Month: May 2012

  • Do You Live in Atlanta? Avoid Perimeter Mall this Weekend

    Do you frequent the top end perimeter? Do you know what I’m talking about?

    If you don’t, then never fear, this post is not for you.

    If you do, I recommend that you avoid the area of Perimeter Mall this weekend. On Friday evening, contractors will be closing all but one lane on Ashford Dunwoody Road southbound in front of the mall, in preparation for closing the bridge across I-285. You will be able to get on to and off of I-285, but you will not be able to cross the bridge. A detour route will be marked.

    Still, I’d stay away. Except that I won’t. Because this is my project!

    An aerial view of what the Ashford Dunwoody DDI will look like.

    That’s right people! The Ashford Dunwoody Diverging Diamond Interchange will be a reality come Monday. That is, you’ll be driving in the new configuration; there will still be a lot of construction going on afterward. I plan to be out there during this weekend closure to watch the contractor compress about 3 weeks of work into 57 hours.

    The closure begins at 9:00 PM on Friday and will remain in place until 5:00 AM on Monday. There are very steep penalties for every hour (and portion thereof) that the bridge remains closed after 5:00 AM. There are a couple big things and a gazillion medium sized things that have to be accomplished in that time, before traffic can resume.

    Layout of some of the weekend construction on the Ashford Dunwoody Interchange

    The image here shows the big pavement or construction items that have to be finished. The loop ramp will be cut starting at 9:00 PM Friday and the rest of the ramp shown in yellow and red constructed. The yellow are areas that are “finished” with the red things that cannot be accomplished until the closure. The red mark across the bridge is an 8 inch concrete median that also cannot be poured until after the closure begins. Other tasks include taking down the old signals, milling and paving the entire bridge deck, putting down new striping, marking off the eventual concrete islands that divide the traffic (you can see them in the first image above), plus a host of other things.

    This is a good project and will help to reduce the traffic congestion along Ashford Dunwoody Road. However don’t expect that relief to happen next week (remember, still lots of construction) and if I-285 is a mess, then the interchange will be a mess, too.

    The details on the weekend detour and other things can be found at the Perimeter CIDs website. And if you want to seem some simulations, built by my friend Dave Sims (The Ultramind!), you can find them at my company’s website.

  • Client Relations

    My job involves a lot of client relations. Not as much as someone who’s title is “Client Relations Manager” but never the less, one of my measures of success is client happiness. The easiest way to maximize the possibility of their happiness is to call them every so often and give them a heads up on what’s going on. If nothing else, acquainting them with the ho-humdrum and other things involved in your project ensures that the only time they hear your voice is not when something has gone wrong.

    Like, when you miss a deadline or an appointment.

    Dining room used as storage for living room furniture

    Our house is in a state of being both horribly messy yet delightfully clean. We were supposed to have a carpet cleaning service show up yesterday “between four and six” and we had to move a bunch of furniture and other detritus out of the way, plus vacuum every carpeted surface. ((The “horribly messy” part comes from having furniture stacked and stored in places where they don’t typically belong.))

    Four o’clock arrived and we were ready.

    Five o’clock passed by and we were patiently waiting, playing Draw Something and Words with Friends (and reading).

    Six o’clock came and went with not a peep. The service was, of course, out of the office as it was Memorial Day. Jenn got dispatched to pick up some take out chinese food so that we could eat something; I stayed home in case the people showed up.

    6:20 and Jenn gets the call from the service asking to postpone until “tomorrow between four and six”. Our response was “how about between 5:45 and 6:00?”

    I/we are extremely frustrated by this service call. It’s not like we couldn’t have been doing something else, and now our house is in a state of “where’s the couch” disorder for another 24 hours. Just one phone call much earlier to let us know that things weren’t working out would have made us much less unhappy; less unhappy enough that we wouldn’t have given them a downcheck on their reviews. ((We haven’t done that yet. We’ll wait to see how the cleaning goes.))

    Client relations. Just talk to them. This is a lesson I’ve learned many times and hopefully others will take to heart, too.

  • Memorial Day

    It’s American Memorial day, and also the one year anniversary of Psyche’s death. In honor of both, and to thank all service members—active, reserve, and retired—I present today’s official cat picture.

    Artemis

    Thank you for your service.

  • Other People’s Priorities

    image

    That thing, on top of the beaten up Toyota? It costs $2,500, new. I hope they got it used. It’s for accessing satellite television on the go. Everyone pays for what they consider valuable.

  • Smartphone Frustration

    6.9 GB or 7.3 GB Free

    What you see here is frustrating me to death right now. I have an HTC Evo 4g smartphone, which came with an 8 GB flash card. However, it only has 400 MB or so of onboard memory and all of that is being used by apps and cellphone stuff that is not dispensable. In other words, I’m having to uninstall things like Angry Birds and Cut the Rope in order to keep my email running and etc. The flash card is almost empty, but can’t be used ((At least, I haven’t figured out how to use it)). I don’t load music or video or other memory intensive things on my phone, that’s what I have an ipod for. Why can’t I use the flash card?

