I'm increasingly depressed by shared-use pathways, which seem to be a danger to all concerned. As a resolute pedestrian, I try to avoid them whenever possible. But with improving technology, cyclists keep turning up in unexpected places. I once walked over the high peaks from one glen to another, and found that my descent route had been turned into a mountain-bike track during the five years since I'd previously walked it. The whole shoulder of the mountain was a mass of eroded zig-zags populated by white-knuckled riders. That descent was the most frightened I've ever been, in fifty years on the hills in all weathers.
Grant Hutchison
I frequently hike a multi-use trail in the near-by National Park. The rule there is that a passing cyclist either verbally or with a bell/horn warn pedestrians. I'd say a large percentage of both cyclists and pedestrians follow the rules and act accordingly (maybe like 80%). Collisions seem rare, but there are a good number of near misses.
My bigger problem (than cyclist who don't warn) are cyclists who ride at very high speeds, particularly when there is a lot of traffic on the trail. They seem to think they don't have to adjust their behavior given those conditions. Even if they give warning, there is little time to act. And they seem to cause even more problems for slower moving cyclists than pedestrians.
To be fair, there are probably as many poorly behaved pedestrians, such as groups that walk three or four across on the trail (so hard to pass them going in either direction) or keep to the left, instead of the normal (in the States) of keeping to the right.
Do you happen to know if the drivers are paid a percentage, or if it's a standard per-delivery fee?
If it's a percentage (and I don't know if it is or not), one would assume the drivers could specify a minimum dollar amount they're willing to deliver, and then the system wouldn't know if there are drivers available until you complete your order.
Sometimes you win, sometimes you learn
"I'm planning to live forever. So far, that's working perfectly." Steven Wright
I drove for Uber and Lyft a couple of years ago, and would occasionally get a food delivery order. I was paid the same as if I had a passenger: a flat rate per mile and another flat rate per minute, with a minimum if the trip was very short ($2.95 as i recall.) As is usually the case, people order from restaurants that are close to them (unlike a passenger who might want a 30-mile lift to the airport). So for most of my food deliveries, three bucks was about as much as I could expect.
And I could take bets. If the person answering the door was under the age of thirty, there were no tips offered. Nor could they tip via the app because it was the restaurant that made the request, not them.
Another issue with restaurant deliveries that was a pain point from the restaurant's side was that they never knew how long it would take for a delivery driver to arrive to pick up the food. If they request a driver too late, then the food might be ready for a long time before it was picked up for delivery. Add the delivery time, and the customer might be getting food that's been sitting in a Styrofoam container for forty-five minutes. But if they request the driver too soon, and the delivery driver arrives right away, then he or she has to stand around and wait while they prepare the food. Occasionally I would have to stand in a corner for twenty or thirty minutes until the food was ready, earning zero bucks an hour.
You're quite right; there ought to be a minimum amount of information you have to enter before they know that and be able to tell you quickly. About the only place we get delivery from hires their own drivers--it's a local pizza place with three or four locations--and I still tip.
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Gillian
"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"
"You can't erase icing."
"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"
I do all the laundry and my wife has a habit of buying yoga clothes.
My personal nightmare are women's t-shirt weight yoga hoodies. Someone decided that women don't need shoulders, backs or fronts or important bits in a hoodie. Sometimes, they have attached tank or t-shirt sewn inside to cover the places the holes won't cover. A few have the stitching on the outside of one part and the inside of another part. Heaven help you if the sewn in shirt is made out of that Underarmor material, because that part will look like a toddler's shirt has fused to a product that will fit an average woman.
They snarl up in the dryer and trying to untangle them is like defining a Calabi–Yau manifold with fingers, toes and few cast off Lincoln Logs.
Solfe
We turned off the telephone land line more than a year ago and stopped getting robocalls, spam calls, scam calls, election calls...etc. Happy dance.
Then we had to place my in-laws in a nursing home last March and forwarded their house phone in Florida to my cell phone in Georgia until we deal with the disposition of their house.
*sigh*. The junk is back. At least my phone marks the junk calls as Potential Spam...most of the time.
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Gillian
"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"
"You can't erase icing."
"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"
It may be time for me to replace the ancient Win7 computer.
The battery hasn't really worked in ages. And it's developed multiple quirks.
One is being stuck scrolling down. It'll start doing this even when not being touched. It took me a while to figure out that the fix is to tap the laptop down arrow key a couple of times.
On the other hand, lately it's been very reluctant to scroll down from the wheel on the mouse, and even from the page down or arrow keys on the offboard keyboard.
And periodically, it decides there's no internet. It's connected to the WiFi and all other devices still work. The only cure is to shut it down and reboot.
Which I did this morning, only it wouldn't start up. I finally disconnected pretty much everything and took the battery out. Now it's running. Oh, well.
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt.
Yesterday evening I was taking my weekly break, which is an online chat and script-read with some friends. I'd missed last week because my firstborn was here--and was looking forward to telling them about it--and fairly early in the evening, our power went out. And stayed out for long enough so that I missed the whole script-read part and apparently a conversation I would've really enjoyed, and then came back on in time for me to get a little bit of a chat. But I'm the only West Coast person, so everyone else wanted to go to bed not long after I managed to rejoin the group.
