Hugo’s blog

101 South was completely empty last Thursday at 10am South of Menlo Park:

I’m not sure why that was, but that was very weird.

The change of Daylight Saving Time in the US actually had positive aspects: when our GPS showed the wrong time, I started looking up for a firmware update, and discovered that it had a somewhat ancient firmware. I got this geek feeling of excitement that you feel that you are going to upgrade the software on a device to the latest version. Come on, you know the feeling.

I noticed in the changelog the following:

• Improved Traffic Interface

Until now, I had been pretty disappointed by the traffic interface: basically, at some point while driving, it would say “Caution, traffic ahead”, and display an icon. At this point, you might already be stuck in traffic and unhappy. Clicking on the traffic icon, you could ask it to avoid the traffic problem in question, with no idea of how much a problem it was and whether it really was a good idea to do so. Basically, it was useless, and frustrating.

Version 5 changes all that. It evaluates the delay that the traffic has on your itinerary, and takes this into account to choose the best route. It then displays, in the traffic icon, the number of minutes that you’ll waste because of traffic. And you don’t need to ask it to avoid anything, as it has already taken it into account. Basically, it’s traffic in a GPS system the way you’d like it to work.

So the question was: how efficient is it? Well, I did a real life test last night. Between Sunnyvale and downtown San Francisco, at 6pm, took me 50 minutes without ever hitting any traffic. Though you can argue that Mondays are usually not as bad as other weekdays, I was impressed by the route it made me take, and by the result.

The bottom line is that I’m now very happy with the traffic system. Kudos to Garmin.

A while back, I expressed in my scratchpad (what I used before a blog) what I thought of Parisian drivers. My view on Parisian drivers has not changed: they are just stupid. And they proved it again today, honking because my one-way street was blocked by the firemen rescuing somebody. How dare they!

But somebody did what I often thought of doing today: throw stuff at them. Well, not chairs like I thought, but balls. This guy is my new hero. I understand that throwing objects on cars is not very clever, but you have to understand after several years of being abused by Parisian honking, it must be a real relief.

So people were honking, and he was yelling at them from his appartment, and throwing balls on their cars. I’m not sure that he only got people who were honking, but eh, there’s always collateral damage in any kind of conflict.

People were honking, he was yelling, and throwing balls, insults were flowing back and forth.

Sadly, I don’t think that any of the drivers will have gotten any lesson out of it. And I don’t think that throwing stuff at car is a way to deal with the problem, but this whole episode really made me feel like I’m not the only one who’s had enough of all this honking.