What a strange day

[giza]

I had a rather strange day today.

• First, on the way into work, a firetruck overtook me and passed me. Then it turned onto the street that I normally perform my commute on. After I turned onto said street and went about a mile (with no sign of a fire), another firetruck came towards me and passed me. I'm not quite sure where they were going.


• I found out that one of my co-workers helped out with RFC 3888. How cool is that?


• Speaking of work, I discovered a new way in which MSIE really sucks. It seems that one of my PHP scripts, when there is an abnormally large number of records in our application, will take about 15 seconds to load. In FireFox, that's no big deal. But not IE. It will assume that you misttyped the URL and send a TCP RST after about 15 seconds. Then it will display "this page cannot be displayed" with... a DNS error! WTF?
  
  Strangely, it only does this when clicking on a link. It does not do it when a form is submitted or a meta refresh is taking place. Very strange.
  


• Some tractor trailer got in a wreck on 476 Northbound tonight. Not only was traffic backed up for 10 miles+ down the Northbound side, but US-30 and all of the back roads were clogged with people getting off of 476, too. What a pain that was.
  
  I'm starting to think that maybe, just maybe, when someone gets in a wreck and backs up traffic for miles, that they should be held liable for wasting peoples' time. A class action lawsuit would sure be an interesting thing to try. If only I went into law...
  

Comments

[triggur.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure what your beef with IE is. Back when I wrote a lot of web applications, I could be sitting in a debugger on the server for 20 minutes while IE faithfully waited for a response. Something's wrong with your machine or your network or something.

[giza.livejournal.com]

We reproduced it on 3 different machines in our office. The original complaint came from one of our customers, who (presumably) was running an entirely different setup.

Note that I submit a form that loads a PHP page that then sleeps for 1200 seconds. I did that this morning and IE had no problems. Clicking on a regular link, however, produced different behavior.

[taral.livejournal.com]

Try making PHP send headers before sleeping.

[giza.livejournal.com]

Uh... but the PHP script that slept worked just fine.

I'm going to play around with this more tomorrow and see what I find.

[tgeller.livejournal.com]

That plan for people in wrecks sounds... draconian. Sort of like in Stalin's Soviet Union: When someone was executed by the government, a bill for the bullet was sent to his or her family. (Or so the story goes, possibly with a different dictator.)

But another friend had a similar idea that I like. She wanted to print up t-shirts that said, "Don't through yourself in front of the BART (commuter train) during rush hour. It's rude."

[giza.livejournal.com]

Wow. Of course, Stalin was a mass-murdering fuckhead, as Eddie Izzard would say.

I'm talking more about someone who, not though a mechanical failure or the actions of others, but through their own neglegence, causes an accident. Should that person not be held responsible for affecting so many others? What about those people who are hourly employees that are potentially losing money by setting in a 5 mile backup? Shouldn't some restitution be paid?

Food for though.

[tgeller.livejournal.com]

Re: "Mass-murdering fuckhead" -- well put. :)

I don't disagree with you -- in theory. In practice, however, placing blame is usually complicated.

I've long been in favor of the death penalty for repeat drunk drivers, BTW. Better them than me.

I remember hearing about one European country (Sweden? Italy?) that has it and, despite a high consumption of alcohol per capita, simply doesn't have many alcohol-related auto accidents.

[giza.livejournal.com]

> I don't disagree with you -- in theory. In practice, however, placing blame
> is usually complicated.

That it is, yes.

> I've long been in favor of the death penalty for repeat drunk drivers, BTW.
> Better them than me.

Whoa. I'm shocked that anyone from the Bay Area would be in support of the death penalty. :-)

With our fault-ridden justice system, I'm not in favor of it myself. Life in prison, on the other hand, I'm all for. Let them serve as a living example to others, I say.

[tgeller.livejournal.com]

Repeat drunk-driving is something that's pretty easy to apply fairly. There are several scientific measurements -- breath tests, crash forensics -- and a clear pattern of behavior. Of course justice can be perverted in many ways, but I think this area's more resistant to jimmying than most.

[randomzen.livejournal.com]

I always thought they should have big robot crane grabbers on the sides of the road to pick up and sweep off crashed drunks and idiots. It could even take pictures and video for the forensics.

Even better, maybe the road should just flip up sidways to slide the tards over. That way you know you got all the little peices of car and skull off that might cause future accidents.

What do I know? I don't drive and I just slept for 12 hours.

[giza.livejournal.com]

Cool! That'd be just like GTA3!

> What do I know? I don't drive

Come on you wuss, get on the battlefield with the rest of us!

-- Giza (You WILL pop your Schuylkill Express cherry, if it's the last thing I do!)

[randomzen.livejournal.com]

As I now live inside the city, there's no reason for me to travel (unless by airplane). I fact, I was thinking of purposely disabling myself. Fuck that Schuylkill, and the expressway named after it. Besides, I've already driven on it. And the expressway named after it.

[nius.livejournal.com]

Fuck that Schuylkill

Careful, you don't know where it's been...

[randomzen.livejournal.com]

I hear the Schuylkill is quite the dirty whore.

[giza.livejournal.com]

Well, there ARE a lot of fish there...

[blaze-heartfire.livejournal.com]

I dunno about holding them responsible to the point where they should be charged... however some states do something similar :) like during a emergency (think flooding) if you do something you're adviced not to and you need rescuing, they charge ya :3

however some things I feel people need to be shot over, like rubberneckers who back up the freeway for miles because they wanna see, they deserve death... maybe a webpage should be made of all the cool car wrecks around your area, so that way you get home on time to SEE the car wrecks :D

[skippyfox.livejournal.com]

Traffic accidents occur often enough that you should be prepared for them by either leaving early, knowing a convenient alternate route, listening to traffic reports, or all three.

In other words a factor in wasting your time is a lack of preparation for delays.

[giza.livejournal.com]

Yes, it's my fault that a tractor trailer flipped over. Thanks for clearing that up. </sarcasm>



Re: leaving early: I was going home from work that night. I didn't have to be anywhere on time, but I didn't like sitting in traffic for an extra 20 minutes either.

Re: Alternate route: The alternate routes WERE backed up. Everyone was getting off of 476. US-30 and Montgomery Ave were also a mess. So was I-76, now that I think of it. That's pretty much all of the routes for getting to my place.

Re: traffic. I *do* listen to KYW, thanks. But it doesn't help any when all of the alternates are backed up.

[skippyfox.livejournal.com]

Good points, but...20 minutes!? You're complaining about a loss of TWENTY minutes?

On the way back from Megaplex this year I was stuck in the same spot at the I-4/I-95 interchange for an hour and a half. Yesterday, I drove out to meet up with some friends, waited and got no response, and returned home disappointed, wasting fifty minutes. What's 20 minutes?

[giza.livejournal.com]

Yes. I value my time, even if I'm a bit neurotic about it and a bit bitchy. :-)

Here's what 20 minutes is for me:

- Catching up on a week's worth of postings on AC's message boards
- Catching up on Friends posts on LJ
- Reading some stories on Slashdot, including the comments
- Writing a small component of code at $DAYJOB
- Eating a meal

So... the way my mind interprets it, if I have 20 minutes wasted, it's as though one of those things has been taken away from me.

It's a pity that cars can't drive themselves. If I had some way to spend that 20 minutes doing something productive, like reading a book, I would have no complaints whatsoever. If only there was a direct SEPTA line to the office...