Live from Austin!

Hell may not have frozen over, but Texas has, and that’s almost as rare. Last night we were driving home from Houston when the temperature dropped below freezing, and the car showed a black ice warning light. Soon it began to sleet.

Texans really don’t know how to deal with snow and ice. I drove slowly and carefully, but people who had bought into the SUV myth were overtaking. Unfortunately, no amount of all-wheel-drive or traction control will help if you hit a patch of wet ice. Before long we rounded a gentle curve, and passed a major accident scene. A big patch of smashed glass was by the central barrier, and an SUV was a little further on, pointing the wrong way with its front left corner crumpled. Seconds later we passed another car, similarly wrecked, then another SUV in a ditch.

Fortunately, we had set out from Houston as soon as it began raining, so we were only around 20 miles from home by the time the roads got really treacherous. I found a truck to follow. My reasoning was as follows:

1. Chances are, the truck driver has years of experience driving in all kinds of weather conditions. So, let him set an appropriate speed.
2. He’s got good visibility to see what’s going on up ahead and slow down in plenty of time.
3. Behind the truck, the ice will be broken up somewhat.
4. Anything an 18 wheeler can safely negotiate, I can probably safely negotiate.
5. One of the biggest dangers when driving in icy conditions is inability to brake. In which case, it’s better to be behind the truck than in front of it.

I also did my best to stick to the middle lane where possible. Again, the reasoning was pretty simple: if the car started sliding, I’d have the maximum time possible to let it stop sliding before I ran out of road.

It’s always worth remembering that a 40mph collision with a solid concrete barrier is quite sufficient to kill you. Combine that with a road that may at any moment decide not to let you put on the brakes, and it’s not hard to deduce that doing 50 mph is a bad move. Some of the trucks put their hazard lights on and drove slowly in formation to block the way and stop various idiots from killing themselves, which I thought was very charitable of them.

By around 15 miles from home, everything had slowed to around 6-8 mph. Fortunately, after 15-20 minutes things eased up a little, and we made it the rest of the way at around 20-30 mph.

The final problem was getting from I-35 to our house, the biggest hazard being the big dip in Oltoft Street just west of the freeway. I eased the car to the top of the hill, and tried to start the descent as slowly as possible. I knew that there was no way I was going to be able to brake significantly before I got to the bottom; I took my foot off the accelerator completely, and let the electric motors provide a little drag on all 4 wheels.

As we hit the bottom of the hill and came up the other side, we realized that the power was out–along with all the traffic lights. Fortunately, there was plenty of time to slow before the first junction, and people were pretty much behaving sensibly in the absence of signals. We made it home safely, and I started trying to un-knot every muscle in my body.

Normally at this time of year, the average temperature hits a high of just over 60°F, 15°C. Today the high was 2°C. Apparently it hasn’t been this cold since 1927. But as Texas’s own Bill Hicks might have put it: Remember, increasing incidence of climactic extremes has nothing to do with so-called global warming, and you’d be a fool and a Communist to think otherwise. This is just a perfectly normal bit of freak weather you’d expect every hundred years or so…and so was Hurricane Katrina, and so is this year’s Amazon drought, and so is the sudden lack of ice in the arctic, and so is the freakishly warm Carribean ocean weather that has bleached the coral reefs, and the drought emergency in the western USA, and the heaviest rainfall since records began in Australia, the freak snowfalls in Kazakhstan, the record heat in Prague, the blizzards in the UK, the floods in Cumbria, and the 195km/h storms in Sweden.

Anyway, Houston…

We’d gone there because I have some time off, and it was a fairly cheap alternative to sitting on my ass watching TV all day, nice though the new television is. We both got a religious experience into the bargain; I got mine at the Johnson Space Center, and rothko got hers at The Rothko Chapel, of course.

As I was driving just now, the frames of my glasses disintegrated, and the right lens fell under the seat.

I’m not sure if it’s an omen or a metaphor.

Last driving lesson (not written about at the time) I was seriously stressed out after a day at work, and I made an unsafe turn. I was so ashamed.

Today I did the driving before work, and did far better. Three parallel parkings, a couple of three point turns, lots of tiny one-way streets with stop signs, and some excitement with an 18 wheeler and a UPS truck, but it all worked out.

I was about 10× better that time, but I don’t really understand why. Perhaps the relative quietness of the roads helped.

I just finished my first driving lesson. Well, not strictly my first, but the last time I drove a car was 15 years ago, in England, and it had manual transmission. It seems like a lifetime ago now.

I’ve been in the US long enough that driving on the right wasn’t a problem. In fact, it seems natural. What didn’t seem quite so natural is that the sticks to control the indicators and lights are reversed—but the brake and accelerator aren’t.

As we pulled away for the first time, Somerville’s finest chose that precise moment to drive past our house. It was an omen. Twenty minutes later I was approaching one of those three lane New England junctions with all the roads at weird angles, when I heard sirens and saw that an EMS vehicle was approaching from behind. Naturally the woman in the right lane didn’t want to let me pull right, and pushed ahead into the space in front of her. Accelerating into the junction seemed like a bad move. I did my best to get over to the right as the instructor pushed the horn, and the ambulance got by once the guy in the left lane worked out what was going on.

I also learned that SUV drivers really are the massive assholes everyone says they are, and can’t be relied on to yield right of way at a four way stop even if you clearly got there first.

