For years, I've harvested the maps out of my phone book. Staple them in a folder, and carry with me. This year, the phone books arrived. I looked for the maps. They had "mall store maps" but none for streets. I'm going to have to make last years maps last a long time.
Christopher A. Young Learn more about Jesus
Usta be like that, here. NO TVs within the driver's view. Slowly, but surely, the creep began. Digital compasses, GPS, cellphones, digital audio dashboards, etc. The fact police cars have what amounts to netbooks and govt services (fire, police, etc) can talk on radio, only muddied the water. These laws are useless. I once witnessed a commuter reading a dead-tree book while driving. The book was on the seat next to the driver!! Bottom line, every time you drive, you risk dying.
nb
Just purchased a new GPS unit for about $29,000.
It did come with a Nissan wrapped around it though.
Phone book?
How quaint.
I dunno about that. I was programming my GPS the other day to find out how much longer it would take to get to my destination.
Thought to myself, "How is this different from texting or dialing a cell phone?"
For the life of me I cannot see why two are "distracted driving" and one, isn't.
much longer it would take to get to my destination.
You can use a GPS pretty safely if mount it where you can see it, use the audio mode (which I wish was able to mute the stereo, give the report and unmute the stereo) and don't touch it when you're actually driving. Anything can be dangerous - a Big Mac, a PC, a radio, a DVD player, the morning crossword puzzle, makeup, beard trimming, etc. The truckers of America recently lost a round, IIRC, concerning using trip management "systems" (GPSs on steroids) while driving. There's all sorts of well-vetted test data that shows when people concentrate on a task inside the vehicle their awareness of the environment outside the vehicle plummets.
I was fussing with my pocket tape recorder while driving my nearly new car when I saw that a metal plate in the roadway had shifted and there was a 3' by 16' hole in the roadway. While I may have been going fast enough to just "ride over it" a recent Mythbusters I saw about the bus in "Speed" leads me to believe I would have destroyed the front end of the car if the lane next to me had been blocked. That incident led me to an overcautious state of mind where I don't even turn my cell phone on while in the car to avoid temptation. It's plain to see when driving down the Beltway that a lot of people are barely paying attention to the road ahead of them. They don't realize that the fractions of a second it takes them to "task switch" are the fractions of a second where an accident *might* be avoided.
I'd like to set up a camera in the rear window so I could I drove ahead of a "look down" driver and let a few big garbage bags out the window. It would probably give them a heart-attack. I can remember the feeling I had when large objects from other lanes were suddenly got knocked hard into my lane. Beds, ladders, a hand truck, tires, tables, an easy chair and something else I'm forgetting - yes, a large chunk of thick ice off a car roof - have all come at me while doing 65 mph on the highway.
I've played a lot of video games but none matched the thrill of trying to evade the huge metal handtruck that blew off a Coca Cola truck. For a while it's still traveling along pretty quickly from the momentum. For a while. Thick rubber tires can really bounce around, too. I was driving on the Verazzano Bridge plaza when a truck full of truck tires lost the rear gate and squadron of tires began flying through the gaps in the traffic.
-- Bobby G.
I drove over a extension ladder recently. boy was I surprised....
saw a sprite truck open up and dump many many cubes of sprite all over the road. geez did those bottles spray big time.
I was driving through Malfunction Junction in downtown Birmingham some years ago when I caught a movement in the lane next to me and it was a big towed Ingersoll Rand air compressor that was loose and the tongue dug into the pavement so the compressor was flipping end over end at
60MPH. The next day, state highway department crews were out repairing divots that had been ripped out of the freeway. o_OTDD
Sunday, I went to visit a friend, and help with some church paper work. He has a working rotary dial phone. Now, THAT is quaint.
Christopher A. Young Learn more about Jesus
Phone book?
How quaint.
snipped-for-privacy@123.com wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:
no,remove the nut behind the wheel.
Bet he's still paying the telephone company a couple of bucks a month to maintain it ;)
< I drove over a extension ladder recently. boy was I surprised....>
I'll bet. If I count all the things that have tried to kill friends and family on the highways we would be described most of WalMart and anything that can be tied to the roof of car with cakebox string.
We had an armored car overturn here carrying mostly bags of coins. As soon as people saw the truck turned over and the stuff all scattered, they all stopped to help pick it up. And then drove off with it!
Raise your hand if you've ever driven behind a chicken truck on a hot two lane highway in the summer.
-- Bobby G.
Ouch! My Italian NYC cousin got hit head on by a towed car that had broken free and slammed into her as they went through an underpass together on opposites sides of the road. Another friend has a picture I should post of some huge truck axle segment that came up through the passenger floor of his Acura and probably would have gelded any guy sitting there.
Some of my closest encounters with the Great Beyond have concerned trailers of one kind or another. There's the "Tale of the Singing Tow Cable" and "Rock and Roll Until You Roll Over." The problem is that U-Haul rents trailers to young adults. (-: I watched "Harvest" on the HistChan yesterday and some kid operating a $500K combine ignites the dry wheat (about an acre's worth) and then hops out of the combine (now hovering over the dry wheat) with a little, bitty fire extinguisher looking to use it to put out huge crop fire. The owner's screaming "Don't cut the fire!!!" worrying that the kid will drive the fuel-laden combine into the burning wheat. We old cusses take for granted how much stuff we've learned just by getting old.
-- Bobby G.
I assume that a) if you use them often enough to really learn their quirks and b) have a good, frequently updated unit that doesn't drag you down logging roads and blind alleys (-: that you can get by.,
I still get freaked when I am sitting in a huge shopping center and the GPS shows nothing - no roads, no buildings, no message "Here Be Dragons!"
Sanyo and Maylong. That could explain it. I really don't use them at all, so I didn't want to spend a fortune.
It is pretty useful for finding my way home when I get lost.
-- Bobby G.
my first garmin cost over 650 bucks, it paid for itself in a matter of months......
I can see how the additional traffic feature could be very useful in metropolitan areas and holiday driving. What did yours cost?
-- Bobby G.
13x the tonnage of the fully loaded Titanic is annually deposited in landfills in the form of phone books.
They have reached their lifespan, though. They will survive the best in the smaller markets, as that will be the best thing going in small towns. But for large cities, the stranglehold monopolies of the phone books is done. It was done a few years ago when the courts ruled that the "yellow pages" did not have a monopoly on that market, and zillions sprang up in competition.
Steve
confusing. "Drrrr, I was lookin' at the pretty numbers and didn't see the kid run out in the street half a mile up."
I've seen prototype HUDs that essentially improve the contrast of the scene ahead, particularly highlighting things that "aren't right". They're nothing like HUDs used by fighter pilots. They confuse even experienced fighter pilots.
Traffic comes on my cell phone's navigation app. It takes a digital connection, though, which isn't a problem in cities where it's needed.
Some places charge more for rotary service, too. It costs them money to keep the dial equipment around.
Back in the late 90's I fixed a garage door opener for a nice lady who lived with her mother. The nice lady was 70 and her mother was 100 years old. They still had their original Western Electric black rotary dial phone that they were renting from BellSouth and I checked the date code on the darn thing and it was 1949. ^_^
TDD
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