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| BlowoutThe least they could have done was put Scalabrine in. He's like the Mark Madsen of the Celtics. | | |
| Better GameThat was a much better game, although I'm not yet sure how the Lakers are going to pull it off in Boston now.
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| Terrible GameThat was the worst game ever tonight.
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| Traffic LightsIn February or March, it all came to a head. The traffic light right by my house really ticked me off for the last time. I live on a pretty busy street that is perpendicular to another really busy street (an expressway, actually). The problem is that the north south traffic lights that govern the crossing of my house's street had green lights that were basically far too short for the amount of traffic that crosses through that intersection. It's also compounded by the fact that we live next to train tracks that are used for Caltrain, the commuter rail that goes from the South Bay (San Jose area) to San Francisco. When the train is coming, the north /south street gets pre-empted and you get a red when you would have normally gotten a green. These two combined make for one terrible intersection.
On this particular Sunday, I had just come home from church, and took the slow way home that would have me take my street across this intersection. It took me 12 minutes and 5 red/green light cycles in order for me to go 1000 feet. That's less than 1mph for 12 minutes. This was an ongoing phenomenon for several months, but it just got to me so much that day that I had to do something about it. Normally, I'm a pretty nice driver, and if people are trying to change lanes in front of me, I'll slow down to let them in. If people are trying to turn from a parking lot onto the street, I'll slow down and let them in. EXCEPT for this particular intersection and street. It got to the point where I would hope that everyone in front of me was a jerk, so that the guy trying to make the right turn onto the street from the gas station in front of me would get blocked until I drove past him. Because the addition of one extra car could mean that I would have to wait another light cycle to get past this stupid bloody light.
So on that day, I decided I had taken all I could take and wrote a letter to the vice mayor of the city and two city council people who were on the transportation committee for Mountain View. I decided I would email them primarily, but send a written letter as well, since I figured politicians would respond more favorably to written correspondence. I wrote a well -worded letter that described my frustration with this particular light, couched in language that said it affected local businesses (it does, but I just really wanted it fixed for me), and asked them to do something about it. I suggested that either A), after a train comes, the next green light cycle for the north/south be doubled to what it normally was, or B) extend the green light time for the north/south direction to 45 seconds from 30 seconds. I fired off the email feeling semi-smug that I could now say I'd done something about the problem, even though I didn't expect them to actually do anything about it.
Imagine my surprise when the vice mayor of the city e-mailed me back within a few hours and said she'd have the city engineer look into the problem and that it had been an ongoing concern. I thought, "Wow! The Vice-Mayor e-mailed me back. Awesome!" I still figured not much would get done, and I ended up talking to my manager about it, but he was convinced it was just a lackey for the vice mayor who wrote back to people. I ended up getting another letter several weeks later from the city engineer saying that the traffic light is actually controlled and managed by the county, rather than the city, because of the train tracks. But he said that he would ask the county to look into the matter and would report back after they had met sometime in April.
So the end of May rolls around, and I got an e-mail back from the city engineer saying that the county had approved my request and the traffic light would now be extended to 40 seconds in the southern direction! Success!!! You might not think 10 seconds makes that much difference, but it actually clears out the backlog significantly faster than the gigantic time sink that was there before. It's probably at least 5-8 cars that wouldn't have been able to cross the street. So, even though I didn't take PS-22, I still feel like I contributed to city politics.
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| Tired1 birthday party, 2 weddings, 1 graduation, 14 flights, 17,865 air-miles, and 4 weekends spent traveling, I'm just really.... tired.
I don't think I'm ready to do a whirlwind month like this again. Not to say that it wasn't great fun catching up with people I haven't seen for months, witnessing marriages start, and see people become doctors, but it was just exhausting. I think the context switching from work to "play" and back finally caught up with me last weekend, and this weekend, I was just running on fumes. I'll be really, *REALLY* glad for a weekend of lounging around, sleeping in, and eating fresh healthy food coming up soon...
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