Four-way stops, which should be a very simple concept and brief encounter to a vehicle operator, appear to be a maneuver of deadly precision, one that should be approached cautiously and with great hesitation. At least, that’s the impression I get from the majority of American drivers. Some have gone as far as to call the four-way stop the “Driver’s IQ Test.” If that truly is the case, the most drivers are complete idiots since they fail four-way stop miserably.

The four-way stop seems to a thing of endless complexity and great fear even among experienced drivers. Daily I cringe when approaching a four-way stop only to be cutoff when it’s clearly my turn, or worse, allowed to go when it is obviously not my turn. In hopes that the entirety of America will read this blog post, adhere to it, and grant me my sanity again when driving, I’ve compiled a list of the (very simple, mind you) concepts and complications present at a four-way stop. Mikey, this one’s for you!

How to Handle Four-Way Stops: The Dummies Guide

The simplicity of the four-way stop can easily be shown in these few key concepts.

• A four-way stop is any intersection with a stop sign in each direction, a flashing red light in each direction, or a broken traffic light should be treated as a four-way stop normally would.
• Four-way stops are usually (but not always) labeled as such, having a rectangular sign below the octagonal shape which reads something to the effect of, “4-Way Stop,” “Four-Way Stop,” or “All-Way Stop.”
• Each driver arriving at a four-way stop must first come to a stop, then one driver proceeds at a time.
• If turning, as you approach a four-way stop engage your turn signal about one hundred feet prior to reaching the stop sign. The four-way stop is one of the most crucial places for using your turn signal compared to almost any other driving situation.
• Four-way stops always operate in a clockwise direction.
• If multiple cars approach a four-way stop at about the same time, the driver who comes to a complete stop first proceeds first.
• If two or more cars arrive at a four-way stop simultaneously, the driver furthest to the right always proceeds first, and each next driver in the clockwise direction follows.
• If four cars arrive at a four-way stop simultaneously, drivers going straight should proceed first. If all four are turning right, they may all proceed simultaneously. These aside, there is no distinguishable way to see who should go first, so the intersection is at a standstill until one driver gets up the nerve and begins to inch forward, alerting the other drivers of his or her intentions, and proceeds through the intersection (thus starting the clockwise rotation).
• If two cars opposite each other are proceeding straight, both turning right, or one proceeding straight with the other turning right, they may go at the same time. The turn then goes to the adjacent cars at the stop, who may follow the same rule if applicable.

Complications (or Simplifications, Depending on How You Look at It)

Of course, complexities inevitably arise. Follow these tips to avoid adding further miscommunication to the situation.

• Pedestrians always have the right of way. Please do not run anyone over simply because you think it’s your turn to go; it may very well be your turn to go, but if a pedestrian is in a crosswalk that interferes with your desired path, do not go.
• You must always stop at a four-way stop, whether you’re in downtown Chicago with lines of cars at the intersection or in rural Bismarck with not a car in the foreseeable horizon. Of course, I’m perfectly fine with the rolling stop in such instances, but don’t assume that just because you don’t immediately see someone you shouldn’t at least slow down to a few miles per hour at the intersection.
• If you’re desired path does not interfere with any of the other drivers--for instance, if you are turning and none of the other drivers at the four-way stop need to use the road you’ll be turning right onto--you may turn right while another car is going straight or turning onto a different road.
• Some drivers will ignore all the rules of the four-way stop and ignorantly assume that they have the right of way, since they are clearly the center of everyone’s universe. Even if it is your legal turn to proceed forward, always do so with caution, being wary of idiot drivers who may be too hasty to wait another ten seconds for you to clear the intersection.
• Some drivers will not use their turn signal when approaching a four-way stop. This may cause you to suspect, for instance, that it is safe to proceed straight because the car opposite you seems to be going straight. However, the oblivious person driving towards you actually plans on turning left, thus crossing your path when you attempt to drive straight. Be wary of such stupid drivers, as they can occasionally look like actual people.
• Disgustingly polite drivers mean death to a four-way Stop. If you encounter one such annoying person who incessantly waves you on, just go or you will simply add to the problem. Honking and waving your arms in the air in disgust is an appropriate reaction to ensure that he knows you’re not impressed with his or her attempted “chivalry.” If his or her apparent significant other is in the car, this is most likely the reasoning for this, so be sure to shake your head, furrow your eyebrows, and mouth, “Oh, really?”
• Similarly, there are the completely oblivious drivers. They make their complete stop and completely forget the order of all things around them. Though it is rightfully their turn, they stare blankly at you refuse to make eye contact with anyone at the intersection, knowing very well they’re an idiot. Attempt to wave them on with a kind gesture, politely showing them that it is their turn, but if they refuse to go, the person directly to their left should proceed instead, continuing the clockwise circle.
• Cell phones. In recent years, they may be one of the biggest complications to a four-way stop. If you are approaching a four-way stop and feel you may not be able to perform at your peak while continuing the conversation with whoever could be so important, please, put it down. I don’t eve care if you hang up, but take it away from your ear. This accomplishes more than you would think. First of all, it allows your focus to be on you’re driving, as it already should have been. Second, it allows you to not focus on the person on the other end of space, but to focus on the drivers who are actually present at the intersection with you. Thirdly, it gives the other drivers a sense of security; a feeling that maybe you do actually know what you’re doing, or at least that you’re trying and paying. If they see a cell phone, you’re just going to anger them, potentially causing road rage, a real condition which thousands of Americans suffer from on a daily basis.
• If any emergency vehicle is approaching from any direction, pull over; they get the right of way everywhere, including a four-way stop. Duh.
• THIS ISN’T A FOUR-WAY STOP. Frequently, people will observe cross lanes of traffic instead of following the road they’re on. This leads to people approaching a two-way stop, assuming it’s a four-way stop, and stopping when their have no stop sign an, in fact, have the right of way. This causes much confusion and potentially chaos as the drivers of the cross street can’t figure out what to do until the genius who actually has the right of way goes, usually after realizing he was never supposed to stop in the first place.

