twtlang: un service de traduction en utilisant Twitter et Google.

I made another Twit­ter… thing. In the tra­di­tion of twt­dict, I give you: twt­lang. What does twt­lang do? I’m glad you asked.

twt­lang mashes up Twit­ter and the Google Trans­late ser­vice. It works pretty much the same way twt­dict does. Send it a phrase, tell it what lan­guage you want it in, and it will send back the trans­la­tion, if it can.

Since a sen­tence is a lit­tle more neb­u­lous than a sin­gle word, I had to change the way the ser­vice parses the tweets. The struc­ture is a lit­tle more impor­tant. Basi­cally, they have to be sent like this:

@twtlang “I would like this in French, please.” fr 

You’ll get this in a Direct Message:

Je voudrais que cela en français, s’il vous plaît. 

If you tack a @ on the end, you’ll get an @reply instead, just like twtdict.

Obvi­ously there are some lim­i­ta­tions. For one, the Google trans­late ser­vice will detect what lan­guage the request is in, so I only needed to spec­ify the tar­get lan­guage. Unfor­tu­nately, it doesn’t do so well on shorter phrases. I requested a Ger­man trans­la­tion of “shit” and all I got back was “shit.” (Just tried with French and it worked. Merde.) It seems to work bet­ter with longer phrases. I thought about mak­ing a way to spec­ify the ini­tial lan­guage but didn’t want to get too cryp­tic or “code-y” (as in, @twtlang “trans­late this” en>fr). Or maybe I was just lazy. I don’t know. I might change it if necessary.

Also, it does noth­ing for pro­nun­ci­a­tion. So if you want to know how to say “什么他妈的这是否说的？”, you’re on your own. I sup­pose if you are actu­ally in China, you could just show it to some­one, if your phone will dis­play the char­ac­ters. Mine doesn’t dis­play them in text mes­sages. Haven’t tried Opera mobile yet.

Like twt­dict, the ser­vice is based on a cron job that runs every 5 min­utes, to keep from get­ting black­listed by Twit­ter. Also like twt­dict, I’ll apply for whitelist­ing if necessary.

You can find a list of avail­able lan­guages on the twt­lang page. (Inter­est­ingly, if I request a full list of lan­guages from Google, Esperanto is listed, but it doesn’t work, and Esperanto is not listed in the drop down at the Google Trans­late site.) They’re pretty much the stan­dard coun­try codes, so you prob­a­bly already know most of the more com­mon ones.

I don’t really know why I made this, other than I thought it’d be inter­est­ing. I may get some use out of it this sum­mer when I head to Man­i­toulin Island, Ontario, Canada for my grandmother’s 80^th birth­day. (She’s not Cana­dian. My fam­ily has a cabin on the island.) I haven’t been there in 14 or 15 years but I think there are some French-speaking Cana­di­ans in the near­est town. Maybe I can use this to ask where the bath­room is.

Où est la salle de bains?

twtdict, because I love words

I made some­thing recently. Some­thing I wasn’t sure any­one would really care about or use. I’m still not sure about that, actu­ally. But, it seems to be get­ting some pos­i­tive feed­back from those that have stum­bled across it. It’s called twt­dict.

Some­time in the past cou­ple of weeks I was read­ing in Hell’s Kitchen (yes, I read in the bar some­time. The white noise of a bar makes it easy to con­cen­trate) when I came across a word I was unfa­mil­iar with: sybaritic. I’ve since learned that it means “devoted to or marked by plea­sure and lux­ury.” At time though, I didn’t have access to a dic­tio­nary. I don’t have a smart­phone of any kind, so look­ing it up online was not an option. That may not be a big deal for some peo­ple, but, with­out toot­ing my vocab­u­laric horn too much, I don’t often run into words that I either don’t know or can’t rea­son out the def­i­n­i­tion for based on root and/or con­text. When I do, it makes me fur­row my brow and wish my mem­ory were bet­ter so I could look it up later.

