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eftychia at 01:00am on 2006-07-24 under life in baltimore, questions, randomness, state of d'glennYou know those little thingies that attach to keychain laser pointers to make them throw a pointing hand or an arrow or a heart or a star instead of just a dot? Do any of y'all have the means to make me one that shows the words "TOO LOUD"? I really want to be able to project that phrase onto the windows of the subwoofer-equipped cars that stop at the traffic light.
My weekend was a matter of repeatedly lowering expectations / plans to try to match what my body was up for, and never getting the bar low enough. To explain in more detail, and especially to describe how I feel about it, would constitute whining, so I'll just type
and be done with that much of it until I'm actually in a mood to whine.#include <whines/fibro.h>
When I was younger and thinking about "when I grow up", I took it for granted that by the time I reached my current age I'd be married and have children -- after all, that's how it went for my nearest role-models, my parents. A little older, I started really thinking about it instead of just assuming that was How Life Worked, and realized that was something that I honestly did want. Several years ago I realized that a knack for falling in love with women who didn't want children, combined with rather bleak long-term financial prospects and having let a decade or so more time go by without paying attention to how quickly the years were moving, meant that it's unlikely that I'll ever have children of my own after all. (And let's see, I'd be how old when they reached high school ...) Sometimes I'm okay with that; sometimes thinking about it really sucks.
Tonight a thought struck me that made me wonder whether hypothetical children would be better off not having me as a parent anyhow ... when I realized that I wouldn't be able to resist teaching them the Alphabet Song to the tune of Horses Bransle instead of the tune of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. But I wonder whether I can still inflict that on one of my nephews ... <laugh style="evil" genre="melodrama">
(This thought came from thinking about some experts on the telly talking about insufficient hand-washing, and how humming the Alphabet Song twice through took the right amount of time to be safely sanitary ... and then thinking that there are tunes the right number of beats that are more fun to have going through one's head while washing one's hands.)
A couple of days ago a bucket truck and a pickup with a big
stepladder (really really big stepladder) and the name of a
lighting contractor on the side pulled up on either side of
the intersection near my house and set out orange cones. There
was some yelling back and forth, and boxes in the bed of the
pickup being sliced open, and somebody holding the ladder
steady for someone else, and then I went and practiced the
drums for a little while. Now the 'walk' signals and the green
lights are OHMIGODPAINFULLY
If they did switch to LEDs, I wonder how much that cost to do, and how long it takes for the LEDs to pay for themselves in reduced electricity and reduced maintenance. I wonder, but not quite enough to crawl through Google searching for the answer.
Blood test tomorrow. A fasting one (cholesterol). I think I ate enough at dinner to avoid being really uncomfortable twelve hours later, without really pigging out.
Hmm. Schlock Mercenary has been loading for several minutes and hasn't finished yet. Time to reboot Windows. (It's not a connection problem, 'cause the Linux machine in the other bedroom still acts like it's on broadband, and an FTP download was going at faster than the speed my ISP is billing me for. So the problem must be that I'm using more than 250M of (virtual) memory (the machine has 96M of physical RAM), which seems to be the point at which Opera starts to crawl. When it gets like this, closing windows doesn't seem to help much but rebooting and reloading the same set of pages does make it snappy again for a while; this suggests a memory leak. (Quitting and restarting Opera helps, but not as much as rebooting the machine does.) Memory leaks annoy me, because gosh darn it, they really Just Shouldn't Happen. Oh well, it's been several days since the last reboot. (If I can restrain myself from having so much open at once, performance remains acceptable a lot longer. Lately I've got a bunch of "gee, I really want to think about this a lot more carefully and respond / quote / link to it later" pages open that I keep not getting around to Dealing With. If I bookmark 'em & close 'em, "out of sight, out of mind" takes over and I never get back to them. I need to update the scheduler for my brain's OS -- that's probably a big download; maybe I should install Bittorrent.)
No family for me either
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evidence that I'm an alien or something.
