Welcome / About This Forum

[Tad Eareckson]

Big trucks smooth out the waves pretty efficiently.

http://trafficwaves.org/trafexp.html
TRAFFIC WAVE EXPERIMENTS

William Beatty - 1998

If I cannot predict where jams will arise, then I'd better drive all the time with an empty space. (Which is just what many truckers do ...even in totally stalled traffic. Did they figure something out that I didn't know?)

I don't try to eliminate the gaps unless they are very small...

I don't understand what you're saying here. But when there's a green light ahead or when the traffic immediately ahead has ground to a dead prolonged stop the gaps SHOULD be filled.

Probably the best we can do.

Nah. WE can do that and better. Totally beyond the capabilities of the average asshole behind the wheel though.

Speaking of big trucks and courtesy/altruism...

One of HM's more memorable tricks a couple years back... We're heading back west in the left lane of I-8 towards San Diego across the eastern mountains of the range. Two semis ahead in the right line. Aft semi signals to go around. HM accelerates to cut him off (instead of just maintaining speed which would've left him plenty of room). T** at K*** S****** starts grinding teeth as loudly as possible. Guess what the aft semi's response is. HM exclaims, "GODDAM!!! " T** at K*** S****** channels, "What the fuck were you expecting him to do?"

This was shortly after he'd blasted on by the probable Golden Eagle I'd spotted circling high ahead back over the desert plain - which was the only one we would've/could've gotten for the trip. So I wasn't in a great mood to begin with. Also royally fucked me over on the very probable only Golden we had a great shot at on a Colorado trip a couple years prior.

Tons of shit like this is why I instinctively knew my poor little bird was doomed the instant she landed on his shoulder - that NOTHING was gonna stop him from continuing out the door.

[<BS>]

I don't try to eliminate the gaps unless they are very small...

I edited that to this.

I don't try to eliminate the waves unless the gaps are very small.

[Tad Eareckson]

OK.

I do.

- People aren't gonna hate me much more than they do already - especially the stupid assholes who only have two positions on their gas and brake pedals - off and floor, and always one off and the other floor.

- EVERYBODY in the miles of traffic behind me behind me benefits from what I'm doing - hell, the whole fuckin' planet benefits - and there's gotta be one or two decent people in the miles of traffic behind me who appreciate what I'm doing.

- EVERYBODY in the miles of traffic behind me behind me is much safer - less fatigue and pretty much zero chance of collision. And no chance whatsoever of significant collision which would seriously further snarl traffic.

- I'd like to believe there's an educational value in what I'm doing.

- From Tarrytown to home I may have had as many as thirty gap haters blast around in front of me. So maybe I'd have gotten home thirty vehicle lengths later than the lead gap hater would've if he'd and all of his followers had lived next door. Thirty vehicle lengths at even ten miles per hour, big fuckin' deal.

- There's a good probability that the person a road raged gap hater shoots in the head will be another road raged gap hater. And if that happens I'll be perfectly happy to sit with the engine off while the police deal with the situation. Think gene pool.

Wanna put in a plug for the double decker bus drivers in Dublin. They maneuver these huge ships around these windy traffic packed little goat cart streets narrower than they are smooth as fuckin' glass. And, when there's another lane running in the opposite direction, on the wrong side of the road on top of that.

[<BS>]

I do leave gaps and try to eliminate the waves. But I also back off from trying to eliminate them completely when I see problems being caused by lane changes to get around me.

[Tad Eareckson]

I'd have enraged beach bound gap haters - invariably in big gas guzzling SUVs - blasting by me on the shoulder on MD-404 (one lane apiece for east and west) and slamming on the brakes a few inches behind the next car while I'd be en route to Ridgely on Saturday mornings. When I'd reach my turnoff they'd still be between the two of us.

I'm driving safely, sanely, courteously, legally. I'm not responsible for other assholes' aggressive, irrational, illegal behavior.

P.S. Did ya notice the quality of seanp2k2's writing in the ninth / second to last post of the previous page?

