Having spent a lot of time in a truck, I can tell you it's extremely difficult to cope on high-traffic roads. Most car drivers will crowd around you giving you no chance to change lanes, etc. Sometimes you have no choice but you just start creeping over and scare everyone out from around you. Obviously most truckers know what they're doing and they won't actually run you over -- it's bad for them, too.
When I'm out on the highway in a car and I see a truck ahead of me trying to get over into my lane, I'll most likely slow down to hold up the lane behind me and give them a quick headlights flash to they can get over. I'm sure the other cars hate me for it, but who cares.
The headlight flash is trucker code...if you do it for them they typically flash the trailer lights back...kinda like a salute and I can say they are typically appreciative (BTW...not a high beam flash but an off/on flash).
My father was a long haul truck driver (lower 48 states) for 35 years. 9mos/year on the road, moving furniture, loading his own truck as an owner operator...he was one of the good truckers with over 1 million safe driving miles...I cannot say they are all good drivers but a lot of them are. If they are an owner/operator all expenses are paid out of pocket (fuel, repairs, tires, food, taxes, etc.) so typically an owner operator is going to be more cautious than a driver who doesn't have to pay for damage.
On a side note there are certain trucking companies which hire mostly new drivers (Swift is an example) I typically watch out for those trucks.
Wish I could do an on/off flash. Darn automatic headlights can't turn off while driving. But most drivers know this and a quick brights flash is understood the same way.
Around the Twin Cities (Minneapolis/St.Paul) you get a lot of people in SUVs not taking into account the size and maneuvering of trucks. I have seen a couple try to pass from 3 cars back when the truck has already signaled a lane change. Then they get mad at the truck (lots of honking, cussing, etc.). It is especially annoying when you see the "look for motorcycles / bikes" bumper sticker on the vehicle acting like an idiot.
You are so right about the headlight flash, help the truck driver quite a bit.
The problem isn't on roads where you can turn left at all. It's a highway problem. And in the Northeast, it's standard for any three-lane road to have trucks in the right two lanes. Having trucks solely in the right lane leads to merging problems.
It seems like most of the folks who've commented with such authority ("there is no reason", indeed!) aren't really familiar with why the rules are as they are.
You're missing the fact that online publishing is only a small part of what the system has to handle. It has to integrate with the print design tools and publishing systems.
Commenting here because the post's comments are 6mo old.
I've had good luck with a combination of what both the author and the first commenter said. Go a week forcing yourself to eat smaller portions, your stomach will shrink and it becomes natural. I can't eat what I used to call "large" portions before (kind of annoying when you're at a really good restaurant or a holiday dinner).
I also dusted my bicycle off and got back out and started riding. I hadn't been active on that since I'd been moving around cities which are terrible for bicycling (Las Vegas being my current). But I found some good roads and trails, found the right times to ride them to avoid traffic and I was set. In the past 6mo or so, I've gone from 5-10mi rides to just over 60mi. When the time changed I lost my every evening ride after work as I hate riding at night around here. So I commute a couple miles to work every day on my bike, then do a nice long ride or two on the weekend.
All this together has taken me from my high school to college to post-college weight of 210 lbs down to just north of 170 in about 6-8 months. I'm now lighter than the weight I wrestled in middle school.
Is Gnome Do still alive? 0.8.3.1 was released in Dec 09 and I haven't seen any updates come across since then. I hope someone's still working on it. I love the project. (If I were less lazy and wanted to learn Mono, I'd take a stab at it.)
I've been using Gluster in a production environment for over a year now with an absolutely perfect track record. I use it for the "centralized" filesystem for a virtualization cluster (using KVM). Currently, I have three virt hosts setup with dual NICs each to get 2Gbps throughput, sharing a RAID1-style filesystem (with priorities to the local copy for r/w speed).
I was (and still am) fairly skeptical about using Gluster in this role for a production environment having come from a fiber/SAN shop before. However, I gained a lot of faith in Gluster after a non-incident a few months back. One of our core switches fell offline (the one all three virt hosts were plugged into) and remained offline for about an hour I believe. When the switch was brought back online, Gluster managed to put everything back together and continue operation without any human intervention. All 20 or so VMs were still humming along like nothing had ever happened. fsck confirmed this.
Even in the case of a failure (which I've not experienced), your data is still sitting on disk (at least that's how it is with RAID1, I don't know how it's RAID0 setup works) -- you'll always have access to the raw files Gluster uses.
It definitely has. Two years ago, I even had issues with some features of KVM/QEMU (live migration, for instance), let alone trying to run that on a distributed FS. It's amazing how fast these techs are coming along.
I'm a Mootools fan myself. I use it over the seemingly more popular libs like jquery because very little of my JS code is actually touching DOM. I usually start my projects by creating all my "classes" (actually prototypes, etc, but classes make sense to most OO people).
I primarily code in Py, but I do really want to sit down with GWT some day, it looks badass.
In a lot of my projects I just use raw JS. Big libraries scare me sometimes and honestly, JS isn't that hard if you know what you're doing and know how to code around the main browser issues. I like some of the functional paradigms from mootools though (well any other lib for that matter), and the XHR handling.
(sorry I didn't really answer your question -- just rambled a bit before I go to sleep)
When I'm out on the highway in a car and I see a truck ahead of me trying to get over into my lane, I'll most likely slow down to hold up the lane behind me and give them a quick headlights flash to they can get over. I'm sure the other cars hate me for it, but who cares.