That just about does it, I’d say. The thing to realize is that four-way stops are ridiculously simple, so simple, in fact, that most people over think them. This, of course, leads to complications as listed above, which proper drivers like yourself and me then have to remember when approaching a four-way stop. It is important to realize that, no matter how well you know how to follow the rules of a four-way stop, the oblivious woman across from you may not have a clue what she’s doing, and the cell phone and hair straightener she’s holding certainly aren’t helping her concentration at all.

At a four-way stop, follow the rules, look out for Number 1 (don’t be polite), and, most importantly, be observant! Maybe someday this country will figure out how to keep their cool when pulling up to a stop sign.

Tags: Driving, Observations

Yesterday, after blogging about how my two fish have lived the entire summer through, Bruno kicked the bucket. After not seeing him and Demetrius play tag all day, I grew suspicious and looked into the tank. He was no where to be found. Not behind his favorite plant, not chasing Demetrius, not hiding behind the filter. This concerned me. I then looked under the filter. There was poor Bruno, dead and stuck to the air intake.

I suppose this is what I get for boasting publically of their long life, and I’m personally blaming Kylee for making me write that blog post, which led to me discussing their life, which clearly led to Bruno’s death. Kylee, this is putting a pretty big damper on our friendship right now. I just ... I ... I can’t talk about this right now ...

Tags: Fish

Kylee reprimanded me for not blogging enough. While this is a very valid accusation, I’ve decided to oblige her in only the most annoying sort of way. So here you go, Kylee. A blog post just for you. Enjoy.

Visa Overcharges Customers

There’s no way this can work out in a positive manner for Visa’s reputation. I mean, they overcharged individual customers to the amount of $23 quadrillion (each), according to CNN. That’s right, some Visa cardholder’s received their monthly statement and had the heart attack of the century upon seeing certain “purchases of goods” to the dollar amount of $23,148,855,308,184,500.00.

To Visa’s credit, they quickly admitted that it was a “temporary programming error ... [which] caused some transactions to be inaccurately posted.” They say some transactions. Roughly 13,000 transactions, actually. Well, at least they caught it, right? But isn’t it scary to think that a programming error could cause such a huge mishap? And more importantly, what the heck did the programmer do to cause such an error.

Well, for those of you familiar with C++, it doesn’t take too long to figure it out. The error was in the amount of 2314885530818450000 (we multiplied by 100 to get rid of the nasty change). If we convert that number to hexadecimal, it comes out to be 20 20 20 20 20 20 12 00. 20 in hexadecimal is a whitespace character, so it’s likely that a conversion was never made and the customers really made purchases for $46.08.

An Online Operating System?

That’s what Google says, anyway. Better yet, they claim they can have it ready for delivery by the end of next year! Microsoft, of course, is in shock, but this isn’t all that surprising considering their OS turn around is something under five years ... If they work really fast.

The Google Chrome OS has led to talk of booting Google’s CEO off of Apple’s board. After all, that would just be a nasty conflict of interest, what with Apple being a major OS distributor as well.

Google claims that the new OS will be written from the ground up (like they did when the “reinvented” the browser with Chrome), will be a system built atop the Linux kernel, and will boot and “get users onto the web in seconds.”

Microsoft’s CEO, Steve Ballmer, has laughed at the new OS. I don’t know if he thinks it’s a joke or if he was scoffing at the reality of it, but I seem to recall him laughing at the iPhone a year before it’s release as well and, well, making some rather audacious (and now embarassing) statements about it in this video. Based upon that evidence, and how successful the iPhone has become today, I’d say the new Google Chrome OS is going to be revolutionary, to say the least.

