Author: Aren Cambre

SCOOP: First 80 mph speed limit sign pictures on the web!

Even though Texas’s new 80 mph speed limit signs have been up for 6 days, my repeated searches haven’t turned up a single photo on the internet. Today, I emailed a staffer in the office of Pete Gallego, the Texas Legislator whose bill allowed these speed limits, and got the photos. I present you the first known online photos of Texas’s 80 mph speed limit!

They are apparently of Gallego unveiling a new 80 mph speed limit sign near Fort Stockton, Texas. (Location assumed from a prior news article, not the words of the staffer.)

This is proof that democrats are occasionally able to do good things.

By the way, you may have seen Associated Press articles that say that Texas adopted 75 mph speed limits in 1999 (example article). This is incorrect. Gallego introduced a bill in 1999, HB 3328, that would have allowed 75 mph limits on all roads numbered by the state or federal government and 80 mph on I-10 and I-20 in any county with fewer than 25,000 residents. (Interesting point: the wording of the bill may have forced the 80 mph limits instead of just allowing the Texas Transportation Commission to set them.) However, this bill died in conference committee immediately before the end of that year’s legislative session. (I.e., it never went into effect.)

Gallgeo introduced a modified bill only allowing 75 mph limits in counties with fewer than 10 people per square mile in 2001. This was HB 299. That one passed and was signed by the governor.

Then in 2005, Gallego’s introduced a third bill, HB 2257, that allowed 75 mph limits in counties with fewer than 15 people per square mile and allowed 80 mph limits on I-10 and I-20 in certain named counties. This bill went into effect on Sept. 1, 2005. It took the TxDOT several months to amend its Procedures for Establishing Speed Zones to allow it to recommend these limits, then another month or so to get the recommendation up to the Texas Transportation Commission for approval.

Anyway, enough talk. The 80 mph limit signs are up, and here are the pictures, courtesy of Pete Gallego’s office.

What you are seeing below the sign is a NIGHT 65 speed limit sign. Texas is the only state with a blanket night speed limit.

Google Mail fails again with an idiotic “sender” field

I am chomping at the bit to get off of POP3-based email clients. I am tired of being bound to specific machines to handle email.

Two days ago, I figured out how to get around the biggest shortcoming (for me) in Google Mail. I had over 20,000 email messages accumulated from when I created the account (explanation), but Google gives no easy way to mark all of these messages as read. I figured out a workaround: just download them via POP3 into Outlook Express, being sure to configure Google Mail to archive downloaded messages.

With that problem fixed, I committed to exclusively use Google Mail. It worked well. It’s very nice to have all your email available in a well-designed, efficient interface no matter where you are. Even the PDA interface was usable!

However, a major design flaw screwed up everything.

I send my emails as aren@cambre.biz. I want to hold on to that email address for life. Google can send emails using a non-gmail.com address with a caveat: Google adds a “sender” field to the email’s header data, and this “sender” field gives away your actual gmail.com address.

This stupid sender field totally screwed up Google Mail for me.

First, anyone using a sophisticated email client will see my gmail.com address immediately. This is how Outlook shows my email address to the recipient of my emails:

I don’t want my gmail.com address published because I don’t want to be attached to it.

That isn’t the worst.

I am subscribed to a few email lists. Less sophisticated mail list programs like majordomo don’t care about this sender field. However, better email list programs interpret the sender field as the actual sender of the email. Why is this a problem? Smartly-configured lists only accept emails that come from subscribed addresses. In my case, the sophisticated email list software sees that the email was sent by my gmail.com address. Since I am subscribed as aren@cambre.biz, the email list software rejects my emails.

In a stroke of genius, Google does not provide a way to disable this feature.

Gee, Google, thanks again for arrogantly making dumb design decisions that don’t work well.

Apparently, I’m not the only person with this problem, and this is not a new problem (link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4).

St. Augustine Decline and Palmetto

It looks like all the grass I planted in Sept. 2004 may be infected with St. Augustine Decline (SAD). What bad luck!

SAD is an untreatable virus that causes the grass to weaken and die away within a couple of years. SAD shows up as a mottled yellow appearance on an otherwise normal grass blade.

Last summer, I noticed some of my new grass had the mottled appearance. I didn’t think much of it because the grass seemed fine otherwise. This year, the temperatures are now warm enough for the grass to start coming back. Early last week, I noticed this same mottled appearance. After looking around, I noticed areas all throughout this new grass that has the mottled appearance.

Here are some pictures of this mottled grass:

I called my grass supplier to ask about this, and they were surprised. I spoke to the office manager and then the company owner, and both were certain that the variety I purchased, Palmetto St. Augustine, was as resistant to SAD as Raleigh. Palmetto is presented as being a step up from Raleigh on their site (link). In fact, the owner said he had a planting of Palmetto himself (not sure if it was in his own lawn?), so he was especially concerned. At first, he wondered if it could have been something else like gray leaf spot. However, I can find no other St. Augustine problem that matches the appearance in the photos. Compare for yourself: Google image search of SAD and an especially good, high resolution photo of SAD-infected grass.

The company owner promised that he or or his office manager would come out in the next few days and take a look at the grass. I put orange flags in the lawn to delineate a few significant spots of the affected grass. Each of the bright orange places is a flag:

This is just one section of the back yard. This problem shows up all over the new planting.

As far as I am aware, the only sure-fire treatment is to remove the grass and a few inches of soil and replace it all with new soil and grass. This is a major undertaking. I don’t look forward to this even if I don’t end up having to do it. It is possible to plant a SAD-resistant variety like Raleigh and hope it overtakes the existing grass as it dies out. However, by keeping the infected grass, I risk infecting the rest of my yard, which is almost 100% St. Augustine and which could be the SAD-susceptible common variety. (It’s quite possible that it is the original stand of grass from the 1950s. Raleigh came out in 1980.)

So far, none of my original stand of grass–the whole front yard and a little of the back yard–are showing any symptoms of SAD. This could be in part because I mow the front yard first, then mow the back yard. The mower sits for several days in a hot garage before it gets used again. If I was to transmit the virus anywhere, I think it would probably be to the small original stand in the back yard.

The fact that I have no SAD anywhere else eliminates my existing lawn as a culprit. Furthermore, neither I nor the previous owner use a lawn service, so there is no chance that this lawn picked up the disease from another lawn.

I really hope this is ends up being a false concern or a misidentified, treatable problem. I don’t want to go through a yard replacement.