I give thanks to Charles Kettering, inventor of automatic transmission. I’m sure I’ll get used to only driving with one foot. Still, I can’t help wondering if teaching mathew to drive isn’t like teaching a squirrel to waterski—sure, you can do it, but some creatures aren’t suited to some forms of transport.

As you may have noticed, I’ve not been writing much recently. There are several reasons for this.

Firstly, work has been insane for the last few weeks. The other day the project manager I’m working with actually asked why I haven’t crawled into a corner to whimper quietly. I explained that at Harlequin, I became completely acclimated to having an order of magnitude more work than I could ever possibly do in the time allowed. After a while, your worry circuits just burn out, and you do the best that can be done with the resources available, and document that you did so.

I’ve also been going through some bureaucracy. The necessary paperwork for the sale of my UK flat is now in the hands of the solicitors. It included a copy of my passport, which needed to be authenticated by my doctor, oddly enough—whereas the US has notaries, the UK doesn’t, and instead you’re expected to get stuff signed in the presence of your doctor or priest, or a certified engineer, or some other notionally pillar of the community. Since the person has to have known you personally for two years, my doctor was the obvious choice.

To add to the excitement, said passport is expiring in October, and the bureaucrats in the UK (and various other nations) have decided that you’re no longer allowed to enter the country if your passport is within six months of expiring. I can only assume that terrorists don’t commit atrocities until 6 months before their passports expire, because they don’t want to waste the effort they went to to get the document. “Hey, I’ve paid for the ten years, why not use them?”

So, my passport has to go to Washington DC. They don’t expect or want me to go with it, but it does mean that once again I can’t leave the country until expensive paperwork is done.

Last week Dan brought round an old HP laptop. It had been taken to the store for repair, because the DVD-ROM drive was broken. The highly trained engineers at the store had decided it was a software problem, probably something to do with drivers, and that Dan should just reinstall Windows.

Needless to say, the machine wouldn’t boot any kind of CD, not even a Windows install CD. Instead, the drive made sad little clunking noises. So, I ordered the cheapest replacement drive I could find, and fitted it. Then at the weekend, we started the “Teach Dan Linux” project.

Since the objective was forcible education, we installed Gentoo. So, that was pretty much the weekend gone. For those who care, XFree86 doesn’t work properly on S3 Savage IX cards, but X.org works perfectly. Oh, and KDE takes a hell of a long time to compile on a Celeron…

Today it was time for further adventure. Having spent a month or two studing now and again, I felt ready enough to go to the Mass RMV and get a permit to learn to drive one of those four-wheeled metal contraptions that seems to be so popular. The test was a bit odd, including questions like how many days I have to file a complaint if my license is suspended. Yeah, like I need to know that while driving. Still, whizzed through it in under ten minutes and got my permit.

So tomorrow, I guess I call one of the local schools and arrange some driving instruction, since we don’t have a car. I took lessons and a test in the UK, but that combined the twin nightmares of High Wycombe’s roads and manual transmission. High Wycombe, bizarrely enough, is at the bottom of a crater, so every start is a hill start. To add to the fun it has a lot of one-way streets, an abundant supply of 18 wheelers delivering to shops, and a “magic roundabout” consisting of multiple mini-roundabouts around one huge one, allowing you to go around the big roundabout in either direction. If you recover from that, they let you try the really big roundabout up the hill, which has traffic lights on it.

So yeah, I’m expecting Cambridge and Somerville to be a fair bit easier to deal with. Plus, this time I’m actually motivated.

In fairness to Wycombe, I should mention that it is the best place in the entire universe to buy a sofa. And that just outside is Marlow, which takes us back to Dan. But anyway…

The test was still nerve-wracking, because I still have major issues around examinations. Which could be a problem, as IBM expects me to take some to get certified as a project manager. Maybe it’s time for therapy?

I’ve also finished as much of Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time as I think I care to—specifically, everything except the silly final battle. Dammit, Jim, I’m an explorer and puzzle solver, not a twitch gamer. So I’ve purchased Burnout 2: Point of Impact, an educational arcade driving game where you get points for driving as recklessly as possible.

Well, we’re booked to go visit Austin in a couple of weeks. We’ll be staying with friends, checking out neighborhoods, and maybe looking at a little Real Estate.

In the mean time, I’m busy reading the Massachusetts Driver’s Manual.

According to market research conducted by car manufacturers, SUV drivers are insecure, vain, self-centered, antisocial, and bad drivers.

“If you have a sport utility, you can have the smoked windows, put the children in the back and pretend you’re still single.”

—David Bostwick, Chrysler’s market research director

Still, on the plus side the occupant death rate is higher in SUVs than in cars. Higher still for really big SUVs. SUV drivers are also much more likely to run over their own offspring.

Unfortunately, SUVs kill five times as many non-SUV-driving people as normal cars do.

I’ve been invited to test-drive an SUV. As the front of the envelope puts it:

It’s the right of every
American to drive the latest
descendent of the original 4×4.

They’re referring to the Jeep Liberty (sic), a gas-guzzling four ton behemoth that gets 16 miles per gallon. To try to sell it as an “off road” vehicle, they’ve set up a special little course that you can drive it around. Careful perusal of the brochure reveals that the course has a maximum elevation of fifteen feet, which will surely give a nosebleed to the kind of terrified soccer mom who actually drives this kind of vehicle.