Month: December 2006

Inefficient use of resources

I’ve been driving the wife to work this week, due to her unfortunate knee incident (She’s seeing an orthopedist on Monday, we think she hurt her MCL), and that involves taking 66 into the city.  Now, at 7am, that’s not bad.  It’s HOV-2, and traffic is light.

However, they already have the metered ramps turned on.  Along the entrance ramps to 66, they have traffic lights, where they allow one car per lane to go at a time.  The light is red, someone arrives at the light, it turns green for one car.  Great system when traffic is heavy – it prevents a big pile of cars trying to merge all at once.  Unless the backup gets really bad, and then it doesn’t do any good.

My point, and I do have one, is that these meters have sensors in the road so they know when a car comes.  So they know how heavy traffic is.  And therefore, they could turn themselves off when there is one car coming by every minute or two, when the lights are totally unnecessary.  They could also turn themselves off when the traffic is so heavy that they don’t make any difference at all.

Is that too much to ask?  I have the email of someone at VDOT now from the whole Seven Corners debacle.  I haven’t contacted him yet.  I should – now that the election is over, I’ve been swept under the rug, it seems.

Open letter to the world

Dear Inhabitants of Planet Earth,

Let’s just say you’re a human being.  The other inhabitants are unlikely to be able to read this, and I don’t hold them responsible.  Those human beings who don’t speak English, if you become aware of this letter, please let me know, and I will provide a translation.

Now that we’ve established that you’re a human being, let me give you a scenario.  Let’s say that you’re walking with three coworkers to Caribou Coffee.  As you reach the door from one side, a dashing and handsome gentleman reaches the door from the opposite direction.  As your coworker opens the door, the gentleman on the other side of the door holds it, allowing you and your other coworker to pass through, after which he follows.

I happen to know that the gentleman would be happy if you thanked him with a brief nod, perhaps a quick “thank you”.  I also happen to know that none of you offered either.  Nor did you offer any alternative method of giving thanks.  I happen to know this because the gentleman is me, and all three of you are BAD HUMAN BEINGS.

That is all.

Love, Complaint Hub

Internet Explorer is the devil

I’ve been working on some Ajax hotness for you on the complaint submission form, and it looks pretty cool in Firefox.  However, not long ago, Windows XP insisted that I upgrade to Internet Explorer 7, where they added some features that other browsers have had for years and moved everything you’ve always used to strange places so you can’t find anything.

So, the cool Ajax, courtesy of Scriptaculous, doesn’t work at all in IE7.  I’m still working on it, though.

For any of you coming here using Internet Explorer, please do yourself and the rest of the world a favor and download a real browser.  I prefer Firefox, but anything is better than IE.

Someone agrees with me about Al Gore

EcoGeek – Technology for the Environment – Gore Officially Campaigning…Poorly

What he’s doing here is trying to seem more thoughtful about Iraq, a very divisive issue, while relying on climate change to be his main bedfellow. What he’s actually doing is looking like a total weenie again, which is exactly what lost him the election in 2000.

Would I like a President who’s willing to do something about the horrible things we’re doing to the environment?  Absolutely.  Do I think Al Gore has any chance of winning?  No.  Do I think Al Gore running will hurt the Democratic party?  Yes.

He already lost once because he was a robot who stood for nothing every time I ever heard him or read about him.  Recently, I hear that he speaks well, and passionately, about environmental issues.  But now he’s maybe looking at another Presidential bid, and returning to his 2000 form.

Stop it, Al Gore.  Don’t run.  Throw your weight behind another candidate, get your environmental message out there, but please don’t hand another election over to someone like George W. Bush.

Are you ready to complain?

I hope you are.  When I first started this site, everyone immediately asked, “How can I complain?”  And now, you can.  The alpha release of the complaint submission form is available!  This is very rough, and needs a lot of work, but if you submit a complaint, it will be displayed.

So, I’m looking for feedback.  It needs some styling, I know.  I’m not really good at building a pretty page.  And eventually you’ll be able to add your own tags instead of picking from a limited number of categories (Something like del.icio.us or Flickr or whatever).

Don’t worry – your email address is not visible to anyone but me, and I’ll never contact you (Unless you’re already a friend, as most of you submitters will be) and I will NEVER sell your email address.

For those who are curious, the submission form is written in Ruby on Rails, which is a pretty cool new-ish web programming language.  So far, it’s a joy to program in.  And I barely know what I’m doing, so it should be even better when I know a bit more.

That sound you hear is Walt spinning in his grave

‘Apocalypto’ wins weekend box office – CNN.com

But “Apocalypto” overcame the baggage of Gibson’s personal troubles as well as its difficult subject matter, which features a no-name cast in a hyper-violent tale that includes beheadings and images of hearts ripped from people’s chests.

