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  • Always One

    One of the things Colorado is infamous for is its terrible highway interchanges. The most infamous of these would be the I-25 / I-70 interchange – lovingly called “The Mousetrap”.

    They rebuilt the Mousetrap in the early 90’s, and it is better now – but it still punishes tourists who haven’t planned ahead.

    Back in the 80’s I drove through the ‘old’ Mousetrap fairly often – it was one of those things where you had to be in the correct lane for where you wanted to go about two miles ahead of time… Unfortunately not everyone was a local and the whole interchange was basically someone playing marbles with cars for most of the day.

    It was so bad that in the 70’s Denver installed an airport-style control tower at the interchange to coordinate police and tow trucks.

    It’s “Orange Season” here in Colorado, which means the surface streets all tend to be one-lane traffic jams currently. So this week I’ve been trying my luck by driving up Parker Rd. to the Parker / I-225 interchange…

    And it’s a bit of a shit-show every day…

    See, thanks to Cherry Creek State Park, everyone in the above area needs to get to that one spot to get on I-225. And there are only two roads to do this; Parker Rd. and Hampden Ave.

    So every morning it looks a bit like this:

    The people coming in from the 2-lane Hampden entrance on the right have to cross four lanes to the left in about a half-mile to go south on I-225. Meanwhile the people coming in from Parker Road at the bottom need to merge right across the 2 lanes of Hampden people trying to go left to go north on I-225.

    To complicate this, if you look closely between the Hampden ramp and I-225, there are a couple of exits for the commercial park to the north…

    This is where, every day, someone with out of state plates will madly charge across several lanes of 50+ mph traffic to take that Vaughn Road exit…

    Something like this:

    This morning I was the lucky recipient of one of these out of state people cutting right a few inches in front of my bumper.

    No turn signal and no hesitation – just yanked it right.

    Apparently there’s a reason the hellcat has 15.7″ 6-pot Brembo brakes on it – and it’s to stop the 4400 pound monster before it kills some idiot Californian in a beat up econobox.

    I screeched to a halt, the cars behind me went three different directions, and I laid on the horn – to get flipped off for being in her way.

    I probably need to just stick to the surface streets despite the cone-zones everywhere… There are fewer out-of-state people away from the highways.

  • Weekend Update

    2017 Challenger Hellcat / 1968 Camaro Z28

    Friday afternoon, here at the office, my CFO came in and asked for a ride to pick up his Camaro from the shop – he had the front suspension redone, a motor mount replaced, and other small mechanical stuff done over at ProTech.

    I looked over the work and they seem to have done a good job and the cost was pretty fair.

    He hopped in his Camaro and I followed him back to his place to give him a ride back to the office, and the trip resulted in a lot of turned heads and thumbs up – so that was fun.

    Saturday morning I ran down to the King Soopers in Parker for groceries, and then in the afternoon I drove back down to Parker to have dinner at Hickory House – which is still the best BBQ in the area.

    Parker is a great place to drive around because it’s the last bastion of Colorado’s front-range car culture. So of an evening you’ll see everything from current-year Italian supercars to 1930’s street rods running around.

    Sunday I spent in my home office, sitting in the air conditioning, doing 3D model and texture work in Second Life.

    A friend wanted me to theme the ground level of their two sims, which I wrapped up Sunday evening. And I think I might shift my avatar from an anthropomorphic dragon to a feral dragon just for fun – so I picked up a few parts for this and will work on it over the week as I have time.

    And that’s the update from the weekend. Nothing earth-shattering, but it was fun / relaxing and that makes it worth it.

  • That New Laptop Experience

    Can I interest you in some shovelware?

    I’m in the office today and staging a few Windows laptops for employee use. It takes me about an hour to set up a Windows laptop these days, mostly because of Microsoft and shovelware bloat…

    The image above is what you’re faced with when setting up an HP laptop currently… Whee! And I have to manually delete all of it to ensure the system is clean for testing…

    Microsoft on the other hand is really, really interested in your personal information, and getting a machine set up for testing with a local account gets harder with each update.

    Most of the time you can shift-f10 into a command prompt at the setup networking screen, type in oobe\bypassnro, and wait for the reboot to get a tiny little “I don’t have Internet” link that will let you set up a local account. But Microsoft is getting rid of that too… The only recourse at that point will be to roll my own OS installers and then go dig around in the manufacturer’s website for drivers.

    When I bring this up most people will point out that Apple does the same sort of thing… But not really.

    See, Microsoft is a software company and therefore has to do a lot of incremental sales and tap as many small revenue streams as possible… For example, Windows 11 Home costs $139 and Microsoft still injects ads into it and data-mines you as a revenue stream… And some people think the insistence on a “free” Microsoft account is innocent…

    With a Microsoft account what you get is another vector for Microsoft to sell software and services to you, and acquire data from you to sell… If Microsoft gives you an email address, it’s purely to sell you Office 365 and tell you about how great Edge is because Edge is another sales / data-mining vector. If Microsoft gives you cloud storage, it’s just to rifle through your data for anything they can resell – when OneDrive feels like working at any rate. And the device settings sharing with a Microsoft account simply tells Microsoft what hardware you have and lets them unify your advertising IDs across platforms…

    Apple on the other hand is a hardware company, so their interest is in selling you more hardware for large sums of money. And the Apple Account exists to get people locked into the ecosystem… There isn’t really a need for an incremental advertising / data-mining revenue stream if Apple can just sell people a new $1000 phone every year because all of their photos are in iCloud and their apps are tied to their Apple Account.

    And annoying users with ads and data-mining is counter productive to that “sell more hardware” goal – Apple wants you happy with the ecosystem, so injecting a McAfee installer into the start menu at random is just not something Apple will do.