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Gillian
"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"
"You can't erase icing."
"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"
I just watched a video of three kids who striped down to underwear and jumped in a fountain at the mall. The parents loose their minds as the kids evade capture, but not one parent steps into the fountain. They let the whole show go on for minutes which makes my eye rattle in my head. One child is splashing bystanders while evading mom.
I am trying to figure out exactly where the parents went wrong. I am kind of leaning on the "embarrassment overpowering self control" theory. Kids sense those things and try to figure out where mom and dad's limits are. Once you get over the idea that you are leaving with wet shoes, the solution is rather obvious. You get wet, you pick them up and walk out. It saves on screaming and yelling. Plus once the kids get the idea that you are nutty enough to follow them anywhere, they probably won't test you again.
Last edited by Solfe; 2020-Jul-19 at 09:32 PM.
Solfe
I never would have imagined trying to run such a system without the drivers being able to set their own minimums. I'd expect it to quickly run out of willing drivers.
I once worked in patient transportation at a hospital. We were all given phones that were actually small tablets based on their usage, with no voice/text functions, running an app that would tell us when there was a new job to do. It also told us immediately which part of the hospital the patient was at and which part of it was the destination. Whenever we saw one pop up, we could accept it or reject it, but the boss kept track of everybody's accept-reject rates and posted them on the office wall, so there was no need to force assignments on us (if there even was a way to do that in that app). The reject option was useful for when we'd get one that was really far from our current location, or involved a department whose staff we didn't want to deal with.
The idea of the pedestrian reacting is exactly the problem. The biker is already about to go around, so all the pedestrian can do by moving is get in the way. Collision & near miss rates go down if you give no warning, because a warning is just an opportunity for morons to screw everything up.
I seriously wonder how polls can ever possibly be accurate. I know they are, so I'm not claiming they're not. I just don't get how. They seem to depend on people actually answering those calls & talking to the pollsters, and on the group "those who answer the calls & talk to the pollsters" not being too skewed in any other way, neither of which seems like a realistic expectation. (Plus, there must be a lot more of these calls happening somewhere out there than it ever seemed like there could be based on what I got.)
I see so many jokes about how much bad stuff has happened this year that I wonder if any of the people passing such jokes around can even remember what bad stuff is supposed to have characterized this year before the plague... because just one or two items, no matter how big & bad they are, doesn't really warrant jokes about how the year keeps coming up with more & more separate new bad things.
I kept my landline (well, Comcast VOIP). I used Nomorobo (free service to me, I think they are paid by Comcast) and that helped quite a bit, but I never would answer unless I recognized the number or they left a voicemail I wanted to respond to. I also haven’t had a phone in my bedroom for a long time - still too many junkcalls often when I was sleeping.
But, there have recently been regulatory changes, and the junk calls have dropped to near zero, so I’m thinking of actually having a bedroom phone and answering numbers I don’t recognize again.
"The problem with quotes on the Internet is that it is hard to verify their authenticity." — Abraham Lincoln
I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?
The Leif Ericson Cruiser
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt.
Normally at this time of year I'd be building and preparing my machines for the Pumpkin Pitch. But this, of course, is the year of Covid. So a couple of minutes ago, just for the heck of it, I went to the Burlington Parks and Recreation website. They've got it on the calendar! I'm 90% sure it's not happening, but I guess I'll drop an e-mail to the organizer, who is the recreation director, and see if I get a response. The last I heard from her she and all the recreation staff had been laid off.
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt.
Polls, don't even get me started on polls.
"I'm planning to live forever. So far, that's working perfectly." Steven Wright
This year has been pretty atrocious to me. Three family members and a close friend passed away in the past 60 days. My dryer caught fire and my washer roasted about 3 weeks ago. I was using a broken glucometer to evaluate how much insulin to take until that cause madness. Add in the some stress from having to teach my students online, and planning to return to the classroom in the fall despite a couple of reasons that place me in risk pool that shouldn't do that, but probably will anyway. Oh, there is a touch of mania in all this because the school hired my replacement three weeks ago. And that person won't return my calls or start their teaching duties while I am pulling triple duty do host their grade level meetings, teaching their students and getting ready for new classroom in the fall.
To put things in perspective, exactly 2080 days ago, I took this picture. It's at Roswell Park Cancer Institute the day my wife had her surgery.
It's a payphone selfie. It made my wife laugh before they took her into surgery. If I'm cracking jokes at that point, the day where a surgeon stopped my wife's surgery to ask me what he should do... Tomorrow will be day 2081 since I made a good call and everything is fine now. I'm throw some attitude at anything that 2020 dishes out.
Solfe
I've been window shopping (on line) for a new laptop.
Keyboard layout matters to me.
For all the artsy-fartsy angles they show laptops at - why are there so few plain and simple views of the keyboard?
Measure once, cut twice. Practice makes perfect.
Our older laptop, with which I've been having problems lately, has a full keyboard, with numeric keypad and all.
The newer, wider one does not, just empty space to the sides, and something weird about the key layout that causes me to get off center.
I use a separate wireless keyboard with the old one, because reasons.
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt.