Darkside Dreamland

Not In My State!

Chris Schaffer — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 20:03:01 +0000

This is regarding the hit and run accident from July 3rd 2010 during which Martin J Erzinger struck bicyclist Dr. Steven Milo, causing serious injury, and then sped away from the scene. The real issue at hand is this statement made by DA Mark Hurlbert “[Martin J Erzinger] will not face felony charges for a hit-and-run because it could jeopardize his job…”

:UPDATE: The above quote from DA Mark Hurlbert was not reported in full, the full quote is:

“Felony convictions have some pretty serious job implications for someone in Mr. Erzinger’s profession, and that entered into it,” Hurlbert said. “When you’re talking about restitution, you don’t want to take away his ability to pay.”

The article below is from the Vail Daily and can be viewed at their site right here.

An update by the Vail Daily “Hurlbert stands by plea bargain” was published November 8th.

There is currently a plea bargain that would include 2 misdemeanor charges.

This is an issue where we need to send a clear message that the law matters and that money does not put one above facing serious charges. You can sign a petition that is already recieving a great bit of attention: sign the petition here. Or perhaps you could give the driver an email and let him know how you feel (martin.j.erzinger@morganstanleypwm.com). Especially if you are a Colorado resident it may be an oportune time to call the Eagle County DA’s office a call and let them know what you think (970-328-6947).

EAGLE, Colorado — A financial manager for wealthy clients will not face felony charges for a hit-and-run because it could jeopardize his job, prosecutors said Thursday.

Martin Joel Erzinger, 52, faces two misdemeanor traffic charges stemming from a July 3 incident when he allegedly hit bicyclist Dr. Steven Milo from behind then sped away, according to court documents.

Milo and his attorney, Harold Haddon, are livid about the prosecution’s decision to drop the felony charge. They filed their objection Wednesday afternoon, the day after prosecutors notified Haddon’s office by fax of their decision.

Haddon and Milo say this is a victim’s rights case, that Erzinger’s alleged actions constituted a felony, and that one day is not enough notice.

“The proposed disposition is not appropriate given the shocking nature of of the defendant’s conduct and the debilitating injuries which Dr. Milo has suffered,” Haddon wrote.

As for the one-day notice, Haddon wrote, “One business day is not sufficient notice to allow him to meaningfully participate in this criminal action.”

Milo, 34, is a physician living in New York City with his wife and two children, where he is still recovering from his injuries, court records show.

Milo suffered spinal cord injuries, bleeding from his brain and damage to his knee and scapula, according to court documents. Over the past six weeks he has suffered “disabling” spinal headaches and faces multiple surgeries for a herniated disc and plastic surgery to fix the scars he suffered in the accident.

“He will have lifetime pain,” Haddon wrote. “His ability to deal with the physical challenges of his profession — liver transplant surgery — has been seriously jeopardized.”

Money manager

Erzinger, an Arrowhead homeowner, is a director in private wealth management at Morgan Stanley Smith Barney in Denver. His biography on Worth.com states that Erzinger is “dedicated to ultra high net worth individuals, their families and foundations.”

Erzinger manages more than $1 billion in assets. He would have to publicly disclose any felony charge within 30 days, according to North American Securities Dealers regulations.

Milo wrote in a letter to District Attorney Mark Hurlbert that the case “has always been about responsibility, not money.”

“Mr. Erzinger struck me, fled and left me for dead on the highway,” Milo wrote. “Neither his financial prominence nor my financial situation should be factors in your prosecution of this case.”

Hurlbert said Thursday that, in part, this case is about the money.

“The money has never been a priority for them. It is for us,” Hurlbert said. “Justice in this case includes restitution and the ability to pay it.”

Hurlbert said Erzinger is willing to take responsibility and pay restitution.

“Felony convictions have some pretty serious job implications for someone in Mr. Erzinger’s profession, and that entered into it,” Hurlbert said. “When you’re talking about restitution, you don’t want to take away his ability to pay.”

