Driving Near "The District"

I find myself in Cockeysville Maryland the next couple weeks. Close enough to Washington D.C. that the driving style is extremely cutthroat. What is up with THAT? - Yet the people, in person, have a near southern etiquette about them. "Good Evening" takes the place of the New England "Hey" but don't even consider anything other than knowing the exact most proficient way to get to a place if you get behind the wheel of a car. Of course everyone here was apparently born with this knowledge. Lane choice can be a matter of life and death. We don't necessarily invite you in in the Boston area, but it's not the end of our world if you don't know where you're going or you make a bad lane choice and (God forbid!) have to (no, don't say it!) CHANGE LANES!!!! - Here it is an unwritten rule that NO MATTER WHAT there shall ALWAYS be less than one car length between cars lest someone TAKE THE SPACE that they are about to be in. What a bunch of driving 'wipes.

Let me illuminate all ye driving 'wipes. Following another moving object closer than about 2 seconds will get you to the NEXT STOP a few milliseconds sooner... and that is worth putting your life in MY FEET? - I could kill any number of these 'wipes by simply randomly applying my brakes. Chances are I would walk and there would be a forty car pile up behind me. Forty 'wipes not driving? - Hmmm - maybe not procreating? - HMMM! - I'll be right back! - I need to go do a public service!

It's just that this would have to be done to the entire D.C. area, and there probably would be about 11 drivers left alive after I went out for an evening set on correcting this issue.

What makes someone, ordinarily intelligent in other areas; ignore quantum mechanics and laws of physics and such? - Are they above THESE laws? Does the spacetime continuum NOT apply to them somehow? I'm in a rental car - If I were a "teach them a lesson" type I could have a field day. It's not exactly a hit and run if you are the one getting hit, right? - I'm thinking of timesavings here - I could take several poor drivers out per hit and maximize the number by not lingering at the scene...

I am making a bumper sticker that says: TAILGATING ELIMINATES ITSELF FROM THE GENE POOL but I don't think many of the 'wipes will get it without further instruction.

http://www.astronomynotes.com/relativity/s2.htm

Ahhhh, What to say about Jordan Davidson?

The highly threatened individual who feels he/she must leave an epistle of excreta in their wake... I'm SO sorry that you and your precious PC are so mightily threatened by my (relatively) spare comment on Mac vs. PC ads on Kellypuffs... The matters of fact you choose to ignore are what's pointed out in the relative elegance of both the Mac (vs. the PC - I'm trying to hold your hand through the big concepts here) and that of your epistle vs. the aforementioned spare commentary.

Do try and relax, sir or madam. The surgery I mentioned is experimental as is any height or length increasing of body parts. This is my only explanation of what may leave one so insecure as to drop such a load on someone's (namely mi esposa's) blog. Maybe you could get a really large pickup truck or something as an alternative? - Camera with a long lens? - Rifle with a long barrel? - Elevator shoes? - Sock in the pants? - or maybe just stick to that whammy PC with all its powerful bits.

As far as the subject of Macs vs. PC's - Slow down, my friend - Truly just an opinion. If one controls the hardware one can make a more elegant total device. It would be difficult to master this with every Tom, Dick and - um - Jordan making hardware of all types. I think this hardware/software combination issue leads to being able to stay in the right side of the brain while using some tools (namely Macintosh in this example) as opposed to having to switch sides and piece together rational issues just to keep the tool working FOR you... (this would be my PC example - still with me JD?)

The better and worse of this situation? Try and remember: Truly just an opinion. Maybe you need to fight that whammy computer in order to create. *I* have a difficult time switching sides too often, as is frequently the case with men. Women can hover and multi-task, so maybe it's easier for them - I can only guess.

As far as the stolen commentary on quitting apps and shutdown and all... get some new material dude. And please avail yourself for your flogging - Your secrecy of identity (although if I were such an ass, I would do the same) is childish, immature, puerile, infantile, babyish; jejune, inexperienced, callow, green, unsophisticated, sophomoric, naive, foolish, and silly. (brought to you by the O.E.D. that comes with Mac OS)

Handing it to myself...

Dedicated readers,

For your perusal, I submit the above picture of the damaged right hand of myself after the Amazing Door Handle Repair of the Mini. Shamed into dealing with this age old problem (I don't know how long, Mahtin - a month of frickin' Sundays, ok?) I resolved to take it to one of our local dealers this past week. The problem with the Mini dealers is that they are both nearly 40 miles away (that's like a zillion kilometers, alrighty? - yonder non Stateside readership!) so armed with the official manual I set into repairing it myself. At first it was but an exploratory surgery, but then upon discovery of not needing any parts it turned into a repair. The cable had come off when the mechanism had frozen. All I had to do was replace it and modify the attach point so it would be less than likely to come off again. Mini is made by BMW and this usually means no nonsense type Teutonic design schemes, but apparently the wacko British design concept of the original Minis had rubbed off on these Bavarian engineers and it has all the quirkiness of the '62 MG in my garage! A love/hate relationship has since developed, like with so many British cars. I had to remove the entire mechanism from within the bowels of the door (of course the manual doesn't go there!) in order to see what I was up against. Working on a car that is used on a daily basis puts a whole new light on a repair such as this and anything going wrong means that the car is disabled. Especially a door... a door is unique in that it has interior and exterior componentry as well as being a major moving part. Never simple. I had to give up as the light of day went away on day 1, but I was able to replace the latch well enough to have the car closed for the night. The weather's unusual cooperation was waning on day 2 but with sailor-blushing commentary it was reprimanded into place and the repair was made 100%. The dealer would have cost anywhere from 120 (minimum) to 400 for this particular task so I feel I got my money's worth aside from the satisfaction AND the battle scars.

