Car Care

Accident on Highway 26

I have spent in an inordinate amount of time dealing with my car this week. Sunday I let my wife use it because her's was out of gas. I like to buy gas at Costco 'cause it's cheaper, but I don't want to go to Costco on Sunday because it's going to be mobbed. Let's wait and go on Monday, but she has someplace to go on Sunday so I let her use my car.

She runs her errand but when she comes back she informs me that the tags have expired and I need to get it fixed. I bought the car back from my son a couple of months ago and never bothered to get the title transferred, so I guess maybe it's time. So off to the DMV to get the title transferred. That takes an hour and a hundred bucks, but I can't get the tags without a DEQ (smog) test. So off to the DEQ I go. That only takes half an hour and $25.

Thursday I head to downtown Portland for a lunch meeting. This usually takes about 30 minutes. Yesterday it took 2 hours. Highway 26 eastbound over Sylvan can get creepy-crawly, but yesterday was much worse. I considered bailing out early but I figured any alternate route is going to be jammed with people avoiding this SNAFU, so I creeped and crawled at less than walking speed for over an hour till we got within shouting distance of the top of the hill and then the congestion suddenly vanished and we all resume charging headlong into the future. At the last minute I realized that the cars at the top of the hill (just over a half mile away) all had their brake lights on. Traffic on the other side of the hill might just be getting into regular creepy-crawly mode (20 MPH), or it might be another cluster-muck, but in any case I had had enough so I bailed out. Took me another half hour to get downtown, but at least I wasn't stuck in a giant traffic jam. There never was any sign of what caused the problem, but the internet knows (picture at top).

Today it's time to tackle the tags again, so back to the DMV I go. Wait 10 minutes or so to find out I need proof of insurance. I have a couple of insurance cards in my wallet, but they're both expired, so back to the house to root around in my files and finally find a couple of current insurance cards. Back to the DMV. This time it takes two hours and $200 but I finally get it done.

Along the way I stopped at UBAD to get a loose rocker panel fixed. The car was a rebuilt wreck when I bought it and this spring the paint on the hood was starting to peal, so I spent a $1,000 and got it painted and the entire car detailed. I think the loose rocker panel is another casualty of the original wreck. Anyway it's trying to fall off, so I stop at UBAD and Martin puts a couple of screws in it. It's not pretty, but it works so it's good enough for me.

I also bought a tank of gas at Costco for $50 and a car wash for $10.

Hillsboro Industrial Park

Driving from DMV to DEQ I took some back roads, just to see what there is to see. Northwest of town farmers are plowing their fields with giant tractors. I thought you needed a giant farm to justify a giant tractors. Well, from the city limits to the coast range, it's all farmland, so yeah, maybe they do need giant tractors. My route eventually took me back inside The Urban Growth Boundary and what a change has happened to this area. There are a dozen, maybe two, big buildings that weren't there last week. The place is going crazy. You can see where The Urban Growth Boundary is in the above satellite map. I don't know how old that satellite image is, but I suspect it's at least a couple of weeks old, meaning it's missing half a dozen new buildings or so.

More car news. I sold my truck. Bought it roughly 30 months ago for $25,000 and spent $1,000 getting the damaged tailgate fixed. Decided I didn't really need a monster truck. Yes, it's a Colorado which is supposedly a compact, but it's a crew cab with a 6 foot bed, so it's very long which makes it kind of a pain to park just about anywhere. Now the Hyundai has returned to my warm embrace, so I don't really need it anymore. I stopped at CarMax in Beaverton. It took 30 minutes from them to come up with an offer of $13,000.

That was disappointing so I thought I'd try selling it myself and placed an ad on Craigslist. There is a little check box if you want to receive text messages and I thought, sure, why not? All the cool kids are doing in now, right? Wrong. I started getting texts right away, but every single one was from a scammer.  I had one guy ask for my best price. I was getting annoyed with all this noise, so I bumped the prince up another $1,000. He writes back immediately, saying okay and promising a certified check. That certified check business is sure sign of BSMF. After a month I finally got a phone call about the truck. This is the first person to call about it and he bought it for $15,000. So, waiting patiently paid me $2,000. I'll take that. He paid with a cashier's check, which is more like a money order. And it was good.