“We have talked with Mr. Haddon and we had their objections, but ultimately it’s our call,” Hurlbert said.

Dropping the felony charge is not a revelation, Hurlbert said.

“We had been talking with them about this misdemeanor disposition for a while now,” Hurlbert said. “The misdemeanor charges really are what he did.”

Haddon and Hurlbert have squared off before. Haddon was one of Kobe Bryant’s defense attorneys, with lead attorney Pamela Mackey, when Bryant faced sexual assault charges in Eagle County. Hurlbert was the lead prosecutor in that case.

Bicyclist hit from behind

Milo was bicycling eastbound on Highway 6 just east of Miller Ranch Road, when Erzinger allegedly hit him with the black 2010 Mercedes Benz sedan he was driving. Erzinger fled the scene and was arrested later, police say.

Erzinger allegedly veered onto the side of the road and hit Milo from behind. Milo was thrown to the pavement, while Erzinger struck a culvert and kept driving, according to court documents.

Erzinger drove all the way through Avon, the town’s roundabouts, under I-70 and stopped in the Pizza Hut parking lot where he called the Mercedes auto assistance service to report damage to his vehicle, and asked that his car be towed, records show. He did not ask for law enforcement assistance, according to court records.

Erzinger told police he was unaware he had hit Milo, court documents say.

When Avon police arrived he was putting a broken side mirror and a bumper in his trunk, court record say.

Meanwhile another motorist, Steven Lay of Eagle, stopped to help Milo and called 911.

Court records say prosecutors expressed skepticism to Milo at a suggestion by Erzinger’s defense attorneys that Erzinger might have unknowingly suffered from sleep apnea, and that might have made him caused him to fall asleep at the wheel and hit Milo.

The original complaint included a felony count against Erzinger for causing serious bodily injury. Deputy DA Mark Brostrom is prosecuting the case and Milo says in court documents that Brostrom called Erzinger’s July 3 actions “egregious.” Prosecutors pleaded the case down to a misdemeanor later in the summer, then in August told Milo and his attorneys that Erzinger would face a felony charge, Haddon wrote.

But on Sept. 7, Brostrom told County Court Judge Katharine Sullivan that the case would be pleaded as a misdemeanor. That’s the first time Milo or his attorneys had heard of it, Haddon wrote, and they protested “in the strongest possible terms,” Haddon wrote.

The Bateman File

Chris Schaffer — Mon, 24 May 2010 15:16:19 +0000

Well, it was a long time in the process, but I have finished an analysis for Patrick Bateman from Brett Easton Ellis’ American Psycho. This was a paper written for my psychology of personality course.

The goal was to examine a real or fictional person from two competing personality perspectives of the eight that we covered in our coursework and reading. I chose to look at Bateman in three ways. The first is to describe his personality more fully from an abnormal point of view using schizotypal and borderline personality disorders. I then did a more detailed theoretical analysis using general psychoanalytic theory and then using a novel application of self-actualization from humanistic psychology.

I just reformatted the paper to appear in a more journal like format, and is hopefully a bit easier to read using two columns and with single spacing.

Read it here: BatemanReformatted.pdf

This paper is my first major work for my PhD program in Clinical Psychology through Walden University. I have written plenty of other papers, but this is the first that really let me dive into theory and produce work that was an original synthesis of other research. Overall, because it was a paper for a class with some specific requirements, it straddles the line between giving extra description of theories to demonstrate understanding and also in using jargon from both the psychology and literary fields. So it might seem to drag in some areas and then plow through others. But, hopefully it will be a decent read overall.

Synthetic Life Now Real

Chris Schaffer — Fri, 21 May 2010 23:42:28 +0000

Synthetic life: now real. Really real.

A 15 year project has now created truly synthetic life. That being a 1 million base pair chromosome that can self replicate and which the scientists understand the purpose of each set of DNA information, what it produces, etc.

Not only that but the genetic code includes a watermark which includes direction on how to decode the watermark into English from the base pair sequences, 46 names of people responsible for the genetic code and project, a website address for the organism, and quotations.