That’s when it hit me: What if there was a way that I could tweet the word and have the def­i­n­i­tion sent back to me in a direct mes­sage? Could there be a ser­vice like that avail­able? If not, could I do it? Would any­one care? Why is the sky blue?

When I got home, I looked online for “twit­ter dic­tio­nary” and all I could find were actual Twit­ter dic­tio­nar­ies, lists of Twit­ter terms and trend­ing top­ics. First hur­dle crossed. If I did it, I wouldn’t be step­ping on anyone’s toes.

Next thing to fig­ure out was whether or not I could do it. I already had a domain and web­space, so that was easy. I looked around online and found a sim­ple Twit­ter class for access­ing the Twit­ter API. That part was easy. Next, I needed an API for a dic­tio­nary, to use to look up the word. This took a lit­tle longer. I found an arti­cle some­one say­ing Google had one, but it’d been long since updated with a “don’t use this API, it’s not actu­ally pub­lic” state­ment from Google. I found one for the Cam­bridge dic­tio­nary, but that wasn’t really an API per se, and tended to return a full HTML document.

Then I found Word­nik. They had an actual API. It’s still in alpha but it’s quick and it’s very easy to use. The rest was rel­a­tively easy, just a lot of pars­ing XML and slic­ing and dic­ing strings. Tweet a word, you’ll get a def­i­n­i­tion… most of the time.

There are still some issues. Some of it with my code, some with the Word­nik API. Cur­rently I grab the first def­i­n­i­tion returned by Word­nik. This isn’t always the best def­i­n­i­tion. Take “hope” for instance: n. A slop­ing plain between moun­tain ridges. Not quite the first thing you think of when you think of “hope.” Also, some words only return one def­i­n­i­tion when looked up by the API, or none at all. Word­nik is still work­ing on that end.

It’s not per­fect, but it works. For now. Should it take off and get pop­u­lar, I might run into black­list­ing issues with Twit­ter and/or Word­nik, so that will need to be addressed at some point. Still, it’s been a fun project and I’m def­i­nitely look­ing for­ward to con­tin­u­ing to refine it. And, with any luck, peo­ple out there will find it useful.

Hello again

Nigh on four months since the last time I updated this thing. Can’t say I’m sur­prised, really. I’m noto­ri­ous for start­ing a blog then either not really updat­ing it or doing so reg­u­larly at first, then slip­ping into irreg­u­larly, before finally falling to spo­radic to not at all.

I should change this.

I think part of the prob­lem is some­thing I’ve recently come to real­ize about myself: I can only have two hob­bies at once, and one of them is always play­ing gui­tar. Stay with me here.

I’ve been play­ing gui­tar for, oh, 14 or 15 years now. Offi­cially half my life. Clearly, that’s not going to stop any time soon, bar­ring any phys­i­cal rea­son (paral­y­sis, loss of finger/hand/arm in a tragic farm acci­dent, which is unlikely, con­sid­er­ing my cur­rent level of farm activ­ity; which is to say, none). When I went to Iraq, I left my gui­tar and went about 6 months before I just couldn’t take it any­more and ordered an acoustic gui­tar so cheap that ship­ping to the APO was $10 more than the price of the gui­tar itself. I still have that guitar.

So we have gui­tar play­ing. What’s my other hobby, you ask? Well, that varies. Which is part of the prob­lem. See, the whole “only two hob­bies at a time, one of which is gui­tar” rule was decided upon after I noticed this habit in myself. It was not arbi­trar­ily decided upon to help with my per­sonal time man­age­ment (which sucks, by the way). One day, I just noticed that my inter­ests change peri­od­i­cally and I only do that one thing for a period of time. Then, for no appar­ent rea­son, that activ­ity falls out of favor for me, and I move on to some­thing else or just start watch­ing a lot of movies.