So the truck cost me $9,000 to own for 30 months. I probably only drove about 10,000 miles, so roughly a dollar a mile. Kind of high being as a car, over it's lifetime, probably costs more like 50 cents a mile.

Spacey

Space Lady

We were in downtown Hillsboro the other day and they had a couple of blocks closed off because of about two dozen big chalk drawings on the street. They were like eight feet square, maybe larger.

Space Dude

North Plains & the Urban Growth Boundary

North Plains Proposed UGB Expansion

Oregon is funny, we have a Land Use Commission that determines which land can be developed and which land is used for farming. The commission has built a corral around the Portland metropolitan area called the Urban Growth Boundary which leads to some odd situations. For instance, I live in residential subdivision that extends north to Evergreen Road. On the other side of the road we have farming fields. Those fields extend to the north for miles except for a little subdivision plopped down in the middle that is part of North Plains. It's kind of weird, all these fields and then all of a sudden a wall of houses.

Data Centers
None of these giant buildings were there last week

You go a mile to the east and we have a proliferation of big concrete boxes, which I suspect are data centers. No signs proclaiming just what's going on, but there are a bunch of them.

As long as I have been here there has been an ongoing war over the Urban Growth Boundary. On one hand we have people who want houses they can afford to buy and on the other side we have the 1000 Friends of Oregon who want to preserve farmland and keep Portland from turning into another Los Angeles.

North Plains is a small town just a couple miles north of here. It lies outside the Urban Growth Boundary but it is still within easy commuting distance of Portland, so there has been development going on there. Now they've stoked the war over the UGB by putting a measure on the ballot to expand North Plains by some 800 acres.

On one hand I suspect the Land Use Commission is staffed by limousine Bolsheviks who want to keep everything the way it was a hundred years ago. On the other hand I am repulsed by the horrendous traffic jams and two hour commutes that are so prevalent in Los Angeles. I would not like to see that here, but I'm not sure it can be avoided. Elon Musk might be onto something with his Boring Company.

The Laundry Room

The Laundry Room

The remodeling project has invaded our laundry room, so today we went to the laundromat.  I think this might be the first time I have been in one in over 40 years. Things have changed a bit. This one was brand new, full of big new, high-tech machines. As you might expect, they don't take quarters, you have to buy a card and then use the card to pay the machines. The washing machines charge by the pound. You load them up, close the door and then the machine weighs your laundry and decides how much to charge you. I think it charged us around five dollars a load. They were big loads, we'd been putting off going so we had a bunch. The dryers were much cheaper.

A phalanx of washing machines, yours to command.

While we were there a van pulled up and started unloading bags of laundry. The whole back of the van was packed. It seemed to be mostly bedding. They were from a homeless shelter. They dropped off the laundry and left it for the attendant to take care of it. $1.75 a pound and they might have had 100 pounds. I'm not sure what to make of this.

bike wreck, small

IAman reports:

hi,

Riding home after a delicious Sunday morning mcDonalds breakfast. I spun into macadam landing on my left knee resulting in 2.5 sq inches of road rash.

Details:

After a week of reminding myself of the hazards of biking in traffic.

ebiking, I pulled off Pacific highway thinking I was turning into a shortcut,  but no, it was the parking lot for a bottle drop.  Realizing my mistake I executed a 180 only to meet oncoming traffic,  I quickly executed a 270 at too slow of a speed resulting in a stall, not extending my leg fast  enough (age related)  I tumbled, landing primarily on my left outer knee. 

Getting up immediately, I check  for mobility,  thankfully no broken bones, The trauma shock wearing off,  the knee hurts.

A guy in a maxed out expedition Jeep asks if Im ok,  I wave him off witha "thanks, im ok".  He parks and comes over with his wife and a stocked medical kit.  Ointment,  gauze,  wrap  done.  "Thanks"  EJ and Pam were my saviours.

3 lessons:

1. Act your age,  at 67 dont bicycle fancy maneuvers in unfamiliar areas packed with cars.
2. Don't assume trauma victims are thinking straight
3. keep a stocked medical kit, in the car

I straightened the bike, found a safe place to try a ride, then pedaled home.

