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Anyone ever suffer from "Nintendo Thumb"? Well, there's more than just thumbs to worry about. I never had a Nintendo so I never suffered thumb injuries per se. However, I did play lots of video games on my computer (and still do) and usually over long periods of time. (Non-stop, all day, every day for a few days to a week.) How I came out unscathed is still a mystery. (No comments from the peanut gallery now!) I got the link from the ShackNews.
Okay, it's time for me to go to sleep. I got the network printer up and running off the WinME computer, but what I really want to do is to port the printer and scanner over to the Linux box, or the old 486. The problem with the Linux box is that the Windows computers might not be able to see the printer, and the problem with the 486 is that it won't run Win95/NT very well..
Decisions, decisions.
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Here I am in snowy Waterloo. (Snowing like a banshee as weirDo says.) But I'm just showing how this thing works to weirDo so I'll keep this short. I'll be putting up a real entry later.
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Yay! I just got back from playing badminton, which was right after a four-and-a-half hour ordeal on the snow flooded roads and highways heading back from Waterloo. I'll go into more detail later.
I (amazingly) was able to get up when my alarm went off at ten after seven. It only took me ten seconds to shamble over to the clock and shut it off. I was debating whether or not to take a ten minute nap when I realized that I probably wouldn't get up on my own if I did. I went downstairs to eat.
Just before I headed out, my dad called and told me that there was a huge snow storm that was supposed to hit the area this afternoon. He was quoting things like thirty centimeters of snow, and all the like. I figured I've been through worse, besides, how often do you go to a defence? I headed out.
The drive out was not particularly interesting. I ended up hitting the morning rush dead on. It took an hour to crawl from one end of the city to the other. I would've had more luck taking residential streets. I did nearly get hit by a tractor trailer which didn't signal before switching lanes. I must've just pulled into his blind spot when I noticed that the guy was driving awfully close to the left hand side of the lane.. then on the dividing lines, then into my lane.. Ack!
The car held up to the pressure pretty well. Actually, the ride there was a little worrisome for me since the car was missing part of it's front assembly. The only difference that I noticed that the car began to shake somewhat when I picked up speed. However, once I got over 120 kph, the shaking subsided. Laminar flow?
The snow started to come down around nine-thirty. (The defence was at ten.) I marveled at the wisps of white that criss-crossed the asphalt in front of me. The shifting winds and the moving cars forced the strands of snow to dance over the pavement. It looked as if I was driving on a raging river, just above the water. I eased off the accelerator, and enjoyed the view. (Then we got hit by near-white-out conditions.)
I made it to the defence aboute ten minutes late. It was okay since the talk started late anyway so I didn't miss much. The talk went well, as did the questions, so Dusty got his degree. *cheers* One more to go.. *eyes weirDo*
We went out for lunch afterward and ended up waiting an hour for our food. (I'm not really complaining since it was free for me!) Afterward, I went to pick up the letter (actually it was a picture) that Yoshi was holding for me (actually, he already gave it to Yiye).
I ended up calling up CJF and having a rather long chat with that kid, and after more talks with the rest of the group, I ended up leaving the university around four. The snow had already been falling for over six hours and there was over an inch on the ground already, with more to come. It was not a fun ride. As a lesson to those who have not experienced this type of driving, let me say this: Don't. It sucks.
I'm going to get some food first, I'll talk about this a little later.
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I guess I should talk about my drive now. It's amazing how much can happen in four hours. I headed out of the university at a virtual crawl. I was not used to the snow yet, and it didn't seem as if anyone else around me was either. I had heard on the news that there was a crash on the westbound lanes of the 401 near Guelph, so I spent a few minutes thinking of a way to get around the problem area when I realized: "Waitaminute, I'm going east!". How silly of me.
Traffic was slow all the way out to the 401. The average speed was around 50 kph on the highway, and I couldn't believe how long it was going to take to make it back home at that speed (roughtly three hours). Hitting the 401, there was much less traffic, and I was free to drive a bit faster to make up for lost time. Still, going at 80 kph seemed fast because of the weather. I wanted to make it back home quickly because I was starting to fall asleep. I had to fight with myself to stay awake during the hour of boredom when I was struck by a moment of terror. I had glanced down at my instrument board and I saw that the tachometer was showing that the engine was running at 6000 rpm. That got my attention. I was suddenly wide awake, and wondering how much damage I was doing to the engine. I quickly eased off the gas, turned off the radio, turned down the fan, and listened to the engine. *listens*
Funny, the engine sounds fine. I gave the engine a little more gas. Hmm, it still sounds normal. A bit more, and the tachometer spiked. The engine, however, did not. I listened for a fair number of minutes before concluding that the problem was not with the engine, but with the tachometer. Whew, serious problem, not!
