TrentonMakes

There are a handful of music artists who will probably rake in big bucks in royalties today, from every single radio station playing their eclipse-related songs.... Bonnie Tyler, and Pink Floyd, and Cat Stevens ("Moonshadow") and such.

If I was cooking for my beer-drinkin' friends I'd have pulled an IPA from the fridge. Cooking for my wife and son, I'm really using beer mostly for the bubbles, and I suppose the opportunity to throw around the phrase "beer batter" which is fun to say. As I think I've said before, I think MHL is in the upper tier of the lower-tier beers.

I watched the first quarter, and then maybe the last 6 minutes of game time. In between was my only opportunity of the weekend to ride so I took it; but I made sure I was home in time to see the end. I was hoping for Iowa to pull it out.

I guess I celebrated... I bought a 24-oz can of Miller High Life; used half to make beer batter for fish and drank the rest while frying.

15 miles on the road yesterday.

I was driving at the time, didn't feel anything, but my wife and her sister at the house felt it. My son's friend texted him in the car - "I hope my Legos are OK........... OK, I just checked on them, they're good"

I remember one time after my mom took me clothes shopping*, I took her Porsche out for a ride, and then picked up a cute girl but she turned out to be underage. Now I look back and I'm thankful the cop pulled me over - I was scared as hell! - before I managed to get into real trouble. * I asked her for Adidas but she bought me Zips

11.5 miles yesterday on the road.

I really don't know much about that band - didn't hear the FAN this week. The name Tommy Conwell does ring a bell, though the name Young Rumbles does not. I will put it on the list though.

"Hey, you scratched my anchor!"

Well, the Beltway North through Towson is an option, and not too much longer mileage-wise assuming you start and end on I-95. But that northern loop of the Beltway is already much more congested than the south (Key Bridge) loop, in my experience. I think they said the KB carries something like 31,000 vehicles per day. By comparison, daily volumes on the northern loop (which provides many more lanes) range from about 140,000 to 215,000 vehicles per day (highest in the segment that overlaps I-83).

In fact I did just read something that said they were able to close off the bridge approaches - which unfortunately didn't seem to help the workers. But obviously in the swirl of news reports in the immediate aftermath, hard to pin down what really happened and when.

I did a little drifting this weekend in Albany. (in the snow) And I learned that in order to turn the car's traction control off, you have to hold the button down for a couple seconds - not instant gratification like my old Jetta. The mix of heavy snow and sleet that had fallen led to some of the worst winter driving conditions I've ever seen, and this was on the NY State Thruway.

Fee-day would be the correct Latin pronunciation, no?

I feel like bridge designers had to assume the professionals driving these vessels could manage to stay within the roughly 1100-foot gap between the main span piers. But s**t happens. I just read that an average, fully loaded container ship weighs about 165,000 tons - larger ones, up to 220,000 tons. That's an awful lot of momentum, even if it was moving at a snail's pace. Were cargo ships of this size a thing when this bridge opened in 1977?

Yes, yes, no - I don't know what the third thing is.

Very sad for the apparent loss of life, for the impacts to shipping, and for all the extra traffic that will dumped into the tunnels until a new bridge can be constructed. (it will take years) In the collapse video there are clearly at least four work vehicles with yellow flashing lights on the span. But I also can't help but feel a little sad for the loss of a beautiful structure. I only maybe ever drove over it twice, but it was clearly visible from some of the tunnel approaches. One of those times I drove it was really late, after a wedding, and the road was deserted. Surely, therefore, the timing of this incident could have been a lot worse. and the engineer in me can't help but be fascinated by watching how the bridge reacts to the strike. I keep scrolling that video back and forth. The far end actually lifts up a little before the truss tears apart, and when it comes back down it has enough momentum to destroy the footing it had been resting on.

When my brother was maybe 13 he got an off-the-rack Columbia road bike at Montgomery Wards with a [fabric] rear wheel disc. I thought it looked pretty cool at the time, but I recognize now that it was as useful to him as the spoiler on a front wheel drive car. That bike was a tank.

I think I was still using DOS-based CAD for a couple years once I started working. To this day, when I use CAD, I've got my right hand on the mouse, and left hand on the keyboard. L for line, CO for copy, OF for offset... old habits die hard.

I can take them or leave them. I do like the black licorice ones and the red spice ones.

I have probably told this story before, but we developed a site layout/design for our senior design project using AutoCAD v10 for DOS, on an old 8086 machine. We'd postpone a regen as long as we could - computer: "ABOUT TO REGEN - PROCEED? (Y/N)" all of us: "No! No! No!" but once the computer stopped asking nice, and insisted, we walked over to another building to get coffee and/or a snack, while it spun. IIRC it took around 10 minutes to regenerate that file.

We had a drafting course freshman year of college (1990-91) - we spent about half the semester with pencils and triangles, and half at a terminal (we learned "Cadkey"). I have an AutoCAD assignment up right now. I'm always happy to be doing CAD work.

If my daughter didn't have to be online for work, we would have been there today. I have been to a few, but it seems the last one was in 2013. Glad you got down there.

Yes, every time.