A Smith

Amazing how time flies... the Smith post was when A.N.Smith was pregnant - she since lost her teenage son, had the healthy baby and died herself in a similar mysterious way her son did... The friend who called me, prodding me to call him back has also since died. Bob. He wasn't in the best of health... in fact the phone call that he promoted was the last time I ever talked to him! - A childhood friend, Bob deserves much more than a casual mention, but the last thing said to him was an extremely funny, extremely raunchy joke that got us both going to the point of tears and having to get off the phone! - An appropriate finé for Bob and myself!

prodded into it...

... by my following - all two of you - I just read through my crazy bloglet and the SRTFN has a couple of funny parts for sure - the rest is as ill humored as - well, nevermind...

I am sick - sick and tired of being sick and tired!!! - :) - The cold that had no end...

I just had a laugh as my daughter reported hitting her own school bus, perhaps disabling the car that never dies - a '94 Saturn wagon with 235,000 miles on it or so... we'll see - I'm waiting for pictures - perhaps the first practical application of a camera phone EVER!

I have a guy who is a police officer that works on Saturns and uses used parts so I'm sure we can fix it! (We can make him better than he was before - faster - stronger....)

I want to brag up my wonderful repair on herself's Mini. *I*, yes, myself, fixed the miserable door handle - and only with 4 or more hours of my time, when I was sick, doing it... not that being sick had anything to do with it... it was a nice day more or less - although it got rainy -

I want to take pictures of the 14, no less cuts on my hand that I received doing said task - look for a picture soon!

Smith

A friend of mine called me recently and pointed out that Anna Nichole Smith was pregnant, and from this extrapolated that anything was possible - even that *I* would call him! - From this sad point of view I make my first blog entry in forever... Sadder yet that this is all I want to say right now!

two finger scrolling

I just have to say that my new MacBook Pro is the coolest thing since sliced bread! I have yet to try the lighted keyboard but two finger scrolling is where it's at! - This is all the better since hp bought it for me and it is all the talk at my gf's place of work HAL - Well maybe hal plus one!

SRTFN

Yes, a SRTFN button needs to be on every product. Stop, Right the Fuck NOW! - Especially printers and computers. Computers also need a previous screen - so NO MATTER WHAT you can go back to the mouse click right before you fucked up. I do it every day. Pay Now, and then you see the wrong shipping address on the screen right before it goes to the Order Confirmed screen. Or the spell checker lulling you into yes, yes, yes, yes as it repeatedly asks you to check the name of your town, your street, or whatever it comes up with - and then that one typo you skip on by, because why? - because you can't go back one screen and you have to go through the whole freaking thing again. - Yes, that's how you spell Ferd Berferd twenty three times...
But the SRTFN button would be key for printers that insist on spitting out pages of six random characters, one after another until it's out of paper... What is this, some sort of deal with Hammermill? - How many forests have been taken down because of that one extra sheet printed with some insidious line on the top. "Mapquest 1977 copyright" or something equally as enlightening, let alone the remarkable, and faster than that printer has ever moved, fuck up of spitting out tons of gibberish paper that causes you to either pull the sheet out of its little death-grip rollers as they protest with breaking sounds and not-supposed-to-turn-that-way clicks, or unplug the thing frantically as it uses all the photo paper in the house. SRTFN!

I have a coffeemaker that beeps when it's done. How nice. You have to unplug it to make it stop. Keen! - My favorite thing EVER! - beeping things. I have a UPS that I use for my cable modem and my wireless router. Both wall-wart transformer appliances with a total power draw measured in milliamps, thereby usable for hours plugged into the cheapest UPS on the market. Usually the cable is still connected eventhough some sap plowed into the power transformer upon the first snow - but NO, one must listen to an incessant beeping every minute, as the UPS dutifully warns me the power is off. SRTFN! - Of course the manufacturer tells me that all I have to do is install the software on my PC and go into it and turn off the alarm. How handy. I don't use a PC. In my industry if I were to walk into a customer site with a PC I would be laughed out of the building. I work for Hewlett Packard and they buy me the latest Apple computers just for this reason. I don't own a PC - don't even have one at work! - let alone having the god forsaken thing hooked up to the UPS. I just want the evil freaking beep to stop! - One customer service rep told me I could screw a wood screw into the cabinet and pin the little speaker, rendering it useless, but I couldn't find it, so I listened to the beep for a few hours and, as you can see, it only shortened my life a few years with the angst it caused. Alarm clocks have to be one of my favorites. Haven't used one since I threw papers when I was a kid and got up before 5. Even then I noticed I woke up right before the thing went off, so I just started waking up and it has failed me maybe once a year or so since. Much less than alarm clocks. Now I am in a household of alarm clock users. How often do they go off on the weekends? - With no one around? - I would say more than it actually is, I am sure, looking for just those times in my mind, but really - just short of locks, if anything else worked against the user so much, would it exist? And as long as I am on this rant, what do locks lock anyway? - what are we locking? - I'll tell you - fear - that's right F-E-A-R - nothing more - except when they work against their owner, then they lock YOU out - but other than that, I can assure you locks are tested less than .00000000001% of the time, let alone actually lock out the bad guys. They work against their owners 99.9999999999% of the time and are you really any less afraid? Maybe in the future we can have locks that report if they are even tried so we can see how silly it is to religiously lock them for no reason. My answer? - I lock things pretty rarely. I think it's kind of funny to see people get locked out of things, but when it's me it's never pretty. Nothing gets me to my core faster than being outdone by a machine, and one that is supposed to benefit me (aren't they all?) outdoing me gets me there all the quicker.