This changes the game.

Dear Mom

Chris Schaffer — Sun, 09 May 2010 05:04:54 +0000

Dear Mom,

You are not here to receive this letter. Some days that makes me very angry. Other days very sad. Still two years after you left this life I fight a struggle with emotions, healing, and understanding. I have had the great fortune to have excellent friends help me at every stage of this process.

Your last wishes to me were that we hold no memorial for your passing. You wished to fade away from memory. We soundly ignored that. You are worth being remembered by each of us who are left behind. At that memorial I read an abbreviated version of this observation about life from Bill Hicks:

The world is like a ride in an amusement park, and when you choose to go on it you think it’s real because that’s how powerful our minds are. The ride goes up and down, around and around, it has thrills and chills, and it’s very brightly colored, and it’s very loud, and it’s fun for a while.

Many people have been on the ride a long time, and they begin to wonder, "Hey, is this real, or is this just a ride?" And other people have remembered, and they come back to us and say, "Hey, don’t worry; don’t be afraid, ever, because this is just a ride." And we…kill those people.

"Shut him up! I’ve got a lot invested in this ride, shut him up! Look at my furrows of worry, look at my big bank account, and my family. This has to be real."

It’s just a ride. But we always kill the good guys who try and tell us that, you ever notice that? And let the demons run amok… But it doesn’t matter, because it’s just a ride. And we can change it any time we want.

It’s only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings of money.

Just a simple choice, right now, between fear and love.

The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors, buy guns, close yourself off.

The eyes of love instead see all of us as one.

Here’s what we can do to change the world, right now, to a better ride. Take all that money we spend on weapons and defenses each year and instead spend it feeding and clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would pay for many times over, not one human being excluded, and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace.

That passage means as much to me today as it did two years ago. Life is a ride, and we can change the ride for the better.

We had our won roller coaster of ups and downs as a family. Few times were easy. It was real, it was fun, and sometimes not real fun. And I am thankful for every moment of it we had.

Thank you for everything you gave me, I love you, I miss you.

Existence in Abstraction

Chris Schaffer — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 19:12:13 +0000

The digital world is an interesting phenomenon. The process of converting to a paperless office has brought this to full conscious awareness. I am notoriously bad at organizing and tracking paperwork, mostly due to the volume of things to track. We are increasingly in need of aids to manage the data that comes through our mail slot.

I want to emphasize: The amount of physical data we receive often exceeds our cognitive abilities to track and organize it.

I have mountains of paper, receipts, rental statements, insurance invoices and payments for both car and home, taxes, property taxes, financial aid documents for my graduate program, software serial numbers, and the list goes on. It is quite impossible for me to memorize any of this information in a way that is useful, and even file folder organization does not provide a way to organize the information to make finding any one document a simple matter. A conversion to digital records provides a layer of abstraction that creates a useful way of managing the data.

Digital conversion abstracts my documents into searchable text that can be indexed, searched, and retrieved in an almost limitless number of ways. A database has no need to have a memory, it can simply query vast numbers of records at a speed which to human perception is instantaneous. However, this data is fragile. My vital records are reduced to magnetically stored 1’s and 0’s. These are not any less fragile than the physical documents, but there is the implication that redundant co-location of this data is necessary so that the information is not lost. Such a loss would be near devastating if physical records are destroyed. Previously, if paperwork had become lost, there was some chance of finding it had been misplaced. Disruption of digital data can mean real total loss of that documentation.

Now examine other parts of life and the many layers of abstraction. I have a bank account. There is money in that account, but if I were to ask to see the physical currency backing the amounts in my accounts I would simply be greeted by a number on a screen that was generated from a database. The majority of that money has come from checks from my property management company, I have records of these checks but the currency they represent is also existent entirely as points in a database. One misplaced decimal and I can grow by orders of magnitude or have my financial ability crushed. We are assured that there are rigorous safeguards and audits of data to insure that mistakes do not occur. In the majority of cases these safeguards and trails of digital records work brilliantly, but errors do occur. Even one error in a million is a high rate when you consider the billions of transactions that occur daily.

