Garrett M. Vonk

Traffic politics are a major point of contention for me, encompassing a huge range of issues from red light cameras to random checkpoints. For this reason, I’ll probably check out Parking Wars on A&E as long as I can take it without changing the channel in frustration.

A blog I found last year, ambiguously named The Newspaper, does a fantastic job of rounding up the “politics of driving” stories. Here’s a sampling of the stories they covered this year:

In September, motorist Brett Darrow’s videotaped harassment during a traffic stop in a small Saint Louis city became international news. Our follow-up coverage showed area police continued to harass the young motorist, and even threaten him, over the publicity.

We also helped spread the word in June about the Virginia’s so-called abuser fees that turned what other states treat as an ordinary speeding ticket for driving as little as 15 MPH over the limit in a 65 zone (or 10 MPH over on sections of Interstate 85) into an offense carrying a maximum penalty of $3550. [...] Many motorists in the same state were surprised to learn in October that they faced a $2500 fine for not making a lane change away from a police officer stopped on the side of the road.

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In April, we broke the news that a little known California agency intended to install speed cameras and the first-ever stop sign — not stoplight — camera, in violation of state law. We followed up with a report on the stop sign camera’s activation in July. But the news was not good for the ticketing industry in Minnesota. The state’s supreme court struck down of the legality of red light cameras with a strongly worded decision in April. In Kansas, ticketing picked up as police struck deals to hide video cameras in commercial big rig trucks to issue tickets to passing motorists.

Some UK motorists discovered ways to prove speed camera tickets inaccurate, including the use of a cell phone’s GPS readings as evidence.

Some of that stuff is pretty infuriating. (stop sign cameras?)

I’ve been playing a lot of Settlers of Catan lately. My brother was good enough to notice it on my wish list and find it for me as a birthday gift last month. My dad, sister, and Heather and I picked it up pretty quickly over the July 4th holiday and with good reason–it’s pretty easy to learn.

The game comes from Germany, and it looks unbelievably complex when you open up the box, but it turns out that it only takes one round of play to figure out that it’s not all that hard. This is, at its core, a game about resource management. It appeals to that corner of my brain that was obsessed with Warcraft II back in the day, mining gold and hacking away at the lumber in a race to build up my cities. (Note to self: play Warcraft II again soon) It’s also a game that holds your attention a lot better than, say, Monopoly, which can take forever to play. Even more importantly, unlike Monopoly, all players are interacting during each player’s turn. The element of trade and continuous resource generation makes the game A) extremely balanced and B) much more enjoyable when it’s “not your turn” (like I said, it’s never really not your turn).

Enough about the mechanics of the board game. The really exciting thing about Settlers is that Microsoft just made it available to play online via Xbox Live. So rather than pestering Heather to play one of the two-player variants or knocking on my neighbors’ doors, I can find a game within 60 seconds with three other human players, day or night. On the off chance that my internet is down (thanks, Comcast) or I don’t feel like interacting with real people, I can play against bots. This is about a thousand times better than just having the game in your closet and playing it (if you’re lucky) once a week when you can get your friends together. This is the ease of use and tremendous connectivity that Xbox Live gave hardcore gamers years ago, expanded to casual games.

Photo credit: Propagandalf

Microsoft made a big splash with their Surface platform today. This is pretty slick.

I’ll take two of every display shown in the video, please.

• Halo 3 - I’m in the multiplayer beta. It’s loads of fun. The mercilessly short beta period means that I’ll probably be online most nights between now and June 10th.
• I’m reading Radical Evolution, which I saw on Cool Tools and recommended to my dad. The book is chock full of exciting tidbits about the frenetic pace of technological progression, and it makes me wish my trip on MARTA were a little longer every morning. Garreau excels at framing concepts in an almost breathless, excitable voice that marvels at many of the important changes we’ll see in the next century and beyond.
  

  We live in remarkable times. Who could have imagined at the end of the 20th century that a human augmentation substance that does what Viagra does would sponsor the NBC Nightly News?

• I had barely closed the book this morning when I read about a related development, the release of the first consumer hard drive with a capacity of one terabyte. For $399, you can (probably) store in a single 3.5 inch device more data than all the computers in the world could hold on the day I was born. I remember going with my dad to pick up an 800MB hard drive for the same price in the late 90s, and I’m pretty sure that’s about what we paid for a 30MB drive back in 1989, though the latter was 5.25″ in size.

I am excited to be able to announce that Heather and I have registered for the ING Georgia Marathon.

Garrett, you say in a polite-but-condescending manner. A marathon is like twenty miles. You generally have to stop and catch your breath after pumping gas. How can you expect to complete such a feat without collapsing into a coma 100 yards in? First of all,we’re doing a half marathon, which is a paltry 13.1 miles, and second, we have a plan. We’re actually training nearly every day and doing increasingly-longer weekend jaunts so that by the end of March, we’ll be ready to at least walk the full 13 miles.

I can’t promise that I’ll do it very fast, but I will make it the full distance. I just need to find out if they’ll let me bring my iPod.

