Diary of a Wolfeman

It’s been a while – time for a little rant.

Portland is known far and wide across the land for their progressive take on public and alternative transportation. Those of you that live or visit here know that the city is quite proud of it’s Pro-Bicycle stance and the things they have done to make things easier for bicyclists.

What they have not done, however, is sat all the damn bikers down and explained to them the laws actually governing their use on public roadways. This has gotten to the point that your average bicyclist thinks that none of the regular traffic laws apply to them. You want to know what the absolute rarest sight in Portland is? A cyclist stopping at a stop sign.

So, without further ado, this page lists all of the ordinances that exist in regards to riding a bicycle on public streets and sidewalks. I’ll be going through the most important ones to explain and amplify.

814.400 Application of vehicle laws to bicycles. (1) Every person riding a bicycle upon a public way is subject to the provisions applicable to and has the same rights and duties as the driver of any other vehicle concerning operating on highways, vehicle equipment and abandoned vehicles (minor exception follows).

(2) Subject to the provisions of subsection (1) of this section:

(a) A bicycle is a vehicle for purposes of the vehicle code; and
(b) When the term “vehicle” is used the term shall be deemed to be applicable to bicycles.

What this means to you: You must obey ALL traffic laws (not just the ones you want) and you must stop at all stop signs and red lights (California Rolls are not allowed.) Most importantly, the Oregon Driver’s Manual clearly states for motorcycles and mopeds that a full stop is defined as ceasing all motion and putting a foot down on the ground. Don’t do that wobbly shit where you try to balance on the pedals, and for fuck’s sake, if I have to sit my car at the light until it turns green, then so the fuck do you.

If any biker ever saw a car pulling the same stunts they do in traffic, the biker would be appalled and calling the driver all sorts of interesting names. Same thing goes both ways assholes, and every time I see you sailing through a red light with barely a glance or a break in stride, I want to go home and mount paintball guns on my car so I can hose you down.

814.420: Failure to use bicycle lane or path; exceptions; penalty.

(1) Except asprovided in subsections (2) and (3) of this section, a person commits the offense of failure to use a bicycle lane or path if the person operates a bicycle on any portion of a roadway that is not a bicycle lane or bicycle path when a bicycle lane or bicycle path is adjacent to or near the roadway.

What this means to you: This is very simple, and they list some reasonable exceptions. Basically, if you aren’t avoiding an obstacle or preparing to make a turn to the far side of the street, then keep your ass in the bike lane. The City/County/State Department of Transportation spent good taxpayer money to mark out those bike lanes, and the rest of us taxpayers expect you to use them.

This next one really pisses me off, because they’ve gone and misquoted the law on a bumper sticker. The sticker says “Bicycles Allowed Full Lane ORS 814.430(2)(c)”. Well the “(2)(c)” is the small section of the law they’re quoting, but the ORS in question reads:

814.430: Improper use of lanes; exceptions; penalty.

(1) A person commits the offense of improper use of lanes by a bicycle if the person is operating a bicycle on a roadway at less than the normal speed of traffic using the roadway at that time and place under the existing conditions and the person does not
ride as close as practicable to the right curb or edge of the roadway.

(2) A person is not in violation of the offense under this section if the person is not operating a bicycle as close as practicable to the right curb or edge of the roadway under any of the following circumstances:

(a) When overtaking and passing another bicycle or vehicle that is proceeding in the same direction.
(b) When preparing to execute a left turn.
(c) When reasonably necessary to avoid hazardous conditions including, but not limited to, fixed or moving objects, parked or moving vehicles, bicycles, pedestrians, animals, surface hazards or other conditions that make continued operation along the right curb or edge unsafe or to avoid unsafe operation in a lane on the roadway that is too narrow for a bicycle and vehicle to travel safely side by side. Nothing in this paragraph excuses the operator of a bicycle from the requirements under ORS 811.425 or from the penalties for failure to comply with those requirements.
(d) When operating within a city as near as practicable to the left curb or edge of a roadway that is designated to allow traffic to move in only one direction along the roadway. A bicycle that is operated under this paragraph is subject to the same requirements and exceptions when operating along the left curb or edge as are applicable when a bicycle is operating along the right curb or edge of the roadway.
(e) When operating a bicycle alongside not more than one other bicycle as long as the bicycles are both being operated within a single lane and in a manner that does not impede the normal and reasonable movement of traffic.
(f) When operating on a bicycle lane or bicycle path.

Ahh, so the revised statute in fact deals with the penalties of improper lane use! Subsection 2 paragraph ‘C’ there clearly states (in conjunction with the main paragraph) that you are allowed to use more of the lane when avoiding an obstacle – which is understandable. But go back up to the beginning, and the statute starts out saying that if you are bicycling slower than other vehicle traffic, you need to be riding close to the curb, not slowing down the whole lane.