[<BS>]

Yes. Someone else mentioned the topic of rubbernecking and it reminded me of something I see here occasionally. There'll be an accident and the traffic is moving slowly. When you get to the scene there's a policeman windmilling his hand in a GO, GO, GO, DON'T LOOK OVER HERE manner. Of course there's no where to go. It'd make a funny movie scene for someone to be minding their own business, driving safely, then get distracted by the officer and speed up slamming into the car in front of them.

[Tad Eareckson]

We have a software problem that's unlikely to be an issue for anybody but Yours Truly but...

- Your:
-- browser's security preferences/settings allow pop-up windows.
-- Kite Strings Board preferences - as set in your User Control Panel - opt for "Pop up window on new private message".

- You're composing, editing, previewing a submission and click "Preview".

- The pop-up window:

A new private message is waiting for you in your Inbox.
Go to your inbox
Close window

appears notifying you that a new private message is waiting for you in your Inbox.

- You click on "Go to your inbox"

- You go to your inbox and see your new private message.

- When you attempt to return to the window on which you were preparing your post you find it no longer exists - and there is nothing you can do - Back, Reopen Last Closed Window, History - to retrieve it.

This post:

http://www.kitestrings.org/post9358.html#p9358
2016/04/03 Tres Pinos fatality
Tad Eareckson - 2016/05/02 16:49:22 UTC

I needed to recreate from scratch. It was almost ready to go; got a note from Steve; "selected all" my text and copied (into memory) which I always do as a safety measure when composing, editing, previewing; read the note; copied some text from the note to use for a search (thus wiping out the text from my nearly completed prospective post; looked into the Steve issue; tried to find my work window...

Hours of work gone. Only silver lining is that the reconstruction is better than what the original would've been.

I rarely set myself up for disaster like that. Usually do the vast majority of composition and editing in word processing which Apple autosaves for me at insanely frequent intervals whether I want it to or not. But this one was image intensive and I needed to work and edit online and failed to maintain adequate safety margins.

This bug is unlikely to hit anybody other than Yours Truly 'cause:
- 77 percent of the posts and probably 99 percent of the bandwidth here is mine
- I'm guessing that 99 percent of the PM traffic is directed to me - mostly Steve and Brian advising me of my post typos and other errors

But... You've been advised. Whatever window you opened or refreshed to trigger the pop-up is gonna be toast the nanosecond you utilize the shortcut.

[<BS>]

So I guess the migration was a success.

[Tad Eareckson]

Yeah, we were dead in the water for about two and a half days - from Eastern earlyish Thursday morning to last (Saturday/Sunday) midnight or a bit before.

When ya went to Kite Strings ya got sumpin' that looked like:

Server Migration Underway

This forum is in the process of being migrated to another server. You'll know when the migration is complete once this message goes away and you can view the forum again.



If you have a custom domain (ex: yourdomain.com) - you MUST update your A-RECORD to 67.23.238.28

You can speed this process up by flushing your DNS resolver cache and/or your browser cache. Otherwise, it could be a few minutes or up to 24 hours depending on your computer and ISP.

You can follow updates on Twitter, Facebook, and our support forum. Thanks for your patience and understanding.

I had just a slight hint of what that meant and SHOULD've gone screaming to Zack immediately but kept hoping that the problem would resolve itself and tried to understand the discussion going on at our host's support forum. Finally blew the whistle yesterday morning at 2016/07/23 10:54:23 UTC and Zack (who'd (not surprisingly) been unaware of the situation) jumped into gear immediately and updated the A-RECORD of our custom domain (that I now understand we most assuredly have) with:

http://www.moniker.com/
Moniker - Domain Management & Domain Services

but there was buggy stuff over there with which he had to deal so we remained adrift for many more hours.

During the downtime I switched modes into housekeeping and put a major dent in my video stills heap problems. Got well over five and a half thousand images at present and they need(ed) lotsa work in the consolidation, organizing, cataloging, time stamping departments.