    I know, I know, I’m complaining about issues that are not exactly life threatening, but you’d think our cellphone overlords would make it easy to, you know, use their products! I’m not particularly interested in rooting the phone, because I don’t need another device that I have to worry about being an IT specialist for. I just want the damn thing to work.

    Where’s my implantable brain chip?

  • Punctuality

    If you are familiar with me, you know that I make every effort to be places on time, or early. I’m that guy who shows up to your party before you’ve finished putting the chips in the bowl and ice in the fridge. It’s a foible, but one I aid and abet at every opportunity. That way, if something unexpected springs up at the last moment, there’s always a bit of flexibility. This is very useful if you happen to live in, say, Atlanta, where the traffic is always a factor, and an unpredictable one at that.

    It’s also useful if you happen to be looking forward to a massage you have scheduled (did I mention my injury?) but on the way out the door, you slice the back of your leg with broken glass in the trash bag.

    As I was leaving early, I had time let the thing bleed like a pig, wash the would, bandage it ((I love that self-sticking wrapping stuff. Very useful for applying a dressing to places like a hairy calf.)) and still make it to my appointment just a bit late.

    The lesson here is, don’t cut yourself. And give yourself extra time.

  • Back on the Training Wagon

    I mentioned in my last post that I’d done myself an injury. This was unfortunate because it came right at the time when I usually start ramping up my running for summer race season, and to ditch the winter ((Yes, I know we don’t have a winter really, but it’s a season. Get off my back.)) doldrums. I’ve also gained about eight pounds in the past year and that just will not do, if only because I refuse to replace all my good slacks.

    So, off I go, working back up to regular 8 or 10 mile runs on weekends, plus bike rides, and swims, and of course, YOGA.

    I say “of course” but you have no idea, do you dear interwebs, that I’ve been doing yoga in the last six months? No, you don’t, but now you do. Jenn started doing more yoga as a part of her Lenten plan, and I joined in for a good bit of it. It’s amazing how just a little bit every day or every other day can improve your flexibility. Plus, yoga is very self-directed and not likely to cause me to break myself through overdoing it. Don’t get me wrong, yoga can be hard, but I choose not to do things that are that difficult, concentrating on poses that will build strength and flexibility slowly.

    To that end, I’ve made it my goal to do some yoga every single day for this summer (at least). I decided that if I make it 30 days straight, I’ll do something nice for myself. If I go 60, then 90, I’ll do something correspondingly better. I have not yet decided what those things will be.

    This will hopefully keep me on my training wagon, healthy and strong. That’s the way toward improving race times, and just being a happy person.

  • Injury. Again.

    I injured my back badly about a month ago. It was through over working it while doing some yard work, house work, and making beer. By “badly” I mean, “couldn’t stand up straight for 5 days” kind of thing. This, unfortunately, isn’t a new thing for me. I’ve come up with a new metaphor for why this keeps happening to me: it’s the difference between a green branch and a dry branch.

    If you bend a green branch way back on itself, it will slowly flex until it starts to deform and then maybe splinter a bit. When you let go, it’ll spring back most of the way to its original shape, although a bit worse for wear.

    If you bend a dry branch back on itself, it will again slowly flex until [SNAP], it breaks in half.

    This is what my lower back muscles are like. Not as much room for error as a younger person’s, or as a similarly-aged person who doesn’t have my history of back surgeries. If I don’t immediately recognize when I’ve pushed too far, and stop, I’m down for the count for several weeks.

    Thankfully, I’m on the back end of that several weeks. I went to our weekly Yoga class last night and it didn’t kill me (and I didn’t have to wuss out of a lot of the poses). I ran for the first time in a month on Sunday and that didn’t kill me either. I’m back on the “ease into it” plan with respect to my aerobic sports, but I’m trying to do some yoga every day. Hopefully I’ll not devastate myself again for another couple years.

  • Ashford Dunwoody Diverging Diamond in the News

    I got to be (very briefly) on TV on Monday. Check it out.

    There’s additional coverage on WSB, too.

  • Bait and Switch

    If you were downloading some freeware to try out, and you received this screen,
    where would you click to download?

    Download Bitching

    Would you click down there on the itty bitty text that says “download installation package”, or would you click on the enormous blue DOWNLOAD?

    Yeah, me too. And then, once you’ve downloaded the innocuously named “setup” file, you’re taken through an installation that never identifies what it is you’re installing. So, unless you know how to find out on Windows what exactly it is you just installed, you’ll never know that you installed PDFCreator by accident.

    So, the makers of PDFCreator get a big “bite me” from me. Thanks, guys.


    Update: Wow. Not only did that mistake I made cause me some headscratching and having to uninstall PDFCreator, it also installed two different toolbars on my browswer and a third party “security” system called AVG. It took me two hours to figure out (through numerous searches) how to remove the AVG crap. It invaded my browser in ways that can only be fixed by going to the about:config settings and that’s just not right. So, bite me again PDFCreator, and a special bite everyone to AVG and all the other spamware that got loaded with it.