For the Highway..., at www.M-eek.com

A second baby step...

As for the nick-naming of the project, please scratch my previous suggestions. How about Bigelow? "Big" because it is, and Boston is still in the post Big-Dig era. L-O-H for little-over-highway, or low-over-highway since compared to the Prudential Center being built over-highway, this one is a shrimp.

When they finished their second pass by hand with standard jack-hammers, they went back for a third, back with the mobile jack-hammers.

Then they cut the trees down on the closest side road, and took over some of it.   I'm amazed at how the trees are absolutely embedded into the chain link fence.   I would have guessed they'd die after being ringed, but many grew to over a foot in diameter with the chain links through them at all angles.

When they first blocked that side road from Marginal Street access, I was a bit concerned.   Emergency vehicles used that route a lot, because of all the one-ways leading away from that area of downtown.

A big problem when they used that route, was double parking and the extreme narrowness of the road to begin with.   I'd guess about 25& of the time they used that route, they had to slow to a crawl at best.   I think they've circumvented the problem a bit, by having a different hospital cover from the other side of the city.   That hospital has temporarily expanded ambulance bays, and is only a mile or so out.   BU Medical Center was always a full time ambulance center whereas Tufts - New England Medical Center had limited hours anyway.   Boston has no lack of hospitals.

They're now at the stage of digging along the separation between the highway and road.   I'm going to guess that'll move the ramp to it's new permanent position, before doing much else.

They found a few small spots in the overhead bridge sidewalls, and they're doing some small patch repairs.   Another guess; they're going to encase every wall on the highway with additional concrete structures to hold up the cover, besides the piers that will be every few feet in every divider, or space between tracks.   The adjacent section of rail tracks are seven trains wide.   I thought they might leave that side open air, but now I'm guessing they'll cover everything.

Columbus First Baby Step

I feel like I just saw the first flake of a big snowstorm coming. This section of highway will be covered with 3 blocks of buildings and park areas. The most distant section in the photo will be a 35-story hotel, in the middle will be condominiums, and where I'm standing will be low and middle income housing. Also, green park space will be added right behind me in a small triangular section between Tremont Street and Arlington Street. From the looks on the plans of this project I found online in a federal environmental impact report, the dust will be flying in my neighborhood. They closed the ramp on the right last week for a few nights, and started banging out the curbs, and putting the prefab concrete dividers along the north edge of this section of the Massachusetts Turnpike looking west, in downtown Boston.

 

Pictures in the daylight will be here on this blog as soon as they start working in daytime.

For the Highway...

Preface: I never considered a blog, but the HUGE Columbus Center Project is going up almost across the street from me. Hopefully, this will be the place to occasionally get a few pictures and insights on what's happening as that's being built. Warning: Once you've started me, you might not be able to shut me up, concerning many topics.

Having said that, here's the first installment, of course, on another topic.

Nothing gets you on this webpage, except through computers, and I'm into them, so I figure that's a good place to start my story. I use two computers. One is a laptop, sitting next to my bed, on a flat nightstand. I can spin it around and sit at a canvas chair on the other side of the table. Five wires and a lock lead to it. One is power, one is for an external monitor I use for Windows Media Player or when I design websites, one is a USB cable that leads to 3 hubs that branch out everywhere, and two are to speakers I have to switch manually depending on where I want the sound. Its a an older model Thinkpad (T23), with no internal wireless. I demand that my laptops be equipped with the eraser head Trackpoint control. I broke my right index finger as a kid, right through the fingertip. I split the end of the bone, and a rhuematist I saw about ten years ago tells me the bone never came together. I did it by testing a bike chain for tension, and getting caught in the chain and sprocket. For whatever reason, I love the 'eraser head' Trackpoint.

My other computer is a local business retiree I got as a gift. It's a Gateway, built in 2001. I live right in downtown Boston, and on trash day, on two occasions, I've found COA's (Certificate of Authorization) for Windows XP, and hard drives together, inside useless cases. I used one set of them to replace the Windows98 hand-me-down computer's, after adding about $15 worth of memory. It's passed Microsoft's Verification process, after I used a disk to reinstall XP Home, which is no guarantee, but a good start.

On that other hard drive, the COA is set in another T23 I rarely use, and doesn't count. I'd count it if I could sell it, but its got potential problems. One is that when I found it's hard drive in a smashed up Dell laptop, it was raining. I had to shake water out of the harddrive, and dry it out for a week before I tried it. How am I going to trust that 40GB won't fail suddenly one day? It's in a computer I bought for parts, and mysteriously started running while I started trading motherboards. It's present motherboard has only one slot of memory working. The last problem has a long and short to it, at least hypothetically. The short is that the LCD backlight was never soldered properly, and burnt out. I've replaced it with an obviously superior bulb, and it looks fantastic, but I think it was originally failing factory tests, and they changed settings to pass it to the public.

I found out by accident that a network install of Debian (a Linux OS) got the resolutions closer. After a failed install, I decided to reformat the hard drive, and leave a minimal Debian install, AND IT WORKED! To some extent anyway. I'm still not thrilled with the way an occasional menu or window looks. Something seems to lack consistency with it, but it's useable.

How would you write an advertisement for it? Thinkpad - Rain soaked, half memory available, only install with invisible Debian?

I love Ebay. I sold my first good Thinkpad there last summer. I said I'd still be using it if the fan hadn't started whining, and I wasn't lying. With all the repair work it's replacements gave me, I finally bought a fan for it, and got a little bit of it's value back.

I have a fourth Thinkpad I bought as my first windows computer. It weighs 20 lbs. which might be handy when I get it to the scrap metal shop.

I've got a second desktop from the Windows95 era, but no externals whatsoever. I plan to allow my first child or step-child to dismantle it.

My first computer was purchased in 1985 I think, when I was in college, and must be buried at the dump by now. I bought a second in around 1994, and gave it away to a neighbor when I left for Israel in 1996. My father is a retired computer scientist, and we had a teletype in our house when computers lived in big rooms in labs, not small metal boxes in cars, or 2 ounce PDAs.

That's the hardware report.