I saw this on the ‘net and I have to say I actually do not want one. And neither should anyone else.

While surfing the ‘net last night, I came across the plight of Philadelphia resident Edward Stanley Harris.  It seems that Edward has a twin brother named Edwin Shelby Harris and about seventeen years ago Edwin received 8 moving violations worth some $1500 that he never paid.  Since then, Edwin has moved away and Edward rarely hears from him.

Every time Edward went to the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT) office to renew his license, they told him he had outstanding tickets and thus couldn’t renew his license.  And every time he would faithfully trot himself down to the Philadelphia Traffic Court and explain (again) that he was Edward Harris, not Edwin Harris and the tickets weren’t his.  Each time the traffic court judges would listen, realize PennDOT didn’t know what they were talking about and rectify the situation (until the next time his license came up for renewal).

Except for Traffic Court Judge Willie Adams.

Traffic Court Judge Willie Adams apparently had no interest in hearing the facts or reviewing the ample documentation and ordered Edward to pay the outstanding fines –now worth a little over $1800 — at the rate of $100/month, or go to jail.

He started paying this while off while he filed his appeal because he didn’t want to go to jail.

Sanity made a brief appearance during the appeal hearing and the payment order was withdrawn and someone suggested to Edward that he go back to Traffic Court to get his money back.

At some point, Edward contacted Ronnie Polaneczky, a reporter at The Philadelphia Daily News.  The reporter in turn contacted attempted to contact Traffic Court Judge Bernice DeAngelis, but wasn’t immediately successful and wrote about Edward’s story in the newspaper.  Two days later, Judge DeAngelis contacted the reporter and couldn’t apologize enough for the travesty Edward has been subjected to.

The judge couldn’t, however, explain how the situation got to the point it did, nor why Edward had to resort to calling a reporter who ultimately shamed the Traffic Court system into fixing the problem.

As for Judge Adams, the idiot who really should go before the Judicial Conduct Board to explain his actions, Judge DeAngelis is quoted as saying “I wasn’t in the courtroom.  I don’t know what was said or not said. Judge Adams is my colleague. It’s not my place to comment on his actions.”  There’s really no need to, eh?

It’ll be interesting to see what happens next time Edward goes to renew his license.  Will PennDOT get things right or will he have to go to Traffic Court again?

There’s a mosque in Umm Tuba, which is near Jerusalem, that was apparently built on a Sunday 700 years ago. You need a license to build things on Sundays and the mosque in question is alleged to not have had such a permit 700 years ago, so Israeli authorities have decided to demolish it. (Ma’an News Agency story and the blog entry I stumbled across)

This immediately reminded me of the destruction of the giant Buddha statues by the Taliban in 2001 (see also Wikipedia). As you may recall, the Taliban destroyed several huge sandstone Buddha statues as part of their campaign to rid Afghanistan of everything they did not approve of.

If there’s any truth to the story about the mosque, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) needs to step forward and prevent the destruction of this mosque, which is arguably a cultural heritage site.

I must not have visited the BOFH pages at The Register in over a week because I found two new stories today.  One of them is about the Boss taking up geocaching.

I stumbled across a very creative solution to people who use someone else’s open access point without their permission.  It was creative enough that it made it into xkcd:

I stumbled across the exljbris Free Quality Font Foundry website and blog while poking around the recently released themes for WordPress.  Currently, there are about half a dozen very sharp looking fonts that you can download and use for free.  Worth a visit if you’re looking for a slightly different typeface that’s not so different you’ll only use it once.

While browsing the Internet looking for an upgrade to the Gallery software I use to put my pictures on the ‘net I came across something called "Eye-Fi".  Apparently, you can now buy an SD card that can connect via WiFi and upload its pictures to various online services, including a number of photo gallery packages, and social networking sites like Facebook.  When you’re out shooting pictures, it behaves like a normal 2 Gb SD card.  When you return home to your WiFi network, it automatically connects to the network and starts transferring the pictures when you turn on the camera.  Assuming your camera uses SD cards, you don’t need to do anything other than pop it into your camera and start shooting.

In theory, you can probably use it with any open access point, too, but many WiFi hotspots require you to login with a browser before you can use the access point.  According to the Eye-Fi website, you can’t use it with those types of access points at this time.  It supports the various levels of security that exist for WiFi such as WEP, WPA and so on.

The Eye-Fi seems to cost about $100 from various online retailers, which is about four times what a 2 Gb SD card cost me about a week ago.  Seems quite reasonable to me.  I might have bought one when I bought my new Canon PowerShot SD850 IS last week if I’d seen it on the shelf.

This is a very cool sounding piece of kit.  Check out www.eye.fi to see for yourself.