A series of observations

I’ve taken to using my trusty camera phone to quickly snap things I find interesting or noteworthy, if only to me. Over the last couple days I had several opportunities.

First off, we woke up early to take a morning walk and passed this guy’s car. He’s obviously just as tired of the lipper traffic as we are. The banner in his back window reads “GO Home Stupid, They’re Just Flowers!!!”

I think the city should coordinate this event better. Hundreds of families (maybe thousands) all driving their own cars through the backroads just clogs up the works from breakfast until dinner. The traffic on the weekends backs up the freeway exit for miles. Unlike this guy though, I don’t think I’m stupid for appreciating the natural beauty of the flower fields.

If anyone is stupid around here, it’s the city planners for not coordinating visitors in a better way. Right now it’s just a mishmash of random cars darting everywhere, and it’s getting more dangerous every year. In an effort to get people to see (and shop) downtown, planners actually published a map to the fields that routes everyone down main street. The problem with this is that nobody has the opportunity to stop and shop because main street is literally a cramped alleyway that somehow became main street. Cars creep inch by inch for 30 minutes just to get through a quarter mile long stretch of road that was never designed to handle that amount of traffic. Nobody stops because they just want to get out to see the fields and get out of traffic hell.

Here’s my suggestion; Pay one of the several farmers with giant fields surrounding the town to have visitors park their cars there. Then shut down main street and use buses to take people into town and shutter bugs out to the fields. Charge a few bucks for a “park and bus” pass and there you go, safety increased, chaos squelched, and downtown shopping maximized.

Later in the day I ventured into the bowels of one of the old main street buildings to take a look at the bottom of an elevator shaft. Under the building were two very old boilers, but only one still had the doors on. They just struck me as so amazing while I crawled around the dirty basement that I had to stop to snap a picture.

Then I took a trip to the autoparts shop to get some air horns and glanced down at what appeared to be a pile of home made sport bike DVDs. I just couldn’t believe the face on this cracked out chick they put on the cover of one of these travesties. You really have to zoom in on this one to appreciate it.

On the way home, I found myself following a truck who’s cargo was labeled “Poison”. This was quite disturbing because the hose hanging out the back of the truck had a constant stream of, what I can only assume was “Poison”, dripping all the way down main street. Nice.

I also picked up some new shoes while out on the town, but the clerk forgot to remove the anti-theft RFID tag. Now, there are three possibilities that explain why I made it out of the store without setting off the alarm. First, the system/alarm was broken. Second, the tag itself was broken. Or third, the giant metal hitch mount bike rack I was carrying out of the store with the shoes was causing too much interference for the tag to be detected. I say “detected” and not “read” because this EAS bit tag is not really an RFID tag, it’s more like a simple resonator. It has no IC chip, only a coil connected directly to a capacitor.

Tags: funny, rfid

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 3rd, 2009 at 8:43 am and is filed under Life in general. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.