Ctrl-d (or close window) when you're done