When I left my apartment this afternoon, the power was out. When I came back, the power was out. A few minutes later (after I’d gotten all the candles and flashlights from the previous outage), it was back on.
But I think it reset my wireless network back to square one. Fred never showed back up again.
I call my wireless network Fred. I find it far more interesting than, oh, I dunno, Meryl’s Network.
I met Elisson and SWMBO and a friend of theirs in Washington for dinner tonight. Driving in the District sucks. I kept pointing out that Manhattan, at least, is built in a grid. People kept telling me that DC is a grid, too, only it’s a messed-up grid. Well then, IT’S NOT AN EFFING GRID.
Stupid District. Park and ride from now on.
Well, at least Elisson stayed in a classy enough hotel that they had notecards with directions to 95 South. Made it easy to get out of town.
And geez, do you think DC has enough cops? I was in the good areas, and they were just all over the place. I asked one of them for directions (Friend and I got lost on our way back to the hotel for my car). When I got back to Friend, who was waiting in the car, she asked me what took so long. “He was very young,” I said. “Ah,” she responded. See, you hit a certain age, and there’s just no need to explain things anymore.
Obviously DC is a French grid :-)
http://www.exploredc.org/index.php?id=3
(You’re correct, of course, it ain’t no frigging grid).
Enough police? Not really (look at the crime rate). It would be better if those they have were protecting the public instead of snarling traffic and writing tickets, however.
When I was in college, I’d visit friends in DC and spend hours driving around, getting lost, and trying to figure out the stupid-ass roads.
That was when gas was 32 cents per gallon.
But we’re glad you braved the Not-Grid so you could join us for dinner. A Meaty Pleasure!
I don’t like driving into DC. The navigation isn’t too bad once you see the pattern.
The city is in quadrants, with the Capitol building at the origin. The axes are North Capitol, South Capitol, East Capitol and the Mall (with Constitution and Independance paralleling the Mall.) The quadrants are appropriately named NW, SW, NE and SE. The north-south roads are all numbered, with numbers increasing as you get further from the origin. The east-west roads are all lettered, with letters increasing as you get further from the origin. Block numbers are all regular – 100 numbers per block.
The only real confusion are the streets named after states. They cut across the grid on various diagonals and don’t have much of a pattern to them. In general, I tell tourists to simply not drive on those. It’s easy to navigate the grid if you stay on the numbered and lettered streets.
Of course, I also tell people to avoid driving in DC altogether. Traffic (and photo-enforcement of whatever the city can get away with) make the whole place very driver-unfriendly. I recommend parking somewhere that is free or cheap and taking Metro everywhere.