If you’re ever in Westwood, or anywhere near UCLA, and in the mood for some really cheap desert, checkout Diddy Riese on Broxton. Basically, you create your own ice cream sandwich and they make it in front of you and hand it to you at the counter for only $1.50. You can also buy just the cookies for 35 cents, or Hawaiian shaved ice for $1 ($1.50 with ice cream added).

It’s a great way to save money on a cheap date but be aware that on weekend nights, there’s sometimes a line down the block.

Hopefully, you will never need to know how to deposit money for an inmate in Los Angeles county. But if you are one of the unfortunate ones that need this information, read on.

One way you can deposit money is to visit the inmate during normal visiting hours and there will be a way to deposit money there. In the old days, it was called a “wet 40,” because the limit was $40 and they would wash it to remove any drugs before giving the wet money to the inmate.  But that was back in the day when females went to Sybil Brand. These days, the money goes into a computer and the inmate no longer receives the actual cash, but instead has an “account” with the county.

However, there are 2 downsides to depositing money in this way.

First of all, you have to have a valid photo ID. Valid ID means not expired. Also, they may check your ID to see if you have any outstanding warrants. So if you are not squeaky clean, visiting an inmate is not a good idea. Of course, you can go there and just deposit the money without visiting, but Wayside and other prisons can be very far to drive for many people.

The second problem is just the long wait. You have to get there early in the morning and wait to check-in, then wait for the bus, then be taken to the section they’re in, then wait again until the inmate comes out to the talking area. The lines are like at Disneyland except there are no rides at the end. This process pretty much blows your entire Saturday day, or you can take a day off from work during the week.

But I digress.

If you want to avoid all this waiting and risk of being arrested, there’s now a 24 hour method to deposit money.

First, you need the inmates booking number. If you don’t have it, you need his/her full name and date of birth. If you don’t have that, you don’t know them well enough to be depositing money for them.

You can obtain the booking number by going to the LASD inmate information center website at:

http://app4.lasd.org/iic/ajis_search.cfm
Here, enter the name and date of birth to get the inmate number.

If you don’t have access to the Internet, you can call the Inmate Information line at 213-473-6100. You will need the inmates’ complete name, birth date and date of arrest. The operator will provide the inmate’s booking number,  jail housing location, next scheduled court date and the bail amount. But how are you reading this article if you… never mind.

Once you have the booking number, go to the “Inmate Reception Center” (IRC) in Downtown Los Angeles at:

450 Bauchet Street
Los Angeles, CA 90012

This place used to be closed at 11pm but now apparently they are open 24 hours a day because I went there at 3am. Not only was it open, there were not one, but 2 cashiers available. The cashier is on the second floor. You can also call the cashier’s office at the IRC at 213-893-5875 if you have any questions. Bring cash.

First, wait behind the “red and white” line, even if there is nobody there. The cashiers there seem to like to follow the rules. Once called to the window, obtain and deposit slip and fill it out with all the required information, including your name. Next, wait behind the line again until called. When called, give the cashier the deposit slip and the cash. They will give you a computer generated receipt.

You are done.

There is one small problem however. The inmate is not notified in any way that the money was deposited. So if you are not in touch with their attorney, or have not visited them, they will not know the money is there unless it was pre-planned. You’d think the inmate could get a twitter or SMS message. Oh, I guess not.

Some other things to remember. Do not talk to other people there, especially at 3am. Do not wake the homeless man sleeping on the bench, even if his cell phone is ringing. Do not solicit anyone, a prostitute or otherwise. Do not argue with the cashier in any way whatsoever, even if what they tell you seems retarded to you.

Lastly, do not use the bathroom there. You can’t really see it in the picture below but it looked like somebody tried to take a shower from the sink and there’s about a centimeter of water everywhere, along with a bunch of jumpsuits the inmates wear while in the holding area. I guess the jumpsuits are free for the taking but I left them there.

Now that you know the trick, depositing money is easy and convenient. Enjoy.