Paint­ing, draw­ing, carv­ing wood, pro­gram­ming (in either a lan­guage I know or try­ing to learn a new one), pho­tog­ra­phy, lutherie, writ­ing. All of these are things that I have attempted, with vary­ing degrees of suc­cess, and sub­se­quently aban­doned. I will go back to them peri­od­i­cally and pick them back up, but so far noth­ing has even come close to touch­ing the tenure of play­ing guitar.

Cur­rently I’m think­ing of going back to writ­ing. I’m not sure I have enough patience for a novel, but short sto­ries might be doable. My prob­lem is sit­ting down and actu­ally doing it. We shall see how it goes.

The only other news is that I’m work­ing on a ser­vice that allows you to tweet a word and get the def­i­n­i­tion sent to you. I real­ized how this might be use­ful when I was read­ing at the bar and came across an unfa­mil­iar word. Not to toot my wordy horn, but that doesn’t hap­pen too often. At the time, though, I didn’t have a way to look up the def­i­n­i­tion. So I thought, “What if there was a way that I can tweet the word and have it sent to me in a direct mes­sage?” The direct mes­sage is impor­tant because I don’t have one of those fancy smart phones and I do every­thing via text mes­sage. My Twit­ter account (@hallowdmachine, if you’re inter­ested) is set so DMs are sent to my phone in a text mes­sage. So, I’m work­ing on that. I hope it will work like I want it to. The details are for another post. As is my expe­ri­ence last night see­ing Lucero at the Jew­ish Mother.

Today the Moon, Tomorrow the Sun clock

There’s a band that I really enjoy with a rather cum­ber­some name: Today the Moon, Tomor­row the Sun. They’re kind of indie elec­tro fuzz dance party rock. Or some­thing like that. They’re from the Atlanta, Geor­gia area but do make trips up the east coast, which is how I was for­tu­nate enough to see them. You should visit their site, buy their stuff, and check their sched­ule to see if they’re com­ing to a town near you. It’ll be a good time. Plus, they’re just really nice people.

When I first started these clocks, one of the first ideas I had was to make a pair of clocks based on the name of the band. I can’t say why, really. I feel like try­ing to under­stand my cre­ative process would either kill it or ren­der me com­pletely insane, so I just go with it.

Today the Moon, Tomor­row the Sun

In the back­ground, you can see some of the tools of my trade: spray bot­tle, pen­cil, eraser, ink, ash tray… Acrylic on two 8“x10” can­vases. It started out as an acci­dent but I now claim full credit for hav­ing four stars and four clouds since there are four mem­bers in the band.

The moon side.

Mooooon. It’s not made of cheese.

Supah-stah

I can’t believe Fire­fox thinks “supah” and “stah” are spelled incorrectly.

To the sun side!

The sun’ll come out, tomor­row, tomorrow

Suu­u­u­u­uun. It’s not made of mac­a­roni and cheese, despite what it looks like.

Fluffy.

I’m pretty happy with how this turned out. It’s been a long, long time since I did a paint­ing in acrylics. It was a lot of fun. You can get a lot more tex­ture and lay­ers of color with them than you can with inks. Try to layer inks too much and they end up look­ing like mud.

Driving: Lights in the rain and four-way stop signs

As I men­tioned in my first post about dri­ving, I have a 40 mile com­mute to work. That’s one way. So, I drive about 400 miles a week just to and from work. Addi­tion­ally, my mom lives about 30 min­utes away and the house where I have band prac­tice is about 35 min­utes away. Because of that, I don’t usu­ally do too much dri­ving on the week­ends unless it’s to Mom’s or to band prac­tice, which is why I don’t get out to see many bands. If I can’t walk there, I’m prob­a­bly not going. But I digress.