We must begin to ask what the reality of our work, income, accounts, and information is based upon. We are physical being who increasingly interact with each other through abstractions in data. To what degree do we know that our digital interactions are with other people? To what extent are we cruel to data in ways that we would never impose on flesh and blood?

This is not an exit.

How Customers Like to Treat Vendors

Chris Schaffer — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 05:06:34 +0000

This video was posted by my friends Josie, and this video is pure gold!

If you have ever been a business to business service provider, this should all seem far too familiar.

The Face of the Future

Chris Schaffer — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 16:35:37 +0000

Xbox 360 Games – E3 2010 – Guitar Hero 5

You know… It might be terrifying but it happens to be wild enough to be true. We respond to points and rewards. Some people really are working to give us points and rewards for things that are good for us, society, and the planet. Most are just trying to make a few dollars. The thing is, this really matters, because behavior can be shaped by series of inconsequential events into very different modes of not just behavior but thinking.

The video may run a bit longer than your attention span, but it is well worth it.

Found at Fox @ Fury via StumbleUpon

Stroke of Insight

Chris Schaffer — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 01:48:12 +0000

I have talked about this video from TED more often than I care to remember (and probably some of my friends who have heard about it many times). However, I could never remember who the talk was by. Well I finally found it, and this is a talk by Jill Bolte Taylor about the brain, and more specifically it is a blow by blow account of her own experience having a stroke.

Hearing this talk certainly gave me a new and valuable insight to the brain, strokes, and just how malleable perception is when things go wrong in the brain. I hope everyone who watches this is able to take something positive, informative, and interesting from this talk.

Is Zune Marketplace Slow? Here is your Fix

Chris Schaffer — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 05:09:40 +0000

To preface, I am indeed a Zune user and had been lamenting the horrible slowness of the Zune marketplace. So after a brief search, I managed to find a solution which seems a bit odd that it works, but it does… dear lord does it work!

The solutions was found here – and the post on that site includes screenshots if you need them. However, here is the text of the fix which should suffice for the majority of people:

This is a fix for slow Zune marketplace on Win 7, I have tested this on my Win 7 64 bit. Marketplace works fine on my Vista 32 bit and xp 32 bit. You can try this for your Vista 64 bit too. You can find users reporting on this forum http://forums.zune.net/2/8/526815/ShowPost.aspx

The Fix
Turn off Automatically detect LAN settings in your IE.
Steps

Open IE

Click on Tools–> Internet Options

Click on “Connections” Tab

Click button “Lan Settings”

Un-Check ” Automatically detect settings” (this is/was set by default in my Win 7 installation)

Restart IE and Zune (if you had it open)

I found an article for slow saving of documents in SharePoint from Windows 7 client and this was the fix and thought these were related.

So go forth, and have a blazing fast marketplace, just the way it ought to be!

The Gamer Life

Chris Schaffer — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 03:32:57 +0000

There are many ways to tell that you play to many video games. My favorite ways are those that manifest in how we perceive reality. And by that I mean, wishing that or thinking of things in real life that would be more awesome if it were in a video game.

Example from work. I work as a customer service rep (seasonal position) for Enstrom’s Candies. We happen to ship exclusively through FedEx, which is an interesting story if you have a love for the world of shipping, so naturally we get a lot of their trucks coming and going. However, the occasional UPS truck shows up, and here is where the game world intervenes…

You see, we had a bit of a falling out with UPS. Thus I sometimes imagine that rather than delivering packages to us one day an armed riot squad will leap out in order to lay siege to us for our impudence at rejecting their services. This is probably a result of too many hours of playing F.E.A.R. where your average jaunt through a parking garage would likely be interrupted 15 times by trucks full of people intent on ruining your day.

Of course, all of this probably related back to the image I posted about how after enough driving games everything in life becomes a bit of a race.

Darkside Dreamland

Not In My State!

Money manager

Bicyclist hit from behind

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