A typical stills project costs me close to half a day of work and a larger one leaves me mostly blind until the next day. Described the process at:

http://www.kitestrings.org/post6393.html#p6393

A good time back I discovered a wonderful little tool that allowed me to alter time stamps on files the way I used to using the native software on the old Mac operating systems. But it was pretty tedious and involved a lot of manual trackpad, one-at-a-time work.

Thursday afternoon I figured out that I was doing it stupidly and using the free / hobbled capability version and went to purchase and found them pushing another product bundled. That one allowed me to batch edit and numerically sequence file names and I immediately went into name-your-price mode.

So now for thirty-five bucks I can do in fifteen seconds stuff that used to kill twenty minutes.

http://www.publicspace.net/ABetterFinderAttributes/
A Better Finder Attributes 5
http://www.publicspace.net/ABetterFinderRename/
A Better Finder Rename 10

Now the tasks I used to dread I'm looking for excuses to perform.

Also sometime in fairly recent months figured out how to do batch stuff efficiently inside of Flickr. See above.

Enduring the heat wave at present. Got the thermostat set to 83 so the AC is just kicking on for short infrequent cycles which make things OK but the hot laptop isn't helping any.

[Tad Eareckson]

Originally Posted - 2017/10/26 20:16:56 UTC
---
Welcome to this forum but as of around 2017/10/26 10:00:00 UTC this forum ceased being this forum - at least as it had been for its entire six year and eleven month existence up to that point.

Our host:

http://www.prophpbb.com
ProphpBB - Free Forum Hosting

decided we all wanted some horror by the name of "Tapatalk" foisted upon and controlling us.

At first I thought we'd been hacked and destroyed by some u$hPa-friendly entity but started nosing around on our host's now user hostile support forum - to which I can no longer log in - and noticed that we weren't the only ones having similar problems.

Got this back from Zack:

Zack C - 2017/10/26 13:09:15 UTC

I just created an account and posted about our site. As you deduced, this is a configuration issue with our host related to a partnership with Tapatalk I only just found out about.

If you go to http://kitestrings.org, it should work without issue. If you go to http://www.kitestrings.org/, however, it will redirect to https://kitestrings.org. The 'https' indicates an encrypted connection which requires a security certificate, but the certificate is issued to prophpbb.com, not kitestrings.org; this mismatch is why your browser is giving you the security warning.

Although there's a workaround, we need to get this fixed, as any existing links (including Google listings) with the 'www' are now broken.

I don't have a lot of time to deal with this right now but I don't think there's anything we can do on our end anyway. Hopefully they'll get to it soon...

and circulated it - 2017/10/26 11:18:38 UTC - to all active participants and then some.

Bookmarkers won't get to us.
Broken links to and within Kite Strings.
Google searches and our hard earned footprint?
Photos aren't loading well.
Longer URLs are now truncated.
Hit counters round off to a tenth of K.
Our rectangular avatars are now circles with half their content trimmed off.

Our time stamps were formatted like:
- 2017/10/26 05:10:52 UTC
Now they're:
- 2017/10/26 01:10:52 America/New_York
if you're logged in and have your preferences tweaked as well as you can. And if you're not:
- Today, 05:10
and if there's a way to fix that I haven't been able to find it.

We're an INTERNATIONAL forum. We have registered members from Fairbanks, Alaska to Port Macquarie, New South Wales and plenty of places in between and not all of them are on US Eastern Standard and Daylight Saving Times.

Apparently all this vile bullshit is to make forums more iPhone friendly. I'd like to make this one a lot more iPhone hostile. Disable viewing and posting for anyone and everyone without a decent laptop display and keyboard or better.

My archiving system is now pretty much shit and don't even know how to format and edit posts and don't feel like learning.

I LOVED what we had before and put enormous effort into making it look as good and professional as possible. Fuck whomever, whatever did this to us.

Bob called me before checking his email and didn't know what was going on. Well, we found one thing on which we're pretty well aligned. May be able to relocate and get things back the way they were. Gawd I hope so.
---
Ignore: