Say Yes! to Organic Market in Petworth

This is my first ever post that's actually about farm fresh meat.

I stopped in at Yes! in Petworth for the first time yesterday. I'm not on of those people who fears non-organic food or even seeks it out. But I like stuff that tastes good, and sometimes the pesticide and/or ground-up-chicken-parts version of something just doesn't taste that good.

You know what tastes awesome?

Organic grass-fed beef.

There is no comparison between the mass-produced, corn-fed, hormone-filled stuff and a delicious juicy natural steak or burger. It is well worth paying even twice as much per pound.

You can't get such beef at Safeway or Giant. And I have some objections to Whole Foods. Mostly geographical, in that there's not one near me. I get it at Costco sometimes, but you can't go to Costco that often. Yesterday, burgers were in order, and time was of the essence. Then I remembered Yes! I don't even think it's been open that long, but for some reason, I was only dimly aware of its existence. But I remembered it in the nick of time.

It was late, and I only had a few minutes to run through the store and find the beef. But find it I did, and generally, that place looks pretty sweet. I'm sure it's expensive, but some things are worth paying extra for. The organic, grass-fed, pampered beef was 8 bucks a pound. A fair shake more than Costco (which I think is around 6?). But it was also stunningly delicious. And I don't think the Costco variety is grass-fed either.

The whole store was incredibly clean and friendly, and the produce looked very nice too. I'll be back soon to give it a more thorough review.

Photo traffic enforcement is out of control in DC

Welcome to 2012, kids. Been dark around here for a while, but I felt the need to get this into the wild so that people searching for information on this subject will find something. I don't understand why this subject doesn't generate more outrage, since the cost to the area's residents is on the order of 300 million dollars over the last decade.

In the last 3 months, I've gotten 3 photo enforcement tickets, to the tune of about $450. All of these are found along my 5 mile commute. One was a red-light ticket at 14th and Miltary, the other two are for a newish traffic camera at the 7700 block of 16th Street.

Ticket 1: "SIGNAL PASS RED LITE"


This violation, for running a red light, comes with a $150 price tag. Unfortunately, I didn't run a red light. I made a right turn on red. Here's the actual video of me.

Now I'm sure some people will point out that I did not technically come to a complete stop (though actually, I more or less did). It was 5:00 AM. There was no traffic. I did, actually, more or less stop. And, regardless, the penalty for not coming to a complete stop is less than the penalty for running a red light.


At the end of the day, I was issued a citation for a crime that was different than the one I actually committed. I think $150 is a reasonable fine for actually running a red light. That's incredibly unsafe and I would never dream of doing that.

I think it's an insane fine for the "crime" I committed in the video above. DC seems to think that you should get your hand chopped off whether you stole an apple or robbed a bank -- and in fact, the system can't even distinguish between them.

Ticket #2: 41 in a 30

This was the first of two "speeding" tickets within a couple days, in mid-december, of the 7700 16th Street camera. Here are the photos. The top two are the original before & after, and the bottom two are after processing so you can actually see something useful.



Problem number 1: Notice of infraction received five weeks after the violation. That means, if you didn't know about the camera, you could easily rack up thousands of dollars in fines before you heard about the first one. Well heck, why not just wait a year? This is ridiculous. If you're going to charge us $150 for a computer-generated violation, there is no excuse - other than extortion - for waiting so long to send out the notification. Oh by the way - you guys also have my email address from when I renewed my registration online, for the last 10 years.

Problem number 2: Useless calibration lines, or misoriented camera. On the back of the citation is a detailed explanation of these lines, and shows how to calculate your speed from the picture. Of course, in the example, the lines are actually in the same part of the road as your car. In the actual photos above, if there are even lines on the pavement where the photos of the vehicle were taken, they are out of the field of view.

Problem number 3: Pictures so dark as to require manipulation just to see anything.

Problem number 4: It's just wrong. I was not going 41 MPH. I added the two diagonal lines in the bottom two pictures so as to have a point of reference. The first one was drawn on top of the (barely visible) calibration line that was under the front axle of the truck in the first picture. I copied it into the 2nd picture at exactly the same spot.

You can see it pretty much crosses the center of my front axle in the 1st shot, and my rear axle in the 2nd. The wheelbase of a 1995 Toyota Tacoma regular cab truck is 103.3 inches. The time between the two pictures is 0.2 seconds.

Doing some math:

103.3 in ÷ 12 in/ft ÷ 5280 ft/mile

---

0.2 sec ÷ 60 sec/min ÷ 60 min/hr

You get the startling result: 29.34 mph

Actually, this isn't very startling, because this camera is on my daily commute and I am not a moron. Even accounting for any imprecision while trying to analyze these horrendous photos, it's impossible I was going this fast. I would have had to travel another 3.5 feet - almost half again the wheelbase of the truck - to be going 41 mph.

Problem #5: This thing is as reliable as a Fiat

In the first week of January I saw people working on this camera for three days in a row. That certainly inspires confidence. But of course, if there was a calibration problem, why bother voiding all the messed-up citations, that you haven't even mailed yet from the previous month? I bet most people will just pay anyway!