<end of todays lesson>

Hmm, nice outcome considering bicycles and jeeps are natural enemies.

Jackson School Road

Meanwhile, the fancy road improvement project in my neighborhood has been completed for a while now. As you might expect, there are bike lanes. However, the bike lanes are not along the edge of the roadway, they are adjacent to the sidewalk with a strip of garden between them and the road. They aren't marked as such except where there are ramps onto the roadway. The sidewalks are a good six feet wide, wide enough to accommodate a walker and a bicycle.

I never see any bicycles using the sidewalks. Twice this summer (Twice!) I have seen bicycles riding in the roadway completely ignoring the ramps and the sidewalks. Dadburn commies! Maybe when school starts and kids start riding their bikes the sidewalk bike lanes will get more use.

Firemen Carry

My wife recorded these short videos last month when they hauled me off to the ER. For your amusement.


Hauling me away to the ER part 1


Hauling me away to the ER part 2

Grain

Take a virtual tour of Port of Newcastle, Australia
Port of Newcastle
If you listen to the news reports it kind of looks like the whole world has lost its mind. In normal times the media are full of all kinds of bullshit, but ever since Russia attacked Ukraine it seems like someone has turned the level of idiocy up to eleven.

I put up a post the other day about how Russia has a stranglehold on Europe's supply of natural gas. Today I came across a report about grain that contained this bit:

Russia is the world’s largest exporter of wheat, accounting for over 18% of international exports. Together with Ukraine, which has also stopped shipping grain, the two countries account for about 30% of global wheat supplies. The crisis threatens to push food prices across the world to an all-time high.

Our fearless leaders are probably jabbering about more sanctions on Russia. What is that going to do to the price of bread? Wait, don't tell me, I'll bet it's going to go up. So not only are a bunch of people going to freeze to death, they're also going to starve. Vunderbar. All so Biden can continue to collect his measly few million in commissions from pipeline tariffs. I hope you're happy, Marky.

Okay, enough about the bullshit. Time for a little technological wonder. Looking for a picture of a ship loading Russian grain, I found this one:

Ship Loading Grain

The page I found it on is talking about Russian wheat, but that picture sure doesn't look like any Russia I know, so I ask Google about it and Google points to the video (at the top of this post). I watched the video, and I did not see this ship anywhere in there. But the setting looks the same. So I'm thinking Google scanned the video and recognized the buildings on the docks, or maybe the configuration of the land, or something and concluded it was the same place. I understand how you can compare different size still images through some mathematical function and tell whether they are the same image or not. If you can do it for still images, you could do it for videos as well, but given that a zillion hours of new video is uploaded to YouTube everyday, it would be a massive undertaking to run a computational analysis on all of them. Just comparing frames of the video to image wouldn't be enough though, because this ship isn't in there. They would have to analyze the scene enough to be able to recognize the place, with or without the ship. It just boggles my mind. Anyway, if you're curious the place is Newcastle in New South Wales, Australia.

To give you some idea of just how out-of-control this whole internet server business has gotten, here's a Google Streetview of the new QTS Data Center on what used to be Shute Road.

QTS Data Center

This image may be a year old. I drove by it today and the building is finished. It's not fancy, bare concrete walls and a wall of screens around the top that barely conceal the army of industrial sized air conditioning equipment, but it's big, and it's not the only one in the area.

Emergency Landing at Hillsboro Airport

Cessna Catastrophic Engine Failure Emergency with Video and ATC Audio
Cessna Twoohfive

The engine on this Cessna airplane quit while enroute from Seattle to Sacramento, California, last week. Fortunately, he was only a few miles from the Hillsboro Airport and was able to glide in and land safely. He was at 9,000 feet of elevation and six miles from the Hillsboro Airport when the engine quit. A Cessna 205 has a theoretical glide ration of 1.5 miles for every 1,000 feet of altitude, so he had a little cushion of time and space, not a lot, but some, and he was able to land safely. Hillsboro Airport, home to Nike, Intel and the Portland Trail Blazers charter flights, is just a mile from my house.

Cessna 205, same one as in the video

The Cessna 205 was only made in 1963 and 64 before is was superseded by the 206.

Continental 470 Engine

There are some photos at the end of the video that show the catastrophic damage to the engine. I hope to hear more about the causes in the near future.

