red light cameras in peoria

Now the fourth city in Arizona to remove the red light cameras, Peoria, AZ has stopped their contracts with the company that's pushing them. The red camera lights, as we've all seen the statistics, continue to do more harm than good. But the almighty money making giants we call our governments install them under the guise of safety. Once again the red light cameras didn't do what they were supposed to do, but instead made things far worse than if they hadn't been there at all. I'm talking about the City of Peoria which installed them on at least 4 intersections. Guess what happened next? Well, crashes went up 29%! Their chief of police said "...cameras that nab red-light runners would save money and allow police to patrol in other areas." Ha! They're being called back to the same intersections only now having to deal with mountains of paperwork due to these crashes. Eat it bitches!

Back To The Future

While in CA, we took a side trip over to Hill Valley High School which is actually Whittier HS in Whittier, CA. Being there for the first time, it was hard to visualize exactly where Marty's car entered with his mom and where he parked when Biff approached the car. Once we were able to pinpoint a couple features it all kinda came together -- the main feature being the "Y" shaped tree and stairs. After going back and watching the film, it's easy to see exactly how the scene played out. In 1985 when this film was shot, you could drive down to this area. The road Marty drives on is still there, however gates exist now preventing anyone from driving down into the courtyard area.







The front is readily identifiable. There's no missing it. It's very clean now, and again there are permanent gates preventing anyone from getting too close.



Finally, it took some more finding, and still was hard to view until I sat there for a minute and actually visualized the scene when Marty gets locked inside the trunk of Marvin Berry and his band, these shots are on the North side of the school, ironically it is the gym door that is used in both part I and II. However, the gym INT shots are actually the Hollywood United Methodist Church on Hollywood Blvd.

Weekend in California

We went to my cousin Liz's baby shower, it was awesome. They had some very unique games to play although I got caught up in conversations in the living room with Liz's cousins. It was truly a great party. There was such awesome food and plenty of it! Later that night we drove down to SeaWorld and had fun there. Riley has a lot of fun looking at the animals. This was my third time going and I have to say I was not impressed at all with the shows. They've shifted the focus away from the animals and more toward a Disney style musical featuring more human actors. The animals were more of a supporting role and Jenny and I got kinda angry at that. They had such good shows before. And all themes were "save the planet, one world" yada yada yada.... It got old trust me. SeaWorld did have some new attractions which was nice to see. I guess they charge for beer college now, so I didn't partake in that. Sea World is a Busch Gardens park so they of course have to have all their beers. At one time it was free to test any beer you wanted.

After that we went to San Diego and visited the La Jolla beach which had the softest sand ever. It was relaxing until I rolled my ankle on the sidewalk. It was only then that I realized how poorly maintained San Diego's streets and sidewalks are in general. In fact, some places I'm sure would ruin a car tire, where there were 6 inch gaping ledges in the middle of the street. So ya I'm recovering from that now. Taking the drive home was a change of scenery -- 8FWY. At one point we were only 200 yards or so from the border fence which was very cool to see. If we didn't have Riley, I think I would have traversed the distance and went up to the fence.

We are glad to be back for sure, even if the temps that welcomed us back topped 114F degrees. Check out our video and pictures we posted!

YouTube and Mobile Video blogging

As mobile phone grow, I'm finding that my CMS and the servers can't really keep up with the mobile side of things. Where I used to be able to send video directly to my site, now it's not allowing me. Anything over 5MB won't be parsed by the CMS. This is both a limitation of the CMS moblog feature AND the server it's on (php). I am actually able to take video and upload directly to youtube via my phone through a handy app so I just incorporated their rss feed of my youtube channel and now I can moblog video blog while I'm on the go. I would expect this to get used a lot from now on. Guess this means I need to design my youtube page. I'm not crazy about having my content on a third party website but what can you do...

You can visit the new gallery by clicking "MEDIA" at the top.

Politically correct

The political correctness in this country is finally getting to a point that I feel we're making progress. I mean when you can't even call a guy by his last name because it's not P.C., and then they change it in a news article... that's a win for mankind in my book. On the other hand, while we've been paying more and more attention to being politically correct, we've been neglecting the obvious enemy here -- these damn milk cows. They are smart bastards.