While setting up my Google Voice account, I found a link to a website called Voki that has a text to speech app. This app can be used to create your voicemail greeting for Google Voice.

They have a bunch of different male and female voices but I found that Kate has pronunciations that I liked. You don’t have to create an account to just make your greeting. You can also create widgets for your blogs. See sample below:

I had a dream. In this dream, there was a service that allowed me to have just one phone number which would ring any or all my phones (cell, home, work) and even allow me to make long distance calls. If I change my number, I can forward my calls to my new number seamlessly. I can even forward specific numbers to specific phones only. And all this was completely free.

Incredibly, Google has created such a service for free called Google Voice.  Currently, it’s still in Beta and available only by invitation but all you have to do is sign up and wait.

Once I got it, I discovered it has even more features that I knew about.  Here are a few that pleasantly surprised me:

Call Screening – You can set your settings so that Google Voice will ask the caller for their name if they are not in your contact list. It’s like having your own secretary.

Listen In – Just like the old answering machines of the 80′s, you can listen to the messages being left by the caller, then decide if you want to pick up the call. Amazing. Why don’t they have this feature on voicemail for cell phones? This is perfect for people avoiding calls from stalkers.

Voicemail Transcripts – As you would expect, when you get a voicemail, you can get an email or SMS message to alert you. That’s no surprise. However, the message contains the transcript of the voicemail. Yes, that’s no bull. It’s not perfect but it seems to work fairly well.  In any case, you also get the full MP3 of the actual voicemail so you can always listen to the real caller.

Ring Multiple Phones – This is the main feature of the service. But there’s more to it than all your phones ringing. You can also direct certain “groups” (e.g. friends) to specific phones, or even automatically send specific numbers to voicemail (or even your SPAM folder) without ringing at all. There’s so much you can do with this, it’s mind boggling.

Call Record – Are you serious?!  Yes, you can finally record your calls simply by pressing “4″ on your phone. When you’re done, press “4″ again. The MP3 file is available in your account online. Not only that, you get a transcript AND code to embed a player directly into your blog.  You know I’m going to use this feature to record those customer service calls for this blog. Check this out:

Call Switch – As if those aren’t enough features, how about being able to switch phones without hanging up. You heard me. Simply press the star button on your phone during your call, then your other phone will ring. Now, just pick that the second phone, and hang up the first phone. So easy, even a caveman could do it.  How many times have I said, “Let me call you back from my cell phone because…” No more.

Free – WTF!? That’s the most amazing feature. It would be great to have all these features (and much more) for a small fee. But when it comes for FREE, you’re just speechless. They even start you off with 10 cents for out-of-the-country calls.

The free long distance (US and Canada) is a game changer for sure. Why would anybody pay for long distance with their land line carrier anymore? All you have to do is sign up for Google Voice and get free long distance calls.

Have you ever had a meal that was begging for some Champagne but you didn’t want to drink alcohol? What if I told you that there’s a Jasmine Tea sparkling drink that tasted a little like Champagne?

I drink a lot of tea but sometimes feel like drinking something different. I happen to come across this sparking tea drink from Golden Star Tea. It does contain a tiny bit of alcohol but they won’t card you when you buy this bottle. It’s slightly sweet but very light and refreshing. It leaves a tea type after taste that’s hard to describe, especially since I’m not a drinker.

The MSRP is about $13 but I found it in downtown for about $8. It’s a little pricey for a non-alcoholic drink but I recommend it to anybody with a taste for something a little different.

Confirmed as labeled. Yes, that’s a real tattoo.

It’s been a while since I’ve done a tournament at Commerce so I decided to try their “Hold’em Series.” Their first of 17 tournaments was a multi-day $500,000 guaranteed one but I got there too late on the last day and it was sold out. They told me I could be an “alternate,” and would be able to get my money back if I decided the wait was too long.  My number was 600 something and after waiting for about an hour, it was only to 70 so I gave up and got my money back.

