Friday, August 22, 2008
Too many lines
In California there are carpool lanes, often separated from the rest of the freeway by double yellow lines with a solid white line on the inside. So if you were driving in the carpool lane, you’d see the white line first, then the yellow. My brother-in-law, who prides himself on knowing everything, told me awhile back that this means drivers are allowed to leave the carpool lane, but not allowed to enter. This made sense to me, because why else would that solid white line be there?
Recently a coworker was telling me differently, that you are not allowed to cross the double yellow lines at all. Somebody was obviously wrong. It took a great deal of research to find the answer. Plenty of material said yellow lines are not meant to be crossed, but nothing explained the purpose of the white line. Finally I found this:
Section 21460 Double Lines
The purpose of the solid-white single line on the inside of the double yellow lines on buffered HOV lanes is to permit vehicles to legally drive to the left of the double yellow lines as defined in the provisions of this section.
In earlier readings I understood that double yellow lines also signify the division between opposing sides of traffic. So technically it would be illegal to be driving in a carpool lane without that white line there.
That’s just stupid. Use double white lines instead. Duh.
Posted by
Geeky Dragon Girl on 08/22 at 02:02 PM
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Random Crap
Thursday, August 14, 2008
Windows Vista - It's good and yet it sucks?
I constantly hear two camps when it comes to Windows Vista: It either works well for you or it doesn’t. I couldn’t figure out the huge disparity until now. Perhaps this is common knowledge, but I never read it anywhere, so it’s my own personal observation…
Basically, it’s like this: Vista is great and fairly solid on machines that were designed to run it. Vista is an unstable dung heap on computers that were upgraded and not originally running Vista.
My laptop, which isn’t a year old yet, came with Vista on it, and I have yet to see it crash once. Well, it sort of froze during a shutdown once, but that’s it. Everything I’ve plugged into it (which admittedly isn’t much) has worked flawlessly and without the need for external drivers. Aside from having to re-learn where everything is in this operating system, I’ve been fairly happy with it. This was my first and only experience with Windows Vista at the time, and overall it was quite positive.
Enter my media center project. I upgraded my 7-year old Dell Dimension 4300 - gave it a faster processor, better graphics card, etc. You can read all about that in prevous posts. The last thing I did was install Vista onto it. Now, it doesn’t crash constantly, but it’s nowhere near as stable as when I had XP on it. The good thing is that the Media Center software (part of Vista Premium) works beautifully, and we are able to play Netflix streaming movies (which wouldn’t work with XP Media Center 2004 SP3). HOWEVER it seems to freeze a lot during the Netflix streaming. What the hell is Netflix doing that is causing so much grief with the latest OSes? Or maybe it’s my video card… that’s possible too. I’ve also seen Vista crash for no apparent reason from normal operations.
With all that going on, there’s no way this media center is going to replace my Tivo. So for now I just load movies into it and we use it as a movie repository as well as a Netflix streaming movie player. Later on I’m just going to go and buy a pre-built media center. It’ll save me the trouble of figuring out all the stupid things that go wrong when I’m trying to build it myself. It really is a time-suck, not to mention causes me to ramble on incessantly about the process on this blog.
To end on a positive note, I was surprised at how much more readable text is on the TV screen when using Windows Vista. On the same screen resolution using the same video card, it was barely readable in XP. It’s nice to do computer operations on it without having to get up and walk over to the monitor at the desk. At some point we can probably get rid of the monitor altogether.
Thursday, August 07, 2008
I rarely oversleep. Oops.
The bad thing about working from home only part of the week is those days you actually have to go in. For several years now I’ve gotten into the habit of waking up at the right time to get ready for work. I just don’t need an alarm clock. Apparently my body got used to waking up at the right time for working from home. At 8:40 I open my eyes and check my watch. Shit. I jump out of bed, waver a bit as my brain gets used to the idea of being upright, and start getting dressed. My honey, sweetheart that she is, goes to cook up an egg for me while I put on my shoes and rinse out my mouth real quick. I throw a box of cereal into a plastic bag and rush off. I love finger-combable short hair. A few rakes during the stoplights and I’m presentable. I think.
I was only 10 minutes late today. Not bad for oversleeping.
Tuesday, August 05, 2008
I love working from home, despite the tickets
The nice thing that has come out of all this is that my employer is willing to let me work from home Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays until I get my medical condition cleared up. Driving and general jouncing of my innards aggravates the discomfort and pain, so working from home is awwwesome. To add to the awesomeness is being able to wake up five minutes before I need to work and still being right on time. Unless you’re a lifeguard or a model, there are few other places where you get to work in your underwear.
The downside to this is that on Mondays they ticket everyone still parked on my street between 9 and 12 due to street cleaning. I totally forgot about this because I’m usually gone by then. Another $35 down the drain…
Posted by
Geeky Dragon Girl on 08/05 at 10:08 AM
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Office Hijinks