Ticket #3: To be determined

I just finished writing all this up for my letter to DMV. It took over an hour to do the photoshopping, math, and so on. For one ticket. I'm looking forward to doing it again for the next one, but unfortunately, I have only set aside 2 hours per day for dealing with automated traffic citations. So that one will have to wait for another day. I assume it's equally bunk since there's clearly something wrong with the camera.

Conclusion: Want to drive in DC? Start paying "protection" money. Because even if you didn't break the law this time, I bet you did some other time!

I've gotten three tickets in as many months, probably none of them legitimate. It takes at least an hour to deal with contesting each one. Assuming, of course, that they are dismissed. If not, I will have to appear in court, or cough up $150 each.

This amounts to racketeering and extortion. It's gotten to the point where I have to pay a couple hundred dollars a month, or spend a great deal of time proving that I did not commit a crime that was photographed by a machine more than a month ago.

And, of course, if there's something wrong with said machine, or you didn't happen to know about it, and it happens to be on a regular route you use, you might get a dozen of these citations before you even know you did anything wrong.

This is out of control.

I urge everyone to contest every single photo citation you receive and complain to your councilmember. This is a shakedown, and it has nothing to do with safety. This has go to stop.

The only way I know to deal with this is to make noise and clog the system. Two and maybe three out of the three citations I've just gotten are bogus. That's a pretty crappy accuracy rate for something that collects $300 million in fines -- a number that will just be getting bigger as more cameras are installed.

So at a minimum, make them work for it. Contest every single one. But please start making noise. When you can't just drive to work without having to prove you didn't break a law a couple times a month, it's gone too far.

Home improvement season: Windows 3.0

It's that time of year again. All right, to be fair, I haven't done anything on the house in about two years so let's say "it's that time of the decade again."

I've gotten the home improvement bug, and this time I'm serious. I'm not stopping until there are palm trees in the back yard.

Last fall I bought a bunch of storm windows. The original windows on my house, while beautiful and built with craftmanship of the sort that died some decades before the drive-in theater, are a hundred years old and were not well maintained.

However, vintage double-hung windows are worth restoring. There's not a single modern window made today that will wear as well as one of these bad boys, and there's nothing even close to as attractive. Most people think that you should just get rid of old windows. Most people are wrong. A new window that's not total crap will probably cost you $1000 or more, for just one. Not including installation. True, it will provide better insulation. At least, until the seals between the panes of glass break and the vacuum goes away. Then it's just like an old window, except uglier because it's probably plastic or aluminium, and probably doesn't work as well. That's just for starters.

Restoring old windows isn't rocket science. And there are web sites dedicated to the process if you need a roadmap. While time consuming, it's definitely a reasonable DIY job for anyone with moderate workbench skills and some patience. Finally, putting new, good-quality storm windows over an old double-hung window will give you heat insulation performance comparable to a modern window.

I had storm windows made for my house by The Burch Company in Baltimore. Very nice product, and they worked out to be less than $200 each. While more expensive than the garbage they sell at Home Depot, they're not even that much more expensive, and these windows have all kinds of nifty features. Like the screens & glass can be popped in/out from inside the house, and the exterior flush mounts so they don't look like storms at all, they look like part of the window. And that's a fraction of the cost of a whole new window.

I put the first one in with last year's total window rebuild project. That took two weeks, and I had a gaping hole in the house for much of that time. Luckily it didn't rain much. This is a much more manageable project because I didn't have to actually rip out the frame and make a new one from raw materials felled in the forest.

Installing the storms is a piece of cake. The problem comes with getting the old window ready for that. Which basically means taking the whole thing apart, fixing broken and rotted parts, and putting it back together again.

This weekend I did that for one of the big floor-to-ceiling windows in our bedroom. The goal was to take the window sashes out and have the storm installed by the end of the day. The sashes won't actually go back in until later - they need to be stripped, cleaned up, reglazed, repaired, which isn't actually a ton of work, but takes several days because there are lots of phases of gluing/painting/staining/drying. So I just neeeded to get things ready enough that I could put the storm in and have a window at all.

Turns out this can be done in a day, barely. I got all the old paint off the frame, the sill fixed, some cracked parts nailed/glued, and the exterior primed so I could install the storm. I still need to paint the inside of the frame and fix up the sashes and all that, but there's no hurry since there is actually a window now!

Go vote tomorrow... because it might matter

Most of the time, voting in DC doesn't really matter at all. We don't have any representation in Congress. Our electorates always go to the democratic candidate in a presidential election.

Yet, for some reason, the only time people feel compelled to go out, wait in line, and create their irrelevant hanging chads is on those big election days. I guess it's peer pressure or something.

The reality is, if you're going to skip a vote, you might as well skip the Presidential election because it really doesn't matter. At all. No, really, it doesn't. What? Third party? No. It doesn't matter. Nope. Nope! Still doesn't matter.

Tomorrow, on the other hand, we elect a city council member in a special election.

So why bother tomorrow?

Because so few people will vote, that your vote actually could make a difference.

So go vote. I think you should vote for Bryan Weaver.

Or, get a half-dozen of your friends together and write yourself it, if you want to be on the city council. You couldn't pay me enough to do that, personally, but this is your big chance.

But there's no better time to vote then one of these special elections. It's like being in a raffle where there's only ten other people in the room. It's awesome! So go do it. And because nobody else will be voting, it will probably take you all of 30 seconds.