The weather here in south-eastern Vir­ginia has been dark, cloudy, and misty lately. I haven’t seen a whole lot of actual coming-down-in-droplets rain, just a lot of mist­ing, spritz­ing driz­zle. And yet, for some rea­son, I’ve seen a lot of peo­ple dri­ving with­out turn­ing on their vehicle’s head­lights. In Vir­ginia, the law states, essen­tially, that if your wind­shield wipers are on, your head­lights should be on. That’s an easy thing to remem­ber. Now, I know noth­ing so triv­ial as a law will com­pel peo­ple to do some­thing so let me put it another way:

IF IT’S DARK, CLOUDY, AND MISTY OUT, AND YOU DON’T HAVE YOUR HEADLIGHTS ON, I CAN’T SEE YOU ASSHOLE.

Espe­cially if you’re dri­ving a dark col­ored car. I don’t care of you can see me, I need to see you. When it’s misty out, win­dows and mir­rors become dif­fi­cult to see out of. A lot of tiny, tiny drops obscure the view more than a lot of big drops, because big drops suc­cumb to grav­ity and slide down the win­dow or just even­tu­ally break up. The tiny drops deposited by mist don’t do that. They just sit there, which means I can’t see your shitty black and primer Civic. Turn your lights on.

(Small aside that has noth­ing to do with dri­ving: The woman in the next cube just asked, out loud, for any­one to answer, where the United King­dom is. Flabbergasted.)

Mov­ing on.

Four-way stop signs appar­ently require more intel­li­gence than turn­ing your head­lights on in the rain, sad to say. It’s a sim­ple premise, but it goes back to what I said about dri­vers being incon­sid­er­ate, although some­times they just don’t know what to do.

A four-way stop is “an inter­sec­tion sys­tem … where traf­fic approach­ing it from all direc­tions is required to stop before pro­ceed­ing through the inter­sec­tion.” Sim­ple enough. Most peo­ple know that you have to stop at a stop sign. What peo­ple seem to have a hard with is what to do when two or more peo­ple approach the four-way stop at the same time, or close to the same time. It is not, to use a phrase Katie finds humor­ous, rocket surgery.

Dri­vers should pro­ceed through the inter­sec­tion in the same order in which they approached it. If the dri­ver from the north arrives just before the dri­ver from the east, the dri­ver from the north goes first, fol­lowed by the dri­ver from the east. If the dri­ver from the east is still approach­ing but hasn’t reached the inter­sec­tion yet (let’s say they’re still a car length or so away), the dri­ver from the north does not have to wait until they get there. It is safe to assume the dri­ver from the east will, indeed, stop at the stop sign. If they don’t and they hit you, the speeds should be slow enough that there will be no injuries and they you can sue them for all they’ve got, as is the Amer­i­can way. You should be able to tell if they are going fast enough to cause seri­ous dam­age and injuries, in which case you wait for them to pass then honk your horn and give them the fin­ger, as is the Amer­i­can way.

Now, in the case that a dri­ver from the west is turn­ing south at the same time a dri­ver from the south is approach­ing, intend­ing to pro­ceed straight, the dri­ver from the west does not have to wait for the dri­ver from the south and vice versa. A dri­ver mak­ing a right turn has noth­ing to fear from a dri­ver com­ing from the direc­tion in which they are turn­ing. Nor does the dri­ver going straight have any­thing to fear from a dri­ver mak­ing a right turn, unless said dri­ver can­not make a smooth right turn and swerves into the other lane, at which time the dri­ver going straight can honk their horn and give them the fin­ger, as is the Amer­i­can way.

Lastly, in the case that four dri­vers approach the four-way stop and arrive all at the same time, they should all look at each other and pro­ceed safely through. This is not a Mex­i­can stand­off. Chances are, at least one per­son among the four is going to be rea­son­able enough to wait for some­one else go, thus break­ing the sur­face ten­sion and allow­ing the rest to flow through. But please, do not assume this is so, because chances are just as likely that one per­son in the group believes they are enti­tled by the heav­ens to always pro­ceed through a four-way stop first. It should be cus­tom­ary for every­one to stop, look at each other, then, almost psy­chi­cally, come a con­sen­sus as to who will go first. If it is not you, do not honk your horn and flip some­one off, as is the Amer­i­can way. Just be patient. What­ever you’re try­ing to get to can wait the extra ten sec­onds it takes for you to have a lit­tle patience and get through the inter­sec­tion safely and with as lit­tle rise to your blood pres­sure or mid­dle fin­ger as possible.

