Now that my drive home is over…
Motorists today have gone past trying my patience, and are edging towards trying my deference towards humanity as something sacred and worthwhile.
learn
to
drive
Because seriously… when I say “eat razorblades and die in a fire”, I’m only half joking and it’s going downhill.
Traffic!!! 
Hmm… what is it about traffic that is so infuriating? Most people know me as a pretty stable guy. I don’t often appear upset even when I am, and I never raise my voice. Usually if I have something to say, it’s calm and well thought out. Traffic is the only exception to this. I can often be found yelling obscenities at or near the top of my lungs at the “parade of morons” or “flock of fucking idiots” in front of me. If you’ve observed me getting angry in traffic, you’ve only seen a fraction of how I get when I’m alone. I reflexively tone it down when I have company. And no… I’m never tempted to get out of my car and “do something about it”, because that is just about the most shortsighted thing anyone could do when road rage sets in. I might wish them dead by some sort of divine intervention, but I retain my higher functions with respect to my own actions when I’m “all fired up”.
To the best of my reasoning ability, it seems to me that it’s people playing down the importance of traffic. The rules are simple. Mind-fucking-buggeringly simple. There is no rulebook, there’s a rule pamphlet which outlines right of way and rules of the road. IT’S NOT COMPLICATED. Right of way laws are so insanely simple and intuitive that there really shouldn’t even need to be a rulebook for them in the first place. Basically if you take a positive action (changing lanes, merging, entering a rotary, turning) which causes someone maintaining a steady path to significantly deviate from it, you are probably violating their right of way. There are exceptions of course, but generally speaking. Basically, exercise “common courtesy”. Click >>here<< for an explanation of courtesy, since it's probably news to you. There are links on the page if this concept intrigues you and you want to read up more on it. Don't forget to tell your friends! For example: if you have been waiting to turn into traffic for a while and no holes are opening up, you are not accruing "right of way points" that let you barge into traffic just by virtue of your having been inconvenienced at the stop. You fucking wait until you have an opening! Nobody else on the road is required to care how long you've been waiting there! Same thing if you've been riding the passing lane and your exit is coming up... Just because there is no clear opening between the semitrucks to your right doesn't mean you dash across traffic with reckless abandon to get to your exit. It's your problem for planning poorly in the first place, nobody else in traffic gives a damn or is required to give a damn where you are going or how you plan to get there. If you miss your exit, you go to the next one and turn around. Believe it or not, there are those of us who do this instead of risking dozens of lives to save a handfull of minutes. For the love of all that is holy, the left lane is the passing lane not a travel lane. You pass and get back in the right lane. Nobody cares if you don't like changing lanes frequently. That's how traffic works. If you don't like it, write your senator or some shit. Don't take liberties with everyone else's right of way. And don't get me fucking started on turning signals. Few things show as much carelessness as not letting everyone else on the road know what you're planning to do. How the HELL can you participate in traffic and not use your turning signals. They should be much more active on ticketing for failure to do this. I've seen far more near-accidents from failure to signal intent than from speeding. I guess the thing is that nowhere in life do I observe more carelessness or lack of respect for the well-being of others than on the highway. People get in their cars and drive "their way" following what rules they see fit when they see fit, completely oblivious to how it relates to anyone else on the road. What is beside or behind them is not relevent. It pisses me off because while you are in traffic you have the ability to KILL others with mere carelessness, whereas in other areas of daily activity you can only really annoy. You're driving a weapon, and acting like a complete braindead fucking idiot on the road is deadly. I saved my life 4 times on the road today. In each case I was driving in the center lane at a steady velocity, traveling the speed of traffic. I had to take drastic corrective actions to avoid being hit by people. Not because they were avoiding something, but because they were not paying attention to their surroundings and were ignoring the rules of the road… just drifting in and out of lanes like the king/queen of the damn road. Although I had more near misses today than normal, being confronted with deadly situations at the hands of the careless public on the road is not anomalous. This, I suppose, is why get so angry sometimes in traffic. Don’t tell me to curb my wrath till everyone else on the road stops treating traffic like an amusement park ride. Start ticketing for something other than speeding, because dammit that’s not the fucking problem. Sorry for the length, but not for the language.
The server for iggdawg.com (aka “that warm place in my room on which Dezzy sleeps”) went down on friday. The bearing in the main drive went ou thursday night sometime, and it was so hot that I almost burned myself when I went to remove it in the morning. I got a new drive from ComPooSA and managed to get the server back up yesterday. Luckily the old drive operated for long enough to get all my data off it before the thing went into BBQ-mode.