Via Byron

Fire in Downtown Hillsboro

Big far fire hose snaking down the street

Fire Truck

More Fire Trucks

Just down the street they have torn down a bank and are drilling for mud

Supposedly there is a big wind storm blowing through this afternoon. Since they got the fire put out before that, we have escaped Boulder's fate.

Recycling

I just opened a bottle of champagne (cheap Costco champagne). It has a plastic cork, but it still has the traditional twisted wire retainer holding it in. I open the bottle and throw the retainer in the recycling, so now I'm wondering will it really get recycled, or is this more stuff for the landfill? We've got mixed recycling here, where you can dump paper, metal and certain kinds of plastic. Glass and motor oil are collected separately as is yard debris. As an aside, garbage is collected weekly here in Washington County, but every other week in Portland. Recycling is just the opposite. Here they alternate between yard debris one week and recycling the next. In Portland they collect both every week.

So, I throw the wire retainer in the mixed recycling. I wheel the container out to the curb Monday evening. Tuesday morning a big garbage truck comes by and picks it up with it's robot arm and dumps it in the back along with all the other stuff he's collected. When the driver has finished his route, he drives to the transfer station and dumps his load. Okay, this is the part I'm not clear about. Somebody is driving trucks to the landfill and and the main recycling center. Are they just driving the garbage trucks? Or are they repackaging the material for hauling on semi-trailers? I dunno, maybe if the landfill is less than 100 miles away, just driving straight there might be cheaper.

The material that gets dumped in the recycling bin eventually makes its way to the giant recycling center, which I think is in northwest Portland in the industrial district. I imagine some rudimentary sorting is done there, blown air can separate the lighter stuff like paper and plastic from the metal, magnetics can pick out the iron and steel. You might be able to use water to separate the paper from the plastic. I dunno, but I wonder about all the metal that's left after everything else gets shunted aside. You should be left with copper, brass, and some stainless. Then again, the amount non-magnetic heavy metal might not amount to a hill of beans. It's what's left over after all the easy pickin's have been picked up. It might be that a man with a broom sweeps up at the end of the day and dumps it in the trash.

Evergreen Road Crash

I originally wrote this a month ago, but for some reason I didn't push the Publish button. I was looking for something else in my drafts folder and noticed this, so here it is.

Evergreen Road Crash #1

Osmany saw a crash in his rear view mirror as he was driving eastbound on Evergreen Road this morning around 11AM. There was traffic in the westbound lane. One of those vehicles (a pickup truck maybe) started drifting across the center line. Osmany saw this and stepped on the gas because he did not want to get hit. That vehicle continued across the center line. He grazed the rear of either the first or second car behind Osmany and then impacted next one. Osmany saw all this happen in his rear view mirror. After he saw the accident he stopped, turned around and went back to check on the people involved. Apparently no one was seriously injured. Everyone involved was out of their car and walking around. Most were talking on their cell phones. There were some cuts and some blood, but nothing serious. The guy who caused the wreck was out walking around, but not talking on a cell phone. Make of that what you will. You can see the results in the photos. 

Evergreen Road Crash #2

The accident happened on Northwest Evergreen Road between Jackson School Road (North) and Jackson School Road (South). Thank you street naming committee.

P.S. The photos were taken with a cell phone and normal cell phone vertical format included the passenger seat of the car. I cropped the photos to eliminate the seat but I left the windowsill in the frame so you would understand what the mirror was doing in the lower left corner of the frame. I suppose I could have cropped it out as well, but I didn't. This is what you get.

Who is that masked man?

Gas Mask

I think the corona virus scare is overblown. I might be wrong. We might get a million deaths next year from some new strain, but I doubt it. I don't think we are even going to see a blip on the population graph. On the other hand, the side effects are going to fuck us over but good.

The lockdowns are having an adverse effect on the economy. That and the psychological effects of people being isolated, or even worse, locked up with their 'loved ones', is killing more people than the virus could ever hope to kill. But that doesn't matter, but because we are not operating in the real world, we are operating in a dream world where everyone is wonderful and we all have the same set of pristine values and nobody hates anybody. The parameters of this dream world are all that you can get a majority to agree on, and this agreement is going to have us marching straight off the cliff that is getting closer every day.

