that is both a very good idea and a nice internet publicity. Especially if you know the names of those gritter
I'm not sure if David Plowie or Gritsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Anti-Slip Machinery are involved in the current gritting. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/uk-england-south-yorkshire-42026485
What the hell kind of paving tar are you guys using that it melts in normal Earth temperatures?!? We use asphalt/tarmac all the time in places that get upwards of 50degC without troubles... (granted, you can usually fry an egg on the pavement under those conditions, but still!) Ooof. 15 yard penalty and loss of down for terrible puns! Oh, wait. UK types probably won't follow 'Murrican Football penalties.
So, talking with my uncle who was a civil engineer who worked on roads and highways for most of his career the tarmac blends used in the UK are designed to be more resistant to freeze/thaw erosion, they don't start melting until they hit 40-50C but 15+ hours in the sun for several days in a row can get them to that temperature. They do have a significantly higher number of days where the roads drop below freezing than they do repeated very sunny days at 28C+ Air temperature, so that makes sense. I currently live in the Caribbean and was able to put him in contact with a local NRA worker (that's the National Roads Authority BTW) to compare notes and apparently they use a significantly different mix on the islands that can stand the heat of 30C+ days for months on end, but according to my uncle would shatter to dust if there was ever a freeze or snowfall.
We prefer the Football that involves feet and balls, rather than hands and ellisoids ;) If we want to see some hand-egg we'll watch Rugby League thank you very much!
In advance: Sorry if this is too much venting. Our cloud solution allows our customers to take snapshots of their drives in the cloud. This, despite the well known adage "Snapshots are not a backup" is mostly used for backups. If you have more than one drive attached to a machine and take simultaneous snapshots this works about as well as a giraffe with a peg-leg riding a unicycle around an obstacle course in the Himalayas during an earthquake. Mostly it falls flat on its face. I was working on remedying this situation with the product's support team in India. We received a Hotfix that stops snapshots from being done simultaneously. Except: the customers can still set them up to be done at the same time. The one that is triggered later simply is not created. The customer is not in any way informed about his snapshot being canceled. Cue customers panicking again. (Of course.) Now I am working directly with someone from their engineering team, let's call him Bob. The thing I want from Bob is an estimate when they will properly fix the issue. Bob asks me to reproduce the issue and send him our logs. I refer him to the conversation of 83 emails I had with his colleague. Bob asks me if the issue still occurs. I refer him to his colleagues explanation how their Hotfix handles the problem and that our customers would have to have access to our management servers logs to see the error message. Bob says customers should increase the delay between snapshots depending on drive size. Asks me to reproduce the issue. I send him logs of me intentionally producing a failed snapshot and ask him if we should tell our customers to do their configuration by trial and error. Bob asks me to increase delay between snapshots and try it with drives of 5 GB. I tell him I just want to know a date or a confirmation that an upcoming version will fix it. (For the record, it works perfectly with a different software one layer down, but in our environment there is a definite bug) Bob says he'll get an answer from their engineers, but he needs the issue reproduced without simultaneous snapshots or a confirmation that the Hotfix works as intended before he will talk to them. I send him the stuff, apparently it takes about 20 minutes to take snapshots for a 5 GB drive. We have customers with up to 8 drives. Size up to 2 TB. I ask him how I should set that up for hourly snapshots. Bob tells me to simply increase the delay between snapshots to allow for earlier ones to complete. (Did he just ask me to bend spacetime?) I ask again for a confirmation that they are going to fix it and if possible a timeline.... If he comes back to me tomorrow with more stalling, I'll hand a request for a baseball bat and a ticket to Mumbai to accounting!
Oh man, I've bounced off offshore tech support hard in past jobs (one of which was actually sent to Chennai) , zero training, constant and frequent staff turnover, and an inability to do anything not in their script or KB articles does not make for a good support experience. Sure it's cheaper than doing things in onshore but they're often next to useless and the frustration plus lack of effectiveness has been shown to not be worth it several times. Not to say they're all bad, but most are run on a shoestring budget by hucksters and the few good firms get tarred with the same brush.
The fun thing is, when we built up our cloud services, it was decided not to go with the open source software, but with its implementation by one of the big players. Who then promptly sold it to our new friends in India. To be fair, they do have competent people over there. Bob just isn't among them... Update: Boss says he'd sign for the baseball bat request.
Good news for us, our head office finally has an underground fibre cable installed rather than the microwave link we've been running all the servers through for nearly a year! No more losing the Intranet, finance systems, and remote desktops when it rains heavily!
Y'all still need to talk to road engineers in the US, as those same places that can hit 50degC in the summer also drop below freezing in the winter, and don't need to be repaved every year. Where I live, we reach or exceed 40degC highs for about 2 months, and have lows during those months of 20degC or less. We also have winter lows below -10degC. And only chip-seal every 5-7 years. We have highs above 30degC for 6 months out of the year (but usually get down to the low teens degC for those months, 20degC temperature swings are normal here). Huzzah! More importantly, though, will he sign for the ticket to Mumbai?
@Section9 But how could politicians help their construction company friends if they dont give them a boon every year? The best here in Germany is, they tried a new stuff for doing roads that would be more durable and wouldnt need to be reworked every few years. Tests started around 20 years ago. Using that stuff is still not allowed in construction cause there are no long time studies about that.
That would be up to his boss and the people of our travel department. (Who once made me fly to Munich instead of going by train because it was about 10 € cheaper. With the usual flight delays I only spent 50 € on a taxi to make my meeting instead of walking five minutes from a train station... That's the drawbacks of working for a company that is partially funded by government money XD)
It's not only on public or partial-public companies. It happens even in private ones. We often save 10-15% on new installation just to spend the double of the savings in fixing the machines because we put together 3 or 4 different suppliers...