Anywaqys, if any of my adoring public wondered where I was on AIM over the weekend, or why my links wouldn’t work, that’s why. I’m sure both of you were very worried.
AIM can choke on a dong. Earlier today I got booted off my main acct (iggdawg555) and couldn’t log back on. it just decided to hang halfway into authentication. I’m still unable to log in. So I dug up my old college acct to use for a while, and now it’s doing the same exact thing. nobody else in the office is having any issues with AIM, and I’m not having any other connectivity issues with any programs. wheeeeeeee.
Also, Dan0 if you’re reading this the time is now 2:57. I’d IM you but I can’t.
I was reminded of the cereal incident the other day when I saw a note my boss left on his desk. He’s a pretty cool guy and generally prefers the direct approach. Ambiguity is no good any way you slice it, right? He’d had a few issues with people not returning things after “borrowing” them. Odds and ends off his desk, his chair, etc. The note reads:
“If you take anything off my desk or steal my chair I WILL FUCKING KILL YOU. This is not a joke but a written threat. Thanks!”
There isn’t much wiggle room there. It’s certainly a lot more direct than putting you name on a post-it and slapping it on the chair.
The other day I was driving home and took a shortcut through one of the “less sexy” parts of Leominster (that’s pronounced “LEM-in-stah” for you non-locals). I came across something interesting on one of the apartment buildings. Typically satellite TV dishes are mounted on the roof of a building, or at least somewhere out of immediate sight. The folks at this place decided to be rebels and break the mold. Smash the cookie-cutter, even! They all decided to proudly display their dishes on the roof of the building’s entryway.
I can’t think of what to say about this really. Perhaps the landlord preferred the dishes there and would not allow them to mount on the roof? Or could it be that the dishes all combine at night like a DirectTV Voltron, providing unbelievable reception? Any way you slice it, it’s as ugly as it is amusing.
I was on the phone with a Bell South tech just now about a circuit that’s been a sore spot all day. he actually said to me, 100% in earnest, “the problem is in that thar router down yonder”.
…
my confidence in the technician went down a little bit following that.
Free food day at work! Free bagels in the morning and free salad/pizza (not saladpizza, mind you) in the afternoon. Free food day is wednesday of every week and is always a good day.
We have only the finest state-of-the-art bagel preparation facilities here. There is a really nice 4-slot toaster and a bagel slicer. But all is not as it seems. At first glance, an unsuspecting novice would see only a normal bagel slicer. Little do they know what terrors lie just past the innocent exterior. The “blade” (ancient record states it was indeed once a blade) has long since been worn to the sharpness of a well weathered stone, or perhaps seaglass. We’ve come to affectionately refer to it as the “Bagel Masher”. Joe Hungry waddles down to the break room to get his delicious free bagel. He innocently inserts the bagel into the hungry maw of the Bagel Masher. Deftly thrusting down the upper portion of the Masher, the “blade” quickly smashes the bagel to a compressed lump of breadlike material which in no way resembles a bagel. After carefully unraveling the bagel to a round-ish state, it is clear that the blade at no time actually penetrated the flesh of the bagel. I’ve given up trying various methods of “slicing” with this hellish bagel torture device. Instead I’ve and turned to fighting with a plastic butter knife instead, which appears to perform quite a bit better.
so I decided to be all leet today and set up a music broadcast server on iggdawg.com. like that internet radio stuff. I used icecast… open version of Shoutcast (shoucast = winamp = AOL = yuck). so I got it all set up and was pretty psyched when I could actually listen at work to music being broadcast from my server at home. geeks like me are pretty tickled when geek shit actually works without much of a fight.
unfortunately most ISPs provide crap for upstream bandwidth. You can download the library of congress in seconds for sure, but the upstream is so little that it could barely support me listening to the stream… never mind additional listeners. Still it was a fun exercise, and it’s way easier than FTPing myself MP3s I want to listen to.
Yesterday at work I mentioned that I didn’t have Photoshop on my laptop. During the day at work we sometimes send email threads back and forth with eachother lighten things up, including *interesting* photochops. Within about 5 minutes one of my coworkers hands me a DVD “here you go. photoshop is in there”. I asked if I needed to hunt down a key for it. “Keygen is in the folder”. I love working with other geeks.
EDIT: related Bash quote: http://www.bash.org/?652012
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