(While proof-reading this, I real­ize I might come across as an ass­hole. I’m not, really. Ask any­one, I’m prob­a­bly one of the nicest peo­ple you’ll meet. I just really get fed up by what I see on the road. Self­ish, obliv­i­ous peo­ple tool­ing around in giant death machines. The fact that Amer­i­cans are in love with (but are finally start­ing to fall out of love with) HUGE vehi­cles only exac­er­bates the issue. The rules of safe, con­sid­er­ate dri­ving are not hard to learn and fol­low, but peo­ple get too absorbed in their own late­ness or lattes or long dis­tance phone calls to pay atten­tion to what’s going on around them. I will admit that I get angry while dri­ving but like to think I don’t drive angry. I just yell and curse and ges­tic­u­late a lot.)

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Word count: 1077 | Sen­tences: 59 | Fog: 10.0 | Kin­caid: 7.2 | Flesch: 76

What do I call this thing?

I don’t like the word “blog.” There’s some­thing about the com­bi­na­tion of the let­ters b, l, o, and g, and the way they feel when I say it that just puts me off. Blog. Bloooooooog. Sounds like some­one retch­ing. Online vom­it­ing. (Which is an accu­rate descrip­tion of some of them, I sup­pose.) More than that, what I’m doing here is not what I think of when I hear the word.

I’ve been “online” for a long time. Our first home com­puter was a 286 Mag­navox something-or-other, back when a 286 was the best you could get. My first online access was Prodigy and some BBS’s, fol­lowed by AOL. When the first web logs started show­ing up, they were lit­tle more than a col­lec­tion of links to other sites, with maybe some com­men­tary, but mainly links. And ter­ri­ble designs, but that’s another mat­ter. So, when I think about a “blog,” I pic­ture a bunch of short entries with links to other blogs or funny pic­tures of cats or ani­mated .gifs that take for­ever to load…

That’s not what I do here. At least, not yet. I may devolve into that at some point, but I’m try­ing to stay away from it. I use Twit­ter for my inter­net regur­gi­tat­ing. I’m reminded now of Diary-X. In a world where blog­ging ser­vices were pop­ping up every­where, D-X wanted to focus on longer entries, much like a jour­nal. The max­i­mum num­ber of posts shown on the page at a time was exactly one (1), in the hopes that it would fos­ter a more insight­ful, well-read inter­net. I seem to be doing that, but with a more bloggy for­mat. I’m sure there’s a way to set Word­Press to dis­play only the most cur­rent entry, but I’d have to fig­ure out a way to add some nav­i­ga­tion links, and I think I’m too lazy to do so.

So, with all that super­flu­ous non­sense said, what do I call this? It’s not a blog (if only because I don’t want it to be a blog.) It’s not a blag. It’s not exactly a jour­nal and my inner 12 year old boy still thinks a diary is a girl thing. I could call it my “online pres­ence” but that’s hard to refer to casu­ally. “Check out my online pres­ence at hallowdmachine.com.” “Hey guys, I updated my O.P.” Nope, not going to work. “Web­site” or “site” could work, but it seems a bit gen­eral, not to men­tion any­thing “web” sounds so 1997. Hell, a lot of sites don’t even require the www. at the begin­ning of the URL any­more. “Domain” is even more gen­eral than “site.”

It’s time to turn to the inter­tubes, which is pretty meta. Ask­ing the inter­net what I should call my inter­net… thing. Sorry, I’m con­fus­ing myself. 

