This weekend we had a significant weather event as a tornado blew through and caused a lot of damage. In a lot of areas, tornadoes caused power outages and a number of traffic lights were out, even after power was restored in some cases.
I was surprised to see that many, many drivers did not treat intersections with disabled traffic signals as four way stops. I don’t know whether people don’t know that’s the law, or they just don’t care, but I repeatedly saw people blowing through intersections without even slowing down.
When I lived in Houston, KLOL (now a Latin station, apparently, but for many years a classic rock mainstay) ran a traffic segment called “Traffic in Bondage,” reported by the TrafficMaster Lanny Griffith. Houston has lots of traffic, and Lanny Griffith was perhaps the greatest traffic reporter ever. How many traffic reporters do you know of who have a devoted fan base?
One of his signature bits was, “Traffic signals are out at Westheimer and Gessner. Treat it as a four way stop! Hwah!” Everyone who listened to KLOL heard that, usually multiple times per day. This, to me, will always be the essence of public service journalism. I wish someone had taken a poll at the time that compared the level of awareness of what to do when traffic signals are out among Houstonians to Americans in general.
We don’t have such a traffic reporter here, and very few people seem to know how to drive. When you arrive at an intersection with the traffic signals out, treat it as a four way stop.
On an unrelated note, in the photo, Lanny Griffith is biting a Key Map of Houston, which was the best navigation aide you could possess prior to the age of MapQuest and GPS receivers. Owning one was absolutely essential if you had a job that required driving around. The company that publishes them is still in business and still produces maps only of Houston and its surrounding areas.
Back in the saddle with Vim
I’ve been a vi user for many, many years. In fact, I used to program in C on a MUD using ed (vi is the fancy version of ed). However, it’s been a long time since I used vi as my editor of choice for development work. I use it for hacking scripts, editing files on servers, and general purpose text editing in a terminal window, but most of the time I use Eclipse for Java and TextMate for pretty much everything else.
A lot of people in the Rails community have migrated over to vim (and MacVim) in recent years, and I know there’s a very active community of programmers who are working hard to make it a better tool for developers. Anyway, I wanted to try out the Solarized color scheme people were talking about and Vim looked like the best option, so I decided to dive in, at least for Rails development.
I’ve been really impressed. Tim Pope’s rails.vim library for Rails developers is really, really good. The navigations features in particular are worth the price of entry. Then there’s the inherent goodness of Vim itself. Vim is difficult to approach initially, but it’s an incredibly powerful tool in the hands of someone who really knows how to use it. Even though I have been using it for a long time, I don’t really consider myself to be a Vim power user by any stretch of the imagination, because I’ve mainly used it to edit small files, one at a time.
Using Vim for project work is completely different, and that’s the area where my Vim skills need work. TextMate provides you with a file drawer with all of the files in your project, easy to use search across all the files in a project, and the ability to easily open multiple files in a tabbed editor and switch between them. The next step is to learn the tricks to accomplish the same things using Vim. Anyone seen a good tutorial?
Update: Just for fun, here’s my .vimrc.