Update:
Category: Daily Life
Ramblings, often stream of conscious, journaling the events of my life.
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Take THAT you evil code!
Yes! I have been fighting a horrid coding problem and the code just lost! I beat it! I mean this is the type of problem that makes you have bald spots and want to give up programming for something less painful like digging latrines in third countries. This is like I’ve been trying to build a car engine but everything is in metric and all my tools are SAE and the client doesn’t care about the engine but really wants to know why the paint isn’t on the car yet. Oh how I want to be beyond the paint and putting the last bit of polish on the application. Today I should be able to make much progress. Oh wait, no I have to be at the body shop by 8am! Guess my workday will begin at 10am. How frustrating!
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Bust’d
So I’m walking out of Walmart to the car and I see this woman approaching. I’m staring at her and staring at her and staring at her and staring at her when suddenly it occurs to me that her shirt has words on it. The words read, "KEEP STARING!" No, I don’t know what her face looked like.
Update: My wife actually asked, "were you really staring at that woman?" and I had to explain, "It’s difficult not to stare when something is covering up the entire horizon!"
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Allow digital billboards with caveat
Give the city state or county the ability to push messages to the billboards.
Mobile post sent by djuggler using Utterz.Replies. mp3
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Don’t yield right of way
Safe driving is predictable driving. Right of way establishes rules for predictability.
Mobile post sent by djuggler using Utterz.Replies. mp3
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Your misfortune brings our fortune
I just got solicited by an honest to goodness ambulance chaser! They had their phone number as "private" and even introduced themselves in such a deceptive away as to imply that they might be with one of the insurance companies. I should have responded to her inquiry about my well being with "I’m dead! I saw the light and I just couldn’t go yet. Now I’m stuck! Help me! My family can’t hear me when I talk to them and they look right through me. I can’t touch them. Help me cross over! I don’t belong here!"
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I-40 is closed! Stay at home!
Gas is now more expensive than milk and I am tempted to see if my van runs better on whole or 2%.
That’s right! Interstate 40 is closed at downtown Knoxville for 14 months! This could be reason enough for me to stay at home. I highly encourage telecommuting and shopping from home
. I wonder if we could use our webcam for dog school and karate classes?
Traffic Cameras provided by TDOT SmartWay (per linking policy)
View the many other cameras.I-40 runs the width of the United States starting in my birth town of Wilmington, North Carolina and running all the way to Barstow, California with the most miles of I-40 running through Tennessee. When I lived in Germantown, Tennessee (Memphis) I-40 had a peculiarity, it dead ended at the Memphis Zoo (specifically Overton Park). A roughened road would audibly warn you that the Interstate was coming to a stop and suddenly you were at a traffic light. You’d travel a few blocks on local roads then get back on the interstate again. I even remember discussion of running a tunnel under the zoo. Apparently the northern loop of I-240 (the Memphis bypass) has now been redesignated as I-40.
In Memphis, I-40 was originally intended to go through the city’s Overton Park toward downtown. Several miles of interstate were actually built within the I-240 loop; this portion of highway still exists and is in regular use as Sam Cooper Boulevard, reaching the eastern end of Chickasaw Country Club. Environmentalist opposition, combined with a victory in the United States Supreme Court by opponents of the Overton Park route … forced abandonment of the original plans, and the road never reached the park. For over 20 years, I-40 signage existed on the dead-end route toward Overton Park. Eventually, the northern portion of the I-240 loop was redesignated as I-40. [Source, Wikipedia]
I remember I-40 ending at Raleigh, North Carolina. It took 4 hours to drive a two lane road the rest of the way to Wilmington. In the 1980s, I-40 was extended all the way to Wilmington, that travel time is cut in half. I remember using those 2 extra hours as an excuse to not visit my grandparents.
Thanks to the interstate highway system, it is now possible to travel from coast to coast without seeing anything. [Source, Wikipedia, Charles Kuralt]
Les Jones has wonderful pictures of I-40’s construction through Knoxville in the 60s! The photos are out west toward West Hills and Lovell but they are fascinating to see this monstrosity of concrete plowing through people’s farms. I found the pictures intriguing in considering what structures were at the junctions then and now. Redmondkr, in a Knoxviews comment, provided a wonderful areal photograph he took in the 70s which is in sharp comparison to how malfunction junction appears in today’s GoogleMaps.
This Saturday our family will experience the SmartFix as we have to travel out Strawberry Plains way for dog school. I am sure we will Twitter, Flickr, and Utterz our experience the whole way! Knoxviews calls this SmartFIX40: The Apocalypse. So far the TDOT traffic cameras don’t show traffic as that bad.
If you are interested in saving the latest wilderness of the Southeast, dislike seeing needless billions of dollars spent, and want to make a difference, please visit stopi-3.org!
Update: Read what others are saying about Smartfix40!
