Crosswalks to Nowhere

I recently received a notice from the Illinois State Tollway Authority for $396.40 in toll violations. Basically, the letter said that if I didn't pay up they'd come after my driver's license, and who knows what other bad things would befall me.

Here in Illlinois, we have a wonderful Tollway system that's supported partially by the people who pass through tollbooths and drop in 80 cents to a few bucks, depending on where you are. (We'll put aside the fact that the tollbooths were supposed to go away in the 1970s when the infrastructure was paid off.)

If you choose to blow off the toll plazas by zipping through the lanes designed for I-Pass holders (an electronic method of payment), the Tollway Authority will take a photo of your license plate and after you reach a threshold you receive a letter like the one above.

It should be stated that I am an I-Pass holder in good standing. My account gets charged, from what I can tell, every time I go through a tollbooth. It's not out of the question to think that the tollbooth would occasionally not pick up my transponder. I just figured that somehow they would match the license plate on my account to the plate that they photographed and say "Okay, maybe he's got a weak battery in his I-Pass" or something.

Nope.

Between July of 2006 and January of 2008 they caught my plate 19 times. At an average of $.86 per toll plus a $20 fine per violation, the Tollway Authority came to me with a bill for the aforementioned $396.40.

Now, here's the really stupid part of all this:

I have "Park District/Youth" plates on my car: let's say the number is "1234," and the plate has a "YP" designation at the end of the number to differentiate it from any other "1234" out there. My registration from the Illinois Secretary of State's office says that my license plate number is "1234YP."

When I registered the I-Pass transponder, I told them that my license plate was "1234YP." In the photograph that accompanied the letter, you can see I have the Park District plates with a number and "YP."

Someone in the Illinois Tollway Authority's office decided that this license plate belongs to a car that does not have an I-Pass registered to it, so the registered owner must be a scofflaw. So they go to another state agency, the Secretary of State, to get my name and address from the vehicle's registration information. The Illinois Secretary of State's office happily complies, and the violation notice is sent.

To put it another way, one Illinois agency will gladly pass along information to another Illinois agency as long as there's bucks to be made. Let's not let facts get in the way or anything.

In the middle of the letter, there's a statement to I-Pass users that the notice may have been sent in error if the vehicle information is not up to date, so just call and they'll take care of it. This is amid all sorts of nasty threats and admonishments.

After 45 minutes on hold, I was connected to a nice lady named Rachael who explained that "1234YP" is not, in fact, my license plate number: it's "1234 / Park District Youth" and she'd be happy to change my I-Pass registration and remove the violations from my record.

I asked if I was the first person to have this problem and she said "Oh heavens, no. This happens all the time." I had to ask if there was any way the Tollway Authority could communicate better with the Secretary of State-- after all, they all have the same boss, right? She laughed and said, "You would think so, wouldn't you?"

So let this be a cautionary tale: if you have special plates (or, heaven forbid are from out-of-state), beware that something like this may be lurking near you.

And sometime in the future, I'll tell the story of how a local police officer stopped me and asked if my license plates were legal Illinois tags. But I'll save that for another time.

We had an awesome wave of green beans, and then the plants started to tucker out. There are a few on the bushes now, but it seems the supply is nearing exhaustion.

On happier notes, you can see the sunflowers have hit 6-8 feet and are about ready to open. The onions are huge in the ground, and the cucumber feast has begun:

We've had a handful of jalapenos and cayenne peppers so far:

And this is the very beginning of our second wave of Roma tomatoes:

Read the next entry to see what happened to these guys.

We've been fans of sun-dried tomatoes for some time now, and with a fresh crop of Romas coming in from the yard just about every other day, we figured we'd try drying a bunch for salads, pesto, etc.

This is the easiest recipe to follow, and the results are amazing. Just take some Roma tomatoes, wash them and remove any remnants of the stem, and then slice them in half lengthwise.

Lay them face up on a baking rack and sprinkle with sea salt. Then put them in a 200 degree oven for a minimum of 6 hours, checking to make sure they're drying out as they're supposed to.

When they're done, simply remove them and let them cool.

We let these bake for about 7 hours, with some of the larger pieces going for almost 8.

Most of the recipes I've found call for simply storing the tomatoes in a ziplock bag-- others mention putting them in jars of olive oil. To be honest, these keep getting eaten before they're removed from the racks. :-)

Enjoy!

This week's update is all about the techie stuff, both having to do with Macs, and both having to do with hard drives.

Tale #1: The Beeping MacBook

I awoke the other morning to a MacBook that was beeping intermittently. The system seemed to be operating just fine, but every so often I'd get an odd beep from under the keyboard. I searched for the symptom on Google and came up with a few hits, including this YouTube video. The most common diagnosis to this problem seemed to revolve around a bad hard drive.

When you purchase AppleCare (Apple's extended warranty), they give you a copy of TechTools Deluxe, which is a suite of diagnostic and test tools. I ran the tests and the machine came up clean: no disk or memory errors.

I decided to re-seat the memory and hard drive just for good measure, especially since it's very easy to do on a MacBook. After I did this, the beeping stopped. Being the superstitious type, I ran a full SuperDuper backup on the computer.

Five days later, the machine crashed and wouldn't reboot. Then the hard drive started to screech. I plugged in my external firewire drive containing my previous backup, and booted from there. The computer came up right away.

One trip to Fry's and $79 later, I found myself installing a brand-new 250 GB Fujitsu drive in the MacBook. After restoring from the backup and assessing whatever I lost in those 5 days, I feel lucky that my intuition paid off.

The former drive, a 160 GB Hitachi TravelStar, is on its way back for replacement under warranty.

The moral of this tale: if your MacBook starts making this particular noise, be prepared.

Tale #2: I'm Goin' In

Rebecca's iBook had a 40 GB hard drive. I'm sure that seemed like an awful lot of disk space when the computer was built in 2004, but with music, videos, movies, and photos, that 40 GB is nothin'.

I picked up a 120 GB hard drive from Fry's (a couple weeks before the events of Tale #1) with the plan of doing the replacement while I was on vacation, so I'd have lots of time to spend working on the project.

Unlike a MacBook, where the hard drive and memory can be replaced by removing the battery, three screws, and a single bracket, the hard drive on an iBook is buried deep within the recesses of the computer and requires multiple disassembly steps and the removal of over 60 screws. Thanks to the wonderful step-by-step instructions at iFixit.com and a pair of non-colorblind eyes (provided by my lovely assistant, Emma), I finished the job in about three hours.

When I got the computer back together, I noticed the wireless (AirPort) signal was really lousy. It worked, but where it previously had very good reception it was now barely connecting.

After a quick search for "bad wireless reception on iBook" (what did we do before Google?) I discovered that the antenna connection on the Airport Extreme Card, which is simply a wire that plugs into the top of the card, needs to be pushed down very very hard in order to make good contact. When I did this, the connector snapped into place loudly, and when I booted up the great wireless reception came back.

I figured I would provide another service to my fellow Mac users in the event they were looking for info on either of these fronts.

The next update won't be quite so geeky, I promise. :-)

A photo essay of our home-based vacation last week:

A ton of tomatoes and other good stuff later, the garden is heading into the home stretch for the year. The sunflowers finally bloomed this past week, and we picked some very nice-sized cucumbers.

Next up: Lisa is going to share her experiences with composting-- you'll want to be around for that. :-)