Checksum Arcanius

Not long after I received a ticket on my bicycle, I saw a driver get pulled over on Stevens Way, the main drag through UW campus, for momentarily stopping to let out a passenger. This is a road where  buses stop every hundred yards, traffic crawls as students constantly cross streets, and people get dropped off from cars in a similar fashion thousands of times a day.

I was riding my bicycle by as the stop happened, and I decided to do something about it. I stopped where the cop had pulled the motorist over and proceeded to give the officer a hard time for what she did. First I asked if what he did was really illegal. She responded yes and I said “Are you serious?” incredulously. I then proceeded to talk to the driver of the car while the officer was doing something else. I told the driver that I would give him my contact info and I would help him fight the total BS ticket. I said this loudly enough for the cop to hear. I then started writing down my contact info to give to the driver. At this point, the officer returned to the car she had pulled over and told me to give her room to speak to the driver. I backed away to finish writing down my info, but then I learned that the officer had decided not to issue a ticket.

Victory!

The only way we can fight police tyranny is to band together and proactively fight it. If someone had done for me what I did for this motorist when I received my ticket, I may have very well not been issued the ticket, and even if I had been issued the ticket, I would have had the witness I am now going ot have to search for in probable vain.

So here is my charge to all of you: If you see a fellow motorist being pulled over for the inane “crime” of speeding, follow them off the road, encourage them to contest the ticket, and offer to be a witness in their case against the state. Although I haven’t seen it work myself, my guess is that a third party who has nothing to gain or lose through testifying would make a very compelling case against the ticket. The state relies on the fact that most people who contest tickets have only their own word against the officer’s, and the officer’s word is implicitly less tainted since the officer is assumed to have little to gain from the ticket whereas the defendant is assumed to have a lot to lose.

One other person, previously unknown to the defendant, saying, “Your honor, I was behind the car that got pulled over and can testify that the car was traveling at or below the speed limit” would go a long way in getting these travesties dismissed. Do it for others, and hopefully when you find yourself being pulled over by a cop who himself speeds at every opportunity with no repercussions, someone will return the favor.

I certainly will.

I went to court today to contest the ticket that a UW bicycle police officer issued to me on February 3, 2009 for allegedly failing to obey a traffic control device.

As I got there early, I sat through a few mitigated hearings before making my way to the contested hearing courtroom. I listened to a few others plead their cases, mostly unsuccessfully, until I had the chance to present my case.

I started out with the nit-picky technicalities, but the judge did not seem to be too interested in them. Maybe I just introduced them the wrong way, but I have a feeling if it had been a lawyer there the judge would have paid more attention to what I was actually saying — for example, the case against me was not mailed to one of the addresses I requested, the ticket was not signed, and the ticket was listed as a non-traffic violation even though the cited RCW is a traffic violation.

Next I proceded with my case. I gave the judge a photo of the intersection where the officer alleges I failed to stop and showed that, by RCW 46.61.755, I was acting as a pedestrian at the time I passed the stop sign and was therefore not required to stop.

The judge said “Well how do I know that’s what happened?” and decided to postpone the courtdate to subpoena the officer to testify.

Since it looks like its turning into a “my word versus his” battle, a battle that police officers will always win unless there is compelling video evidence to the contrary, my next step is to find some witnesses who can back up my story. This is no small task — the incident occurred two months ago — and more importantly, a college quarter ago — and the only witnesses were random people out and about at 10:40 am. Perhaps my best bet is to stand out there with a sign saying I’m looking for witnesses, but even that seems like a long shot.

A more realistic option will be to postpone the court date as long as possible, hope the officer doesn’t show up, and if he does quiz him about other facts in the case — such as the color of the car I rode alongside as I came to the stop sign, the color of my bike and my backpack, about how many bicyclists ran the next stop sign where he detained me while he ticketed me, and so forth. But even that seems like a losing battle.

And if I lose that battle, I will appeal based on the unsigned ticket, the traffic-vs-non-traffic disparity, and the insufficient time to subpoena witnesses.

What I do promise is that the state will, overall, lose much more money going after me than they can possibly hope to gain by forcing me to pay the ticket.

In fact, I would encourage everyone who ever gets a ticket of any kind to contest to the fullest extent of the law — if we make it so expensive to enforce these inane laws that overall they lose money, the laws will either go away or become unenforced, which is better for everyone. Maybe the cops can go back to stopping and solving real crimes instead of harassing motorists and bicyclists on UW campus.

Note: I wrote most of this post last September, but never finished it until today.

Like many others, I recently downloaded and tried out Google’s new web browser, Chrome. It has some interesting and innovative ideas, but due to a few key missing features and one hard-to-overlook philosophical difference, I have not become an avid user. Firefox remains my browser of choice, and with its wonderful array of plug-ins and hacks, I have managed to “port” Chrome’s best feature to Firefox.