One thing new was they finally changed their player card to a thick credit card-like card instead of the thin paper-like card from before.  As before, they have a computerized system that prints out the player card with your name on it.  Nice technology they have there.

One new thing they added was an ID scanner called “SnapShell.” I tried to find out who makes these via google but was not able to find the manufacturer. There is a company in Santa Monica that OEMs them and sells the OCR software called Card Scanning Solutions. Basically, it’s a small device that has some type of scanner or digital camera with a light built into a  box as shown below. The user puts the ID right on the screen face down and an image of your ID is scanned into the computer. the OCR software then extracts the data right off of your ID. This software automatically recognizes IDs from all states and enters the extracted data into a database. When there are long lines of people waiting, this can save tons of time compared to an operator manually entering the data.

But I digress.

I returned the following week for another multi-day $400,000 guaranteed tournament but only lasted about 4 hours. Although the rounds are 40 minutes long, you start with only 3,000 in chips so one big mistake and you’re stack is low. I tried to make a move and got caught and lost half my stack. From there, it was a struggle and a slow death.  The lesson there is, when you are playing a small stack tournament, don’t’ try to get too tricky until you build up your stack.

A co-worker was wearing this t-shirt so I asked her what the writing was. She didn’t know what it says but I got the idea from the graphic that it was something about Chikan.

In case you’re not familiar with the word “chikan,” it’s a Japanese version of “frotteurism,” which is the act of groping, or rubbing of a non-consenting person for sexual gratification. More specifically, “chikan” usually refers to this act in public, like on crowded trains, buses and elevators.

If you look at a close-up of the graphic on this t-shirt, you can see that the male on the right is groping the female on the left. They are riding a train because they are both using the type of hand-straps that are available on Japanese trains.

If you’re not into coding in PHP, skip this post and read the next one.

A few months ago, I was working on some PHP code and found a bug in the strtotime function in PHP version 4.3.11. It’s been fixed in version 5.2.0 but I’ve created a workaround fix for people using the older version of PHP.

Strtotime is a function that converts strings into time. The strange bug shows up when subtracting 2 from Sunday, which should give you the date of 2 Sunday’s prior to the original date.

The code below shows the same code running on both versions:

$datefmt = 'n/j/Y';
echo 'Current PHP version: ' . phpversion()."";
$offset = time();
echo "today=".date($datefmt, $offset)."<br />";
$s = strtotime("-2 Sunday", $offset);
echo "-2 sunday timestamp=".$s."<br />";

$d = date($datefmt, $s);
echo "-2 Sunday=".$d."<br />";

$sunday = strtotime("last Sunday", $offset);
$lastsunday = mktime(0, 0, 0, date("m", $sunday), date("d", $sunday)-7,   date("Y", $sunday));
$d = date($datefmt, $lastsunday);
echo "fixed -2 sunday=".$d."<br />";

The output from the code above is shown below when using PHP 5.2.0:

Current PHP version: 5.2.0
today=4/14/2009
-2 sunday timestamp=1238914800
-2 Sunday=4/5/2009
fixed -2 sunday=4/5/2009

The output from the code above is shown below when using PHP 4.3.11:

Current PHP version: 4.3.11
today=4/14/2009
-2 sunday timestamp=-1
-2 Sunday=12/31/1969
fixed -2 sunday=4/5/2009

The error is shown in yellow highlight. You can see that the error starts with the timestamp being “-1″ in the older version. Hope that helps somebody out there.

This is one of times when it’s probably a good idea to leave the Spanish translation off of the sign.

It took me a couple of days to figure out that “Pies” is Spanish for feet. If you want to get picky, “pies” is plural, so it should read “feet,” or it should be “foot” and “pie.”

But that’s not really the problem. The problem is I don’t want a food related word anywhere near the word “foot.” I know what a cream-pie is in pron, and I don’t even want to find out what a foot-pie is in pron.  But I wonder if the “special” means you get a happy ending.