Aren Cambre's Blog

We scanned a photo of our son and took it to Wal Mart to have prints made. After waiting for the printing, the photo guy refused to sell us photos of our kid because he thinks they are copyrighted.

Technically speaking, they may be copyrighted by the studio that took the pictures (PDF explanation).

Great, technology gives us a way to get around monopolistic, anal rape pricing of photo studios, and big nanny Wal Mart just puts up another roadblock.

Thanks a lot, Wal Mart! And thanks a lot to the fat cat politicians whose laws lock up copyrights on photos of our children for up to 120 years, decades beyond our natural lifespans.

Plan:

1. Only use studios that will give us copyright releases or learn how to do our own photos.
2. Use photo centers besides Wal Mart.
3. Urge my Congressmen to reform excessive copyright privileges.

I am pleased that the City of Dallas is cutting costs by dropping employee coverage for bariatric surgery. The operation alone can cost tens of thousands of dollars.

There is an easier, far less expensive solution that works for the vast majority of fat people: take control over your lifestyle, stop porking out, and get physical activity. Painfully simple.

I was also pleased to see that benefits for smoking-related problems are next on the cutting block.

This is a great, commonsense message: you control your self-destructive behaviors first. Then we can talk about other treatments.

This morning as I was backing out of my driveway, I saw an aqua blue 4 door 1995 Chevrolet Cavalier with very dark tint race off from the trailer of the mowers who were mowing a neighbor’s lawn. The Cavalier raced off very quickly, and the mowers’ expressions showed that something wrong just happened.

I was able to catch up to the criminal at the traffic signal leaving my neighborhood. I got his license number. The guy may have wanted to go south, but I think he noticed I was recording his license number, so he instead darted north, almost causing a rear end collision as he raced into traffic. I didn’t try to keep up with him because he was driving extremely erratically, obviously fleeing.

I reported this to 911 within minutes as a suspicious activity call, and I also called the owner of the mowing company. He confirmed that $400 of equipment was just stolen.

I hope that since I reported the license plate number, something good may result from this.

I was able to get more of the car’s details through www.publicdata.com. It can be a good idea to purchase searches from this site!

EDIT: I called the lawn mowing company owner a few days later. He said that the police were not able to do anything because nobody got a good visual description of the thief.

The commonly-accepted method of setting speed limits is to unobtrusively measure the 85th percentile speed of free flowing traffic. This is the speed such that 15% of drivers are faster and 85% are slower.

The theory behind this is twofold:

1. Speed-related safety problems are concentrated in the fastest 5%, so the 85th percentile speed clearly criminalizes those 5% and allows for a small enforcement cushion.
2. If you plot all measured speeds on a graph, you will get a bell curve. The 85th percentile speed is the break in the upper end of the bell curve.

Interestingly, in actual practice speed limits are often set in the 30th to 50th percentile, meaning that anywhere from 50% to 70% of all drivers on any roadway are criminalized.

Seems goofy, doesn’t it?

According to a Dallas Morning News article about HOV lanes on US 75, the plans have changed for HOV lane implementation between I-635 and north Allen.

The HOV system would have been a single, counterflow HOV lane. Now it’s going to be like the HOV lanes on I-635: one dedicated HOV lane in each direction.

It’s good news if you don’t like speeding tickets: it eliminates the left shoulders, making it more difficult for cops to sit behind a radar gun.

Sure, gas may be cheaper than other liquids (per http://www.cockeyed.com/science/gallon/liquid.html), but do you swill other liquids as quickly as gas?

The bonehead who does the Frisco to downtown Dallas commute in his 15 MPG SUV swills 4 gallons of gas daily. That’s $8 per day at $2 per gallon.

On a typical day do you consume $8 of any other fluid?