During that lapse in my "let's make up time" stage, I realized that there were a lot of flashing lights up ahead (not including the police car that had passed me). On closer inspection of the trucks ahead, I realized that they were snow plows. There were four of them. For some reason, these four snow plows just happened to meet up together at this moment and began to plow the snow off the highway. This is good and all, but why did they have to do it right in front of me? (There were only two cars ahead of me, and that included the police cruiser.) We were in the Milton area, and the only thing I could do for the next little while was coast while the plows ahead of us did their work at 30 kph. (And I had thought that going at 50 kph at the beginning of this journey was slow!)
This went on for quite some time. There were no breaks on the ranks of the snow plows. They were locked tight, and even a motorcyclist would've had trouble squeaking by them. I felt sorry for those cars that got on the highway just behind them, but after a little pondering, I realized how difficult it was to drive on the three inch deep snow in front of them and changed my opinion. One of the trucks in the front group with me thought otherwise. (I had thought of this, but decided against it.) When we approached the last service station before entering the city, this guy took the exit, burned through the service station, and despite getting detoured, was able to make it out in front of the snow plow convoy. It must've been nice to be driving an SUV too.
As we approached highway 407, I was half hoping that the line of plows would break, giving us an opportunity to make a break for it. No such luck, although the police cruiser that was heading our pack took the off ramp and split, along with a number of other cars. Me, being the cheapskate that I was, stuck with the plows and continued along the 401. It was just after that off-ramp, before we went under the highway, when the plows stopped. All of them.
I couldn't see what was ahead of them so I couldn't figure out the reason for halting. There had been cars in the way before, but all they did was plow around them. We sat there for a good five minutes. I took that time to turn my radio back on to see what was going on. I should've gotten my notebook out to take more notes.
I didn't see an opening until after we had passed highway 410, when the collector lanes branched off the main highway. The plows in front of us began to veer to the right, and I noticed that the highway was plowed recently. Up ahead in the distance, I saw a shimmering light. My head gre heav.. wait. Sorry, I was just about to break into song there. But anyway, up ahead in the distance, I saw that there were more snow plows that were plowing the road in front of us. These plows, however, stayed on the core lanes, while the plows we were stuck behind seemed to be heading off to the collector lanes. I (and a few others) took this opportunity to squeeze by the leftmost snowplow and make a break for it through the collector lanes.
There was very little traffic in front of us to slow us down, but boy, was there a lot of snow. Because of the lack of cars, I was tempted to try some slides, but considering the condition of the car, I'm glad I didn't. I was able to burn through that stretch of the highway very quickly, until we approached the border when intercity traffic began to build up. (It was already deep into the afternoon rush.) The short lived euphoria of moving quickly dissapeared when I saw the traffic chaos in front of me. I decided at that time to take a little detour, heading north on the 427 to take 409 and then get back on the 401, but those plans were dashed when I saw the huge backlog of vehicles trying to go north on the 427. I went on Renforth drive instead. Oh boy, that was also a chore. There was quite a bit of traffic on that road, and after realizing that I didn't have a city road map in the car, and that my knowledge of that area was very limited, I found the earliest exit back onto the highway. This fortunately put me past the main part of the bottleneck, but still put me smack in the middle of the traffic jam.
Once I had snuggled myself back into the flow of traffic (at all of 15 kph) I noticed that the oil pressure gauge was a little high. To me, I consider off the scale to be high. This baby was WAY off the scale. This too was a little worrisome. It could also be an instrument problem as with the tachometer, although I don't have any easy way to gauge what the oil pressure is without opening up the engine. While we were crawling along the highway, I tested out how badly the needle would jump, and I realized that once the level passed the halfway mark, the pressure went through the roof (which also coencided with an rpm of around 2000). It lead me to believe that it was another measuring goof, but to be safe, I kept the rpms (and oil pressure) down.
Being behind the snow plows outside of the city was bad, but being behind miles of traffic inside of the city was worse! The average speed I was getting was around 15 kph. Much slower than even the darned plowers. Because I was going so slow, the snow that struck my windshield tended to stick, which meant that I had to keep the wipers on constantly. I turned down the heat because it was getting unbearibly hot in the car, and ice started forming on my windsheild wipers, making them a little less efficient at keeping my windshield clean. The unwiped snow then blocked my field of vision, making me drive even slower. Worse than that, I noticed that my engine started to overheat due to the stop and crawl conditions. I turned the heat back on and rolled down the window. Every ten minutes or so, I had to keep smacking the windshield wipers with my hand to dislodge some of the ice building up on them. This cleared up my vision for a little while, but only for a little while. This continued on for another two hours. Because I left the heat on, I left the window down, which meant that sometimes, some of the ice that had been building up on the side of the windshield would tumble down my window. Most would stay out of the car, but..
If it was just the traffic, I wouldn't be too annoyed. If it was the traffic and weather, well.. that can be handled. But throw a clunky car (which could probably break down at any time) into the mix.. At least that kept me up. No problems with falling asleep!
At least I'm still in one piece. It was a drive that I needed to take, and experience I needed to recieve, but boy, I really don't want to do that again. Now, I think I need some sleep. *yawn*
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