Blown up car, cornfield, midnight

Here's what I was doing last midnight.

I'm standing beside my car in a middle of a dirt road that's cutting through a cornfield. I don't dare go further as my car has sporty, quite low-suspension and I'm afraid one of the holes in the bumpy dirt track ahead of me will prove too deep for it. My wife is trying to figure out how could I safely turn the car back. What are we doing in the middle of the nowhere at this hour anyway? Why aren't we at least on some regular road, if not safely tucked away in bed?

The problem is, few minutes earlier we came across a wreck of a blown-up car blocking the normal road, lying on its roof (or what remained of it), surrounded by one fire truck, several police cars, and a slew of firemen and policemen, impossible to drive past it. On advice of one of the by-standing villagers, we tried to get around it on a "back road", which turned out to be the aforementioned dirt track through a corn field. When it proved unpassable for my Mazda, we scrambled back to the road, to wait for the firemen to eventually clean up the wreck from the road.

My biggest problem though is that when we came upon this roadblock, we were only ten short kilometers away from our beds at my parents' house, after I spent my last thirteen hours behind the wheel (only stopping for gas), covering nine hundred kilometers. I'm exhausted beyond belief. I can't actually believe this is happening to me.

(Not too relevant to the story: the car blew up because its fuel tank was leaky. The kid driving it, his driving license only four days old, miraculously survived it with only burns to his legs, as bystanders told me.)

I was royally pissed off after all other things that happened to us earlier that day leading up to this. You might have noticed it took me thirteen hours to cover nine hundred kilometers. It's a very bad average speed, considering I drove most of it on highways. Short explanation for it is two words.

Italian highways.

We spent our vacation this year near Rimini in Italy. The people were kind, the sea warm, the food great. Everything was perfect, except for italian highways. We run into a congestion because of an accident, both ways. Took us more than an hour each time to get out of it, driving in lockstep. You'd say it's no fault of the highway system itself - accidents happen. That's true. However, there's also one 100% predictable, huge congestion that's coded into the system - the tollbooths near Venice. The idea is that you pay as you leave the section of the highway built and operated by one particular company. They do however have a throughput problem, which manifests itself in a nine kilometers long queue of cars before it. Yes, nine kilometers. In rows of three. Unfortunately, their business model completely defeats the function of the highway. The function, to me at least, being efficient road transportation. It took us an hour and a half of driving in lockstep from reaching the end of the queue to clearing the tollbooth. Together with the one-hour accident-caused congestion between Rimini and Bologna, this resulted in four and a half hours to cover the first two hundred and seventy kilometers of our trip back home. On a highway. Do the math.

By the time we reached the tollbooth, both me and my wife (and our seven-year old son, too) were red with fury. The poor clerk at the booth got on its receiving end. It isn't his fault, but he was the closest human representative of the company that operated the highway, the company we by that time hated fiercely for operating a highway where you stand in a queue by design with thousands of other cars for an hour and a half, or more if you're unlucky enough to run into an accident. And then you pay fourteen euros for the privilege. We told the clerk how this isn't a highway, this is an inhumane joke, a horror, not something belonging to western civilization, how even Balkans are better, and we know because we were to Balkans earlier. He had a look telling us he hears this kind of testimony of customer satisfaction regularly.

So, I won't make any service to that highway, as it didn't really do me any service either: I'm telling anyone reading this that if you can avoid using higways going through Venice-Mestre tollbooths, avoid them. You can't go any worse on secondary roads - they're free, and you'll probably have a far, and I mean far-far better average speed and fuel economy. You certainly won't get two and a half hours behind your travel schedule. And this isn't an isolated event - I drove on that highway five years ago, and it was the very same experience back then as well.

Those +150 minutes then led to me standing with my car in the middle of the night in a cornfield, exhausted, ten kilometers away from a bed I should've instead been in at that time.

Update: To be completely honest, we did acquire some more delay after we left Italy, while driving through Slovenia, due to one case of bad signage (in Maribor), a blindingly pouring rain, one case of detour (near Murska Sobota), and a general disagreement between our road atlas and the physical reality regarding existence of certain roads. The exploded car wreck and the cornfield were really just the finishing touches in that day's demonstration of God's sense of humour.

A grab-bag of two-week memories

This is really just a quick grab-bag about various things that happened with me in the last two weeks.

Been to Croatia a week ago. Went on workdays - thursday and friday (and saturday). Kids were at wife's relatives, wife was working on these days, so my absence had minimal impact on family :-) It also had minimal impact on work, as I took my laptop with me and stayed at a friend who could provide me with internet connection, so I worked during the day and visited friends in evenings. I even called into the work-related conference calls during these days, although calling US numbers from a Hungarian cellphone while romaing in Croatia earned me a call from T-Mobile customer relations next monday asking whether there's a chance my phone was used unauthorized as they registered calls worth 300$ in a single day on it. Whoops, here comes my record phone bill. Anyway, it was really great to visit childhood friends and go for swimming at sunset in the same lake I swam in every day of every summer of my childhood. This was my very first return to that lake in fifteen years - since I had to leave the region because of the then-war. Yes, I'm being sentimental. A bit.

