Hayseeds No. 19

Happy 4th of July!

It's that day, where we get to celebrate freedom or the lack therefore of, and see how many fingers we can remove with fireworks.

Don't worry, the pigs plan to arrest plenty of people with fireworks, in an effort to keep morons from hurting themselves. We should all just move into tempeture controlled rubber-rooms, and get rid off all our cars—they are way too dangerous.

Freedom is a strange thing for sure, it's the right to be left alone (something similar to the right to privacy and I guess abortion and all that fun stuff). There is nothing like the thrill of killing babies and burning trash to celebrate the 4th. Sorry, that idea was some how inspired by misc.rural.

Or it could be like Easy Rider, where freedom is something you get after some redneck kills you by shooting your gas tank. Somehow, you don't see that image on the celebration of the 4th.

All I know is, god damn it, be safe—we don't need any more fascist laws taking away our freedom, because some morons don't know how to be safe, and end up injuring our selfs. Drinking and fireworks don't mix, even if both of those things are good in seperation. Same thing with drugs—even though they might make the show far more interesting.

News from the Anti-Thesis of Freedom.

That would be New York City's anti-preservation laws.

I guess in the big evil city you have to get an expensive permit to modify any historic building, even if it means just keeping up the building.

Well folks, I'd rather see old buildings kept up, instead of going through a bueraucratic mess. Shouldn't people have the freedom to do with their with buildings what they want, well with moderation. Routine maintance and improvements shouldn't be included in that.

Good Night.

It's almost midnight.

Like any weekend in the summer, the news is slower then slow. But, alas, I found some interesting stories that migth just peak your interest.

It's been pretty hot around here, the past few days—not just hot, but humid enough, that nobody really wants to do anything. I've been in the creek the past few days, and doing some sleeping in the daytime (it's far nicer at night).

I'm probably going to go hiking tommorow, maybe back up to P. Run again. We shall see.

The Interstate System.

As seen in '57-'58.

Not surpisingly, the main trunks of the Interstate system have not changed significantly from that point on, but little changes were made to the route.

Take a look at these two maps to see the orginal interstate layout. This page may take a while to fully load, but its viewable while it is loading (at least, in part ;).

Every State Highway: Codified into Law.

Some of you might not have expected, that every highway in New York was actually part of the Consolidated Laws.

The section you want to read is Chapter 25, Article 12, which lists every single State Highway in the state of New York.

An important thing to note, is that Consolidated Law highway numbers and names are different from the touring Routes we all know an love (like State 'legislative' Route 9102 versus State 'touring' Route 32).

Confusing, but I guess it gives the legislators maximum power over highway naming. ;)

Overdone and Undone Webpages.

Unforently, for the greater population, the first is far more common. This all started as a discussion on IRC.

While I try to be conservative with my design, sometimes it more moderate then conservative.

A very conservative design would be Matt's Webpage. A more moderdate design would soemtime like my page. I must admit, that its a bit too fancy for my taste, but everybody gotten to know it, so it will probably.

Advogato.org has found the balance perfectly. I probably should have done something closer to that, except replace some of the heading tables with CSS (although that would be unfriendly to older browsers).

Overdone pages are everywhere. I won't link them, but CNN.com and Netscape.com are very good examples. Even Yahoo.com is super-overloaded.

Finding balance is hard. But I've gotten to like the current design around these parts, and it's over a year old, so I know it works well. It has been tweaked, but that's the course of everything.

Sunday Evening.

And it's still pretty warm out there.

It's summer, and the start of a new week. Back to work, yawn. But another weekend isn't really all the far in the distance.

At any rate, I went out to Partridge Run today, and did some hiking along the Long Path. Plus, I took a nice little drive—it was nice out.

Dealing with those Red Lights.

Different people have different solutions for different problems.

Some of the big cities (fortunetly not upstate New York), have been putting up those dumb red-light cameras, as a way to increase the number of accidents in intersections, and raise revenue.

Well, here's one for you—a flash senstive spray that is invisible to the nakid eye, that makes flash pictures of license plates unreable. Great.

A solution for rural roads with traffic lights, is 'dilemma zone' circutry, that senses when cars are close to the light, and allows them to pass safely, so they don't have slam on their brakes or race through the yellow/red to make it through.

Certainly sounds like an interesting idea, and would be a perfect addition to roads like the Delmar Bypass (Route 32, Expressway part). See misc.transport.road for details.