And don’t forget the reference to ORS 811.425 – the full title of that one is “Failure of slower driver to yield to overtaking vehicle“. Yep! That’s right folks, if you can’t keep up with normal traffic, get your ass to the curb and let traffic pass you. You DO NOT get to lollygag and slow the rest of us down. Also, if you can’t keep up, you need to get out of the middle lane of those one-way streets Downtown. (Three days in a row I’ve been stuck behind some twat in the wrong gear going half the speed of everyone else while in the exact center of the middle lane.  Going downhill on 4th. Fucker.)

And don’t forget about this guy.

Here’s an easy one to wrap up:

814.440: Failure to signal turn

This one is as typically long-winded as the others, but the gist is simple: you are supposed to signal for 100 feet before a turn or stop – even if you are stopping for a red light or a stop sign. I have seen maybe three bikers EVER who signaled a turn, and only one that signaled a stop.

So, all you bikers out there: you want a safe road to ride on? You want to stop worrying so much about getting clipped by a car? Then stop riding like assholes and follow the laws. You are NOT a special and unique snowflake, and riding a bicycle does NOT mean that you get to do whatever you want.

Oh, and you pedestrians out there, I don’t want you to feel left out – you’ll get your own rant in a day or so.

“Deja-Bu” – that feeling you get when you pass someone driving a Subaru identical to the one you are driving yourself.

Here is a phone pic of my computer 3 minutes into the process of installing Internet Explorer 9:

Why a phone pic? Because it had to completely shut down everything else, including:

• Antivirus
• Firefox
• Media Monkey
• All the widgets
• Logitech software
• and Windows Explorer.

So why it took 6 whole minutes when it wasn’t fighting anything else for my processors or 6GB of RAM, I have no effing idea…

So no, it didn’t actually require a reboot, but it did completely take over my computer for 6 solid minutes while it downloaded and installed the new package. So yay, no reboot, but WTF?!? Why are you STILL making the browser such an integral part of the operating system?

Chrome, Firefox and Opera all run quite happily without being so integrated. What the hell do you do that needs to be so wrapped up in the whole system other than allow a canny hacker access to core OS functionality through one of the inevitable security holes you provide with each release? Hmm?

Okay, enough of that, time to run it through some tests. So, load up my main work website, go to the toughest and slowest page it has and… huh. Right. IE9! Does so much more!! Look at all the pretty HTML5 it can do!!!

But apparently it doesn’t do Ajax, which means we can’t use it at work, which means it is utterly useless. Go Team Go.

So, right here is where I plug ChromePlus, a mashup that comes pre-loaded with IE-Tab right in the download. All the speed and security of Chrome AND the ability to run IE-required pages.

In conclusion, IE9 looks to be just what I expected it to be: several good ideas completely screwed by a company that refuses to pull it’s head out of it’s ass.

The time has come where the good ship HS Golightly (AKA “Holly”) must be retired and a replacement brought in. The reasons behind the move are mainly financial – it was a terrible loan rate and the car was actually rated as worth only about $500 more than the cost of some needed repairs (some damage to the heads when the timing belt went and a power steering pump). There is also the idea of tourney season coming up, and we need more cargo room to haul our ever-expanding camping gear collection.

Like most people, I hate car shopping. The entire process of buying a car from a dealer is not designed to make things easy for you. You only get to compare cars side-by-side if they happen to be at the same lot, so when you’re shopping for used you must resign yourself to a lengthy process as each dealer tries to coerce you into buying what they’re selling, never mind what you told them you’re actually looking for. (Yes Mr. A.M., I am talking about you and your damn Equinox.). Or (almost) worse, you get a dealer with a huge selection – that is scattered over 5 different lots scattered across town.

In any case, to chop several paragraphs of me griping about the process out of this post, suffice it to say that we eventually did find a car that was both A) worth driving and owning and B) we could fit into the budget. The surprising thing was the car we ended up with.

Originally, I was looking at a 2004 model, but in the end it turned out that the dealership had spent so much money on the car already (trade-in value, repairs, etc.) that they wouldn’t be able to fit it into my budget as well as make my upside-down Kia loan go away. They could do all of this, however, if I were to instead buy this 2009 model…

Uhm, ok. Twist that arm there just a tad… newer car, a little more miles but in better shape and without the leather interior. And it’s even silver!

So, after about 150 signatures on the dotted line and a liter of my O-Positive, I am the proud owner of a loan that has the physical representation of an as-yet un-named silver 2009 Subaru Outback wagon.

