Traffic Nightmares, Audrey rocks

Traffic has been steadily getting worse and worse since school has reopened in August. It is now pretty horrible. We have a 23 mile commute to work. Today it took nearly 75 minutes to make it. The most frustrating part of it is almost half of that time is spent waiting at 3 lights within 2 miles of our house. The culprit is the traffic associated with the high school and the incredible amount of dump trucks that clog these roads in the morning. That and the fact that we have a 2 lane road in our area when we really need a 4 or 6 lane road. Mornings are enough of a pain in the ass being all tired and shit, having to sit in gridlock and then deal with the assholes trying to find a way to get ahead by pulling ignorant manuevers just compounds it. When traffic is “normal” I can do the trip in 35 minutes.

Yesterday at work my new Audrey was waiting for me. What the hell is that? It is an internet appliance. It came out a few years ago from 3com, however at the time it was slow to catch on and 3com was hurting financially so they pulled it after only a few months without giving it much of a chance. They cost 500 bucks new. I got mine for less than 100 bucks. It rocks. It is hackable meaning you can add much more functionality to it then what it has out of the box. Even in stock form it is pretty cool. It will do email, web browsiing, date/address book, sync with palm pilots, has a nifty little infrared keyboard and comes in a cute little package with a nifty little 640×480 color touchscreen. You can also record messages and handwrite them as well. The amount of hacks for it are impressive. I was up till 11 last night doing nothing but tweaking. So far I added root shell access, a caller id program and a mp3 player. You can download completes images with all of these hacks already put in to make things very easy. The Audrey is also popular in home automation applications as well as making one hell of an all in one remote control. When we built our house, I prewired a network jack above the kitchen counter for this exact reason. If you want something really cool in a geeky kind of way, get one. Ebay has them regularly.