Lots of cranes in the news lately.
Our friend Nina lives at 144 Nevada Street, in Bernal Heights. The top half of her street is fairly steep, maybe 10% grade, and there's a construction site at the top, where they're building a new pumping station. There was a crane up there for about a year, and they drove it down this morning, about 7:30.
ftp://66.117.156.8/oops.zip
She's been annoyed with the way her neighbors park the red Cadillac; that shouldn't be a problem any more.
John
Was a city employee at the wheel ??
Holy crap! I hope those were all unoccupied, parked cars that got crunched.
Nope, private contractor: Nina has their card.
I think the driver did great. A half block down the hill is Cortland Avenue, a major deal. After that, it's downhill all the way for an aerial entry onto Interstate 280. As soon as he got off the steep half of the block, he steered to the side and took out the Toyota SUV and the Cadillac and the tree and the telephone pole. Not bad for no brakes.
John
Without checking the brake fluid ?:-)
Won't need to let the air out of her tires after-all ;-)
...Jim Thompson
Update: turns out that the brakes on these gadgets have two modes, "construction" and "drive", and somebody forgot to flip a switch or something. So it was a single-bit soft error.
They flipped it, started it up, and drove it off.
John
Could anybody say more...
I poked around a bit via google but didn't find anything interesting.
Why do they need/want two modes? The best I can come up with is that they want to set the brakes but not have the pressure so high that all the fluid leaks out. But I can't really make sense out of something like that.
This seems like an obvious enough problem that I'm surprised there isn't an interlock. Something like you can't put it into gear if the switch is in the wrong position. Or maybe only if you are in super-low gear so you can't go more than 0.1 miles per hour.
Or maybe they need an airplane style checklist, with a second person in the cab to help go through the list.
On a sunny day (Sat, 31 May 2008 14:31:08 -0700) it happened John Larkin wrote in :
You could have warned it was 14 MB and your site is dead slow :-)
# wget ftp://66.117.156.8/oops.zip
--12:11:26-- ftp://66.117.156.8/oops.zip => ps.zip' Connecting to 66.117.156.8:21... connected. Logging in as anonymous ... Logged in! ==> SYST ... done. ==> PWD ... done. ==> TYPE I ... done. ==> CWD not needed. ==> PASV ... done. ==> RETR oops.zip ... done. Length: 14,304,827 (14M) (unauthoritative)
100%[==============================================================================================================================================================>] 14,304,827 86.29K/s ETA 00:0012:14:14 (84.67 KB/s) - ps.zip' saved [14304827]
Insurance will get them a nice new one.
Generally I have seen building constructors do really dangerous things.
But it is not as bad as a 747 landing in a flat next to where I used to live years ago.
Last night thunder (4 at night) moved in, lightning everywhere, still no rain, I went outside to disconnect the CB antenna.
The previous time my hairs started standing up, because of the field strength. Flash, Count: one, two, one kilometer, I am still fine. See, each has its own risk.
It took me about 100 secs to load at home, and I have slow DSL. The ftp site itself is on a server at LMI.NET, our ISP, so it's pretty fast.
Hell, some software patches run a gigabyte.
John
14,304,827 86.29K/s ETA 00:00I've lost two friends to antennas. One fell off a tower on an oil platform off the coast of Nigeria. About a year later, his younger brother was putting up an antenna on his roof and hit a high-voltage power line.
John
You'd think they'd be air-brakes, like on semi's and trains??
...Jim Thompson
Yeah, yeah, yeah; always blame the programmer...
Have something to add? Share your thoughts — no account required.
Ask the community — no account required