The differences, New Car vs. Holly:

• Slightly bigger engine producing 32 more horsepower
• Estimated improvement of 1 mile per gallon!
• Automatic transmission with Sportshift (almost as good as manual… but no more clutch-cramps)
• Wheelbase is one inch shorter, but the new car is:
• 3.2 inches longer,
• 5.1 inches wider,
• 6.1 inches taller overall,
• and yet 121 pounds lighter,
• with a towing allowance of 2700 pounds. (Which is better than a Dodge Magnum!)
• The big change, though, is we went from 13.6 cubic feet of cargo to 33.5 internal, with a full set of factory roof rails  on top.

I think I can fit all our crap inside that :)

Speaking of those larger numbers, this is the last year (in my mind, at least) that the Outback is a station wagon and not a full-up SUV. There was a minor re-styling in 2008 over the previous body which added a couple inches here and there, but the 2010 re-design added a handful more. This was a bad move in my mind, as one of the selling points to an Outback has always been that it isn’t a ginormous SUV. Luckily for me, Subaru has a well-earned reputation for building cars that last, so I’ll be in this one until the SUV trend finally dies off and they go back to their more minimalist days. (Heh – my first car was a ’74 Subaru wagon – I could almost fit it inside this one.)

I may end up missing the Kenwood stereo I had installed in the Kia – it had HD Radio (which I almost never used) and would play MP3 files from a USB stick (which is almost all I ever did with it). The new car has an aux jack in the center console, so with a two-ended headphone plug you can wire in anything that has headphone outputs… but at that point I’m not using the radio controls, so I have to fiddle with a small device flopping around on the end of a cable if I want to skip a track or something, and I don’t get the track readout in the display on the dash.

Considering that this is my only real disappointment in the entire car, I think I can live with it :)

As can be expected, Microsoft made a lot of changes in the SBS 2008 / Exchange 2007 combination, and while it has been out for several years now, I have yet to find any articles or HOWTO’s that specifically address the problems of getting ancient, legacy code to reliably send email alerts with the new systems.

With Exchange 2003, it was simple and mostly just built-in, all you had to do was add the IP address of things like your scanners and other fairly dumb systems (or even advanced ones, like Backup Exec and APC Powerchute) to allow them to relay email alerts through Exchange.

Well, in Exchange 2007, they made things a little more difficult and force you to create new Receive Connectors with specific restrictions to allow these systems. It has been well documented before, so I’ll just include a link: http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2006/12/28/432013.aspx

I will point out one thing, however: my experience (and a blog posting I cannot find again today) says that to make this actually work, the remote network range for this connector must be 0.0.0.0-255.255.255.255, and not limited to the single machine or short range of IP addresses. I tested this extensively, and always came up with the same result: narrow IP range = no workee. This means that you must create rules on your firewall to strictly limit incoming SMTP traffic to make sure you don’t set up an open relay on the Internet. You should already be doing this anyhow, considering how cheap Postini spam filtering is.

There’s also one other small problem: SBS 2008 only allows you a single NIC, and therefore a single IP address for the server, which means that you’ll have to assign this new relay connector to a non-standard port (like 26) to make it work. (The trick of adding a second alternative IP address to the NIC will not work – it disappears after a reboot.) Here’s a series of pics with my setup:

Now to use this, you’ll obviously have to configure your legacy systems to point to the specific port as well as the IP address. Usually, this is done by tacking a :26 (or whatever port you chose) on the end of the IP address or server name. (192.168.x.x:26 or servername.domainname.local:26).

Sometimes, however, those legacy systems will be so entirely stupid that you can’t point them at a non-standard port. This is where stuff gets damned annoying.

If you are lucky enough to have another server on the network, you can install SMTP on that server, and tell it to use Exchange (at the special port you made) as a Smart Host, and then you can point your legacy systems at this SMTP server and allow it to do the relaying for you. For example, my client has another Server 2008 machine handy, so I added the SMTP Feature and created a new SMTP Virtual Server called Relay 1 and set it to allow anonymous connections.

Instead of 15 pictures, I’m going to give you a hundred words of settings description:

General Tab:
Select your IP address, nothing unusual here.

Access Tab:
-Authentication button – select Anonymous access only.
-Connection Control button – select “All except the list below”
-Relay Restrictions button – Select “Only the list below” and give it your network range. This one should accept the restriction of single entries, unlike the Exchange 2007 connector. I also checked the box for “Allow all computers which authenticate…” just for grins.

Messages Tab:
-Set your favorite limits here, as well as the location of the Badmail directory.

Delivery Tab
-Set more limits and timeouts here. I usually expire messages at 2 hours.

LDAP Routing and Security tabs:
-Probably no changes needed here.

Lastly, go into the Services management area and set SMTP to Automatic Start.

Hopefully, I’ve just saved at least one other person from having to figure all this out the hard way. May the Force be with you.