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According to an January 2000 EPA Report (pdf) on LED lights:
Also, from the same source "LED traffic signals are estimated to last 5-10 years before they must be replaced, compared with 1 to 2 years for
incandescents."
At the time of that report, the green ones were not cost-effective in most places; I presume that manufacturing costs are now lower and electricity costs higher (which probably also means the payback time on the reds is now shorter.)
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And the problem with this is?
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Unfortunately I think that's the effect they're going for; they'd probably just crank it up and smirk at you. :-/
My wife's teacher had an "interesting" solution: an old open-topped Jeep he had wedged a nice stereo system into. Pulling up to a stoplight with a boomba-chucka car going, he'd lean over, crank it to 11, and BLOW THEIR DOORS OFF with, IIRC, Flight of the Valkyries. More than one surprised look. Not sure if it helped the noise pollution, but at least he had fun.
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If I just shine a plain laser pointer out my bedroom window, sometimes they turn the volume down because they suddenly realize there's another consciousness in the area -- I'm figuring those are the ones who are just thoughtless rather than intending to annoy -- or because they see it as a threat and want to use all their senses to try to figure out where I am -- in which case I still get some relief from the noise. But I figure a bunch probably think it's just some jackass playing with a laser at random, and I'd like to be able to make it clear that I'm attempting to communicate a message, not just annoy. Plus, if any of them sic the police on my and say I tried to blind them or something, having thrown text instead of a single dot will probably weigh heavily in my favour.
I mostly want to reach the thoughtless ones and drive home the point that they're driving through a residential area, where at 2AM a number of people are attempting to sleep, and that the sound they crank up in their car doesn't magically stay confined to their car. If they just forgot to turn down after getting off the Interstate, or they're driving home from a loud club and didn't realize how loud their stereo was, I can shame them. The ones doing it on purpose are already beyond hope of being reached by anything other than violence, and the police might object to my running out into the street with a sword.
If they crank it up louder, well, at that point I'm already bothered enough to have gotten out of bed, and eventually the traffic light will turn green. If they're parked (as happens occasionally), I can ring the police with a noise complaint.
[Sorry about the incomplete copy of this in your mailbox (if you have emailed comments turned on) -- Perrine sat on the keyboard and managed to do so just wrong. Argh.]
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You need a session saver. If you want to try Firefox, there's an extension that will remember your open browser windows, those windows' tabs, and each tabs' contents, scroll position, and history. (You can save multiple sessions and load them selectively. And it can recover your session from a browser or system crash.)
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Used to be I really hated having to reboot because I had to bookmark everything I wanted back individually, which took forever if the system was already thrashing. Now it's an annoyance but not su much of a chore.
The thing is, I've now also got a bunch of saved sessions waiting for me to remember to get back to them at a time when I don't already have a buttload of stuff already open, just like the bookmarks and text files full of "not done with this, come back when I'm feeling organized" links. So saving my current state and closing everything to free up RAM is approximately as useful as bookmarking it all to get back to (different advantages and disadvantages; a wash all together I think, unless a lot of the pages I'm saving are long enough to really need the scroll positions stored). Note that if I manage to upgrade my own {mental processes|habits|organizational skills}, these browser tools will suddenly become marvelously useful.
While I was wandering around,
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And Mozart's "Theme and Variations" (K265).
Wiki gives a few more references.
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The green LED problem is subtler. The green LEDs Are brighter than the old ones, but Not as much so as the newer reds. They Look brighter because your eyes are Much more sensitive to green And to relative intensity in that range. So they are brighter, but they also look More ~brighter~. Also, the red LED traffic lights are still using the ~older (ie., cheaper) middling brightness LEDs. The newest ~really powerful ones would be blinding people at the same levels of wattage as the old ones use. OTOH, for the Vast majority of the populace, their red sensitivity is poor to low and even blue isn't seen terribly well.
Yellow and red LEDs have been cost-effective as incandescent replacements in public fixtures for years, but the greens only in the last year or two that I'm aware of. Even the blue- and white LEDs are coming down in price, finally. Indoor lighting with LEDs is beginning to take off in Europe and Japan. Maybe here in a year or three?