Hello dear friends. It’s time for my annual post! Haha. I bought a bike last week and immediately was faced with a conundrum – should I get a bike computer?

I was thinking about my Samsung Epic 4g and figured there surely had to be an app out there that would serve the same function as a bike computer, and would have the added benefit of GPS and route tracking. Well, there is. There are actually several apps, but the one I went with is Google’s My Tracks. It’s free, and it gives you some great info.

There are three screens – the first looks like a fairly normal bike computer giving you speed, average speed, average moving speed, altitude (plus gain, min and max), time, moving time, etc etc etc. The second shows you a graph of your speed over distance and your elevation over distance. The third is the map – which shows you a highlight of your elapsed route. When you’re done with your ride, hit the stop button and you can send the ride to your Google Docs and Google Maps. Pretty nifty.

So, the obvious question was, how I I mount my phone on my bike? I found a few mounts online, but they all looked like those dopey car mounts that grip your phone around the sides with little plastic/foam arms. Not exactly what I would consider the safest option (though correct me if I am wrong if you’ve used one). So, instead, I bought a hard shell case for the phone and took a handlebar mount for a headlamp and super glued the two together.

And presto. A bike computer that cost pretty much nothing – assuming you’ve got the phone already.

As for the bike? Well, Julie thought we should finally just go out and buy some bikes, and we found this thing last Saturday. It’s a 1983 Fuji Supreme that is, apparently, in pretty mint condition. Turns out I got a bit of a good deal on this thing. So, I’m excited to have a good road bike again and am looking forward to a good summer of rides.

So, here’s what I want to know. How does the money work between ACS and the City and County of Denver. Because, when I got my photo taken for speeding (10mph over, btw), the radar van seemed to be raking in the violations. It’s like printing money. Is it legal? Well, in 2002, the Denver County court ruled that it was illegal to have a non-law enforcement officer issue citations which rendered the photo radar vans at odds with the law. This was upheld by the state court. I’m not sure what’s happened between now and then, but I do know the revised Colorado statute 42-4-110.5 seems to now allow this.

ACS was the company the county contracted photo-radar out to before the practice was halted in 2002, and it seems to be the company the county is once again using.

The fines are capped at $40 (for a normal speeding violation, school and construction zones are rightfully higher). How much of that money does ACS keep, and how much does Denver keep? That’s what I want to know. Because as far as I’m concerned, ACS has no interest in my personal safety and my safe driving. Actually, I take that back on the last part. I would hazard to guess they are quite interested in me driving over the speed limit. As is Denver, by all calculations. The ridiculous revenue this scheme must bring would seem irresistible to any government official (especially one who doesn’t have the ability or the political will to pay for a city’s budget through, uh, you know, taxes).

I pulled this off of a no-longer available ACS website (a subpage on the www.cite-web.com domain which is where violators are directed to pay their fine, with a 2.5% administrative fee, of course). The website itself was cached through Google:

ACS State and Local Solutions is the largest supplier of ATE systems for law enforcement agencies in the United States and Canada, with more clients, cameras and installations than all other photo enforcement vendors combined.  The Company’s ATE systems include Photo Radar for speed enforcement, Red Light Cameras for intersection enforcement and Traxguard^TM for rail crossing enforcement.  These systems combine cameras and computers with detection technologies to create photographic evidence and digital imaging of traffic violations.  ACS State and Local Solutions offers these systems for lease, purchase, or as part of our complete Turnkey Processing Service.

ACS State and Local Solutions is a company designed to offer not only photo enforcement hardware and technology,but a total solution, including experienced program management, turnkey violation processing, proven community awareness programs and management information reporting — all tailored to your city’s exact requirements.

These are exciting times for ACS State and Local Solutions, we are both the largest and fastest growing provider of traffic photo enforcement systems in North America.  In the past three years, we have received four out of every five procurements awarded in the U.S. and Canada, including jurisdictions such as:

So, if you live in any of those cities, you at least know who to direct your anger at. The local ACS State and Local Services here is down in Littleton. Man, it would be pretty amazing to sit there and see all the envelopes come in with the bundles of $40 checks. I’d kinda like to operate a business like that. It’s simply stunning that a private company could get a government’s blessing to fine its citizens so brazenly – and then handle all the processing, overhead, the works. And the city just sits there and accepts a nice fat commission.

And that’s sort of my point. I’m all for officers pulling speeders over. Hell, I’d even think that even if I had been cited for speeding before – which I haven’t, because I’m a reasonable and cautious driver. But setting a dial on a camera and then just watching the money pour in? Does that improve safety? Or does it just make for a really impressive bottom line?

[And for the record, I'm not necessarily against their red light camera operation. They do reduce intersection accidents, though they have been shown to increase rear-endings.]

Hey all. Julie and I made it up to Loveland yesterday for our first ski day of the season. The mountain had a decent base of nice crisp snow and my freshly waxed skis were slippery as hell. But, I thought I would change things up a bit and try our snowboarding for the afternoon. With Julie’s help (and extreme patience), I started to get the hang of it, though I never graduated past “threat to all within 25ft radius upon unloading from chair” status. It was a blast, though. She and I are both a wee bit sore today – but if you’re not sore, you weren’t trying hard enough. That’s what I think, at least.

On a semi-separate note, our CP+B gift this year was one of those HD pocket cams. Great little gadget! We took it up to the mountain and snagged some fun shots. Mind you, this was also my first time doing a video, so it’s not the cleanest editing job you’ve ever seen, but it gets the job done.

Hope you enjoyed the little film!

Go Ducks!

Just saw this – in YouTube’s new 1080p to boot! Thought I’d share the joyous holiday vibes and repost this for your viewing and listening pleasure. Man I miss the Muppets.

And if you want a real “whoa, what just happened” moment, read Salon’s posting of Lynn Vincent’s supposed leaked diary on meeting Sarah Palin and their interviews for the book. It’s pretty scary. It really reads like a joke, but I haven’t seen anything anywhere admitting that it’s a hoax. Anywho, read with a grain of salt. That link is here.