Demetrius and Bruno Live

Near the end of our semester at Cedarville, there was an unfortunate accident involving cold-blooded animals and hot water coming out of the faucet. Now I’m not going to point any fingers, but Dave was the one changing the water in the tank ... Needless to say, there was a seizure and the fishes died. There was much mourning and sorrow.

At the beginning of the summer, I cleaned my room. This is a regular occurrence for me, but in this particular cleaning I came across my 2.5 gallon fish tank which was empty. I thought to myself, “The tank and filter are the expensive parts ... Fishes are cheap!” I quickly drove to PetSmart and purchased two little fish: a Platy and a Molly. One was red, the other black. The black one I named Bruno, and the red one was called Demetrius (names compliments of an afternoon of boredom for Evan and me).

After these three months of summer, Demetrius and Bruno are still kickin’! I’m now getting slightly worried about the eight hour trip back to school. I’m really hoping they can survive it so we can see how much longer these guys will keep on sticking with us. If you have any good ideas for safely transporting said fishes from Iowa to Ohio, drop me a line.

So, Michael Jackson is Dead

That’s the rumor, anyway, though there are still those that believe it’s all a marketing ploy. And, you know, that’d be a pretty good idea considering sales have never been better for him, especially on iTunes. After Jackson’s death, six of the top ten songs sold on iTunes were Michael Jackson’s hits. More significantly, nine out of the top ten albums also belonged to Jackson! Nineteen out of the top twenty-five music videos had Michael Jackson in them as well.

I can’t say that I blame the world. I mean, he was a legendary artist, and I don’t think there will ever be another musician that will be able to attain the caliber of Jackson. Despite his social record, he holds the spot as one of my all-time favorite performers, and within two days after his passing, I listened through his entire discography as a tribute. Yes, I do own his entire discography ...

Please Try to Compile Your Code ... Seriously

I’ve been running into this annoyance a lot lately, especially at work. Honestly, how hard is it to just make sure the code in your tutorial actually compiles before you submit it, huh? I’ll tell you: it’s not that hard. Dropping it into UltraEdit and running GCC on it is about the most complicated way to do it, but you could obviously just paste it in an IDE and check it that way as well. I don’t care if it runs, necessarily, just make sure it compiles. You’re trying to teach people with your code, for goodness sake. What kind of an example are you setting if the code you’re “teaching” them with sucks?

Frequently I stumble upon tutorials, and as I’m reading through them I think, “Wait, that can’t work. Will that really compile? I thought ‘Class’ was lowercase in C++ ... And why isn’t there a semicolon at the end of this line? Shouldn’t they have included this library?” Out of curiosity, I grab the code and try to compile it myself and, sure enough, it craps out on me. The common misconception is that, “Well, this code is never meant to be compiled, it’s just an example.” But that’s just the point! It’s supposed to be an example ... And it’s wrong!!

Nine times out of ten this is a trivial issue, but I’ve run into instances where the broken code is what I’m trying to interpret, and it’s really hard to interpret something when you’re first trying to figure out if it’s right in the first place. How do you expect me to know if it’s right or not if you’re supposed to be teaching it to me?

Sometimes the errors are just syntactical. Those are bad enough. The worst is when you try to compile a tutorial’s example code and it causes something catastrophic, like a segfault. Please, for the sake of those you’re trying to teach, make sure what you’re teaching is accurate!

Microsot Wants to Give You Anti-Virus Support for FREE

After Microsoft OneCare failed worse than Windows Vista and the Zune combined, Microsoft took some well deserved time off from the Security Protection field of computing. They needed to rethink things. In steps code name “Morro.” What is Morro? Well, it’s pretty much Microsoft OneCare ... But for free ... And apparently better. And it’s supposedly going to be bundled with Windows 7. OneCare failed because it was accused, numerous times, of being “unable to detect a significant number of threats.” I guess Morro plans to be better?

There are already two excellent and free alternatives to the Symantec and McAfee subscription services out there made by Avast and AVG. Microsoft’s Morro soon to be the third free alternative, both Symantec and McAfee are saying that they aren’t worried about their sales being effected by these free products, even with Morro bundled with the Microsoft OS. According to the CEOs of the Big Boy companies, a free alternative just can’t guarantee the security that users need while browsing today’s malicious internet; you need more than just anti-virus support, and that’s what the Premium services give you. While I agree that you need more than just anti-virus support, there are many other prevention companies out there that offer the same services for free that the Big Boys offer at a hefty price.

Whether you’re interested in paying for Symantec’s services or you’re willing to settle for the free Morro that will soon come with your Windows operating system, it’s good for the Big Boy’s to have some healthy competition to keep their products quality and their prices low. Though I can’t say that security competition from Microsoft is any incentive for Symantec and McAfee to keep their quality high ... But we can hope.


That’s all I’ve got for now. We’ll see how long it takes me to come up with more Information You Won’t Find Useful.

Tags: Information You Won't Find Useful, Google, Microsoft, Visa, Music, Programming, Fish