Journal lingqi's Journal: Feburary 25th, 2003 3
Feburary 25th, 2003 (5:41pm)
From work to home, there are two bridges. the eastern one is the showa bridge, and the western musashi bridge. Technically musashi bridge is closer, but since showa bridge is wider (the lane itself - both bridges are two-lane bridges), and more "out of the way," less traffic passes through it. consequentially, you don't have to wait for a excessively long time getting onto the bridge. usually.
The north side of the musashi bridge is quite interesting, but kind of hard to explain. First imagine a river with high banks on both side. The bridge is placed from the top of one bank to the top of the other. on the south side, the "run way" from the bridge goes more or less straight, as the area is filled with more earth to give a managable slope. Such is not the case with the north side. The road leading up to the bridge stops at the base of the bank, and makes a sharp turn right, following a semi-helix (toward the left) onto the bridge's entrance, and then turns another sharp right to go onto the bridge. Actually the entire bridge and the curving ramp strongly resemble a '5' without the horizontal line on the top. the road leading to the bottom of the five, turn (and elevate) to the straight section, and move ahead.
At the corner is, though, interestingly a 'T' corner. perpendicular to the main road there is another slanty slope that leads into the darkness (no street lights). The road has two barracades - but if one were to examine the barracades closely, it would be obvious that portion of the barracade that faces eachother has been severely scratched up, many times.
It turns out that during heavy traffic, the "semi helix" would really get congested, so brave japanese men (I think usually they are men) would attempt to "shortcut" to the front of the line by driving between these barricades. Now, it's not an impossible feat, but by just looking at the thing, you can tell that it's not easy. The two barricades spread about 1.75 meters apart, so don't even think about attempting unless your car is smaller - and you have to remember the side-mirrors.
At any rate, I guessed the previous 1.75 meters because my car is 1.736 meters wide, and squeezing through was the trickiest operation I have ever attempted in a car. I was lucky that it was attempted when nobody was around, as the entire ordeal took some 20 minutes (or, certainly felt that long!). Of course, all the yellow-plate small cars are limited to 1.4m width, so they should have no problems getting through.
So, what was my point ranting on about this? well it's three fold:
1) stay on the same side of river as where you work can save a lot of commuting
2) buy a tiny car have many benefits
3) don't attempt the musashi bridge shortcut if you drive a big car
interestingly, my observed behavior of people attempting to utilize the shortcut is by lining themselves up and then do a wide-open-throttle. Maybe that's where all the awful scratches comes from. many cars must have lost themselves there...
Oh, and they are doing a "expansion" project for the other (showa) bridge - and are building a parallel bridge a few meters to its east. Schedule of completion is something like 3 monthes after my date of return to the US. oh the irony.
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Interesting thing: for 3 monthes, all the journals adds up to a mere 239kB.
How does people EVER fill up CDs (let alone DVDs) worth of stuff?
No wonder "library of congress" is so tiny. Text costs no space at all.
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Having had a 10mbit fiber connection for a while, I have often wondered where my many gigabytes of free space went. Granted, if you do not listen to or collect music or movies, or play any games, you will most likely not have a big problem with disk space. I do however collect music, mostly from East Asia, and sometimes the accompanying music videos - some of which can be as large as 250MB a piece. As you can understand this adds up over time.
I do end up buying the music I like. This doesnt ease the harddrive burden in most cases though, since I usually want to do a high quality rip of the cd once I get it so I don't have to fiddle around with changing discs all the time. Meaning even more space is sucked up than before, since the new mp3s are of higher quality. Ack.
/ V