![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
zdashamberHi, I'm blogger Madeline F. You may remember me from such posts as, "Honk twice is you realize that your car is on fire", and... ...Damn it, I should have held off for this intro.
So, about a month ago I was on my way down to TV night, in the left lane on 580 (because 511.org showed 880 as being slow). In front of me was a pickup truck, and I noticed after a bit that its left rear tire was flat, obviously so; like, if the tire was full of lime jello and a guillotine had dropped along the outside of the tire it would have revealed a circle of lime about 4 cm wide. So, not riding on the rim, but not good for gas mileage either, maybe 20 psi. I thought back to February of this year when I one day noticed that my car had a nigh-completely flat left rear tire, and filled it up to find that it had a pregnant side wall and was probably about to blow. I figured it'd be nice to tell the guy about his tire.
I jogged over to the second-from-left lane, planning on communicating when traffic jammed again; but at that point things cleared up and I shot past, only catching a glimpse of the guy... Black or hispanic, 20s-30s... He caught up soon enough, still doing 60, so maybe he knew that he shouldn't be going fast on his tires. Having found a spot where there was no one really on our butts, I rolled down my drivers' side window and caught up with him and waved. He turned to me, yay peripheral vision. I yelled, "Your left rear tire is flat!" He was leaning in, trying to catch the message through his passenger side window, but he looked kind of baffled. I dropped back for an instant, pointing at his rear while thinking about the second try, and then caught up.
I yelled with matching motions of my left hand. "Your left! rear!" jerking my thumb back in the appropriate direction, "tire!" fingers and thumb making a big circle, and it looked like he was getting it, "is flat!" hand flat and pressing down. He does this big grin and a thumbs up, and I scoot away, having sucessfully conveyed the message, watching him in the rearview mirror slice across the lanes of traffic and get off.
Anyway, I hope that was helpful. Was the tire so flat that he should have booked off the highway? Eh, it could have used some air certainly. Still, the conveying of info was fun.
And, continuing last post's one-post trend, I have a completely different bit of info to convey here: my uncle is looking for an IM client to suggest for his work. He says: "Years ago there was a client (Trillium, I think) that could talk to all the major IM flavors. Is it still the pan-client-of-choice, or is there a better one out there now? Do any of them allow interoperability w/ texting to/from cell phones? (We're deploying our whole group all over the country full time for the next several months, and we need a universal way to keep in touch realtime.)" I don't chat, but I know some of you do. Any suggestions?
So, about a month ago I was on my way down to TV night, in the left lane on 580 (because 511.org showed 880 as being slow). In front of me was a pickup truck, and I noticed after a bit that its left rear tire was flat, obviously so; like, if the tire was full of lime jello and a guillotine had dropped along the outside of the tire it would have revealed a circle of lime about 4 cm wide. So, not riding on the rim, but not good for gas mileage either, maybe 20 psi. I thought back to February of this year when I one day noticed that my car had a nigh-completely flat left rear tire, and filled it up to find that it had a pregnant side wall and was probably about to blow. I figured it'd be nice to tell the guy about his tire.
I jogged over to the second-from-left lane, planning on communicating when traffic jammed again; but at that point things cleared up and I shot past, only catching a glimpse of the guy... Black or hispanic, 20s-30s... He caught up soon enough, still doing 60, so maybe he knew that he shouldn't be going fast on his tires. Having found a spot where there was no one really on our butts, I rolled down my drivers' side window and caught up with him and waved. He turned to me, yay peripheral vision. I yelled, "Your left rear tire is flat!" He was leaning in, trying to catch the message through his passenger side window, but he looked kind of baffled. I dropped back for an instant, pointing at his rear while thinking about the second try, and then caught up.
I yelled with matching motions of my left hand. "Your left! rear!" jerking my thumb back in the appropriate direction, "tire!" fingers and thumb making a big circle, and it looked like he was getting it, "is flat!" hand flat and pressing down. He does this big grin and a thumbs up, and I scoot away, having sucessfully conveyed the message, watching him in the rearview mirror slice across the lanes of traffic and get off.
Anyway, I hope that was helpful. Was the tire so flat that he should have booked off the highway? Eh, it could have used some air certainly. Still, the conveying of info was fun.
And, continuing last post's one-post trend, I have a completely different bit of info to convey here: my uncle is looking for an IM client to suggest for his work. He says: "Years ago there was a client (Trillium, I think) that could talk to all the major IM flavors. Is it still the pan-client-of-choice, or is there a better one out there now? Do any of them allow interoperability w/ texting to/from cell phones? (We're deploying our whole group all over the country full time for the next several months, and we need a universal way to keep in touch realtime.)" I don't chat, but I know some of you do. Any suggestions?
no subject
Date: 2008-08-06 07:33 am (UTC)I'm currenly testing out Pidgin, which is free and covers all of the above.
no subject
Date: 2008-08-06 01:00 pm (UTC)It would be reasonably easy to set up an SMS to XMPP gateway, though.
no subject
Date: 2008-08-06 02:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-06 03:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-06 05:37 pm (UTC)Neither is perfect, but both are free, cover the bases and include Jabber support.
If his entire office is going to IM, they should perhaps consider running their own IM server. We have a Jabber server here that we keep meaning to use ...
no subject
Date: 2008-08-07 12:17 am (UTC)