pseydtonne | The cruel temptress of speed and Ecclesiastes

Thanks to the excise tax and ridiculous registration timeout laws (The law is that there is no grace period when you move here. If you come from a particularly litigious state such as the Empire one, you do not realize this means "we aren't paying attention either, just try to do it before your old registration expires"), Mass has the best License Plate Bingo around. I've seen two Nebraskas (Nebraskae? Nebrasse?) in the past two weeks. On the way to New Hampshire on Saturday I saw British Columbia. On the way back, I saw my favorite Florida one with the sea turtle popping out of the sand.

So yeah, I was driving to work today when I got to staring at license plates. I got to missing the plethora of vanity plates we had in New York. NYS has no excise and lots of open land Upstate. This means you may have a car half-lifing into the lawn or on blocks but the plates are still valid. There are 17 million residents. There are eight character spaces on the license plate. If they used random combinations for all the plates, cops would still have a hard time keeping everyone straight. Therefore, vanity plates are cheap in New York. It's easier for the cop to write "ASSMAN" or "IX XII" and it's easier to remember your plates.

Massachusetts has only six characters on the plates. I can't figure it out. Six, and one of them has to be a number on the non-vanity plates. This is because that number is also the month the registration expires every other year. This way a cop can figure out what kind of ticket you are right away, even though there will also be the three-letter version of the month on the plate as well. No, I'm not kidding. There will also be two letters, usually at the end of the plate. The letters tend to refer to which office issues the plates or something lame like that. This means there are really only three numbers changing on the plate.

They have certain semi-vanity plates, such as "Cape Cod and the Islands", "Preserve the Trust" (meaning the wetlands in the southeast) and "Bruins". When you have these plates, you get two letters in the front of the plate instead of two numbers -- such as "CI", "PT" and "BR" -- and you can guess what they stand for. This reintroduces characters to the pool but not by much. It really makes me wonder why they haven't had to add another character to the plates when even New Hampshire has only one area code's worth of citizens (we have nine area codes) but plates with seven characters. (Then again, plate numbers in NH have to do with which town you live in. Live Free But We Still Know Where You Belong.)

I have really become hung up on SCSI drives. They are significantly faster than IDE drives -- not simply ten thousand revolutions per minute instead of 7200, but faster throughput. SCSI is bidirectional: i can read and write at the same time: the buffer on the drive handles the switchover. This means even a slower machine is suddenly very fast at things. However, these are loud frickin' drives. When they spin up, you know it.They whine as if to say "speed or quiet: choose wisely, ya punkass."

I was thinking about vanity plates when I wondered what I could even fit on a plate. Then it occurred to me that DEVSDA (/dev/sda, or the primary SCSI drive in any Unix flavor) would be keen. Then I wrote it down when I got to work and read it as "Dev's Dad" or many other things that don't seem inherently geeky.

I had been afraid to show the world what I geek I am. Now that I admit it but I don't have the kind of bumper that would look good with stickers on it, what can I do? Worry less, obviously.

Time for bed. I now have three working towers but nothing installed. This needs to change. I am tempted to put all the noisy boxes in the office and use a thin client from the kitchen.