Sometimes I wish that I had a really crappy car.  ‘Why?’ you ask?  Because then when someone is tailgating me, particularly when I am already going 5-9 mph over the speed limit and there is a perfectly good lane to my left not being used, I could just slam on the brakes so that they would hit me.  After all, it would be their fault (who’s to say I didn’t see a deer about to run out onto the highway?).  They would learn the hard way not to tailgate, their insurance would go up, and they’d get a ticket.  Maybe they’d even be over the legal blood-alcohol limit and spend the night in jail.  Jackpot.  As for me, I’d just be out a crappy car that I didn’t care about to begin with.  I guess if I did it too many times the police or insurance companies might catch on.  Oh well, it’s not like I’d actually do that.  I’d probably react much more passive-aggressively.  Perhaps by writing a blog post about the tailgating incident.

No, and I don’t care.

Last night Stephanie, Emma, Stephanie’s dad, and myself were traveling to Florida to visit Stephanie’s sister.  Along the way, we stopped for gas twice: once in South Carolina and once in Georgia.  Both times, it took far too long for no good reason.  At the first gas station, for some reason, you have to go inside and prepay for gas, even if you are paying at the pump.  This makes no sense.  The only reason to require someone to go inside and prepay is if they are paying cash, because you are afraid they will drive away.  When you pay at the pump, the gas station has already ensured that you have enough funds on your credit card to cover the gas.  The second time we stopped, an attendant walked up to us after we pulled up beside a pump and said they were changing shifts inside and the pumps were going to be off for about ten-to-fifteen minutes.  (Also, he was smoking at the time.)  Really?  It takes fifteen minutes to balance the books when you change shifts??  And again, we were paying at the pump, which means we didn’t need to pay the guy at the register anything, so why couldn’t they at least leave the pumps open for people paying there?

Anyway, I just thought I’d share.  Enjoy your Independence Day everyone!

While scanning through my junk mail folder in Gmail, I noticed a new spam tactic: directly insulting the reader.

<img class=”snapshot” src=”/files/for_blog/20080609_insulting_spam.png” title=”Snapshot of my spam folder, with subject reading “You look really stupid kip.robinson”” alt=”Snapshot of my spam folder, with subject reading “You look really stupid kip.robinson”” />

I’m curious if this is effective.  I find it hard to believe that anyone would ever read mail that is obviously spam nowadays, but these people must be making money somehow or they’d stop sending this stuff.  My guess is that anything which stands out is likely to be effective in piquing readers’ curiosity, much like the “I love you” e-mail virus from several years ago.  But only if other spammers don’t copy the tactic.

Below is a sketch of an intersection that is the main bottleneck of my commute home from work.  I’ve had a question about right-of-way and I’m curious if any of you know the answer.  In the sketch below, if cars A and B both turned into lane 2, colliding with one another, who would be at fault?

Not to scale.  Lanes 1 and 2 are actually long enough to hold about 15-20 cars each.  Cars A and B would actually be nearly parallel to one another.

This is an unusual design; typically lane 2 would be created first, and then lane 1 would be created to the left of it.  Instead, we have a lane created in the middle of two lanes.  On the one hand, car A has already turned into lane 1, and now he’d be changing lanes back.  But on the other hand, car A has gotten into the left-turn lanes, and now he wants to pick which left turn lane to use.  It should also be noted that where lane 2 is created, both lines are marked with short dashes.  If one of them were marked with regular dashes it would be clear.

Now what makes this really annoying is that from around 5:00 to 5:45, there are a lot of people that need to turn left here.  So there is a line of cars backing up well into the area that is only two lanes, so there is a long line of cars in lane 3.  What happens is that nearly all of these cars end up turning only into lane 1.  But a few people go past the traffic in lane 4, then move left at the last moment to get into lane 2.  So they only have to wait for the stoplight to complete one or maybe two cycles, as opposed to four or five.  This makes the problem worse, because the line of cars coming out of lane 2 makes it practically impossible for a person who was waiting patiently in lane 3 to merge into lane 2.  I’ve often thought about going from lane 3 into lane 1, and then continuing straight into lane 2 (making the person who skipped the line have to wait).  But I’m afraid if that guy hit me it would be my fault, or we’d both be at fault.  And my sense of politeness keeps me from passing the line and merging into lane 2.  After all, I wouldn’t want anyone to road rage me.

So what I actually do when it’s backed up like this is take lane 4 straight through the intersection, then move left and make a U-turn at the next break in the median, then make a right turn onto the road I want to go on.  This is actually quite easy since a good two-thirds of the traffic either turns left or right at this intersection.

A few weeks ago I installed Firefox 3 Beta onto my work laptop, in order to test if two add-ins I wrote would need any tweaking to work.  (These add-ins are simple search bars for people in my company to use to search our source code and our bug-tracking database.)  They worked fine, once I jumped through the necessary hoops to convince Firefox that they weren’t viruses.  But that’s irrelevant; this post is about two small “it’s about friggin time” improvements in Firefox 3.  You can read about the big changes elsewhere.

The first of these changes is the way Firefox handles hyphens in text wrapping.  After a long period of bickering, they finally decided that Firefox (like every other piece of software which displays text) can insert a line break after a hyphen character.  This is something that is particularly annoying to me, since I sometimes use long, hyphenated phrases.  (I’m sure there is a proper name for such a phrase, but I don’t know it.  I guess that’s what I get for not being an English professor.)

Take for example this post from a few weeks ago in, as viewed in FF2 and FF3:

See how FF2 treats the long line as a single word, rather than breaking the words on hyphens?  In Firefox 3 this has been corrected, which I think is super.

The other small thing is that tooltip text (usually from an object’s “title” attribute) is no longer truncated.  This is mainly a nuisance to me on webcomics xkcd and Dinosaur Comics, where the tooltip text is usually kind of a second punchline.  To demonstrate, here is a screenshot from a recent xkcd comic:

Much better in Firefox 3.  These two improvements (and the new address bar features) make me excited to use Firefox 3.  Of course, I won’t switch to it full-time until the final release, since most of my favorite add-ons don’t support FF3 yet.

Scientists in Japan have succeeded for the first time in experimentally reproducing traffic jams.  You can read about it here or you can read about it here (both articles say basically the same thing).

You can also see a video of the experiment on YouTube.  It is pretty interesting, but I wish they had done more work to figure out how many cars it takes to cause a traffic jam.  Clearly, two or three cars on the track wouldn’t produce a shockwave.  Ten cars might produce one but it would take longer, for example.  Then maybe they could come up with a general equation to predict the capacity of a section of road.

In case no one ever told you, Monster cables are a waste of money.  It turns out, a coat hanger is just as effective as Monster Cable at transferring an audio signal.

I mentioned not long ago that I sent in my copy of Guitar Hero 3 to get a replacement with stereo sound.  Yesterday I got my replacement, which was faster than I was expecting (only fifteen days).  Having heard the game in stereo now, I can say that the difference is huge, and immediately apparent.  And now that I know that, I can’t see how this got through QA.  You’d think some of the same people who were testing the Wii version would have tested or at least been exposed to the PS2, PS3, or 360 versions of the game, and would have said “hey, why does the game sound like crap on the Wii?”  I mean, it is a music game after all.  Oh well.

Remember when Dane Cook was funny?  That’s what Stephanie and I were thinking when we watched his new special on Comedy Central the other day.  Maybe it’s harder to write funny material when you’re not stealing it.