collisionbend.com

Whoa, relief…

I was just able to relieve myself from a difficult client’s expectations and go to another project at work this week. The initial client is a bit, shall we say, persnickety; everything has to be absolute letter-perfect, pixel-perfect, etc., all the way down the line.

Print stylesheets? Perfection need only apply. (What? We have lousy print CSS support across browsers? The Hell, you say!)

We have a bug tracker, of course, and I have been free for a couple of days now — that is, of course, if you ignore the client’s bug reports issued today, which were really a series of change requests…

All that aside, it was a pleasure for me to move from one challenging site to another, internal, site that is probably more like moving from the frying pan into the fire than it is moving from one difficult situation to an easier one.

Seriously.

But what I was able to do, this week, was to leverage some recent learning into the internal client’s site that saved me time, countless hours figuring out stuff, and plenty of headaches.

I used jQuery, my new heartthrob.

My superiors are impressed, and so am I — and the best is yet to come, as I have more wrinkles to expose in this project: the sky is my limit!

So I just got home, after numerous hours at the agency this week, slaving away, and I come home feeling… well… tired, yes, but…

…damned good.

It’s a feeling of accomplishment, but better: it’s knowing that I stretched myself to create something that should be; something that belongs where it is as it is. It’s a feeling that I created something that simply deserves to be. Something right.

It’s rare, because it’s a feeling that I did it.

It’s a good feeling, too: and I want more.

By now, I can assume that you have been able to dig yourselves out of the snow and actually get around our fair city.

For some of us, that process took longer than others.

I got home Friday night around 7:30, and it was just in time: I took my lunch leftovers and the daily mail inside, dropped it on the kitchen counter, then slid into the bathroom to do something… well, if you can imagine that it took me almost 90 minutes to drive home, you can imagine what I had to do in there.

Afterward, I went outside to have a cigarette, and I saw the first of what was to become a long list of cars to get stuck in front of my home over the weekend. I lost count around 18 or 20, most of which were 4-wheel drive trucks with snow plows, or Jeeps, but there were a couple of cars and minivans — and one of the latter got stuck right at the end of my driveway sometime late Saturday morning.

By that time, we had at least 16 inches of snow in the street, and it was still coming down — hard. (When all was said and done, we ended up with 28 - 30 inches of snow in the street, drifting to 4 or 5 feet in some places just off-road.)

The lady who owned the minivan abandoned her vehicle with the intent of returning to get it out. She tried later, only to get her Jeep stuck before she arrived at her minivan.

What really got to me was what happened Sunday morning: a city snow plow, trying to get around Ms. Had-no-business-being-out-in-the-worst-snowstorm-in-Cleveland-history’s minivan, got stuck in the very same place many other vehicles found them selves in the hours earlier.

I woke up just in time to take these videos (I apologize for the sharpness — I woke up just seconds before, grabbed the camera, and began shooting; the fuzziness is the window screen):

Turn the volume up and you can hear my bride and I talking about what a good job these guys were (and have been) doing — and they have.

I mean, let’s face it: the heavy snow wasn’t hardly their fault. Nor was the fact that their jobs were made infinitely more difficult by the bozos who felt that they were such good drivers, and their cars were so great in the snow, that they could get through anything.

For that, the proof is in the pudding, as they say:

In this second video, you can hear me say, “oh, please hit that minivan — please hit that minivan!” I was saying this because the person that left their minivan there had absolutely no business being on the road on Saturday — for whatever reason. And their lack of consideration for themselves or others resulted in many more individuals getting stuck in the same place — and to preventing the plows from cleaning our street when all of the others in the neighborhood had been cleared at least twice.

We were stuck in our house until 5:00 p.m. Sunday, unable to go for groceries or other goods when others had been out for hours — thanks to this person’s stupidity.

I took the video because you never see snow plows getting stuck — or pulled out of such a situation; I posted the videos because people need to see what a lack of thought and consideration can do to inconvenience others (and I’m not just talking about me).

Next time they say to stay off the roads unless it’s an absolute emergency — stay off the roads.

UPDATE — My video has been picked up by The News-Herald.

“Stormageddon” strikes the city mid-day. We had plenty of warning, so why was there 5 inches of snow on the Eastbound Shoreway at rush hour?

Seriously. The National Weather Service issued advisories, watches, and warnings for the last three days. We knew it was coming.

Jeff Tanchak on Channel 19 hasn’t worn a jacket for a week now, and his sleeves have been rolled up so long his arms are frostbitten. We knew it was coming.

They can track these storms and predict right down to the hour when they will enter our area — so we knew we would get it mid-day today.

The highways in our area tonight were a total mess at 6:00 p.m., some 8 hours after the storm started. It took me 90 minutes to get home tonight, from Independence to Euclid, white knuckle all the way. Go figure.