This is a DISNEY movie.  What is wrong with the world where once-respected actor who has lost all touch with reality can make a “hyper-violent” movie in a language almost no one speaks, get a deal with the company that makes almost nothing but children’s entertainment, and then lead the weekend in ticket sales?  There is absolutely nothing right with this picture.

Where are the people screaming for an NC-17 rating?  Once again, horrific violence is just fine, as long as there’s no sex.  Or maybe there is sex, I don’t know. Our country is so messed up.

In any event, I don’t watch Mel Gibson movies anymore.  Old ones are okay, before he lost it.  But nothing new.

Metro doesnt understand economics

Metro Considers Increasing Rail Fares – washingtonpost.com

“Because of declining real estate values, we have holes to fill of our own, and now we’re being presented with holes in Metro,” said Kauffman, a member of Fairfax County’s Board of Supervisors. “It’s not like we have a stockpile of green putty to fill the gaps.”

Wonderful. I was just talking to my friend and host in NYC yesterday about how much nicer the subway is in New York than Metro is in DC, and how Metro is expensive here.

I love how they want to combat a slower-than-expected increase in Metro riders by a fare increase. It’s like the pay phones, facing greatly increased competition from cell phones, doubling the cost of a call in a few years. And what happened there? The pay phone has become nearly obsolete. Not that they had much chance of competing, so maybe it’s not a good analogy.

But it’s Econ 101 – the way to fix slow growth is not to raise the price. In fact, they might want to consider lowering rates. And the article mentions discounts for SmartTrip riders (SmartTrip is the permanent card that replaces the paper cards, if you ride Metro more than once every six months it’s worth the SmartTrip). I had no idea there were discounts for SmartTrips. Maybe they should try publicizing this. You can discount all you want, but if people don’t realize it’s cheaper, it doesn’t do you much good.

Worst tunnel ever

Yesterday, we finished our flag football season, finally.  I had the pleasure of taking not one but two members of the team to the GW emergency room.  In the first game, on the last play, they had 4th and goal, eight seconds to go.  The play before, my wife had been bumped in the head, and she was a little ticked off.  They snap the ball as she’s leaning over the line, ready to rip someone’s head off.  She pressures the quarterback, he throws it up, we knock it down, and we have our second win of the season, 12-7, over the 4th seed in the playoffs.  Our only other win was against a team playing short a player because they only had two girls, and you need three on the field at all times.

So, in our celebration, we didn’t notice at first that my wife was on the ground.  Did any of you see Carson Palmer in the playoffs last year, when he got hit on the side of his leg and tore up his knee?  Well, that’s what happened here.  It doesn’t look like it will be that bad.  She’s on the couch icing it right now, and we’ll go to an orthopedist later this week if it doesn’t get better.

She was sitting on the sideline, elevating her knee, as we played our second game (Rescheduled due to rainout), and it didn’t go so well.  They went up 7-0 pretty quickly.  On the ensuing kickoff, “Picnic” got run over by this gigantic meathead.  You know the type of guy who comes to a game when it’s 27 degrees out in shorts, with the sleeves ripped off his shirt, with “MAXIMUS” or something written on his arms?  Wearing a leather rugby helmet?  Yeah, that kind of guy.  The one who is way too intense for co-ed flag football.  Anyway, he ran into Picnic on the kickoff, and Picnic came off the field.  He had his hat pulled down to his brow, but there was a little blood on his forehead.  I mentioned this to him, and he took his hat off, revealing an inch long cut about an inch above his eye.

So, I took Picnic and the wife to GW, where he got ten stitches, and they determined that my wife hadn’t broken her leg or torn anything major.

Then we went to NYC to visit some friends.  We’d been planning this for months, and didn’t want to let a little injury get in the way.  But we left hours later than we meant to, and hit the Holland Tunnel just as everyone going out in Manhattan on a Saturday night got there.  I’ve never seen anything like it.  The four lanes in the middle are EasyPass only at the toll, while the two on the right and two on the left are cash.  I was in the second from the right, and the EasyPass lanes are moving much better than the cash lanes, obviously.  So everyone wants to drive down the EasyPass lanes and then cut in in front of me.  I played chicken with a big black Nissan Titan for about 50 yards before he finally backed off.  It was extremely satisfying.  I was less than six inches from him most of the time as he tried to nose his way into my lane and I wouldn’t let him.  I hate people who do that.  Traffic sucks, we all have to sit in it, and you’re making things worse.  But I didn’t let anyone in.  Ordinarily, if people are being polite, I’m happy to do it.  But not when they’re sprinting to the end of the line and then trying to cut in at the front.

Anyway, it was an adventure.  The weekend was fun.  I got to see some of the holiday decorations in Times Square and all that.  I love NYC.  I didn’t think I would until I visited earlier this year.  I’ve been three times now, and I’ll definitely go back, especially since we have a friend in Chelsea who happily gives up her apartment and stays with her boyfriend when we come visit.