Entries from August 2007 ↓

So check this out:

I’ve never seen this kind of error before. All of Minnesota’s cities are classified under Mississippi. If you look under Minnesota, you see Missouri’s cities. Maryland has the right cities, but Massachusetts has Portland and Bangor (in Maine). What’s going on here?

The first thing I checked was the drop-down menu, thinking that the label and the value for the states might be out of alignment (MO - Minnesota, MN - Mississippi, etc.). But no, the drop-down has values equal to the labels, so you’re choosing Minnesota and it’s going to the database to pull whatever it has for Minnesota, not the state called “MN” or the state with StateID = 22.

Bummer for them. I bet this happened because someone had an assumption somewhere that the abbreviations of the states alphabetize the same as the names of the states, but this isn’t true.

Well, so much for that theory. If that was what screwed it up, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, and Montana would be right, and Maine, Massachusetts, Mississippi and Missouri would be wrong.

I don’t see the pattern. Do you?

(Side note: I’m going to be playing a fantasy team on Rotohog this year. Rotohog has a pretty good plan: market-based values for players, and you hold them like stocks, waiting for their values to rise and fall, but they’re always paying dividends based on their game performance. It’s not exactly like HSX, though: there is a limit to one of each player per 12 managers in the game, so actual scarcity does interesting things with demand.)

I got to work pretty early on Wednesday, and so I was leaving here right around 4:00pm. Depending on how you come into Roseville, it’s one of your first exits after you’ve crossed the river. They’ve been doing a ton of construction lately: when I was working a few miles away in Northeast Minneapolis (two whole weeks ago), I finally stopped crossing the river on 35-W because the backups made it more convenient to cross on 3rd Ave, after you’ve cut through downtown.

But that was two weeks ago, and with a new assignment in Roseville, cutting through downtown would only prolong my commute. And for the eighth day in a row, I did, cruising past the workers at 45 (a portable electronic sign read “PATROL ON SITE”).

And at 6:45pm that night, I ran out of things to do with Adam while Christie made sandwiches for the kids, and I said “let’s watch some baseball” - but as we flipped past “breaking news” on four channels, I stopped and watched.

35-W?

University bridge?

I called for Christie, saying only “come here”.

She and I watched, and of course poor Adam was taking in all these images and ideas the same as we were, without the frame of reference you get from not being four. After about two minutes, I changed it to baseball. Christie took a step towards the stairs, and I had to stop her.

“That - that’s got to be the bridge I take to work every day.”

Christie held her hand to her heart - she must not have realized - and she reprocessed everything she’d heard so far in terms of me not coming home, me being stuck on a bridge, me falling into the water.

“I - I really think I was on that bridge two hours ago–”

“Shh.” She couldn’t talk. I wasn’t helping. She hugged me and went back to her sandwiches.

Adam, though, started stringing together ideas immediately, and had to get them out of his head.

“I think the bridge fell down because there was a storm.”

“No, guy, there wasn’t a storm. Nobody really knows why the bridge fell down.”

“Maybe the bridge fell down because there was a, a really loud noise.”

“I’m sure there was a really loud noise, but it probably didn’t happen like that. Let’s go upstairs.”

“There are many cars in the water.”

“There are, Adam. Let’s go get that sandwich.”

And by this time, Becky’d woken up, and she got an earful from Adam about 35-W (what they called the “interstate road” for a year, and only recently individually identified), the cars in the water, and bridge falling down, and Christie and I didn’t intervene. They talk to each other about everything, and I was interested to see if Becky would be able to process what he was saying, or if Adam was capable of expressing the kind of confusion he must be feeling (or was he?)…

Christie hugged me again (and I am now a little embarrassed how frequently I am hugged, simply because I have not died - I hope this isn’t embarrassing to Christie), and Becky talked to Adam about her sandwich in the same kind of tone that he used to tell her what he’d seen on TV. We tried not to expose them to anymore television, but we also tried not to shield them from anything that was actually happening - things they were showing a real interest in.

We put them to bed. We watched baseball, Christie got two Killer Brownies at the grocery store, we took a few phone calls from concerned relatives.

Traffic wasn’t bad the next day. (I cut through downtown.) My contacts at my agency (who know where I work) called, as did a couple more out-of-town friends. On my way home, I went over the river on 94 - a bridge three times as long, and three times as high. You can’t live here and not do this every week, whether on 35, 94, 694, Hennepin over Nicollet Island, Washington Ave, Marshall, Ford Parkway, that long stretch of 494 by the airport…. (To be fair: I didn’t cross the river at all when I commuted to Minnetonka. And when they made it hard to get to NE via the 35-W bridge, I stopped - cutting through downtown was easier.) It’s remarkable how we take it for granted - even so much as walking over a bridge or opening a window reconnects you to the physics and engineering involved.

But nobody here - nobody near the city, anyway, and certainly nobody who took that bridge that day - takes it for granted anymore. It won’t intimidate us forever, obviously, but I’m pretty sure it’ll get my attention for weeks and months to come.