I Googled “another word for blog”. Let’s see what we have here.

This adver­tis­ing agency is call­ing it “Intel­li­gence”. Inter­est­ing, but a bit pre­ten­tious. I can’t guar­an­tee that every­thing I put up here will be intel­li­gent, or even mar­gin­ally clever.

This post, dated March 2007, details why one per­son doesn’t think jour­nal­ism columns should not be called blogs. No help there.

After that, Google just served up a bunch of hits that have “blog” and “another word” in the titles but aren’t “another word for blog.” Next, I tried search­ing for a syn­onym for blog.

Synonym.com only has an entry for blog as a verb, giv­ing me com­mu­ni­cate and inter­com­mu­ni­cate. Meh. Synonyms.net is even less help­ful. That’s not going to work.

It appears today is not the day that I coin a new inter­net word to describe what­ever it is I’m doing here. I’ll con­tinue to refer to this space gener­i­cally as “my site,” where I “write posts.” I will admit that blog is con­ve­nient, being both a noun and a verb at the same time. “I’m blog­ging on my blog” would be a very silly thing to say, however.

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Word count: 644 | Sen­tences: 65 | Fog: 7.7 | Kin­caid: 4.5 | Flesch: 80

Timewarp

See, here’s the thing. When I get going on a new art project, I tend to kind of churn them out. So, have another clock.

Let’s do the time warp again!

Fancy hands.

Spit, splat­ter, and whirl.

Time­warp

On Driving

I was going to write about the peo­ple that are mak­ing t-shirts that use Psalm 109:8 as an anti-Obama slo­gan, but the folks over at MetaFil­ter are pretty much say­ing most of what I would. Instead, I will write about driving.

I do not like driving.

The end.

Just kid­ding. Actu­ally, it’s not dri­ving that I dis­like, but dri­ving with other peo­ple on the road. It’s not nec­es­sar­ily that they’re bad dri­vers — although a lot of them are. It’s that more often than not, they’re incon­sid­er­ate dri­vers. First, a lit­tle background.

I live in Hamp­ton Roads, Vir­ginia. Some time ago, They (who­ever They are) started billing the area as “America’s First Region,” which sounds rather ridicu­lous to me, but since they did not seek my input, that’s what we have. This part of Vir­ginia, bor­dered by South Car­olina to the south, the Atlantic Ocean to the east, the Chesa­peake Bay to the north, and the rest of Vir­ginia to the west (yeah, not very imag­i­na­tive, but there’s noth­ing really sit­ting just the west that’s worth men­tion­ing), and being split by numer­ous rivers, creeks, canals, and water­ways, does not make travel around the region very easy. There are seven sep­a­rate cities, two of which are on a penin­sula formed by two rivers, and roughly 1300 square miles served by a sin­gle inter­state sys­tem. There are two major bridge-tunnels (three, if you count the Chesa­peake Bay-Bridge Tun­nel), two tun­nels, and numer­ous bridges, most of which cause a bot­tle neck because peo­ple don’t know how to merge or drive through a tun­nel with­out slow­ing down…

Okay, here is where I start to lose it. I wanted to write about this but wasn’t sure if I could muster the spit and vit­riol nec­es­sary to describe how I feel when I drive with these peo­ple. Or, that it would get out of hand. A tun­nel is a road with walls and a roof. There is no need to slow down. Also, when com­ing out of the tun­nel, you are going up hill. You need to press down on the accel­er­a­tor more because you will require more gas to coun­ter­act grav­ity. This is not rocket surgery.

…

At this point, I’m not even sure how to pro­ceed. Do I just let the rage flow out in a stream of red-tinted con­scious­ness that may or may not have any lit­er­ary merit? Do I present dri­ving tips in a clear, easy to read brochure-like for­mat? Do I sim­ply revert to all caps pro­fan­ity then post a YouTube video of a guy smash­ing his com­puter? That last one is prob­a­bly the least likely, although if I stew long enough I could end up feel­ing like it.

