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.

If you own a Wii, Nintendo just made your holiday fifty dollars cheaper by delaying Super Smash Bros. Brawl until 2008 (they claim February, but we’ll see).

In an act of unprecedented cruelty, they announced that Sonic will be playable just before telling us we can’t have the game yet.  I fully expect an apology in the form of a playable Mega Man in the final release.

That is all.

As someone who works in an office environment, I run into a lot of people with Dilbert comic strips tacked or taped to various cubicle surfaces.  After deciding that there must be something to Dilbert, I started reading the strips (posted online daily).  After trying for about two months to figure out why people find Dilbert entertaining, I’ve given up.  In fact I’ve come to the simple conclusion that Dilbert is not funny.  At best, it is highly overrated.  I guess if you draw 365.25 strips per year you are bound to hit on something funny sooner or later, but I’m not sitting through crap like this to get there.

you heard me

This has been a crazy week for me.  It started last Saturday with the move and the craziness we encountered from both Budget and Time Warner.

Then on Sunday afternoon, thirteen days after buying our house and one day after we moved in, our air conditioner broke.  I called some of the people in the yellow pages that advertised 24-hour service, to see what it would cost to send someone out at 10:00 pm.  That ranged from $129 to $199, just to send someone out (not counting any work they would have to do).  We opted to wait until the morning.

Side note: I had two phone calls that went something like this:

“Our air conditioner is broken and I was wondering how much it would cost to send someone out tonight and how soon they could get here”
“You want someone to come out now?”
“Well... I mean, your ad says 24-hour service...”

That was a miserable night, it was at least 85 degrees, and very humid, inside our house, preventing anything that resembled sleep.  First thing in the morning we called someone out to fix it.  It turned out to be a problem with the tube that drains condensation being clogged, causing the unit to shut off (so that water does not overflow).  We may have a warranty that will cover the cost of the repairs, but we have to find that paper among the five hundred or so pieces of papers we signed.

So then Tuesday afternoon, on my way home from work, I got into a car accident.  Fortunately it was not serious, and I was hit from behind so it is not my fault, but we’re down to one car for a few days at least.  I’ll describe the accident with the aid of this diagram from the police report (what you see is this intersection):

So I’m car 2, and the guy who hit me is car 1.  Not shown is that there was a car in the eastbound lane of Poplar Tent Rd, waiting for an opportunity to turn left onto I-85.  I saw that this car would have to wait a while to make a left turn, so I started to make my turn.  But then another car heading east drove around the car turning left, in the shoulder, so I had to stop.  But the guy behind me thought I had gone and was looking left to see when he would get an opportunity to go as he moved forward, unaware that I had stopped.  He at least was cooperative, and didn’t raise a fuss when I said I wanted to get a police report (a police officer I know said to always do that, no matter how minor the incident, so that the other guy can’t change his story later).  We did have to wait about thirty minutes for the police officer to show up, and it was very hot while we waited.

You may not know this if you’re reading this from another part of the country, but we have had extremely hot and humid weather this week.  In fact, as I type this, it is 100°F, making this the third day in a row to hit 100.  And that’s not a heat index; that’s the actual temperature.  Yesterday it was 103, and it may get that hot again later this afternoon.

Something else I learned: lawyers and chiropractors are very quick to send you things in the mail after you get in an accident.  Our police report was made available at 9:00 AM on Wednesday, and we got things in the mail from two lawyers and one Chiropractor on Thursday, wanting to make sure they can cash in on our misfortune.  I anticipate many more such letters.

Lastly, if you’re feeling adventurous, view the Concord Police Department’s web page with Firefox.  Fantastic!  I’m guessing this is the result of a developmestuction environment.

All in all, quite a crazy week.

I have recently had two very annoying experiences with the online fronts of two different businesses.  First up is Budget truck rentals.  On Tuesday of this week I reserved a moving truck from Budget, using their website.  I picked the closest center to our house as the pickup/dropoff location, and they reserved a truck that I could pick up at 8:30 this morning.

So Stephanie and I headed over there this morning, getting there about 8:00.  We walked up to the office, because we saw a guy getting there and unlocking the gate.  “Are you guys here to pick up a truck?” “Yeah, for Robinson.”  “They were supposed to call you, this location is no longer open.”  “Come again?”  “This location is closed, last Saturday was our last day... what was the name?”  “Robinson.”  He went inside and looked at the four names he had, and said Robinson wasn’t even one of the names he had on his list.  After some discussion, I mention that I made the reservation on Tuesday, after this location had been closed.  He said they were supposed to have blocked that location from the website.  The guy was nice at least, and called around to other Budget locations nearby to see if anyone had a truck that wasn’t reserved, and after about fifteen minutes he found one not too very far away, so we rushed over there to get it.  So it turned out okay, but it was incredibly scary for a minute, because we had to get moved into the house today, and some people from our church were showing up at 9:30 to help with moving and we needed to be there with a truck.  Plus I’m probably going to have to deal with a $50 no-show fee, which will require some kind of hour long phone call to try to explain what happened.

The second situation is with Time Warner.  I called them about two weeks ago to arrange for our cable to be cut off at the apartment and turned on at the house, and they set up an appointment for 1-5 on Friday (yesterday) to turn on the cable at the house (they didn’t have to come out to disconnect at the apartment).  Yesterday morning I wanted to see if the technician could give us a call-ahead before showing up, since 1-5 is a pretty big time window.  I went to the website to find a number, and decided I would go to the “chat with a customer service representative” option.  I wouldn’t have to be on hold forever, and chatting would be easier to do while I was working.  The lady on the chat window told me that a technician didn’t even need to come out, since the last people had never canceled their service, so they would just change the account over to our name.  I was a little miffed at this, because had I not called, someone would have been at the house from 1-5 with no technician showing up.

So this morning, when we were moving into the house, we saw that we had a message.  It was Time Warner, saying that the technician had showed up at 1:50 and no one was home.  When we got a TV unpacked we discovered that the cable had been disconnected and the internet didn’t work.  I called Time Warner and they sent someone out, and when the guy got here and connected everything he said “I’m sorry we have idiots working for us.”

Both of these situations were really annoying, because the people at the website aren’t communicating with the actual people on the ground.  This whole world wide web thing is not new, and its primary purpose is, after all, to be a communication tool.  Both of the situations shouldn’t have happened.