Road Rage

Sometimes when people tailgate me I will slow down just so they stop, but in general I’m a pretty courteous driver. In this case I made a guy really mad even though I wasn’t trying to and he took the most aggressive retaliation of anyone I’ve ever come across. Once he was in front of me I wished I had gotten his license plate so I could report him and I sped up to catch up with him before realizing I was being pretty stupid. But as traffic got more congested closer to Atlanta, I actually caught up with him and passed him anyway and got his license. But then what do you do with it? I found a website called www.roadragers.com and reported him, but that doesn’t really do any good. So I sent a description of his car and his license plate to both the Georgia State Patrol and the Florida Highway Patrol. I doubt they will do anything, but I suggested they send a letter to the guy just to say he had been reported.

I’ve always thought it would be a good idea to have some kind of traffic posse where the police deputize private citizens to report bad driving. As I envision it you would have to attend a day-long class about rules of the road and rules of the program and then you could report one person a month (maybe more). While no one would receive tickets when they were reported, they would receive a letter describing the infraction and a note would be made to that person’s file so that if the police ever pulled the guy over they could see a list of citizen complaints about him and realize he deserves to have the book thrown at him.

Anyway, here’s the letter I wrote:

Continue reading “Road Rage”

Katrina

Since I only use 1 bedroom of my house and live very close to MARTA, it seems like my house would be perfect for any hurricane evacugees. At first I thought I would be able to just drive by a shelter and pick up a family, but to qualify for assistance people have to work through the system. So, today, after procrastinating a while, I posted an offer to keep people at my house on the website that the AJC has set up for this. The AJC says they will share the list with relief agencies. We’ll see what happens. While I want to help people, I don’t want to have just anybody in my house. Here’s what I wrote:

“Single male homeowner with 2 indoor dogs has 1 or 2 bedrooms of house to share with a small family, married couple, or two individuals for up to 3 months. On bus line; one mile to MARTA rail. One-story house, but there are a few stairs at every entrance. No smoking, drugs, profanity, or weapons. Would prefer someone placed through a relief agency.”

TypeKey Comments

With the new blog upgrade, the old password thing doesn’t work anymore. Jeb is experimenting with junk filters and not using a password at all. But I set up my blog to use TypeKey which is a free service from the blog makers (Movable Type) to allow people to register and comment on any blog. I kind of like that because it lets people outside the family add comments, but it should stop junk (I guess if someone posts blog spam their TypeKey account is revoked, but if they are just obnoxious then I can put a block on that person).

I don’t think there is a way to do both, so if you would like to be able to post comments on my blog you will need to sign up for a free TypeKey account and log on when you comment. Please try it out. It only takes a few minutes to sign up, then you have to respond an e-mail to activate your account. The only problem is you have to use the same name all the time instead of getting to make up a name depending on whose blog you are commenting on (like “Mom” or “Gramalie”), so now I will just be “brted” (my usual internet alias) instead of “UT”.

Anyway, the TypeKey thing is working already because a guy made a very good comment to my entry about Mom’s new notebook computer.

Don’t Panic

Yesterday the governor said “Don’t panic” about gasoline. Today I needed to fill up the office car. Though there is a credit card that can be used at most gas stations, I always go to the state gas station near the twin towers downtown. They had a sign on the pumps that said that by order of the governor the gas was only for state emergency vehicles. Yeah, don’t panic.

Great Quality ZX-5572

Last night, after shopping online for Dells all day, Mom and I went to Fry’s Electronics to buy a cheap no-name laptop (the brand name is “Great Quality” or just “GQ” and is only sold by Fry’s and their website, Outpost.com). It is actually pretty decent. It doesn’t have built-in wireless but she can get a USB thumbdrive type of adapter for $30 (on sale) if she ever needs it. The silver chassis looks great and is thin and lightweight. Because the notebook was so cheap ($500) already and was no-name I recommended she get a 3-year extended warranty for $130. So it was $670 for a 1.3 GHz Celeron 256 MB 40 GB notebook with a 15-inch screen and a CD-RW/DVD combo drive, including tax. The equivalent Dell was $783 and only had a 90-day warranty, but included an internal wireless card. When buying a cheap computer $100 is a lot of money. Plus Dell’s free printer used Dell cartridges you can only get from them and this free printer is a Canon (iP1600) so cartridges should be widely available.

There was still foam paper wrapped around the notebook, so even though the box had been opened, it looked like it was in mint condition and had never been started. It started up without any trouble, I got MS Office installed, transferred some files from their old computer with my thumb drive, and dialed in to the internet to start downloading Windows XP patches. That tested most everything on the computer and it all worked flawlessly.

The Fry’s store was actually pretty nice inside even though it was enormous. The salesmen were reasonably honest and readily available though they weren’t particularly knowledgable (they didn’t know about the newspaper ad and said USB wireless adapters weren’t available). They didn’t push extras too hard or try to upsize us to a more expensive computer. We had some trouble at checkout because they had given us the wrong free printer and had to go back and get the right one (about a mile walk, so it took a while). Their checkout process is horrible where the salesman has to write a quote and then the cashier rings it up. It took at least half an hour to check out. I found out later that all of this fits perfectly with Fry’s reputation. I found a great web page about how to shop at Fry’s and a Salon article about Fry’s as well. The first guy likens shopping at Fry’s to competing in an Olympic event.

Mom didn’t realize she could use the notebook as her primary PC at home. She just figured it would be good to take to Florida. But I told her she could hook up an external keyboard, mouse, and monitor if she wanted. Their desktop monitor is only 1 inch bigger than the screen on the notebook though (Mom measured it).