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Traffic

There’s some sort of machismo tied to how awful the traffic is in your city. Who doesn’t look on the ten worst traffic spots in the US with a little bit of pride when their city is mentioned, or disappointment when it isn’t? I am here to tell Atlantans that I’ve seen worse traffic than the usual downtown connector clusterfuck. I’ve seen worse traffic than DC’s beltway bridgelock. The city that has them both easily topped is Boston, and I say this solely on the basis of a few hours as a pedestrian in that fine city.

But Atlantans are a special breed of driver. Compared to Virginians, anyway, who — get this — obey most of the traffic laws. Atlanta is one of the few places where you can do 25 over the speed limit in the next-to-rightmost lane of an eight lane highway and get passed on the right by a tractor-trailer. So I got the use of my Dad’s truck this weekend. It’s a Dodge Dakota. Dakota: ten tons of bone crunching, car-crushing madness. I am not very confident piloting this behemoth, as from the height of the cab I can barely make out the ant-like vehicles in the neighboring lanes. But as I drive the old reflexes come back. Before the evening was through, I would get honked at, drive on the wrong side of the yellow line, and blare my own horn at some unsuspecting jerk. It felt good.

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Atlanta

Forgot to mention that I’m going back home this weekend. Anyone who wants to hook up on Thursday or Friday drop me a line. Holla!

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2LAME4U

A few things I have learned from driving in a state with a crazy high number of personalized license plates:

  • Just in case people can’t recognize the make and model of your car, the license plate is a great place for a helpful reminder. Oh, it’s an M3, I couldn’t tell from the branding trim all over your ride! (Yes, someone has YUGO.) Include the color too; you never know when someone might be colorblind.
  • People who have QT, HOT T, or SXC somewhere in their license plate aren’t.
  • I still don’t know what PIXPOO means, nor do I really want to.
  • There are lots of assholes on the road. Not that that has anything to do with license plates, just saying.

I think there should be a subversive movement of low self-esteem license plates. Put out your basic insecurities for all to see. Instead of QT, why not SO FUGLY? IM DUMB? Or, if you are quite secure in yourself, let people know just how much: HUGE EGO. All of these plates are available right now in the state of Virginia!

Make your own State of Virginia license plate.

Plates that won’t make the cut.

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Nonexistent comment

I have a few things in the hopper to post about, but I am really tired and lazy these days. So today I’ll just pretend to be writing in the nonexistent comments section of Ryan’s blog and say that the reason you can’t vote online yet is because it is a ridiculously bad idea. When the robots elect themselves, you’ll see.

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Sun Microsystems suck

Can we start over and design the internet so that not everything in the world breaks when there is no reverse DNS?

Anyone else remember when a lame radio show about slashdot was called Geeks in Space? Oh, but I guess since GiS predated the iPod it didn’t have quite the same caché as its flat-white podcast brethren.

This whole word-coinage thing is getting out of hand. Every day some “blogger” “podcasts” “mashups” while “wardriving,” or worse, “warviewing.” WTF? Back in my day we only had thirty-seven words. We would have had thirty-eight but the Kaiser stole our word “twenty.”

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Broke

What a weekend it has been. I left Thursday for some gambling action in AC and to send my buddy Scott off on a life of marriage. We arrived at the Borgata around 10pm, and hit the poker room where everyone else was already “flopping nuts” as they say. I signed up for a $3/$6 table and got my $140 in chips, then sat down when my name was called. First hand: pocket tens which matched up for a set on the flop. The turn made a pair on the board so I had my full house and took it to the bank. Unfortunately, that would not be a sign of luck to come. By the end of the night, I came back from a deficit to be just $4 short of what I started with, not too bad.

Friday was the day I decided that gambling is not for me. I hit a long string of 2s and 3s at the blackjack table while everyone else hit it big. I left after I had met about half of my pre-set loss limit. Then came back, to lose another third. After that, I went for a swim.

The Borgata is a nice hotel. The showers are all marble, the elevators play West Side Story on a loop, and music is piped into the heated pool, so that you can listen to it underwater.

I blew the rest of my money Friday night on more poker in a boring 2/4 game. In all it was a good time; I just think two days is a little much to spend in a casino and it would’ve been nice if the weather had been good enough to go outside. Never went to bed before 3, and I was always the first.

Saturday I returned, caught up on sleep a bit, then headed to Joe & Jes’ for a cookout. Played DDR and Karaoke R. My singing/dancing careers are about to take off.

Last night Angeline came down this way for dinner. It appears we are back together again, which is good, though not without a tiny bit of anxiety. Who didn’t see this coming besides me?

Today, I should’ve attended work again, but I had to wait for Ikea to drop off my new kitchen in flat box form. They finished up about 2pm and I figured commuting 3 hours to work two hours was pretty pointless. So I stayed here, made spaghetti and finished up my HDTV wiring without cutting any more holes in the wall.

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Wormy

This is one of the most interesting papers I’ve seen. Some researchers investigated the Witty worm. They decoded the random number generator used by the worm for finding new hosts, and managed to figure out all sorts of things like how many disks a compromised host had, initially targeted hosts, even the machine that injected the worm into the internet. Ed Felten’s description. One of those guys is from G-Tech.

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Book

I just finished reading The Dew Breaker. It was one of those books I just randomly picked up off the table at Borders, on the authority of some probably made-up award stamped on the cover. But it was a good pick. Dandicat paints a vivid picture of war-torn Haiti while exploring the past of a former prison torturer. The book is short, so it doesn’t go as deep as, say, QB VII or even Mother Night, but it gets a lot of mileage for its brevity. One interesting thing is that Breaker is written as a set of short stories from various points of view that all stand on their own, but still tell a complete story together. This approach is at times annoying for those of us with bad short term memory, but overall it works. I’m looking forward to reading more of her books.

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Fire… good?

Ok, here’s the deal with the Darth Vader-Frankenstein thing. It’s not a case of bad acting, it’s an homage! You see, (Doctor) Palpitane took what used to be a person — Anakin — and created this hideous, evil, but in many ways just misunderstood creature. No longer human, but very much alive. It’s straight from the pages of Shelley! Or not.

Anyway, Been there, done that.

I’m still playing with electronics despite the recent near-frying of myself. I think once I get the parts in for my next creation, I’m going to etch a board, something I’ve never tried before. So I’ve started messing around with a few of the linux EDA tools, and so far I haven’t found one that doesn’t suck. Although I say this as someone who has had a fair amount of cockpit time in several $30k+ EDA tools, and really, they all suck too.

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Influenza

I just finished reading The Great Influenza, by John Barry. This is a fascinating look at the 1918 flu pandemic: the researchers who tried, and for the most part failed, to identify and fight the virus, the conditions that fostered the massive spread of contagion, and even the dangers of a wartime propaganda machine. There are implications for today, of course, as avian flu H5N1 continues to infect humans and may adapt to us at any time. To the author’s credit, though, there is not a lot of fear mongering, just a brief few pages in the end about the possible looming pandemic and what steps we may take to limit its death toll. The only thing I didn’t like in the book was the author’s insistence on foreshadowing while unraveling the story, in the style of VH1’s Behind the Music. After the break, we will see how Lewis’ failure to isolate the influenza virus marked a downward slide from which he would never return. But in all, it’s well worth a read.