Electric Josh

bzero
This bzero project by this dude in New Zealand is busy trying to clone everything that Dave at Userland is doing with Radio and whatnot. I've discovered that I can update this toy blog quite nicely from the bzero command line interface, and that Movable Type, which runs the site you're reading, is capable of responding to the very same command line tool. This is good. But, arrrrgh! it's not quite together yet, so I'll be updating this site in the most painful possible fashion---typing in a web browser---for the forseeable future. Bummer.

An even bigger bummer, of course, is that I can't get the source code. Argh. Alas. Update: the aforementioned dude, Philip Pearson, points out correctly that I don't need the source code in order to wrap an interface around his code. True, but the code would great fun to play with.
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Sitting in traffic, looking at snow
So it turns out that about 40 miles of the ride up to Vermont is clogged with people heading up to ski and (hopefully) spend a pile of money over the weekend. That is, traffic is stopped. Despite really enjoying the company of family, we have no desire to be in the stationary line of metal boxes on 93, or, worse, one of the city cars slid off the road because we rarely need and thus don't have snow tires, so we'll be heading up tomorrow instead. When I was a kid growing up in Vermont, we'd make great fun of all the Massholes who tried to drive 65 miles an hour on three inches of packed, wet snow and more or less invariably ended up slid sideways off the road ten miles ahead, flashers futilely blinking and headlights pointlessly on.

(Driving slowly helped, but such was the magic of the Nokia Hakkapelitta snow tire, a tire that looked more suitable for a mountain bike, and sounded like one when the car was at speed. Driving a Volkswagen or a Saab gently at 40 mph was pretty routine even in several inches of packed snow with these suckers on the wheels. The superb grip allowed one to safely get around all sorts of less well-wheeled cars. When I lived up there and had cars and tires to match, I'd typically drive through storms at 50 in the right-hand lane, where the greater traffic volume had swept more of the snow away, until I came up on a car driving at 35, at which point I'd slow down to 36, move into the relatively treacherous left lane, make a perfectly safe pass, get back over, and speed back up. Periodically, I'd be blown past by a car with Mass. plates. They'd go off the road, and I'd pass them back before long.)

At any rate, I know about the nasty traffic because of this site. Online traffic updates like that are a great idea, but holy crap are they badly implemented. Mostly I just don't trust the information they contain. Instead, traffic maps should look like this.
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