Not too long ago, we had another mid-day storm that we knew for two days was coming mid-day, and evening rush hour traffic was again a mess — snow crews hadn’t gone out to plow during the day; they waited until rush hour was over to go salt and clear snow, and by then the highways were a total mess.

Why do they wait? Why don’t they get out there at a proper time and treat the roads so that they don’t accumulate so much snow and cause so many problems? Are they in cahoots with the body shops or something?

(It’s not the guys on the line, in my opinion. I think it’s just a simple case of poor management.)

Oh, by the way, the answer to the question is an ODOT truck. Or, if you’re a Hitchhiker fan, they sleep 42.

And… punt.

Here’s a second interesting piece of trivia: what do all of the following actors and actresses have in common (hint: read the title of this post):

• Martin Landau
• Ida Lupino
• Martin Balsam
• Gig Young
• Joe Flynn
• Jack Warden
• Ted Knight
• Jean Marsh
• Burgess Meredith
• James Franciscus
• Ross Martin
• Inger Stevens
• Dick York
• Jeff Morrow
• Vera Miles
• Martin Milner
• Roddy McDowell
• Ivan Dixon
• Sebastian Cabot
• Jack Klugman
• Orson Bean
• Anne Francis
• Keenan Wynn
• Donna Douglas
• William Shatner
• Patricia Breslin
• Art Carney
• Arte Johnson
• Agnes Moorehead
• Jonathan Harris
• Don Rickles
• Buddy Ebsen
• Bill Mumy
• Cliff Robertson
• Dennis Weaver
• Charles Bronson
• Elizabeth Montgomery
• Jonathan Winters
• Peter Falk
• Lee Marvin
• Lee Van Cleef
• Cloris Leachman
• Buster Keaton
• William Windom
• Dean Stockwell
• Leonard Nimoy
• Robert Redford
• Frank Sutton
• Carol Burnett
• Donald Pleasence
• Bill Bixby
• James Doohan
• Ann Jillian
• Robert Duvall
• William Sargent
• Julie Newmar
• James Broderick
• Joyce Van Patten
• Burt Reynolds
• Mickey Rooney
• Telly Savalas
• James Coburn
• Sir Cedric Hardwicke
• Richard Basehart
• Greg Morris
• Robert Lansing
• Mariette Hartley
• Wally Cox
• William Demarest
• Alan Sues
• Jackie Cooper
• George Takei

All of the actors and actresses listed above starred in the original run of the TV series The Twilight Zone in the early-1960s.

While writing about the Outer Limits TV show, and after Joel Libava’s comment, I thought I’d do the other show.

Remember this?

“There is a fifth dimension, beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space… and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition… and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call… The Twilight Zone.”

You couldn’t make a TV show today with all of those people in it — there’s too many of them.

From this morning’s Plain Dealer Monday Moaning (the fourth paragraph after the ad dead-center in the article). Euclid Police, please take note:

“My moan is about idiotic drivers who do not know how to use a ‘left-turn-only’ lane. They either sit in the through lane holding up traffic, or they angle the front end of their car into the turn-lane leaving the rest of the car in the through lane still blocking traffic. If you’re too stupid to drive it, then park it.” — Euclid

I would have taken my neighbor’s argument a bit further (no, I didn’t call this in, but wish I had; it was a fellow Euclidian): I think these people should lose their drivers’ licenses.

Seriously. They congest traffic, cause accidents, and angrify other drivers — as if we didn’t have enough “road rage.” To make matters worse, they don’t care.

It’s part of what I’ve said before: we’re becoming more rude and inconsiderate of others every day.

Now, there’s one intersection in Euclid where I can predict with absolute certainty that this will happen: Westbound Lake Shore Boulevard at East 260th Street. No one — absolutely no one — who enters the left turn lane, preparing to turn Southbound on E. 260th, ever lines up in the turning lane properly.

And if they somehow do, by some shadow of luck, pull fully into the left turn lane, I guarantee you that they will fade severely to the right — well into the next lane of traffic — before actually making the turn.

Along the north side of Lake Shore Boulevard at the intersection are three driveways, four telephone poles and a fire hydrant. Someday, someone is quite unexpectantly going to forcibly meet one of those poles, the hydrant, or a car in one of those driveways after being forced over to the right by some idiot who can’t drive.

And someone — perhaps a pedestrian on the sidewalk a mere two feet from the street — will get hurt.

It’s one of the most dangerous intersections in Cuyahoga County, even if it hasn’t been identified as such by any planning commission or traffic survey. It scares the crap out of me every time I drive through it — in either direction — sometimes four times a day, sometimes many more.

Euclid Police should pay closer attention to this intersection — before someone dies.