How to behave like a d**k and end up arrested

While visiting some relatives Michael Righi stopped into a Circuit City and decided to get arrested.

Two minutes later Brooklyn, Ohio police officer Ernie Arroyo arrived on the scene. As I began to explain the story leading up to Joe Atha preventing my egress from the parking lot, officer Arroyo began to question why I refused to show my receipt in the first place. I explained that I lawfully purchased the contents in the bag and didn’t feel that it was necessary for me to let a Circuit City employee inspect the bag as I left. Officer Arroyo disagreed. He claimed that stores have the right to inspect all receipts and all bags upon leaving their store.

Not long after this Mr. Righi refused to show his drivers license (what I might call his "papers") to the officer and was subsequently arrested for "Obstructing Official Business".

Lame, incredibly lame. The arrest sounds unlawful to me and part of me applauds Mr. Righi for standing up for his right not to have to show his papers on demand but the way he got into the situation shows what an idiot he is.

While it’s annoying to have to show your receipt and goods at the door, just present them to the drone, let him pretend to understand what he’s looking at and you’ll be on your way. There’s no good reason to get the police involved unless the store starts the conversation by accusing you of theft. Looking through your bag isn’t an accusation, it’s an admission that they aren’t bright and haven’t thought up a better way to prevent people stealing from them.

I hope he beats the arrest but also hopes he stays away from electronics retail stores in the future.

Recording Conversations With OneNote

OneNote is a great tool for note taking and information management. It also is a good tool for recording meetings and conversations. If you haven’t heard about ON’s ability to search audio recordings head over here to read more.

ON does a good job of indexing audio which can then be searched much as you’d search a text file.  This is especially convenient in cases when you know someone said something in a meeting but you don’t know exactly when.  By indexing your audio you don’t have to listen to the entire meeting again as long as the audio is of good quality.

What none of the marketing info covers are the laws that affect your ability to record those conversations and what you can do with those recordings after you’ve made them.

More after the jump.

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They probably wake up giggling

like little schoolgirls.

No, not real schoolgirls. Terrorists. Yeah, I know, that girl looks a bit like a terrorist but she probably just put a spider down someone’s pants. I guess today that would make her a terrorist.

At lunch recently, a few of us were talking about flying and how the ridiculous restrictions limit law-abiding citizens (and non for that matter) a hell of a lot more than it keeps terrorists out of the skies.

I swear, the real terrorists probably wake up giggling and laugh all the way through each day.

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What is happening to our civil liberties?

It’s been a year since I wrote this post about the problems in New Orleans in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina.

I think it’s very relevant today as much of the nation thinks back to September 11, 2001.

At the time I hadn’t thought about the connection between the two events even though I was writing my comments on 9/11 but in light of our steadily eroding liberties as we travel the skies I have to wonder just how far things will go before we say "stop!"

The terrorists are winning and as a group we’re not doing enough to get our leaders to realize that the more restrictions they place on the the law-abiding citizenry, the more the terrorists achieve their aims of making us all afraid.

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Interesting Coincidences

What do you normally think when you get a sales call and the person on the other end says he is responding to a request you made online? Many people would respond that the person made a mistake, ask to be taken out of their database and forget about it. That’s what I did.

What if you got two similar calls in the same hour?

What if you received 32 such calls in a single day?

What if those calls continued day after day?

That happened to me. And that was only the beginning.

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