Home For A Day

I seldom use my Dreamwidth anymore except as a mirror for Home For A Day. But a certain someone has been saying how much they miss my more journal-like entries, so here's one. This is going to be brief, because as you can see from the dateline, it's well past 5am, and I haven't slept yet.

Husband and I were on our way back from Christmas vacation in Chesterfield, Virginia. We were about an hour out when traffic on the I-95N slowed, then slowed some more, then slowed still more, and finally ground to a complete halt. For over an hour. By "complete halt", I mean you could have turned your car off if you wanted. I was the first one I noticed whose bladder gave way; judging by the occasional person getting out of their car and toddling into the woods, I was not the last.

During all this police cars were going by down both shoulders in a tearing hurry. After we'd seen maybe twenty of them, we then started to see the fire trucks and ambulances go by too. And then a police helicopter circling a ways down the highway. By the end Mike estimated over 30 police cars. After an hour and some, state troopers came back and helped us all get turned around and go back down the (normally one-way) highway, then across to I-95S, whence we exited and got onto the Jefferson Davis Highway, which was now carrying much more than its carrying capacity of cars, and thus moving at a ridiculous crawl.

Lets cut this short and say that we left Chesterfield around 10am and got to Ottawa around 4am.

As for what on earth happened, we only got the story in dribs and drabs--a bit from ilanikhan by cell phone, a bit more from a waitress in a restaurant along Jefferson Davis. The full story had to wait until we got home and I checked the news online. Here it is.

ETA: I would like to say that the state trooper who helped us and nearby cars get turned around was awesome. And cute as a button. I know "cute" and "state police" are not words that normally go together, but really, she was. An irrepressible bundle of good cheer who single-handedly improved my mood. "Everyone ready to get turned around? Lets get turned around!" Someone else must have commented on how cheery she was considering, since I then heard her say, "I'm getting paid for this, you aren't."

Followed by--I think she repeated this part twice--"I just hate the 95."

(Look, ma: a public post!)

So I've added a Scrabble game to my website, that lets you play against the computer with selectable skill level. I actually programmed the thing months ago but then got distracted by other projects. In the grand tradition of Scrabble-software-named-after-neat-Scrabble-words (see: Zyzzyva), I'm calling it Quixotic. As suits my tastes, it's a very old-fashioned web app that works mainly through CGI, but I think it works very well, nonetheless. The frontend is in Perl and the backend solver is in C.

Probably the weakest link at this point is skill level. Ironically, it's easier to make a Scrabble AI that plays very well, than one that plays at a novice level realistically. Part of that work was developing a stripped-down dictionary containing only non-obscure words. A freely-available English corpus was a good start but I had to add a bunch of inflections and missing words back in. That actually took longer than the coding itself. At level 3, the computer is like a not-quite-novice who has memorized all the 2-letter-words (one of the first things you do when you get seriously into club/tournament Scrabble) and knows the occasional weird longer word like "acanthus." But at level 2 and below, it will pretty much never play any of those words that make non-Scrabblers go, "wait, what?"

But there's more to skill level than vocabulary. Even at level 1 the computer player is better at, for instance, parallels, than any real novice would be, and it might still play too well to be a reasonable opponent for beginners.

Anyway, check it out if you like Scrabble, and let me know if you run into any problems.

In the heavy rains of a few weeks ago, our basement window well filled up with water and ended up flooding into our basement. This had never happened before. But now it's happening repeatedly even from brief showers, and we don't know why. Our house is new enough that there should be a drain installed in the window well, but it may be clogged.

The main thing is we need this dealt with quickly, I'm beyond sick of bailing water and every time we leave the house during a rain, we might come home to a flooded basement. Does anyone have specific recommendations? Like a specific company or person in Ottawa that fixed this when it happened to you? So far no one seems to think this is their province. PuroClean told me to talk to a foundation repair company, foundation repair company told me to talk to a plumber, plumber told me to talk to a landscaping company...and anyone who says "we can book you sometime in May for an estimate", just, no.

We could dig up the dirt and gravel in the window well ourselves and see what's underneath and have plans to do so this weekend, but if the drain actually is clogged, that may well not be something we can fix ourselves.

ETA: This just in, talked to a landscaping company, guess who also doesn't think this is their province? They're willing to look into re-grading the land for us, since part of the problem is that water is flowing back from the gutter towards our house. They could come sometime, you know, a month or more out and give us an estimate for re-grading, but as for the issue with the window well? Nope. Not their thing. The guy I talked to suggested a foundation repair company (yes, this now forms a complete loop of referrals), several of which have already told me "if it's not actually a flaw in the foundation but just a clog in the drain, we're not interested in the job."

ETA2: DrainPro didn't blow me off--hallelujah--but it would cost upward of $800 to flush the drain (??) and there are no guarantees that that would actually fix the problem. He wondered about the state of our weeping tile (some magical thing that the drain is supposed to connect to) and thought that I really instead should be talking to, drumroll please, a foundation repair company.

Since my primary blog is now over here, I've set all LJ/DW entries friends-only to avoid duplicate content on search engines. If you'd like to follow me on LJ or Dreamwidth and need a friending, let me know.