Miscellaneous

Part 1: here. Part 2: here. Suburban practice: 30-45mph streets Goals: Be able to drive to (and park at) Trader Joe’s then Metropolitan Market and get back home. Continue building good habits, two-way communication with parental unit in right seat Relatively simple drive to there, some complexities coming back. Scanning and naming things to keep an eye on (e.g., pedestrians looking like they may cross, lights about to change, etc.) Lane changes. Left and right turns, signaling. An example of a multi-lane left turn; there are no lane dots to assist. ...

(A belated followup to Part 1. Part 3 is here.) Neighborhood Practice: 25mph streets Goals: Back out of and pull into our driveway. Complete point-to-point drives in a gentle environment, build good habits – speed control, scanning, and learning to recognize potential issues. Two-way communication with parental unit in right seat. For example, when I say stop, you need to stop right away. Otherwise, I’ll suggest things like “let’s pull over ahead” or “right turn at the next traffic light.” I need you to articulate things you see and actions you’re about to take (e.g., “I see a child on a bicycle weaving; a pedestrian is about to enter the crosswalk, so I will plan on yielding.”). If you don’t do that, I will assume you’re unaware of the issue and will point it out with varying degrees of subtlety. Locations: Klahanie Blvd – This is a wide road with ample shoulder, traffic calming devices, and pedestrian crosswalks. The speed limit is 25mph and visibility is excellent … once you’re off our street. Neighborhood beginner level. Source: Google Street View ...

I will be teaching my adult children how to drive and found it helpful to cobble together a syllabus of activities. This will be in multiple phases, starting with … a parking lot. Part 2 is here. Part 3 is here. Parking Lot: Goals: Use and feel of steering inputs, mirrors and other controls. Car gauges and lights. Learn how the car handles at different slow speeds. Parking. Basic turns and navigation around stationary objects. Locations: Sammamish Park and Ride ...

Not that I need another hobby, but… I’ve belatedly taken my friend Tracey’s suggestion to try geocaching, essentially a treasure hunt. When I started reading about it last month, I was impressed with how many of these things there are. Check out the map of geocaches within a few miles of home: So many caches, so little time The first one I found is known as a multi-cache – the little icon that looks like a sort of yellowish file cabinet drawer opened. With these, you have to find one or more intermediate waypoints to end up at the final, “traditional cache” (the shoebox icon) destination nearby. It’s not the best type of cache to try at first, but in this case I lucked out. What made finding it memorable was how much effort its creater put into the ingenious contraption. Externally, it looked like the ubiquitous bird house found in suburbia. When inspected closely – not that you’d ever have any reason to do so – one might notice the bottom pulled out to reveal the Cache of Geo-Joy. ...

To trim expenses, I consolidated my web and email providers this week. My web provider has been good to work with, but the virtual dedicated server is much more than I need (and can afford) right now. The email provider’s been somewhat disappointing, but the account had been prepaid through Wednesday. While I was waiting for the DNS entries to propagate, I noticed someone had sent a trackback ping to the Soy Ginger Mayo recipe on the old site. Twice. ...