The Route

I just came across this fantastic story from a US Navy Surveillance Ship that was captured by North Korea in 1968. The North Koreans forced the American POWs to create propaganda films that would “prove” that they were being treated humanely (which, according to the rest of the accounts I’ve read, was obviously untrue). However, the Americans had a secret message to pass along through these photos…

This was further demonstrated in the second film in which a US Navy Officer flipped off the cameraman. They left it in. We now had a weapon! Back in our rooms we were elated, this was one more thing we could use to discredit the propaganda we were being forced to grind out. Several crew members expressed caution, but the general attitude was use it. We had been captured, but we never surrendered. Damn the Koreans, full fingers ahead!

The finger became an integral part of our anti-propaganda campaign. Any time a camera appeared, so did the fingers. A concern grew among us that sooner or later the Koreans would notice this and ask questions. It was decided that if the question was raised, the answer was to be that the finger was a gesture known as the Hawaiian Good Luck sign, a variation of the Hang Loose gesture. In late August one of the duty officers asked about the finger and seemed to be accepting of the explanation, but most of us realized that our zeal to ruin their propaganda would come back to haunt us.

It did come back to haunt them, but it’s still a great story.

Master of Business Administration

I flew down to Palm Beach for a day to see my Dad walk across the stage and get his MBA from FAU. Now, he can teach business school if he wants to (and I think he wants to), imparting the many lessons he’s learned over his career on a new batch of would-be entrepeneurs and businesspeople. Congratulations, Dad! I was happy to get to spend some time with the family yesterday and go shoot pool with Stephen, Ashley, and Christine. Also, Happy Birthday to my sister, Christine, who turned 24 yesterday.

My Head Explodes

This is probably the most frustrating customer service phone call I’ve ever heard in my life.

This is a whole new level of frustration that not even Vincent Ferrari ever encountered. At least in the case of slimy retention specialists, you’re both on the same page. If I were dealing with people making so egregious a mistake, it would probably be all I could do not to stab myself in the eye with a salad fork. This isn’t “cancel the account” 47 times while the guy pretends not to hear you. This is thirty straight minutes of CSRs at increasing levels of management failing to recall their fourth grade math lessons. To me, it’s almost unbearable to listen to. The best part, the shining pinnacle of ignorance, is near the end of the call when the “floor manager” tells George that their math error–overcharging him by one hundred times the amount they’re quoting–is just a “difference of opinion”.

In All Seriousness

I’m sitting here at PBI waiting for my plane to Hilton Head to board. The guy next to me just reached over to plug in his laptop and noticed my laptop’s power cable plugged into the outlet by his seat. He whipped out his travel surge protector and turned to me and asked, in a very serious voice, “Sir! Would you like to plug your laptop into my surge-protected outlet?” For some reason, this struck me as riotously funny at 7:15 in the morning. I stifled a chuckle and said “No thanks, I’m fine.” It guess was funny in both a wow-you’re-really-excited-about-your-surge-protector way and an um-is-that-supposed-to-be-a-euphemism way.

OhGizmo! is giving away a TON of stuff, and all you have to do is blog about it! See? Just like this!

This morning, I read a photoessay on Chittagong, a Bangladeshi beach that is one of the world’s longest. It’s not your typical beach: this is where half of the world’s tankers go to die.

When the tide is high, vessels are driven at full speed toward the shore. Once the water recedes and the ships rest along the muddy beach, the salvage crews move in, emptying the vessels of everything on board.

There are some incredible photos in this essay, but the data are equally fascinating and startling:

• The work employs over 200,000 Bangladeshis
• The scrap metal from the scavenged ships provides 80% of Bangladesh’s steel
• Most of the workers working on this toxic, dangerous site with sharp metals and unknown chemicals do so without gloves or shoes
• It is estimated that one worker is killed each day

The economics behind two hundred thousand people making their living handling titanic cast-off detritus is mind-boggling to me. What a huge, strange world we live in.

link: Foreign Policy: End of the Line
(via mental_floss)


There’s a lot more info on this phenomenon known as shipbreaking over at Google Sightseeing.

After work yesterday, I dashed up to Buckhead to attend the book signing for Brainiac, the book Ken Jennings wrote about his experiences with Jeopardy! and as a paean to trivia in general. I highly recommend the book and the blog.

Maybe the best test of a well-composed trivia question is how you feel when you don’t know the answer. Anybody can enjoy getting a question right, even if it’s poorly written or dull. It’s fun to show what you know. But the ideal trivia question is so good that you even enjoy getting it wrong: you liked the mental exercise of rooting around for the answer, and you like the surprise of hearing the right answer after you gave up.

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I took apart trivia questions and interviewed trivia writers hoping to find the “quintessence,” the life-giving force, that made trivia tick. I wanted to hold in my hand the mysterious Element X that differentiates a humdrum run-of-the-mill fact from the kind of sparkling, brilliant memorable fact that spawns trivia questions, the hidden factor that separates trivia from minutiae.

Well, defining “good trivia” turned out to be elusive, but the more trivia I look at, the more I realize that, like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said about porn, I know it when I see it. And at least you don’t need to hide trivia under your mattress so your mom doesn’t find out.