Paying homage to Murphy

We all know Murphy's law, that if something can go wrong, it will. I'd consider adding the addendum "especially when you expect things to work." As we gear up for site visit, a lot of... well, odd things have been happening. One of the team described it in a graph, with time on the horizontal and sh*t breaking on the vertical. The phrase "when the sh*t hits the fan" gets used a lot these days, and while most of us will say that the worst has not happened, I will say that so much sh*t has hit the fan that it's been knocked over and covered in a pile of the stuff.

Incidentally, while I'm on the subject of sh*t, I should note that the drive to the shop takes me by a very large pile of free manure. I know it's farm country, and that stuff could be useful, but let's face it, a free pile of crap laying there just doesn't sit right with me.

Anyway, like I said, odd stuff has been happening. For one thing, dinnertime seems to have moved to midnight. That's the problem with having road sensors that depend on daylight (the cameras). I'd advocate moving to some more active road sensors, but between the wireless bridge, radios, radars, and lidars, we've all already made the switch to the new en vogue lead-based clothing. Also, stuff seems far more prone to break spontaneously. For example, you wouldn't expect a car window to shatter when you roll it down, but sure enough, one of our chase vehicle's windows did anyway. You also wouldn't expect battery terminals to melt, but sure enough, one did anyway. I think my favorite one of all, however, is when you try some well-worn code late at night and it just arbitrarily stops working. That happened to me last night, and upon waking up in the morning and running the exact same code, it magically worked fine again. I think it might've been Ben Franklin who said something like "insanity consists of doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results..." Not that I would count myself among the sane at present, but clearly good old Ben never tried to make a car drive itself.

All that, and I haven't even mentioned our test grounds at the abandoned army depot. If you want sketchy, you've come to the right place. It's full of white deer (a rare albino trait that thrives in the group there), mysterious piles of ore, abandoned hospitals and office buildings, demolition grounds and burning pits, and lots and lots of unmarked... stuff.

I'll make sure to post some pictures soon, but for now, I have more stuff to break.