People are resilient, so we should be able to adjust to this 'new normal' of never going anywhere and never seeing anybody.  We should be able to find some way to hobble along, but I am afraid of what it's going to look like. 

Homeless camps have started showing up in Hillsboro. We're 30 minutes by car from downtown Portland.

Will the Biden Presidency implode? Given our history, he or his cohorts will blunder along till the next election. Will anything change with the next election? I doubt it, the President is, after all, simply the figurehead on our ship of state, a ship that has considerable momentum. Changing the President isn't going to change our course. No, I suspect things will deteriorate until we have 50% unemployment. Of course, those will be the official numbers. Most of those people will have joined up with criminal gangs who are going to be engaged in all the traditional forms of crime and probably some new ones that haven't been invented yet. At some point some demagogue will capture people's attention and we'll get an entirely new form governmental bullshit. Let's just hope it doesn't include death camps.

Now might be a good time to reread The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson.

City Camping

 

PMG PHOTO: JAIME VALDEZ - Tents pitched in a parking lot at Westside Commons, formerly know as the Washington County Fair Complex, where the county has opened a camping facility for unhoused people to reduce the risk of COVID-19 spreading in unofficial camps.

Hillsboro now has an official campground for homeless, er, unhoused, people. Seems like camping in a parking lot would be uncomfortably hot, but what do I know? The story in the HillsboroNewsTimes mentions COVID-19 ten times, like it is somehow more important than having a place to sleep, but what do I know? Not very much apparently.

Previous post on the subject.

Last Thursday

Guantanamera - The Sandpipers
Driving down the road and this tune comes on the radio, probably KQRZ (the website is down). It sounds like they are singing 'for he's a guantanamera', but I check the lyrics and the only word I got right was guantanamera, which means 'a woman from Guantanamo'. No trace of "he's a", nor is there even anything in there could possibly be construed as "he's a". Huh. Just for grins, here's another link to a copy of the lyrics. This one goes to Google Translate and the URL contains the entire Spanish version of the song, which is just over a kilobyte.

Guantanamo? Haven't heard that name in a while. Wasn't it all over the news, what, a couple of years ago? With me it's a crap shoot whether I can come within a dozen years of being able to tell you when something happened. Mostly, something will come up in converstation and I will think it was a recent event, like a year ago and then I find out whatever it was was actually five or ten years ago.

Anyway, back to Guantanamo. Funny how the news only seems to capture our attention one crisis at a time. I suppose it's a form of entertainment, and possibly a little enlightening, even if it's only the light resulting from the flames from someone fanning the fire. Anyway, whatever happened to Guantanamo? Last I heard nothing had changed.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I went to the eye doctor this morning for a check-up and got my eyes dilated. Driving down TV (Tualatin Valley) highway and I see a traffic light up ahead. It's a little far away and I can't make out whether it is red or green. No matter, there is a pickup truck in front of me. If the light is red, he'll stop, so it doesn't matter if I can make out the signals on the traffic light. We get a little closer and now I can see that the light is red. So okay, I don't need to rely on the pickup truck anymore, which is very good because he just sails right on through the red light.

The speed limit on Jackson School Road used to be 35 MPH, but a couple of weeks ago they changed it to 25 MPH because of construction, but no construction has been done. I suppose they were trying to get it done before the construction starts, but this is silly. And very annoying.

Me, Me, Me

Wife & I went to dinner at Amelia's this evening. $10 for happy hour street tacos, $30 for booze. No wonder I'm so happy.

Lose-Lose

Yellow blocks are eastbound cars waiting to turn left, me in front. Red block is westbound car attempting to turn left.

An automobile collision happened right behind me yesterday. I was sitting in the left turn lane on Cornell Road. At this point, Cornell is five lanes, two travel lanes in each direction and a center lane for people making left turns, like me. Traffic is heavy, so I am sitting and waiting. A red car, coming the other way, wants to make a left turn just past where I am sitting. Fine, except a couple of car lengths in back of me there is another car, also waiting to make a left turn, so red car needs to squeeze into the left turn lane in between me and the car behind me. But instead of pulling into the left turn lane, she decides to just go ahead and make the left turn right across the other two travel lanes. That would have been fine if nobody was coming, but because her vision was blocked by the car behind me, she didn't see the Subaru barreling along and it smacked her right in the nose.

