Lewis County, Your Roads Are Fantastic!

Part of my job revolves around maintaining not only the Chronicle's web site but also the Nisqually Valley News in Yelm and the Gazette in Orting. I moved to Orting in 1997 and was warmly welcomed by the community. When I say "warmly," I really mean the slow lingering warmth that sweeps over a dead body.

Orting, situated in south-easy Pierce County, was in the beginning stages of a population boom that quadrupled its size, and still continues to grow. When my family arrived, we were labeled as "new-folk," making it difficult to enjoy school (not that attempting to enjoy the eighth grade is particularly easy to begin with). Perhaps you experienced this sort of thing happening in your communities lately.

The stigma lifted after a couple of years as more and more developments sprang up in the Orting Valley. My wife, Lynette, grew up her entire life in Orting. She watched from the mid-90s on as developments went in, classroom attendance increased, traffic lights went up, and (horror!) a Starbucks came to town. Last night she and I reflected on this growth for awhile, laughing at something we had read on The Buzz.

Our laughter came from the "terrible" traffic on the freeway and how we should be demanding from our legislators that Interstate 5 be widened to three lanes. Now let me clarify: Yes, Lynette and I agree whole-heartedly that the freeway should be three lanes; maybe even four through the Twin Cities. Our laughter comes from the fact that every post we read on The Buzz complaining about people and traffic is completely without perspective.

I can only speak for Pierce, Thurston and Lewis counties. There have been times, possibly, that you have driven to Tacoma or Seattle and, while passing through Pierce County have slowed down. You might think to yourself "There must be an accident up ahead," and then, after a mile or two, traffic will clear up again without any sign of an accident and then slow down again a bit further up. "Maybe it's just today," you say. It isn't. Pierce County is filled with the worst drivers on the planet. The traffic is bad every day. Every day.

Lynette and I laugh because it will take you an hour to travel four miles on Meridian Street in South Hill. Lynette and I laugh because it will take you 45 minutes to travel 10 miles on 512, a major freeway in Pierce County. Lynette and I laugh because it will take you 30 minutes to travel from Puyallup to Orting, where if you're not stuck in the daily traffic jam coming home, you're stuck behind someone traveling 35 mph in a 50-zone. There are other traffic snarls Pierce County residents know to avoid: I-5 southbound through Tacoma; State Route 162 from Kent to Auburn; 410 to Bonney Lake; Portland Avenue exit from I-5; Meridian Street through downtown Puyallup. This list goes on and on.

You may wonder my credibility in being able to claim that I'm sort of "driving expert." I digress: I am indeed no expert. I worked for Pizza Hut delivering pizzas for almost three years in downtown Puyallup. I am neither an impatient driver dangerously swerving around others or an ignorant driver plodding along under the speed limit while I attempt to use my cellphone to name a song on KISS 106.1 so that I can download it as my next ring tone.

It's not solid credentials, but I believe it helps.

Thurston County is starting to experience this growth as it moves progressively southward from King County. Already this month I've seen two Hummer H2s (possibly just passing through), which is the same amount I've seen in all of Thurston County since moving there in September. I believe you can measure a county's inability to drive based on the Hummer H2 count. I call it an "H2 Scale." Pierce County, for instance, is filled with H2s. They converge upon smaller, weaker cars in an attempt to establish their dominance. The greatest among them are coveted for their "phat 22s, yo."

Now, don't get my wrong, I love Puyallup. It's still probably my favorite place to live. I just really dislike anyone who gets into a car there. Chances are they can't drive.

But Lewis County, how I've fallen in love with you. I enjoy being able to travel 20 miles on my commute in a 30-minute timespan. I love that most of you are safe and courteous drivers. I have seen only a single H2 since September. I am certain more are to come; chances are there are several dozen registered in Lewis County (my H2 Scale is purely based on my observation while driving divided by time spent on the road). When the laughter Lynette and I were sharing died, I began to think of all the good things about Lewis County's roadways. Sure, there are some things we universally complain about, but I decided to make a little list of the positive things that Centralia drivers do that Puyallup drivers do not:

1. You turn left at a green turn arrow. Puyallup drivers sit there, befuddled that possibly the traffic across the intersection will jump forward suddenly, even though a giant green arrow to turn is staring them in the face. They don't understand the people across the street have a red light still. This goes hand-in-hand with failing to understand what "yield on green" means, so I'm grouping these two together.

2. You know how to use a four-way stop. There are still lots of four-way stops around town. You know how to use them. Puyallup drivers yield, leap into the intersection when it is not their turn, and then proceed to scream profanities to the person whose rightful turn it was when they began to cross the intersection.

