I need to stay away from Shows in Vegas

I have not blogged for a while. I had lots of things to say about lots of things that interest me and possibly no one else but I had some interesting things happen to me at the Sheriff Conference.

I always like the Sheriff Conference's. They are always very interesting and informative. I met a Sheriff who told me the story of finding a man who was raising 47 pit bulls for fighting. They took the dogs and sent them to a shelter (pit bull relocator) in Vegas and all but 7 were adopted.

I met the Sheriff who was in charge of the incident where the man fell down the mining shaft in Northern Nevada and could not be rescued. Another Sheriff told me about an incident they had involving some border crossing problems and many many other stories. Sheriffs are often the most important person in their counties and they are mostly personable and good people.

The reason I may need to stay away from Vegas though has nothing to do with the Sheriffs or the obvious losing money at the tables and the machines it has to do with hurting myself. We now carry a nice line of knives. While taking down the booth I got into it with a knive and ended up stabbing my hand. Look at this pic. It is kind of gross but a picture is worth a thousand words.

Distracted Driving. The new DUI

For the past month I have done a lot of studying on distracted driving. I have 4 daughters and I am very concerned about their ability to put down the phone while they drive. I try to show them things all the time that show how bad texting while driving is. I show them the stat that you are 23 times more likely to be in a crash if you text and drive. I show them videos with blood and gore to scare them away from texting and driving. I have them play Mario Cart and text them to show them how it make them a worse player. I tell them how test show that texting and driving is worse then drinking and driving and we all know how bad drinking and driving is.

The problem I have here is that I think my words are falling on deaf ears. I do not want to be a parent who is on a crusade because I have already lost a child to texting and driving. I want to be the proactive parent who sees the danger before hand and warns them so that they can avoid this dangerous action.

I have a facebook page that only deals with distracted driving and I post articles there everyday. I send out twitters everyday with posting of the dangers of texting while driving. I talk to my kids and they tell me that they understand and that they will not text while driving but I want to be sure.

Maybe I should buy them a lock box and tell them to put their phones in the lock box while they drive. Avoid the temptations of hearing the phone buzz so they will get used to not taking calls or texts while they drive.

Maybe I am just paranoid. Maybe I am talking to myself as at one time I was a huge offender of this law. I heard it took a generation to understand why we need seatbelts. It took a generation to help people see the evil of drinking while driving. I hope we can shorten the learning curve on this.

Does everything have to be regulated?

I was thinking over the weekend as I was driving and saw a disabled big rig with 3 reflective triangles set up (Two that were blown over) just how ineffective these were and the only reason that people used them is because they were regulated or mandated and they would get a ticket if they did not have them. There are a lot of better products on the market to warn drivers of a disabled vehicle but everyone just uses the triangles because of the law.

It got me to thinking about other things that we should just do because we know it is safer. The seatbelt law is a good example. We should just wear our seatbelts because we know it is safer. We should not be wearing them out of fear of getting a ticket. What about the new cell phone and texting laws. Everyone with a brain understands the danger of texting while you drive. Distracted driving is a huge problem and I think it will get worse before it gets better. I have also heard the arguement of talking on the phone while driving and have seen many discussion on this. Some say that you are just talking and if it is hands free there is no difference between that and talking a passenger in the car. Someone else might say that the passenger can see the danger and knows the situation and understands when to shut up and the person on the phone does not have that ability.

Back to my basic tenet that is why do we have to be told to be safe. None of would go home and eat rat poison and there is no law against that. Why can't we just do what is safe without someone having to make a law to force us to be safe. Our we so stupid that we cannot protect ourselves? Does the Government know better then we do what will make us safe so we need to listen to them.

BTW they did not have the part for the Toyota. I will take it back this week and give you a report later.

Follow Up on the Ball Joint Problem with my Toyota

So if you remember last week on the way home from my daughters birthday dinner we had an incident where the ball joint broke on my Toyota Sequoia. I have received many messages since then from people who have told me that they had seen the same thing happen on the freeway and almost always the vehicle ended up rolling. Going 65-70 MPH that is not a fun ride. We are still just very happy that we are okay.

So after posting this information and having it tweeted I get a call from Toyota on Wednesday offering to pay for the replacement of my ball joints. I guess it was on recall and I did not notice that they had sent me information in the past. I have to say I was very impressed with Toyota's proactive stance on this. I did not complain to them and they contacted me first from information that they found on the web. I will submit the paper work tomorrow and let you know what happened. I have to say I am very happy at this moment with the effort that Toyota is making to do right on this. I am a fan of Toyota.

On the other hand and for another time I am not overly happy with United Airlines. I fly over 100,000 miles a year and have done so for over 10 years and everytime I have a situation with them they seem to do what ever they can to hide from responsiblity but I will save that for another blog.

I really am lucky to have had a box of Duro Flashes.

Wow another week another adventure. Our 3rd daughter turned 17 on Saturday and after spending a day at a swim meet at La Mirada and most the afternoon getting squirted by swimmers with latex tubes we finally got away and went to dinner. We had a nice dinner at the Spaghetti Factory and then we went home. Home was only about 10-15 miles away.

So we take off driving down Chapman with my wife and 3 of our daughters in the car and then we here a loud bang and the car pulls hard to the right. I thought we had blown out a tire and I pulled into the median and then when traffic was clear pulled over to the right hand side of the road and got out to inspect the damage. It looked like either a tie rod broke or more likely that and ball joints on the wheel broke. My tire was on it side underneath the car. Don't ask me how we got from the median to the other side of the road like that. Also don't ask me how we did not sustain more body damage etc. We also consider ourselves very lucky because 2 minutes later and we would have been on the 57 freeway going north at about 70 miles per hour. We were very lucky. The tow truck got their within 5 minutes of the call and we had some one come and pick us up. Good job to the tow truck driver James who was very good and did a great job. They took the Sequoia back to the body shop and I will get a quote tomorrow. In the mean time I went and rented a Suburban so I could take my booth to the National Sheriffs Show that starts tomorrow.

What a crazy weekend. Mostly I am just happy everyone is okay.

Here is a video of the Duro Flashes set up behind the Sequoia (the tow guys said it made it very easy to find us with these and also a pic of the tire laying under the car. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utL0z2SWiNs

Traffic in China is different

I have been going to China since the early 80's. I lived in Hong Kong from 1980-82 and made my first trip to the mainland in 1982. I then moved back to China in 1987 and spent about half of the 90's there. I remember the days when there were no stop lights most cities in China and most people rode motorcycles as cars were to expensive. There were also no highways and everything was the rural driving and it took hours and hours to get anywhere. More on this another time.

Things have improved dramatically in China. They now have Super Highways everywhere. I went to China in the late 90's to do some consulting on the Hi Speed Rail Signals and learned that the technology they had was already ahead of what was being used here in the USA. All that being said I still see things that do not make sense.

Can someone explain to me how this traffic light makes sense. It has the outside lines going straight and the inside lanes with the turn indicators. There is also a count down so the guys at the red light can get ready to take off like a drag race. It seems to me that this is an accident waiting to happen. I was thinking that I could stand on the corner and wait for a couple of hours and I would for sure see someone crash but I didn't Here is the video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIUAbHNfTOs