I use Google Maps frequently. It does a great job of helping me avoid traffic and gives me an estimate of when I’ll arrive at my destination. And I get alerts about traffic incidents, like police activity or an accident.
It also uses data from Waze since Google bought that app, and takes inputs from users.
But here’s one gripe. For some reason people keep reporting a car off on the shoulder as a “stalled vehicle”. That’s not a stalled vehicle. A stalled vehicle is obstructing traffic. A vehicle on the side of the road is parked. Traffic reporters will alert listeners about stalled vehicles, but not when a vehicle is parked on the shoulder. Why? Because nobody gives a shit. It has no relevance to anyone.
Every time I drive anywhere on the highway I get alerts about “stalled” cars. Every fucking trip. Morons.
This is a mini mini rant, but Hubster and I watched Dick Clark’s New Years Rockin’ Eve to see the ball drop.
What? We’re officially old. 20+ years ago we were always booked to play 'till 4 am. Now we struggle to stay awake for the ball drop. This, my friend’s, is excitement in the Syl household these days.
What’s my beef? Well I’m more than happy to air my grievences; right at midnight you could just see the ball starting to sink down BEHIND THE ENORMOUS KIA ADVERTISEMENT The camera then promptly cut away with the ball never seen again. Humph.
Many of the music acts sort of sucked, and it was more about advertising than celebration. I am, indeed, officially old. Hubster said he felt a bit ripped off, and I feel like the victim of a bait and switch. Bad ABC
I spent my New Year’s Eve coaxing a stray cat out of my cellar. Not sure what this means for the year ahead.
(have no idea how it got in but will do some sleuthing)
I noticed this on my Thanksgiving road trip. Another annoyance was that on Android Auto there was a prompt to confirm if the stalled vehicle was there or not appeared on the screen (same with reports of police on the road or shoulder, and I suppose other warnings). But there is a countdown timer on the prompt, after which it disappears from the screen. 90% of the time the prompt disappeared before I got to the location of the stalled vehicle. Google knows the location of the stalled vehicle because it shows the location on the screen. And Google knows my location. So it shouldn’t be brain surgery to figure out that I can’t answer the prompt until I get to the location of the stalled car, but once I do get there the prompt is long gone.
I mentioned this in another post, but I’ll say it again. I am certain that the coders who work on Android Auto are gen Z kids who don’t drive or own cars. They are morons who have a concept of an idea of what driving is like.
Most tech is built by people who don’t use it but have a vague idea of what other people might want from it. This is why UIs suck, and why routine maintenance requires complete disassembly.
Agree there ought to be a category for “vehicle parked fully off the road not blocking anything.” As distinct from “vehicle blocking a lane.”
But many many freeway slowdowns are caused by drivers slowing due to a car on the shoulder that ought not be bothering anyone. It may be more regional behavior. They drive like skittish cattle: “See something unusual? Step on brake and drop 25mph until past it. Or change lanes unnecessarily and preferably without really looking.”
It certainly depends on how large the shoulders are wherever the car is stopped. In places where passing cars will want to half-shift into the adjacent lane to avoid exchanging mirrors with the parked car, that parked car will certainly cause a slow-down. On my own former 45 mile freeway commute, shoulders ranged from non-existent to 40 feet = 4+ car widths’ wide. A stall in one spot on that freeway would have a very different effect from a stall in another.
IMO the best choices would be “stopped vehicle causing slowdown” and “stopped vehicle not causing slowdown”.
Agree. This grinds my gears a bit. But …
Google doesn’t know where the stalled car or police car is. They know the centroid of where X number of people have pushed the “report a stalled car / accident / policeman” button. Which IMO are typically reported after passing the spot, but sometimes before. The reports probably vary by a half-mile or more along the road.
The warning is only useful if you receive it soon enough to react to it. Whether that’s slowing for the police car or changing lanes for the accident or whatever. So once they have enough ab initio reports to establish that something really is there, they begin displaying the warning to other drivers. Some distance upstream from where they guess the problem really is. How do they decide that distance?
Now once they start issuing warnings, some folks push “not there” immediately to get it off their screen. “See message; dismiss message” is their mantra. Others push “still there” for the same reason. Others conclude from the fact they are or are not experiencing traffic slowing that the thing is or isn’t still there and push the appropriate button.
And some, like me and I bet most of you, report it as still there or gone based on what we can see before the prompt disappears. If the prompt times out first, so be it.
Of necessity the fore-aft spread of the confirming/denying reports is even more stretched out than the ab initio reports. And maybe there’s something somewhere along that mile+ length of road.
Heck, for all we know, Google may be paying attention to the timed-out non-reports and if those start to predominate they assume that means the warning is coming too soon and they start walking it forward for subsequent drivers.
ISTM the real problem is the countdown timer should be more like a countdown distance and should be about a mile long. But I bet testing has shown that the longer they leave it up, the more false reports they get just to scratch that itch by getting the message off the screen.
I know my own largest irritation w Google Maps on the car screen is the amount of the map obscured by the various hunks of displayed data. Including those “Is it still there?” alerts.
It always amazes me that Google puts the “police ahead” alert out there. Presumably the cop is hiding behind a bush/over the hill/around the curve to catch speeders. It’s one thing in an individual flashes their high beams at you in warning to slow down but it’s quite another when a multi-billion dollar company intentionally programs their software to do such. I’m surprised some little dept somewhere hasn’t charged them with obstruction for thwarting revenue speed enforcement, even if they are getting cars to slow down.
I like rye - rye bread, rye bagels, even a good bottle of rye.
Why do caraway seeds need to look like little mouse turds? I always panic when I find a stray one, especially on the floor, against the cabinet, which is where a mouse would run, if I had one? I usually find them well after I ate some rye, which means it’s no longer on my mind that I had bread with caraway seeds.
IMO the whole and entire value proposition of start-up Waze was that it was a cooperative speed-trap detection system with far longer range and greater reliability than any modern (mostly useless) radar detector. I know that’s the only reason I ever subscribed to Waze.
It got pretty big before Google bought it. I suppose Google’s suits said to each other something like: “If the police were going to object, they already would have. So our coast is clear; no cops ahead for us!” while rubbing their hands Mr. Burns style.
My employer decided to go with new vision insurance separate from our health insurance. Signing up for an online account with my new insurance* did not go well, so I asked them to delete my online account with them. After all, what good is having an account that they could not get me access to even though they could clearly see the account and tell me it existed?
Dealing with their website, phone system, and chat agent did not give me confidence that I chose the right company. Luckily, I only need to use them for a year before I can try another plan with what is likely an equally shitty company.
Anyway, this reminds me how much I hate the way vision insurance is set up. Set amounts for each ‘part’ of a pair of glasses rather than a set amount for an entire pair. I don’t need to spend $200 on frames, so let me use the $100 I didn’t spend there to defray the costs of the shit I need for my lens.
Also, the printed certificate of coverage should not require a magnifying glass to read. Is this your cheap-ass version of an eye test?
*eyemed can fuck right off with their terrible phone system. And get customer service reps that can answer basic questions like how will I receive my claim explanation of benefits if I do not have an online account?
Anti-rant time, just a quickie: thanks to the heavy rains here which began shortly before midnight, I was spared the endless firecrackers that typically take place at midnight on the 1st of the year, yay–heard nary a single pop. Which in my specific case was nice because I was nursing a headache that the Tylenol only blunted a bit.
By me, there were only a few very short bands of high winds and some rain.
Of note, there was some lightning with no sound (thunder). I’m sure it was an optical illusion but the rain made me walk to a window and look out… and I almost swear that I saw ball lightning at the top of a small tree in my backyard.
I spent new year’s at a friend’s party with my beloved. For some reason, my beloved has had headaches every day this week. This morning, she also felt nauseous. Her mother (who has absolutely despised and hated me from the beginning for no apparent reason) was a doctor. When her daughter, who choose to give up independent living in her own place and move back home so she could take care of an elderly parent whose health is in serious decline. says she feeels very sick, what does mom do? She insists in a stern voice that my beloved is being very selfish and that she needs to come up and wash the dishes immediately.
This is just the latest in a long list of examples of how this woman lacks any of the qualities I generally associate with ‘mother’. She is not giving, caring or empathetic. For reasons that I am not really clear on, my beloved cares for her very much. I am concerned that when the woman dies, I will be unable to properly comfort my beloved. It will be very difficult to hide my joy and relief that she is no longer around.
