All Narfed Up photography and words by Bryan Villarin

It stinks to be a driver in California. I’ve gotten pulled over a few times and have dealt with the legal system. My mom has had worse. Ultimately, it’s very time consuming and stressful. But, it doesn’t have to be!

I haven’t heard of Ticket Assassin until today, when someone I know got flashed by a red light camera. Now, I’m seraching and reading/skimming through as much information as I can to help out. Had I known about this website, maybe I wouldn’t have had to deal with all that garbage in the past.

I really like the site because it looks extremely thorough and honest. Here’s the statements from the website that stand out the most [to me]:

• The “courtesy notice” the court sends you after you are cited seems to suggest that you must appear in person twice for a single chance of winning at trial: the first time to plead not guilty, the second to stand trial. This is simply not true. The law allows you to contest your traffic infraction entirely by mail.
• A written not guilty plea takes 5 minutes or less to write and will save you the time and stress of a court appearance.
• Submitting a Written Not Guilty plea is your legal right (under 40519b), but there is no state approved form for this plea. It seems suspicious that the best and easiest way to contest a traffic ticket is not supported by a state approved pleading form. We at Ticket Assassin have created a Written Not Guilty Plea template since the state has neglected to do so. You can find this form in our shareware section. (requires [$25] registration)
• There are many advantages to contesting by written declaration. The most obvious advantage: the officer gets paid $200-300 to show up in person at a court trial but gets paid NOTHING to complete this declaration paperwork. In my experience, about 30% of police officers fail to submit a response to the court by the deadline. If the officer does not turn in his declaration on time, your case is DISMISSED and your bail is returned. By simply contesting by written declaration, you stand a decent chance of dismissal regardless of your argument.
• Why doesn’t the court clearly inform us that we can appear just once in court for two chances of contesting our traffic infractions? Money. Last year the traffic courts in California collected approximately one billion dollars in fines and forfeitures on uncontested traffic tickets. Ignorant of their legal rights, confused and intimidated by the courts and police, 99% of Californians ticketed simply pay up.
• A friend of mine submitted a written declaration for speeding on the freeway; he was driving 93 in a 65, clearly in violation of the law. On his written declaration he wrote,”I’m not Guilty” with an orange crayon, misspelling “guilty”. The officer who cited him did not respond; my friend received a dismissal notice and his $270 in bail back in the mail. If the officer does not respond, your case is dismissed and all your bail is returned, regardless of the merits of your argument.

Intrigued? You should be! What are you waiting for? Head over to Ticket Assassin and enlighten yourself! (I think I’m going to print a stack of “Why Fight?” flyers to help people. The PDF link is at the top of that page.)

*****

Update July 23, 2008: I’m hearing more bad than good from this website, especially with the possible lack of response from Patrick. Let me clear things up for myself.

• I’ve only used it once to help fight my mom’s ticket.
• I’m not affiliated with Ticket Assassin.

If you’re having trouble with the website and haven’t heard a response, complain to the Better Business Bureau. As for me, I will not promote this service until I hear a lot of better feedback.

Update 4/18/2007: This post is outdated. Audacity 1.3.2 (Beta) changes the method a bit, which I describe here.

Over a month ago, Lifehacker linked to an article: “Speeding Up Podcasts and Audio Books“. Here are the two sentences that caught my eye:

It lets you play one minute and fifteen seconds of audio for every minute you listen. In other words, you get an extra 25% of content.

However:

It’s the feature that Apple introduced with the 4G iPods back a couple of years ago. The feature is the ability to speed up (or slow down) audio without changing the pitch (if you are familiar with variable speed tape recorders, you understand that simply speeding up the playback of something tends to also make the speaker sound like a chipmunk).

I have a 3G iPod, so I don’t have this feature. The article mentioned Amazing Slow Downer, but it’s not free. Fortunately, Matt commented about Audacity:

Audacity is great for this, at an unbeatable price ($0). [..] It is cross platform, open source (free), and [speeds] up audio excellently, [in addition to] being a general purpose audio editor. There was a beta of the next version last time I checked that allowed bulk conversion. Unfortunately no command-line. (Effect [menu] > Change Tempo is the command you want.)

So, if I want to speed up podcasts, I have to do some work. Except for the tempo increase, it won’t be automatic.

(more…)

I’ll be short here, because this is somewhat off topic. Basically, a big part of my life will be coming to an end after this Saturday: coaching children’s sports (Kare Youth League and RHLA). This means that my focus will be on school, work, and music.

I’ll have a more thorough posting at Bryan Off Topic later today.

Update: Here’s my official “statement”.

Today will be my last day of school for the semester, then summer should be wide open (other than work, of course). I’ve had at least one or two things that have been queued up for me to write about, but a major thing has been on my mind for quite some time. No details yet, but it’s huge, in terms of where my focus and time will be in the immediate future.

Amongst other things, I’m in need of updating WordPress. One of my friends keeps trying to comment or something, they’ll click a link, then a “412 precondition failed” error comes up. At the moment, I’m using Akismet 1.15, Bad Behavior 1.2.4, and Referrer Karma. Hopefully I’ll get to the bottom of that after my final tonight.

Sorry for the filler post!

La La looks like a fantastic service that gives back to the artists.

New CD trading service La La lets you put your old CDs up for trade and browse other people’s CD collections. Interested in an album? Pay La La $1 and have the other member ship you the disc - like a distributed Netflix (except you get to keep it).

Actually, imagine if one CD got traded around like 25 times. Each time costs $1 USD, and the artist/band gets 20% of that. They’d get $5 from that one CD being traded 50 times. Crazy!

I don’t know what artists usually get from a CD sale, but 20% sounds pretty cool.

From the “How ‘la la’ Works” page:

1. List the CDs you have, pick the CDs you want
2. Ship CDs you have to ‘la la’ members
3. Gets CDs you want from ‘la la’ members

There’s an estimated 1.4 million CD titles to choose from, and Finch was on there. Nice. The issue is whether or not they’ll want to give up awesome CDs, such as that one. Grr. However, I’ll definitely put up all the albums I’ve got, in case they’re wanted. My music tastes have changed quite a bit since high school.

[via Lifehacker]

Update: I’ve finally put all the CDs I have in my la la collection. People need to request CDs from me in order for me to receive any. Sift through and see if I’ve got something you like, ‘kay? Thanks!