Greg In The Desert

The city of Rio Rancho has been putting in roundabouts all over the place and installing “road diets” which I didn’t know what they were called. I learned about them in a Rio Rancho Observer article.

Road diets, according to the United States Department of Transportation, are often conversions of four-lane, undivided roads into three lanes. The fourth lane may be converted to bicycle lanes, sidewalks and/or on-street parking.

The Federal Highway Administration touts roundabouts as being safer than four-way stops.

Roundabouts are touted as being safer because there are less points of conflict than with a four-way stop. Eight with roundabouts, compared to 32. There also are no right angles, meaning less of an impact if a crash were to occur.

According to the Department of Transportation, roundabouts have contributed to a 90 percent reduction in traffic fatalities, a 76 percent reduction in injuries and a 35 percent reduction in crashes. The DOT also says the roundabouts are safer for pedestrians.

• News : Bats provide alternative to spraying – Rio Rancho Observer – SSCAFCA sponsors a number of bat houses erected near water retention ponds in Corrales and neighboring areas of Rio Rancho. Each house can hold between 150 and 400 bats, depending on its size.
• Plant communication: Sagebrush engage in self-recognition and warn of danger | Science Blog – Plants engage in self-recognition and can communicate danger to their "clones" or genetically identical cuttings planted nearby, says professor Richard Karban of the Department of Entomology, University of California, Davis, in groundbreaking research published in the current edition of Ecology Letters.
• Sci-fi comedy shooting in New Mexico – New Mexico Business Weekly: – “Paul,” a sci-fi inspired comedy starring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost is shooting in New Mexico through mid-August. “Paul” is about two sci-fi geeks who make a pilgrimage to Area 51 and have a bizarre encounter with an alien named Paul, which leads to a life-changing road trip.
• Gil’s Thrilling (And Filling) Blog » Turtle Mountain Brewing – Rio Rancho, New Mexico – When Nico Ortiz, son of the famous anthropologist launched his inaugural restaurant and microbrewery in 1997, it just made sense that it should be called Turtle Mountain, a name which pays homage to his father and to the magnificent peaks under whose shadow his enterprise would reside.
• Is There a Milky-Way Galaxy/Earth Biodiversity Link? Experts Say "Yes" – 1n 1999, Astronomers focusing on a star at the center of the Milky Way, measured precisely how long it takes the sun to complete one orbit (a galactic year) of our home galaxy: 226 million years.

  The last time the sun was at that exact spot of its galactic orbit, dinosaurs ruled the world. The Solar System is thought to have completed about 20–25 orbits during its lifetime or 0.0008 orbit since the origin of humans.

• Watch this space | The Australian – AFTER you've spent more than 20 years hunting for an alien signal, you think you'd be celebrating if you noticed a mysterious pulse suddenly rising up on your computer readouts. A regular pulse, amid the random clatter of the cosmos, suggests that someone very smart at the other end is sending a message.

  But when Ragbir Bhathal, an astrophysicist at the University of Western Sydney, who teaches the only university-based course on SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) in Australia, detected the suspicious signal on a clear night last December, he knew better than to crack open the special bottle of champagne he has tucked away for the history-making occasion.

• Apartment Therapy ohdeedoh | How Mac N’ Cheese Is Like A Cigarette BusinessWeek.com – The article by Cathy Arnst is a review of a new book by Dr. David Kessler promisingly titled The End of Overeating. In it he describes "conditioned hypereating" – an almost uncontrollable drive to eat excessively beyond hunger. This breakdown in appetite regulation begins in childhood and only gets worse.
• Add enhanced audio track to iMovie | Music and Audio | Mac 911 | Macworld – Set about your dirty work in Soundtrack or whatever audio application you care to use and do anything you like except change the duration of the audio file. So, play with the EQ, filter noise, or add an unhealthy amount of reverb, just don’t cut or add anything to the file. (Because if you do, the file won’t be in sync when you add it to your iMovie project.)
• Wienermobile Crash: Oscar Mayer Wienermobile crashes into Racine home – WITI – The Oscar Mayer Wienermobile got itself into quite a pickle when it crashed into a Racine home Friday morning. Neighbors tell FOX 6 the Wienermobile took a wrong turn and ended up on the dead-end street, Kenilworth Avenue in Racine.
• Hoover Dam bypass bridge an epic marvel – A quarter-mile downstream from Hoover Dam, two fingers of concrete stretch toward each other from sheer cliffs, suspended nearly 900 feet above the Colorado River. In a month, the fingers will meet, an 80-foot gap will close and the longest concrete arch in the Western Hemisphere will be complete. The union will mark a major milestone in the nine-year construction of the Hoover Dam bypass bridge, scheduled to open in late 2010.

• Can’t belive my hometown team won. It’s about time! #
• My dam iPhone crashes at least once a day when I plug it into iTunes. #
• It’s kinda warm, guess I can remove the liner from my jacket. #
• @adin didn’t know @brentspiner was on Twitter. Cool! in reply to adin #
• Enjoying W’s last day in office by watching Star Trek Generation, eating a salmon and rice and having a little Crown and Coke. #
• Watching the inauguration on a crappy 20 year old projection tv at work. High tech company my ass. #
• Had a work related meeting in the cafe during the inauguration. The guy I was meeting with couldn’t understand why everyone was watching it #
• Channel 13 is on the Intel NM site. #
• Another horrible end to the week. And I’m once again worried about my job. Went through this two years ago. #
• Didn’t find the video of KRQE at Intel today, only yesterday. http://tinyurl.com/7e2y8o #
• #firstmac Took out my first loan at 18 to buy a Classic II. #
• #firstmac I still have that Classic II. #
• Intel still has a few more 200mm plants. Wonder if those will get shut down too. #
• Apple has best quarterly revenue and earnings in apple history during one of the worst recession in US history. Weird. #
• Last three tweets indicates everyone is lost on lost. #
• YouTube sucks. Rejects my video because it’s 11 minutes long. #
• @UltraMagnus @bsailer @mr_ezra, thanks for having that conversation now. Bought Tweetie earlier today. #
• Gizmodo has a shoot out posted between twitter apps earlier today. http://tinyurl.com/a9ufm2 #
• @bsailer I will have to tell you what I think of tweetie after a few days. I previously used twinkle. in reply to bsailer #
• I’m getting Jehovah Witnesses at least once a week to my house. Leaving their propaganda each time. #
• @claystorm Wouldn’t it be more fun if YOU went to Phoenix and bought it for him? #
• Since switching to Wordpress, I have received 30 spam comments and 16 non spam comments. #
• Why do none of the stimulus projects include the I-25/Paseo interchange? http://tinyurl.com/al3zs8 #
• I would have never imagined subscribing to the Whitehouse.gov blog feed. #
• @bsailer That’s exactly what I say. I love the show, especially in HD. #
• @bsailer Oh, and it’s always a friends car or a friends pants that those drugs were found in. #
• @fbihop Survivor Man is better. #
• @fivezerofive How was the snow? #

Pulp Fiction now has betas out to hopefully fix all the issues. You can read about my previous experiences here and here.

[Update:] Looks like they need to reset the demo timeout for me to be able to give it a try again.

[Update 2:] The latest beta re adds the 15 day demo period (should be longer for a beta). Works much better. No database crashes and pretty speedy. Will keep trying it out for the next 15 days and see how it goes.