Saturday, 5th of February, 2000
Friday, 4th of February, 2000
The trend now is for specialized vehicles. The Sports Utility Truck is one of them. Man are they really neat. The styling of the Chevy Avalanche is really awesome.
Wow! Subaru has an STX concept car. This thing is da bomb! Woah! Turbocharged for 230 bhp, and a dual-range 5-speed stick. Tons of crazy off-road lights and stuff. McIntosh 7-speaker audio for 650 watts and an in-car VU meter! The Switchback system is awesome. If this comes into production, it may as well be my dream car.
I got a haircut today. It's better than before. I decided not to get the back cut at all, so kinda leaving it long. However, the hair stylist was very good about cutting the rest of my hair so that it was still decently long, but not as thick of a layer of it.
I burned a CD today with the cheapo CompUSA CD-R I bought. The results are kinda depressing. My CD-ROM won't read it! Wow, this is some cheapo media. I had to stick it into my burner for it to work properly. Owell, time to go back to ordering Pengo media.
Thursday, 3rd of February, 2000
Wednesday, 2nd of February, 2000
Woah, the newspaper Suburban Journals had a aerial view of my subdivision the other day. I scanned it in.
Movie - 15:58 - I grab the digital camera and head east on I64 to go down to U City and take some picture of the intersection that may come in handy when I go to court.
Movie - 16:03 - I head north on I170. Woah, what happened here. Traffic. This is unusual.
Picture - 16:07 - More traffic. Owell, at least it is moving.
Movie - 16:08 - Must be an accident or some. This is pretty bad. Good thing I'm getting off the highway soon. Woah, highway stopping, time to hit brakes.
Movie - 16:15 - Ah, now I'm on Midland Boulevard. Ok, time to find the intersection. This is an interesting road, it is 1/1 with a wide median.
Picture - 16:22 - Ah, here it is. Check out how there are two stop signs here, one really far ahead, and one really far back. This is because of the nature of the intersection, it is not perpendicular.
Picture - 16:24 - Now you see it from the different angle. The street that's going across is Midland. You can see the back of one stop sign, and the other stop sign is on the back of the Wrong Way sign. Here, you can see the nature of the non-perpendicular intersection.
Picture - Same vantage point from a little further back, now you can see more of the intersection.
Movie - 16:31 - I think that's all I need. I hop onto MO340 and head west to go home. Oh, wonderful, white BMW 525i gets right in front of me and hits the brake.
Movie - 16:33 - Still heading down MO340. Nothing significant. I'm approaching the interchange with I170, which is the bridge up high that I approach, you can't see it very well though. Nabil is right, these movies of driving are really cool. Especially now that I have the camera mounted right on the dash so it doesn't move around too much.
Picture - This is the offramp from northbound I170 to MO340. Traffic starting to pile up a little.
Picture - This is the onramp onto northbout I170. Again, getting kinda busy now.
Movie - 16:35 - I head under the I170 overpass and towards home.
Turns out, when I get home, I realized I took all those photos in low res. If I want to print it out, I need to have the maximum quality possible. Ooops. I might have to go back and get those shots again.
Movie - 18:53 - I head south on I270. Woah, video is horridly choppy, because I have lots of effects to make it even decently viewable in the dark turned on, and there isn't enough processing power I guess. I ought to try optimizing more next time.
Movie - 18:54 - I start driving into the stack interchange with I64.
Movie - 18:56 - I approach the MO100 exit. Woah! Some guy got busted! And that cop almost hit me too!
Some thoughts:
If a pig loses it's voice, is it disgruntled?
Why is the man who invests all your money called a broker?
Why do croutons come in airtight packages? It's just stale bread to begin with.
When cheese gets its picture taken, what does it say?
Why is a person who plays the piano call a pianist, but a person who drives a race car not called a racist?
If horrific means to make horrible, doesn't terrific mean to make terrible?
If lawyers are disbarred and clergymen are defrocked, doesn't it follow that electricians can be delighted, musicians denoted, cowboys deranged, models deposed, tree surgeons debarked and dry cleaners depressed?
Do Roman paramedics refer to IV's as 4's?
Why is it that if someone tells you that there are 1 billion stars in the universe you will believe them, but if they tell you a wall has wet paint, you will have to touch it to be sure?
Tuesday, 1st of February, 2000
A Hundred Years Ago -- (From a book called "When My Grandmother Was a Child" by Leigh W. Rutledge, which begins, "In the summer of 1900, when my grandmother was a child...")
Only 14 percent of the homes in the United States had a bathtub.
Only 8 percent of the homes had a telephone. A three-minute call from Denver to New York City cost eleven dollars.
There were only 8,000 cars in the US and only 144 miles of paved roads. The maximum speed limit in most cities was ten mph.
Alabama, Mississippi, Iowa, and Tennessee were each more heavily populated than California. With a mere 1.4 million residents, California was only the twenty-first most populous state in the Union.
The tallest structure in the world was the Eiffel Tower.
The average wage in the US was twenty-two cents an hour. The average US worker made between $200 and $400 per year. A competent accountant could expect to earn $2000 per year, a dentist $2500 per year, a veterinarian between $1500 and $4000 per year, and a mechanical engineer about $5000 per year.
More than 95 percent of all births in the United States place at home.
Ninety percent of all US physicians had no college education. Instead, they attended medical schools, many of which were condemned in the press and by the government as "substandard."
Sugar cost four cents a pound. Eggs were fourteen cents a dozen. Coffee cost fifteen cents a pound. Most women only washed their hair once a month and used borax or egg yolks for shampoo.
Canada passed a law prohibiting poor people from entering country for any reason, either as travelers or immigrants.
The five leading causes of death in the US were: 1. Pneumonia and influenza, 2. Tuberculosis, 3. Diarrhea, 4. Heart disease, 5. Stroke.
The American flag had 45 stars. Arizona, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Hawaii and Alaska hadn't been admitted to the Union yet.
Drive-by shootings -- in which teenage boys galloped down the street on horses and started randomly shooting at houses, carriages, or anything else that caught their fancy, were an ongoing problem in Denver and other cities in the West.
The population of Las Vegas, Nevada was thirty. The remote desert community was inhabited by only a handful of ranchers and their families.
Plutonium, insulin, and antibiotics hadn't been discovered yet. Scotch tape, crossword puzzles, canned beer, and iced tea hadn't been invented.
There was no Mother's Day or Father's Day.
One in ten US adults couldn't read or write. Only 6 percent of all Americans had graduated from high school.
Some medical authorities warned that professional seamstresses were apt to become sexually aroused by the steady rhythm, hour after hour, of the sewing machine's foot pedals. They recommended slipping bromide-which was thought to diminish sexual desire-into the women's drinking water.
Marijuana, heroin, and morphine were all available over the counter at corner drugstores. According to one pharmacist, "Heroin clears the complexion, gives buoyancy to the mind, regulates the stomach and the bowels, and is, in fact, a perfect guardian of health."
Coca-Cola contained cocaine instead of caffeine.
Punch-card data processing had recently been developed, and early predecessors of the modern computer were used for the first time by the government to help compile the 1900 census.
Eighteen percent of households in the United States had at least one full-time servant or domestic.
There were about 230 reported murders in the US annually