I desacrated my MacBook Pro by installing Windows XP on a small 8GB partition on it few days ago. I guess I just couldn't watch my copy of Far Cry gather dust on the shelf anymore knowing that I didn't complete the game before I switched to the Mac. I have to report that all is peachy with it. It even takes advantage of the two CPUs reasonably well (i.e. it runs with over 50% CPU utilization). After few hours of installing XP, Far Cry, and all patches for Far Cry, I even got a chance to play with it for about an hour :-) Far Cry BTW is one hidden gem of a first-person shooter - it brought the same graphical excellence and gameplay experience to the market as Half-Life 2 did, only Far Cry hit the market about 9 months earlier than Half-Life 2 did. It is somewhat underappreciated compared to HL 2 though, unfortunately.

Been re-watching Futurama Season 1 lately as work-unwinding. It stuns me as a bit boring and predictable - well, maybe because I already saw it once, but still. I don't have the same feeling when rewatching The Simpsons. Pausing it a lot though to spot various not uncommon easter eggs that are visible for only a second or so. Speaking of work-unwinding, I'm trying to cram in at least half an hour of cycling or running lately in the evenings. I noticed that a bit of a physical activity after an all-day sitting in front of a computer really refreshes me for an evening of Uno with kids :-)

Been listening to "Kite" and "Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own" much lately. Not going to explain it - if you're a close friend, you understand anyway.

Oh, and here's your movie recommendation: make sure you watch "Hoodwinked!". It's an indie CG animation feature "loosely based" on Red Riding Hood. Better said, it turns it a bit upside down and is absolutely hilarious. It being indie shows at the CG models and animation, which are few years behind the big-budget Holywood state-of-the-art, but believe me it wouldn't diminish the experience at all - the lovable and zany characters, the twisty story and the jokes, provide for over an hour of fully immersive fun. My wife generally doesn't like animation, but even she said this was a cool one.

On professional side, few things are moving. Just asked Norris Boyd today to pack up the current Rhino CVS HEAD and release it as Rhino 1.6R3 - last release was over nine months ago, so it's about time we give people a bunch of bugfixes in an officially blessed release state. Watch the Rhino download page to see when 1.6R3 pops up for download. Shouldn't be more than a day.

I'm still trying to find myself a bit of a time to learn a new programming language. No specific reason, just trying not to narrow my view too much on Java and try a language that forces me to adopt/discover new ways of thinking about software architecture. The only problem is, there are too many candidates. LUA, Haskell, Ruby, to name just a few. There's one particularly interesting new language that seems to get lots of publicity lately: Scala. A fully OO (every value is an object, no primitive/object types dualism as in Java) and at the same time fully functional language, that also natively compiles to either CLR or JVM bytecode, allowing it to be used within a .Net or Java system seamlessly. This is quite an advantage since it makes it possible to use any Java library with it, something that I can maybe readily and easily introduce into daily work if need be. I sometimes find myself in a situation where an otherwise elegant idea takes quite a verbose and/or awkward code to be expressed in Java, and think that a language that is more friendly toward designing internal domain-specific languages (Ruby, as Martin Fowler demonstrated it nicely during his presentation at JAOO last year), or even comes standard with macro preprocessor of some description (yes, I know C macros are evil, but I don't generally use them in evil ways) would really help reduce clutter. Maybe Scala? Don't know yet. I did download its full documentation - something to print out and then read on my vacation in Italy next week. Wife is going to kill me for it, though :-)

First penguin to climb Mt. Everest

Few days ago, while spending our vacation in a camping near the Hajdúszoboszló Aquapark, in the evening sitting on a bench in front of our trailer home, my son Ákos asked with a fully serious face: "Dad, what was the name of the first penguin to climb Mount Everest?".

I just adore my big seven year old son.

We tried to discuss it briefly, and he suggested that some alpinist could actually tie up a penguin and take it with him to the Top O' The World, but I told him that the animal rights activists would have a word or two about it, so it's highly unlikely. On the other hand, we speculated that as a rule, humans only climb Mt. Everest during summer and maybe penguins visit it in the winter, that sort of weather certainly suiting them better, when no human can observe them. We envisioned a crowd of penguins in full alpinistic equipment gathering at the foot of the mountain, looking enthusiastically to the challenges that await them. We rolled with laugther.

He then went on to invent a story about a penguin who left South Pole as he wished to see the world, climbed Mt. Everest, crossed the Kalahari desert where he found a small town, settled in it, then went on to earn a living first by being a street musician (we recently watched "Cars", and they show One Man Band before it, maybe that's where the idea came from) and later by building a power plant and wiring the houses and selling electricity to the city. There was also a wish-granting magic stick involved in the story that the penguin used to wish all his penguin friends he left behind are with him, but it backfired as they quickly died of dehydration in the desert (when I asked why our hero, also a penguin, didn't die as well, he explained that he travelled in a special aquarium car that kept him wet). Fortunately, for undisclosed reasons, the magic stick only transferred third of his friends, so he presumably got few more left back home.

I remember sitting on a chair placed to face opposite the bench, rendered too unwilling to move by the slight fever accompanying my bronchitis (ideal development for a vacation, huh? Right, I thought so too.) and not very willing to talk either due to a sore throat, and just listening to him fascinated as he tirelessly spun his story further and further for at least an hour. It finally ended when I told him we'd have to head for showers and then for bed soon lest we be totally consumed by mosquitos. By that time the penguin (who remained nameless, or at least, unnamed) was providing electricity for the whole world, but in the end got homesick, went back to South Pole (yes, I know strictly speaking they don't live at the Pole proper, but that's how he told the tale), and divided the wealth he accumulated during his electricity tycoon and street musician times among its (remaining two-third of) friends.

Few days later, on a similar evening while sitting on a bench and eating cherries he asked me whether there's a limit to one person's creativity.

Guess what I answered him.