The Subaru continued in a straight line for maybe 50 yards. The front end was shredded, the left front tire was blown and it looked like every one of the 27 air bags got deployed. The red car ended up on the sidewalk pointing east, 180 degrees from her initial direction. No apparent injuries, everyone got out and walked away. A fire department pickup truck was there within a minute, he may have just been driving by, but the whole crew of police and firemen were there within a couple of minutes. Cornell is a busy road, rush hour was fast approaching, so I suspect they were ready to deal with an accident if one should happen. Some bystanders who worked in the area tell me accidents are very common at that location.

I don't know what was going on in red car's mind, but she may have felt pressured by the herd of cars she was traveling with. I am just projecting what I would have been feeling. Sometimes you just have to stop and not worry about how the herd is pressing in on you.

Jackson School Road Project

Jackson School Road Visualization Video - October 2017
Our neighborhood is adjacent to Jackson School Road. This road is basically one and half miles of two lane asphalt with drainage ditches on either side. It was a typical rural road for motor vehicles, no allowances for pedestrians or bicycles. A few years ago they widened the asphalt by a couple of feet on each side to make room for people and or bikes or something. Now there're going burn $20 million to turn it into a suburban utopia. I suppose it's a good thing. There aren't many pedestrians, but the ones there are tend to make me nervous because of their proximity to the traffic lanes and because they are often women and children.

Right-of-Way Section

They say this road sees 7,000 cars a day. $20 million divided by (7,000 cars times 20 years) works out to about $140 for each car. Washington county just added a $60 license plate surcharge for road improvements. It's semi-annual, so it's only $30 a year, which is only about one fifth of what this road improvement project will cost.

I posted the video above not because it was particularly interesting, but because it shows what kinds of software tools are available to designers these days. A similar video could have been made 20 years ago, but it would have been a major engineering project. Now the software has been developed so it's just a matter of point and click. Okay, it's still a bunch of work, but it's a standard thing now, not some Computer-Aided-Fantasy.

Pic of the Day

930M Caterpiller Small Wheel Loader at the scene of the crime

This is what passes for excitement here in suburban Hillsboro. Two o'clock this morning a couple of people stole this wheel loader and used it to flatten an ATM. They then gathered up the cash and sped off into the night.

Hillsboro Hops Baseball

Ron Tonkin Field

Saw the Hops play the Tri-City Dust Devils last Tuesday (or was it Wednesday?). Great fun. Early on in the game a player broke a bat when he hit the ball. The broken part flew as far as the pitcher's mound. One of our player's hit a home run, there was even a double play. Three or four foul balls came down on the roof of the stadium, one of them was right above us and it was loud!  A couple of batters got glancing hits to the foot from foul balls. We had a woman umpire calling the balls and strikes and a man out in the field.

This place started with a football / soccer stadium. I think it was for high school teams that didn't have their own, I dunno, but a couple of years later they built the baseball stadium in back of it. The lower roof on the left side of the picture covers the baseball seats. The four towers at the top support the roof over the football stands which back up against the baseball stands. The place is wire rope heaven. The roofs of both stadiums supported by cables, there are nets in front of the stands made of wire rope and the nets are supported by more cables.

Theoretically, baseball is a simple game, and it seems to move slowly, but you can mosey along until you have a precarious position and then something will happen to trigger an avalanche of activity. You have to be paying attention to catch it all, and even then you might not.

The only bad thing is getting out of the parking lot. We left after the 8th inning so it wasn't too bad. I would have liked to stay for the whole game, but needs be. I don't know how long it takes the parking lot to clear out. Maybe long enough to drink a beer in the bar, if they are still open.

Glencoe High School Robot

Glencoe High School Robotics Team

Glencoe High School Roboitics team went to Houston for a competition with other high school robot builders. They came in fifth, which I think is pretty respectable for a small town high school. Okay, it was a small town when I moved here 25 years ago, but it's grown considerably since then, mostly due to the massive Intel presence. Think that might have had some bearing on their success? Glencoe is where my kids went.