I just wish peo­ple out there would pay more atten­tion and be more con­sid­er­ate. Stop talk­ing or tex­ting on your cell phone, stop fix­ing your hair, stop look­ing for some­thing in the back seat, stop work­ing on your lap­top. Yes, I’ve seen that one before. There is no rea­son to race up to the end of the merge lane, swerv­ing around other cars who tak­ing advan­tage of an open spot, just so you can end up a half a dozen or so vehi­cles far­ther ahead. You know why traf­fic slows to a crawl when a busy road merges with the inter­state? Because peo­ple don’t know how to zipper.

Merg­ing should be like zip­ping up your coat. Look closely at a zip­per. I wouldn’t sug­gest your pants zip­per if you’re at work. Those indi­vid­ual teeth neatly and orderly come together, one from the left, one from the right, one by one, as you pull the tab up. That’s how merg­ing should go. That means the peo­ple enter­ing the high­way should take the first open­ing they see. Sim­i­larly, peo­ple already on the inter­state need to make room for some­one enter­ing. One by one, like a zip­per. There is no need to race up, or, just as bad, to be so obliv­i­ous that you run out of room before you real­ize it and have to get over. That is what causes some­one to slam on the brakes, requir­ing that peo­ple behind them do the same, lead­ing to con­ges­tion, if not an accident.

Along with the actual act of merg­ing, there’s some­thing else you should know. Those lanes that let you on an off the inter­states, the ones you call exits? They have another name, one that points to a dif­fer­ent pur­pose that peo­ple seem to for­get. Acceleration/Deceleration lanes. They are to be used for speed­ing up to and slow­ing down from inter­state speeds. As much as pos­si­ble. Yes, I know, some of them are too short to do so fully, but try to make the effort. And remem­ber, merg­ing onto the inter­state is some­thing that requires your full atten­tion. There’s a lot going on. You have to speed up, put your sig­nal on (AND FOR GOD’S SAKE, USE YOUR SIGNALS. THAT’S WHAT THEY ARE THERE FOR. TO SIGNAL, TO INDICATE YOUR INTENT TO MOVE TO THE RIGHT OR THE LEFT), check for peo­ple other peo­ple enter­ing or exit­ing the inter­state, increase your speed, move over safely, and adjust to the flow of traf­fic. That’s a lot. You can’t do all that safely and smoothly if you’re talk­ing on your phone. No, you can’t.

So that’s merg­ing. I went over the tun­nel prob­lem, briefly. Remem­ber, there is no rea­son to be afraid to drive through a tun­nel. You will not drown. I touched on the turn sig­nal issue. What else? Oh, speed. I don’t care if you drive fast. I don’t really care if you drive slow, although I wish you would at least go the speed limit. What I would really like is if you could pick a speed and hold it.

I drive with the cruise con­trol on pretty much all the time on the inter­state, unless there is traf­fic. It causes less fatigue in my legs, it saves on gas, and it pretty much makes dri­ving eas­ier all around. In fact, I would urge every­one else who also has cruise con­trol to use it. When you don’t, and you’re using your foot to main­tain your speed, you can get dis­tracted and let up, slow­ing your speed. Then you real­ize what’s going on, and give it more gas to get caught up. First, this uses extra gas. That push you give it to get back up to speed uses more gas than hold­ing your speed. Sec­ond, it pisses me off when I have to keep turn­ing off my cruise con­trol because you’re dri­ving from 60 down to 55 then back up again. I could pass you to get around it, but I don’t feel I should have to if you would pay atten­tion. Plus, that means I have to use more gas, and as some­one with a 40 mile com­mute, I try to save gas as much as pos­si­ble. So please, either use your cruise con­trol, or, if you don’t have it, try to pay atten­tion and hold your speed.

