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Neumo's, pressure washing the deck, redundant signage

News ·Friday September 1, 2006 @ 20:42 EDT (link)

There was recently an accident at the roundabout between Duvall and Redmond (NE 124th St. to SR-203, which becomes Main St. in Duvall; another branch forks off to Carnation). I'm unaware of the details; I just drove up and saw a police car in my usual lane in the roundabout, lights on, blocking for a tow truck that was getting ready to remove a wreck. A day or so after this event, new signage started sprouting up all around the roundabout: a small white sign that said "Yield to traffic in roundabout" was affixed to each of the existing yield signs, and several large yellow and black turn arrows were added around the center of the roundabout. As a taxpayer, I'm annoyed at this waste of my money. Drivers already know to drive on the right; the roundabout is well signed from all directions, and who else would you yield to at a yield sign before a roundabout except the bloody traffic in the bloody roundabout? The twit who caused the accident probably threatened to sue the county, so they did this to placate him, when really they should have thrown him in jail for a few years for, in all likelihood, driving like an idiot.

Since I'm ranting about road signs, how about those "Don't Drink and Drive: In Memory of Susie Sweetums" signs? The whole piece of metal is a waste of my money, and of my attention—drivers can only focus on a few things at once, and on the particularly steep and twisty stretch of road where this one is located, that sign shouldn't be one of them. Yes, it's unfortunate, tragic even, that your child was killed by/by being a drunk driver (although one could argue the latter is Darwin popping up with his chainsaw of natural selection). Is it relevant to drivers on that hill? No, not in the least. Will it change anyone's mind? Probably not—I doubt very much driving drunk is premeditated. And last, who cares about your kid? Driving drunk is a bad idea anyway. I don't know your kid, maybe he was a good person, maybe a thug and a philistine; it doesn't matter. It's just ego gratification; get a headstone like the rest of us.

AT and I headed out to Neumos after Wednesday workaholics (which finished surprisingly early; before 2300). Pretty Girls Make Graves were playing; we got there just as they started (2320?), after the opening bands had finished. Dark room, loud music, lotta standing. I wish I'd known the songs since it's hard to pick out lyrics one is hearing for the first time. The club is in Seattle, so I drove; got home around 0130.

I pressure washed our top deck yesterday and this morning ; I spent 4-5 hours in total. I rented the washer from the nearby True Value, for $35 for a half day. Tough work, and fairly wet, too (soaked my shoes, so I wore sandals to work, NH style); I had to hold the sprayer about 1"-2" from the surface of all the wood on the deck (think railings, each post having four sides...) and cover all of it slowly and methodically, feathering so as not to leave too many stop marks. I was nervous about starting it, to tell the truth, having never used so much as a gas-powered lawn mower; there were no instructions and a few of the knobs and levers' covers had fallen off, but eventually I figured the choke, gears ("start" and "on"), and the pressure adjuster; turn the red switch on, gear to start, open the choke, pull the starter, gear down, adjust pressure (and choke) and go. I ran out of gas just as I was finishing, but I had to fill it before returning it anyway, so it wasn't much time lost. The former owners came to stain the deck while I was at work (this had been agreed to after the inspection as part of the sale); it looks good (same color as the lower deck, light honey brown).

Interesting bug today, although it turned out not to be so interesting; AT, MS, and I were looking at some code with two string (BSTR) allocations; the second seemed to get allocated and copied right on top of the first. Turned out to be heap corruption due to a mis-freed string earlier (but later in the same function).

Another interesting bug with a BEAR (it's a near-acronym for an idle task to download images); the task is created, it downloads the image and invalidates layout (so the image is drawn instead of the placeholder), then the task tries to unregister itself - when an image is downloaded it has no more work to do. However, it throws an exception (which readlly should have asserted; shame on you, OArt) so never unregisters itself - so we keep getting called at idle for already downloaded images. This leads to a lot of unnecessary blinking and redrawing, sometimes to the point where performance is impacted. It ended up beign a "smart pointer" bug - the object held one smart pointer proxy, but another one was created and given to the registration code, although they both pointed at the same BEAR. We tried to pass the initial proxy to the unregister code, but since it had no "strong" references (because we created the second proxy instead), it threw an exception.