@Section9 last I heard Domino's Pizza was taking over road maintenance in the US https://www.theguardian.com/busines...es-road-repair-potholes-paving-infrastructure
A wedgetailed eagle carted off someone's terrier in a neighbouring suburb. They were warning people to keep their cats and small dogs indoors. We have a surprising lack of pigeons where I live. Between the ravens, the currawongs (like a bigger, meaner raven) and the pair of falcons that call my patch home, I guess they decided to make themselves scarce.
Lucky man. Pigeons are basically a nuisance here, we had to evict a nuber of pairs off your balcony this year - each tried to nest here and raise a family, damn winged squatters... I almost pulled out my airsoft shotgun to start shooting at them (even pigeons should make the connection between "sitting on that balcony" and "having a sore ass"), but - under local regulations - that would be illegal... Though one of my buddies says the method works.
Just a forewarning, this is going to be a bit of a rant post. Also, it is past midnight where I am, and I've been up for 18 hours, so I have no idea if I'm going to be making any sense. For me, having a "W tee Eff?!" moment is almost a weekly occurrence, and it's always somehow related to my work. For context, I work as a cashier/feed associate at a gas station/convenience store/feed warehouse in rural Colorado, and we also fill propane tanks. For anyone who has never had to fill an empty propane bottle before, there is a list of safety regulations as long as your arm, and apparently very few people in the United States have any knowledge whatsoever of how the technicians have to go about filling an empty tank. The most important thing to do when you fill a tank is to check it's manufacture date because the tank is only good for 10 years after that date before it needs to be requalified (e.g. a tank dated 01-04, meaning that it was manufactured in January 2004, can only be legally filled until January 2014 before it needs to be requalified). If someone asks us to fill a tank that is past its expiration, we cannot fill it until it's been requalified, which usually consists of an inspection of the tank to make sure that it is in good condition and all of the valves work properly. Seems simple enough, but apparently people get really uptight about getting their propane tank filled up, regardless of whether or not we can legally fill it, and sometimes they get mad at us when we have to reject their tank for safety reasons. I've seriously lost count of how many times I've had someone get all pissy with me because they gave me an expired tank, and one of my coworkers actually got cussed out one time. There's even been customers who've very rudely asked me if I was afraid that the expired tank might blow up (the answer, of course, is "well yeah I'm worried this might blow up. I'm basically filling up a bomb, here!"). To be fair, I do understand that it would be easier for everyone if we could just fill up the tank and send the customer on his way, but these rules are still in place for good reason, and I also would really like to eat dinner at home that not and not get blown up because the tank hasn't been inspected and approved in too long. And I don't like sending customers away, because that's money walking out the door. But there is one funny thing that jumps out at me now that has happened to me twice, both involving the same customer, who I am convinced is one of those people who thinks he knows everything about filling propane, but in reality he knows jack-squat, and every technician in the building can see that when he starts talking. So anyway, he comes in and wants his propane tank filled up. I go out to the filling station and inspect his tank, and see that it is expired and tell him that. He complains that he had been coming in for years with a tank to fill, and every year he has had a "discussion" with one of us about it, and it's always something to do with the nozzle (for the record, I have never, ever had any problems with the nozzle on a tank or had to reject a tank because of it). I just shrug it off and offer to do a propane bottle exchange, and after a short back-and-forth, he relents and lets me exchange his expired tank for a better one. While I am busy grabbing a fresh tank for him, he comes inside and starts chewing out the person at the cash register who has nothing to do with this particular interaction. I grab a fresh tank, let him know, and show him the date and explain that he won't have to worry about getting this tank expiring for years. He then chews me out also, and I just stand there wanting to say to him, "Are you done yet? Sir, you have no idea what on Earth you are talking about, and you're making an ass of yourself." Of course, I don't say any of that out loud, and just nod and let him finish his uninformed rant until he finally walks out the door. Apparently, he's this has been the typical interaction that we've had with him for years, and after a while you'd think that he'd figure out that if he's getting his tanks rejected every time he comes in, then maybe there is something about it that he should be doing differently, like listening to us when we tell him what the issue is with his tank and how to avoid it instead of talking down to us like we know nothing. People like that just really get under my skin.
Heh. Yeah, Boise doesn't have much trouble with flying rats pigeons. Most of the tall buildings downtown (I'm talking 5-20 stories max here, not like NYC) have gravel outside their windows. Boise is also home to the Peregrine Fund and lots of wildlife rescuers. Peregrine falcons love having a nice gravel space up on a tall building. In fact, one of our buildings is 'notorious' in a good way about always having multiple nesting pairs of endangered falcons on it. Pretty sure they've set up webcams to watch the nests these days. I suppose you could ask him how much he is insured for, since a propane cylinder will happily blow up if you don't take proper care of it. Blow up and take your house with it. I hate compressed gas cylinders. Acetylene tanks are the worst. You never know if that rusty old tank is 250psi acetylene stabilized in kerosene, or if it's 250psi acetylene without enough stabilizer. Acetylene will happily blow the fuck up at any pressure over 15psi (well, that's 30psi absolute).
We've had falcons up here for as long as I can recall. The mascot for the local airbase (also my nearest airport - shared runways - base on one side, civ airport t'other) has been a falcon for many years. They keep the smaller flying vermin (and seagulls) off the tarmac. Sydney airport also has their own falcons. Unfortunately for the staff on the support side (engineering), their (birds) main feeding area to consume kills is on the roof of the cafeteria building - and lacking hands, they're somewhat "messy" eaters, dropping bits over the side, adjacent to the main entry. It's put a few apprentices off their lunch. :D