I think that’s about all I have to say. I’m proud of myself. I don’t think I used any pro­fan­ity and kept it pretty civil. There’s not much I can think of to men­tion, other than there’s no need to slow down when pass­ing a cop who already has some­one pulled over, and there is no rea­son to slow down when pass­ing an acci­dent because I know you’ve seen them before and gen­er­ally, it’s not that excit­ing any­way. If it’s that ter­ri­ble, you’ll see it on the news later so just keep driving.

I hope this has been an illu­mi­nat­ing pas­sage on mak­ing Hamp­ton Roads a safer, more enjoy­able place to drive.

(And if another SUV or crappy Civic tries to zoom up and cut me off in the merge lane again, I am going to start shank­ing motherfuckers.)

P.S.: I would like point out that yes, I know what I have described here will prob­a­bly not have any effect on the traf­fic sit­u­a­tion in Hamp­ton Roads. There are too many cars and not enough roads. We need more options, a third cross­ing, and bet­ter pub­lic trans­porta­tion. How­ever, this being my web­site, I can dream that if every dri­ver fol­lowed some of these steps, dri­ving would be a lit­tle more enjoy­able, and less like punch­ing your­self in the face with a hand­ful of car keys.

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Word count: 1382 | Sen­tences: 97 | Fog: 8.5 | Kin­caid: 5.7 | Flesch: 80

Time Is Money

Occa­sion­ally I make art. I may add pic­tures of other stuff I’ve done, but tonight, I present my lat­est project.

I have a hard time call­ing it a “piece”. Seems kind of pre­ten­tious. Anyway.

“Time is money.”

Clock in a 5″ x 7″ can­vas, with a penny, a nickel, and a dime at the 1, 5, and 10 o’clock posi­tions. Clever, huh? I just hope the hot glue hold­ing the coins on doesn’t give up the ghost one day.

Okay, so I need to work on the whole Word­Press file upload and dis­play. I’ll work it out tomorrow.

The next day…

After some finagling I got the pic­tures worked out well enough. The Word­Press sys­tem for upload­ing and adding images to a post is kind of cum­ber­some but I think I can get used to it. If you click on the images up there, you’ll be taken to the full size pic­ture, which is rather large, so be warned. My friend J sug­gested I work on inte­grat­ing Flickr and I might do just that.

Extrasocialness

I am get­ting this thing set up to con­nect to all kinds of super social plat­forms. Face­book. Twit­ter. Tum­blr (on the advice of Jamie). Because of the fancy nature of Word­Press and RSS feeds and all man­ner of inter­net good­ness, I can send updates to all just by post­ing this, um, post. The plu­gin I’m using also updates MySpace, but does any­one use MySpace any­more? I haven’t tried the Face­book update yet, so we’ll see how that goes. Tum­blr updates via the site’s RSS feed, which will hap­pen in about 40 min­utes, so we’ll see how that goes, too.

I’m not sure how social I really need to be. Adding Tum­blr to the mix now seems a bit ridicu­lous. I’m already fairly addicted to Face­book and Twit­ter. I think I might be the only per­son I know who pretty much keeps Gmail, Face­book, and Twit­ter open — in that order, usu­ally — all the time. On mul­ti­ple com­put­ers, even. Hell, I’ve got them open on two com­put­ers that are sit­ting right next to each other. If I’m at home or at work, I’m always con­nected. I’ve not yet moved to hav­ing the phone with all the fancy inter­net appli­ca­tions yet, but that’s mainly because unlim­ited data access is still pretty expen­sive, not to men­tion the phones them­selves. I hope that if I ever have kids, they grow up in a world where access to the inter­net — which is not going away, or will be replace by some­thing else — is not nearly as expen­sive, if not free. Per­haps I’ll raise them in Fin­land just to make sure.

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Word count: 262 | Sen­tences: 18 | Fog: 8.9 | Kin­caid: 6.6 | Flesch: 74