Pick a Line, Any Line

There's a section on the freeway near work where they are doing... something (and really, at this point I don't even wonder what's going on any more), and apparently they needed more room at a few spots in the median.

So they took something that looked like this (fourth lane not shown):

And then they scraped the pavement to get rid of the paint in the section they wanted to change, which really means they made lane lines that are 1/4" into the asphalt instead of white paint sitting on top.

And then they painted the new lines, so you're driving forward and it looks about like this:

This is all happening at about 70 mph.

Some people notice the painted lines, other people go with the scraped-off asphalt as a guide, and a significant number of people just split the difference. It's a bit like watching bumper cars except I have yet to witness an actual accident here.

These are the days I wish my car was a lot smaller.

Stay Connected

My new laptop showed up this week, so now I'm switching from the so-old-IT-won't-even-support-it HP Windows (ptui!) laptop to a brand new MacBook Pro. Aside from the crapware that the company loaded on the new laptop, it works great.

But.

I work in three locations. With the ancient HP, I had three identical docking stations. In fact, I had three docking stations and a file cabinet full of backups in case one broke because I'm one of the last people who is still using that laptop. I have seven monitors spread out among those three locations, but all I have to do is dock the old laptop and everything magically works.

I have one docking station for the MacBook. So... right there you can see there might be a bit of a problem. Still, I was in the main office on Monday and I had the docking station and I had a drawer full of monitor cables and I thought for sure I'd be able to hook everything together without too much trouble.

Reader, I was naive.

The laptop connections:

• USB C
• HDMI

The monitors:

• VGA
• DisplayPort
• DVI

Cables I had:

• DVI - DVI
• VGA - VGA
• DisplayPort - DisplayPort

So then we opened the other big box 'o cables under my boss' desk and dragged out a few more. We eventually found a DisplayPort-HDMI cable that they used back when the Super Bowl was in town. Granted it was twelve feet long and I could have hooked it up to any of six computers in the area, but at that point I didn't really care. I'd at least be able to get one of the monitors connected.

It didn't work. I have since googled and it turns out it is a unidirectional DisplayPort to HDMI adapter which was exactly the opposite direction of what I needed. There's apparently some technical reason that those adapters are unidirectional and can't be made in the other direction and I'd probably understand it if I hadn't slept through my original degree, but I have accepted the bottom line which is that it doesn't work because *reasons*.

And people wonder why I start laughing when movies show hackers breaking into alien computers in fifteen minutes...

New Year

Well, 2019 still has that new car smell, and we haven't dented the fenders yet, so I guess this is the time I'm supposed to write resolutions. Except I don't really do resolutions. I occasionally have goals, and even then I tend to go shorter term (ie, the writing goals of the month which I keep on the other blog and we aren't going to mention my failing grade for December because now it's January, yay!).

I guess the closest I'll come is listing habits I'd like to acquire or reinforce. That doesn't seem so scary or a path to failure. Here are all the ones I could think of:

• Exercise the dogs more. We get at least one walk in every day, and I take the big dog along when I jog, but they would like to get out more and I could certainly use the exercise.
• Write in this blog more consistently. I used to come up with something twice per week. I think that's possible again.
• Continue to eat more fresh vegetables.

I mean really, that's about it.  I don't have any non-writing grand goals for the future. Maybe get rid of my car? Win the lottery and quit my job? I can't really control that last one although I'd have to start playing the lottery first.

The timer just went off for my fresh vegetables habit (autumn pot pie) and I even mostly followed the recipe (or at least as much as I ever do).

Happy New Year!