3. You stop at a yellow light. In Puyallup, a yellow light means "go faster, quick!" usually resulting in a stream of cars going through the intersection long-after the light has turned red. (Note: This is beginning to happen more and more in Olympia.)

4. You enter a freeway at an appropriate speed. While I've had my complaints about this a few times since moving here, the majority of you can enter a freeway at 60 mph and merge with the lane next to you. Puyallup drivers will slam on their brakes at the top of the ramp and then jump into the freeway at 20 mph. For shame.

5. You "keep right except to pass." I love this. This doesn't happen up north.

6. You don't talk on cellphones, generally. Last summer, in Puyallup, I was filling up my car between two pizza deliveries and I was watching the cars pass, counting how many were on their cellphone. Every person that passed was on their cellphone. Twenty-one people. One-hundred percent.

7. You don't tailgate the people in front of you. This is one of my biggest pet-peeves, for the sole reason that, when the person in front of you slows down because someone cuts in front of them, you have to slam on your brakes. And slamming on your brakes makes your brake lights light up. And when your brake lights light up that makes the drivers behind you subconsciously put their foot over their brake pedal, sometimes other people then brake without any real need. The whole instance can cause a backup on the freeway, and this is the reason there are so many backups in Pierce County. I don't believe they have accidents: just drivers following too close with their foot on the brake.

8. You don't drive other obnoxiously ugly "vehicles."

9. You don't drive H2s.*

Thank you, Lewis County. You can continue to complain, but don't forget to take stock of all the good things before the development boom reaches here in the next decade and they all go away.

*I'm fairly certain this picture from the Wikimedia foundation was taken outside one of the many Puyallup pediatric offices.

The Trouble With Turkbots

You may have noticed a severe lack of new postings on "the Tubes," as my co-workers have begun to call this blog. The Tubes' writer has noticed this trend, too. I can assure you that I have two excuses I intend to employ: The firewall went up killing the blogs and I have had writer's block.

I shall now explain each to it's fullest.

The trouble began two weeks ago the day after my last entry. On Friday afternoon chronline.com was hacked by a PHP exploit that we were able to fix fairly quickly. I believe the hacked page was online for around a total of a minute-and-a-half. Take that, hacker! Turns out these hackers, these Turkish Hackers, are usually just robots from Turkey surfing the net and looking for PHP exploits.

I always imagined hacking as kind of a hobby for some people. If you get a robot to do it, what is the point? It's like watching a game of soccer where both teams are robots with no affiliation. Could it possibly get any more boring than that? Only if you replaced the word "soccer" with "sitting on the couch".

Jon quickly surmised a solution to these Turkbots by implementing the firewall to block Turkey. We somehow felt worried about blocking an entire nation of people from being able to access our website until we realized there are about fourteen computers in Turkey (all being used to run Turkbots as far as we know) and that none of them probably is too concerned about the events happening in Lewis County, Washington State, United States of America, North America, Western Hemisphere.

I could be wrong, but I somehow doubt it.

With the firewall up, however, we didn't realize the folly in being able to post blogs until a few days later when our co-workers attempted to update their own. That was an easy fix, however, by simply allowing the Blogger Software to connect to our server through the firewall. Once we added that (and Blogger, knowing this was a common issue, made it easy for us), everything was hunky-dory.

Well, except that I had the flu. Influenza does a strange thing to a person; once you're done retching and feeling as if you're slipping into infinity or that strange monsters are surrounding you, you're left in the recovery feeling very unmotivated. I spent most of last week and the beginning of this week in a stupor. And as soon as I was done with my bout of illness, my daughter and pregnant wife both came down with it. They're both feeling better now, but the Pierce Household has been a proverbial wasteland of illness for some number of days.

I didn't stop coming up with topics to write about during my absence, though. Looking back now, I'm almost glad I couldn't convince my fingers to type because the topics I did come up with are somewhat... lame. Here's what I had:

Anonymous, an anonymous group on the internet (shock!) has declared war on the Church of Scientology; not over their religious practice but over the ways the Church has dealt with dissenters and critics. I'm remaining fairly neutral on the issue, saying that everyone should have religious freedom. But Anonymous does make a point.

Voting for the caucus is the 9th (Saturday). You probably already know this.

Standards Compliance coding is fun, but extremely difficult. I've decided I'm going to stick to Transitional for at least another year. At least this time when I tried, I was able to build an entire Standards site until I needed to actually include content. One step closer, I suppose.

The Buzz is alive and doing well as we ramp-up towards the political season. I've decided that it would be best for me to leave my opinion out as much as possible, but feel that I can still post links to Snopes when some stupid e-mail gets circulated as fact. We're still waiting for vBulletin 3.7 to be released officially and then I will start undergoing the process of upgrading.