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.

I’m thinking about implementing tags on this site, but I’m curious if anyone ever actually uses tags when visiting small sites.  The only time I use them is on a large blog like Joystiq, which publishes dozens of posts per day, far more than I care to read.  But maybe everyone else uses them and I’m just behind the times?  As far as I can tell, on a site like mine the only purpose would be to quickly find other posts similar to the one you just read.  A search feature would help in that regard too, and I’ve thought about using ZendSearch because it looks really easy to use.  But I just haven’t bothered to sit down and figure it out.

If I do implement tags, would I really need a tag cloud?  I happen to find them only slightly more useful than they are aesthetically pleasing.  And like I said, for a site like mine you probably wouldn’t use the tag cloud much.  But again, maybe I’m just behind the times?  Like when I launched this site and didn’t have an RSS feed for like six months because feeds are for hippies.  Then I started using feeds and decided I needed one too.

I went to a new Thai restaurant with some people from work yesterday, and I took a business card as I was paying:

I’m not sure what that means.  My theory is that a non-native speaker meant to write something like “premier” instead of “first.”

Any other theories?

What does etiquette dictate that one do when someone uses the n-word in conversation?  When we were at the police station recently, the other couple there was present when the guys were brought in, and they mentioned to us more than once that the guys were a bunch of “stupid niggers.”  Another time a coworker (at another job) was talking about when he was in the Marines going after some “sand niggers.”  It surprises me that some people still think and talk this way, so I don’t know how to react.  I imagine most people wouldn’t say anything but would feel extremely uneasy..  At least, that’s how I what I did.  Is there a more appropriate reaction?

Jim: What did you just call me?
Huck Griffin: I thought that was your name.
Jim: That is our word! You have no right to use it!
Huck Griffin: Hey hey hey, I’m cool, I’m cool, no problem!
...
Huck Griffin: So, could you pass me the oar, n-word Jim?
Jim: Thank you.

--The Family Guy

I have a couple of unrelated topics to discuss today...

I’ve made several little updates to my website lately, most of which I have mentioned on the homepage.  Most recently I’ve given the photos page a new feature, where each directory now has a thumbnail, made up of four photos beneath it.  I’m still not totally pleased with the way it looks, and part of the problem is the dark background.  I got the inspiration from this article, which produces some impressive results.  Only problem with that method is that the height of the thumbnails will depend on the images involved, and I wanted them to be all the same size.  I may just get over that, or write some code to crop the images.  I’ve also encountered a problem where PHP crashes if I try to generate too many images at once.  I think I know what the problem is, and in C++ I’d just use a pointer and be done with it, but I don’t know that PHP has those.

Firefox has been crashing a lot for me since the last patch, usually when I load several pages with Flash ads.  Penny Arcade and Joystiq in particular would consistently crash Firefox.  Has anyone else had this problem?  It doesn’t seem to happen for me at home, but happens a lot at work.  The only two differences between home and work are: 1) I leave my Firefox session open for about a week at a time, so that it will remain the first icon on my taskbar and so that I won’t have to reenter a bunch of passwords; and 2) I am going through a proxy server at work.  I tried updating my flash player but that didn’t do anything.  I did find an extension called Flashblock, which (you’d never guess this from the name) blocks flash content.  Since I’ve used it I haven’t had any problems.  I’d recommend it even if you’re not having problems.

One last question—does anyone have any recommendations for video editing/DVD making in Windows?  I’d like to be able to create simple menus, just a jpeg in the background and a list of video clips to jump to.  Nothing fancy really.  I have just never gotten around to transferring our videos from the wedding and Hawaii to DVD, since my old PC just didn’t have the power to do it.  I’ve used Adobe Premiere before, but I wasn’t very impressed by it.  Any other suggestions?

Well I’ve been doing this updates-every-Monday-and-Thursday thing for nearly two months now, and traffic to my site seems to have actually slowed down.  Of course I’m judging traffic by number of comments, so this could also have to do with the most frequent commenter being pretty busy lately.  There are still a lot of lurkers, because when I was at the beach for a week, traffic (as in, page views and bytes transferred) did not decrease by as much as I had expected (i.e., I do not account for the majority of page views on my own site).

So are two posts a week too much?  Should I just go back to posting whenever I feel like it?  I’m thinking I’ll keep posting on Mondays, but only post on Thursdays when I have something worth saying.  And of course I’ll omit my post on the occasion that Stephanie posts something beforehand.

When I saw the trailer for the new Superman movie this weekend, I realized that I can’t name a single Superman bad guy besides Lex Luther.  There had to be others, right?  I vaguely remember that the guy who killed Superman was some monster with a kryptonite skeleton or something like that, but nothing else.  And yes, I could just look Superman up on Wikipedia, but what fun would that be?  (on a side note, is there a verb form of Wikipedia, like Google?  Could one say “go wiki/wikify Superman” or something like that?).  I guess the reason I don’t know is that there weren’t any Superman cartoons that I watched growing up, unlike Batman, X-Men, and GI Joe.

Without looking it up, can anyone name any Superman villains besides Lex Luther?

if I go crazy then will you still call me Superman?

It’s no secret that my blog has a huge fanbase in the Olympic snowboarding community.  And by huge I mean nonexistent.  That’s what she said!  Anyway I was watching snowboarding the other night, and noticed that all the snowboarders wear really baggy clothes, and I can’t figure out why.  I mean in every other sport I’ve seen except figure skating and curling the athletes wear those spandex things for aerodynamics (even cross-country skiers).  It seems like being an aerodynamic snowboarder would allow you to get more air in the stunt events, and it would allow you to go faster (especially important in the snowboard cross, I’d think).  I have a few theories as to why they wear baggy clothes:

1. Snowboarding has its roots in skateboarding, where baggy clothes serve a purpose.  When you fall and slide along the pavement while trying to skateboard down the huge hill near your house, the baggy clothes help to keep you from getting as messed up as you would have otherwise.  Maybe the sport is so young that they are still wearing the vestigial baggy clothes?

2. Snowboarding is a sport that the cool kids are into, and spandex is totally uncool.  I think this is a large part of it.

3. Maybe the added resistance of baggy clothes helps them do tricks easier?  This still wouldn’t explain why they wear them in the snowboard cross.

Anyone know of a good reason for snowboarders to wear the baggy clothes, other than aesthetics?  My guess is that eventually some European will race in the spandex stuff, and finally start beating some Americans (since we’re dominationing the sport), and then everyone will start snowboarding in the disturbingly anatomically revealing spandex.

If the subject of this post was a little too cryptic for you, it’s my pseudo-enigmatic way of saying “taxes.”  Does anyone know much about doing taxes?  I know it’s possible to do your own taxes, but... is it hard?  I mean, I got an A in three calculuses (calculi?), I should be able to handle it, right?  My parents used an accountant as far back as I remember, but my dad also owns his own business and so his taxes were a bit more complicated.  Mine should be pretty simple, I just have one income source, and the only deduction is the money I tithe to the church I guess.  Oh and I’m married, and supposedly one of the things George W. did before he started bombing the middle east was to get rid of the so-called “marriage tax.”  But I don’t know what that means or if it actually changed anything or if it was just a talking point.  I guess my biggest concern about doing it myself would be that I might do it wrong and get sent to jail for tax evasion or something when it was really just tax ignorance.  I’d also be afraid that I’m missing some refunds I could apply for or deductions I could take that would save me more money than an accountant charges.

Any comments from the audience?