The first thing that annoyed me about Chrome was that forward slash did not initiate a quick search, as it does in Firefox. I use forward slash all the time to perform searches, and this annoyed me. I also noticed that Chrome skinned the window’s title bar. To me, the title bar is “sacred” territory. In my world view, the title bar belongs to the Operating System, not the application. Applications that skin it away don’t get much traction with me.

So, I happily went back to Firefox, but then one thing that Chrome didn’t have started to bug me in Firefox because Firefox did have it. And that was various bars cluttering up the vertical viewing space in Firefox. From the top, I had the tile bar (which I like), the menu bar (which I rarely use), the navigation bar (useful and necessary), my bookmark bar (which I use, but not all the time), the page content, and finally, the status bar (which is only useful when hovering links, loading pages, or using a feature such as Adblock).

Google Chrome, on the other hand, got rid of most of these except when you needed them, which I thought was a wonderful idea. So I went about getting Firefox to behave the same way. It is, I am happy to report, possible and, in my opinion so far at least, wonderful.

Note: I originally experimented with removing the status bar, I have since brought the status bar back; the extensions I tried never got it quite right, and made some web sites work less well. This was months ago, so I don’t remember all the extensions I tried, but I am open to new ideas.

The extension I still use is called “Hide Menubar” — it allows me to get rid of the menubar unless I press “Alt.” I then put all of my bookmarks on the menubar, so they only show up when I want them. Altogether, my verical space takers went from 5 bars — Title, Menu, Navigation, Bookmarks, and Status, to 3 bars — Title, Navigation, and Status. The difference is quite nice, and I suggest it to anyone looking to regain some screen real estate while surfing the web.

Thursday through Saturday I volunteered at the Microsoft Seattle Regional of the FIRST Robotics Competition. More on that later, perhaps. First, I must report on my wondrous trip to British Columbia.

As I already posted, I got lost on my way there, but I found my way to my hotel so it was all good. The next morning, I woke early to drive to Whistler, where I purchased a ski ticket and hit the slopes just after 10 am.

The lift infrastructure at the Whistler-Blackcomb ski area is immense, modern, and spectacular. Most of the lifts are enclosed gondolas or express chairs, and they cover a vast skiable area. It was lightly snowing most of the day while I skied, and visibility varied between good and fair. Winds picked up towards the end of the day, but my new ski pants and venerable yellow jacket withstood the weather very well.

I had forgotten a how much fun skiing is, and this was a spectacular reminder. I wasn’t in very good skiing shape, so I tired quickly from terrain like moguls, but I still enjoyed everything I went down and avoided falling — although I had a few close calls as I got more tired in the afternoon.

My knee held up very well, and although it was a little more stiff than usual the next morning, it was not bad at all, and while skiing it felt find the whole day.

One of the highlights for me was the newly completed Peak-to-Peak Gondola, an engineering feat that whisks passengers between the peaks of Whistler and Blackcomb mountains. The unsupported span is nearly two miles, and it hangs about 1500 feet over the bottom on the ravine it crosses. A spectacular and awe-inspiring ride, and almost worth the price of admission alone.

Both mountains offer a wide variety of excellent skiing. I didn’t attempt anything too difficult, but I did hit a few black diamonds and had a great time throughout the day. I stopped at a Mongolian grill in the village for lunch, and then when the lifts started closing, I headed back to Vancouver, albeit slowly. On my way back, I stopped at a couple of places to take pictures along the scenic Sea-to-Sky highway that is under heavy construction leading up the the 2010 Olympics.

This is why going places is so fun. Right after I crossed into Canada, I realized that I hadn’t been following my directions at all — they said I should take the other border crossing, and then get onto highway 1 and continue that way. I stayed on I-5, which over the border turns into Highway 99. I figured 99 and 1 must cross at some point, so I continued on 99 trying to keep my eyes open for highway 1.

Interestingly, highway 99 goes right into Vancouver and doesn’t stay very highway-like. I was basically on a surface street headed straight for downtown. I got the drive right by the Harbor Center (that tower thing you see in photos of Vancouver), and then I turned right, because in my memory that was more or less the way I had to go from downtown to get to my hotel in North Vancouver.

I was right, but I was still on surface streets. I eventually made my way through several blinking-green-light-intersections to a somewhat major road and then sped my way right on out of town. Eventually I started to think I must have missed the highway, or been totally lost, so I turned around and hit up a gas station where I refilled and picked up a map. It turns out that I was literally a block away from highway 1, and had just missed it while admiring the pretty lights of a bridge the first time past.

Back on track, I arrived at my hotel a little before midnight, and now here I am.

Tomorrow is Whistler for my first skiing in over two years.

Should be awesome.