So today, Da Wolfe did his civic duty and showed up for Jury duty, and was pissed off inside of 45 seconds. Jury duty is of course served in a courthouse, which is high on the list of places you’ll be subjected to what people say is keeping us safe – the mass-annoyance of everyone who has to go into the building.

This wasn’t always so, as evidenced by the design of the building, which has an entryway juuust wide enough to put an X-Ray luggage scanner into, so the prep area where one is supposed to put their keys in the bowl is in this tiny vestibule that is almost outside – which today meant 2 degrees above freezing while I was forced to divest myself of jacket, cell phone, keys, thumb drive, change, bluetooth headset, cap, wallet, watch, belt and my fucking shoes.

Thank you, oh shoe-bomber for that last bit you fucking asshat.

Then I got to sit around until noon, when they let us out for lunch. “Oh, and you get to use the Employee Entrance when you come back!” (She said it with Capital letters) “It’s easier than the public entrance.” Cool, I thought, I only have to want to rip their heads off once today.

Riiiiight.

The Employee Entrance? 10 feet down the sidewalk, only it doesn’t have the vestibule, so I’m taking off my jacket, cell phone, keys, thumb drive, change, bluetooth headset, cap, wallet, watch, belt and my fucking shoes a second time with a freezing-cold breeze blowing up the back of my shirt.

Y’know, if this is all to ensure my safety while I’m in the building, I’d rather be mildly unsafe. And I sure as shit won’t be flying anytime soon, because there’s no way I’m getting through airport security without punching someone.

9:30am. Breakfast with the lovely Illyana at Holman’s. (A great little dive, by the way; you should check it out on a day when I’m not going to be there – I like it quiet.)

11:30am. Left the restaurant and called my insurance company – and got the “please call back during business hours” message. I called back again, and this time impersonated a clinic and got into the automated system, which then confirmed I am eligible for lenses and frames; no idea on the value thereof. Went to the mall.

Noon. Saleslady confirmed that I indeed have a hardware credit available and priced things out for me – both sets of frames I chose fell under the coverage limit, but the lens options I wanted would bring the total up to $169. Money well-spent, I figure. It’ll take 10 days to get them though.

Crap.

This is where I give some mad points to Binyon’s: they offered to give me a pair of “loaner” lenses to use until my ordered lenses come in. This is extremely cool, because it involved them throwing away a set of basic lenses – it’s not like anyone else will have my exact ‘scrip, so they won’t be able to re-use the lenses.

So, either they are very cool about this, or the lenses and two hours’ worth of technician time to grind and fit them is really a lot cheaper than they want us to think it is. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt this time and say they’re cool.

Noon to 2:00pm. Wandered ’round the mall killing time while Binyon’s built my glasses.

2:00pm. Picked up my new glasses. I be stylin’ now. Once my eyes get used to the change in ‘scrip, I’ll be able to see a little better. Now time to vacate the mall because I have spent far too long there for one day.

5:00-8:00pm. Office Holiday Party at Uptown Billiards. Food was good, table arrangement in the party room is still poor – one of the pool tables is pushed too far to one side to allow for a dartboard, and wouldn’t you know it, half our group ended up hanging out on the narrow side of the room and were constantly being asked to step aside for a pool shot. I expect a little better out of a pool hall. The Boss stole all of my blackjack mojo, and I ended up just breaking even this year.

Saturday needed help, but the weekend turned out ok.

9:30am. Got up to get breakfast (yay for Lazy!)

10:30am. Some light shopping, got the car washed, stopped at Wendy’s for a quick bite.

1:30pm. Discovered I had missed getting into the bank by 31 minutes.

Damn.

Continue shopping.

3:00pm. Get home, pull shades off of glasses and notice that the left arm is out of position. Inspect carefully, left arm of glasses falls off.

Crap.

Run upstairs, make calls. My regular eye doctor is booked, but I can sneak into Binyon’s at the mall at 4:00, and they take my insurance. Print new insurance card and run to appointment.

6:00pm. Sales lady at Binyon’s informs me that my insurance company’s servers are down, so they have no idea what the dollar amount of my benefits are, please try back tomorrow.

Fuck!

On the good-news side of all this is the fact that my current glasses are frameless with super-light lenses, so I can still wear them with only one arm, provided I don’t move my head too quickly.

Been busy on a project over at the other blog. Check it out!

This makes me happy.

[Judge Emory A.] Pitt wrote: “Those of us who are public officials and are entrusted with the power of the state are ultimately accountable to the public. When we exercise that power in public fora, we should not expect our actions to be shielded from public observation. ‘Sed quis custodiet ipsos cutodes’ (“Who watches the watchmen?”).”

Thank you, Your Honor, for having the intelligence and wisdom to see to the heart of this matter. May all of your brothers and sisters of the black robe agree with you.