• dave (unregistered)

    please yo-yo this comment.

    captcha: ingenium - very apt

  • (cs)

    I am in Colchester, England. Still driving around the circle!

    This post was generated by my Blackberry.

  • david (unregistered)

    I want to yo-yo their program

    --

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  • Joe (unregistered)

    Fourth!

  • Email (unregistered)

    Are you sure that you didn't mix up the locations for the two subway images? Cause the people in the Hong Kong station look really western, and the people in the New York station look more Chinese ... Apart from the fact that it would have to be a cold day in hell for a Hong Kong station to be that deserted.

  • (cs) in reply to Email
    Email:
    Are you sure that you didn't mix up the locations for the two subway images? Cause the people in the Hong Kong station look really western, and the people in the New York station look more Chinese ... Apart from the fact that it would have to be a cold day in hell for a Hong Kong station to be that deserted.

    I haven't been to either city, but in the picture from Hong Kong, the station was a lot cleaner, everything looked pretty new. I think I can believe the pictures are right.

  • Smash (unregistered) in reply to Joe
    Joe:
    Fourth!
    but first on the stupidity rank
  • Wickerman (unregistered)

    The hong kong photo looks photoshopped.

  • George Nacht (unregistered) in reply to Wickerman
    Wickerman:
    The hong kong photo looks photoshopped.

    Yeah, possibly. Sentence begins pretty close to left side of the display. Almost like overlapping it... And the colour of the letters seems to be a little too uniform. On the other hand, if anyone decided to send a forged snapshot, would not he or she pick a little more catchy sentence to appear on the display? Well, I´m no expert.

  • Phil (unregistered)

    I live near Colchester, and I have to say, that road sign is actually pretty accurate. That is one weird roundabout...

  • (cs)

    The real WTF is that if you miss your exit, you're screwed!

  • Joe (unregistered) in reply to Smash

    Your mama!

  • Owlpete (unregistered)

    Passenger.exe crashed? Well, I gues that's better than driver.exe crashing!

  • Jay (unregistered) in reply to Phil
    Phil:
    I live near Colchester, and I have to say, that road sign is actually pretty accurate. That is one weird roundabout...

    Oh, that's a road sign? I thought it was the new name of the Artist Formerly Known as Prince.

  • Jay (unregistered)

    Sounds like Homeland Security run amok again. Exactly what branch of the service is this General Failure from, and why is he writing to MY hard drive?

  • (cs)

    The first thing I thought of:

    "Please yo-ho-ho the bottle of rum."

  • Ata ul Haq (unregistered)

    the post made my day. We integrate with a third-party vendor (that provides transit backends) and they have this error code in there. It was a year back that I circulated "please yo-yo the rrm" error message with rest of the folks in my company :)

  • Steve (unregistered) in reply to ParkinT
    ParkinT:
    I am in Colchester, England. Still driving around the circle!
    TRWTF is those darned Brits driving on the "wrong" side of the street.
    This post was generated by my Blackberry.
    That's nice. Aren't you giving your Blackberry just a little too much autonomy?
  • Anonymous lurker (unregistered) in reply to jspenguin
    jspenguin:
    The first thing I thought of:

    "Please yo-ho-ho the bottle of rum."

    That gives me a great idea for a log messsage when 15 threads are waiting on a dead one...

  • RandomWTF (unregistered)

    I'm guessing that 'yo-yo' is slang for 'stop and restart [the service]'.

    I know I've heard all kinds of different terminology for the same thing from IT types. I've worked with one vendor who always mentioned 'bouncing the service', which pretty much has the same connotations as a yo-yo.

    I always just say 'restart'. I don't need any cute euphemisms.

  • Marcus (unregistered)

    <a rel="nofollow" href="http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=colchester&ie=UTF8&ll=51.905254,0.889421&spn=0.013345,0.023475&t=h&z=15"" target="_blank" title="http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=colchester&ie=UTF8&ll=51.905254,0.889421&spn=0.013345,0.023475&t=h&z=15"">See google map of that junction here.

  • DavidN (unregistered)

    That's an epic junction. I admit that a lot of British roads are rather... creative, but that one's a record breaker.

  • tom (unregistered)

    Who is General Failure? Why is he writing drive C?

  • (cs) in reply to tom
    tom:
    Who is General Failure? Why is he writing drive C?
    Damn, beat me to it.
  • Massimo (unregistered)

    And the sign said, "the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls". (C)

  • Gedoon (unregistered)

    Isn't that the symbol for she-male? Not that I'd know anything about such videos...

  • James (unregistered)

    I've heard of yo-yo as a foreign colloquial version of 'bounce'

    As in, "Hey, we're having a problem and need to bounce the server"

  • An Aspie (unregistered) in reply to DavidN

    That's an entertaining traffic circle, certainly, but I've seen some rather curious non-circle intersections, with perhaps one of the funniest being in the middle of the ISU (Indiana State University) campus in Terre Haute, where there's 5 streets meeting at approximately one big cluster of an intersection, at least one of those streets are one-way only, and... a railroad track running through the middle of it all. That's on the west side of town, within a few blocks of Wabash Ave and US 41.

    DavidN:
    That's an epic junction. I admit that a lot of British roads are rather... creative, but that one's a record breaker.
  • (cs) in reply to Phil
    Phil:
    I live near Colchester, and I have to say, that road sign is actually pretty accurate. That is one weird roundabout...

    Hehe, yeah, I've driven through that junction quite a few times on the way to ASDA, it is really mind bending ... though the junctions near by aren't much saner.

    DavidN:
    That's an epic junction. I admit that a lot of British roads are rather... creative, but that one's a record breaker.

    This is my favourite

    How many roundabouts can you count?

  • (cs) in reply to Nazca
    Nazca:
    Another good one is this one from Swindon. I'm pleased to say I've never driven that one (unlike the that one from Colchester...)
  • (cs)

    Still rather have a road sign like that than the guesswork involved in the average Bay Area highway overpass, where you don't know until it's too late whether they had room for a cloverleaf or whether you'll actually need to be in the left lane to go left. It's not like you can see it from the far side of the overpass.

  • SB (unregistered)

    I don't have any fun roundabouts near me, but we do have this beauty.

  • Jon (unregistered) in reply to dkf
    dkf:
    Nazca:
    Another good one is this one from Swindon. I'm pleased to say I've never driven that one (unlike the that one from Colchester...)
    I like this one.
  • (cs)

    Well if you wanna go in to motorways ...

    How about this one?

  • Tim (unregistered)

    OMG They're building a rotary supercollider in Colchester!

  • some dude (unregistered) in reply to Email
    Email:
    Are you sure that you didn't mix up the locations for the two subway images? Cause the people in the Hong Kong station look really western, and the people in the New York station look more Chinese ... Apart from the fact that it would have to be a cold day in hell for a Hong Kong station to be that deserted.

    I'm from Hong Kong, and I don't think the pictures are mixed up. Unless I'm mistaken, this is taken in Central station. There are many expats in that area.

    It's pretty blurry, but if you look at the sign above the stairs in the back, you can vaguely see that it's bilingual, with the bigger, blockier Chinese characters on the first line, and English on the second line.

  • Kim (unregistered)

    http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=33.85593,-117.979496&spn=0.013364,0.015385&t=k&z=16

    /thread

  • Kim (unregistered)
  • (cs)

    Lets be honest, that's the result of somebody being told that they -had- to submit a proposal, even though they didn't want the bid, and putting in the craziest junction they could think of.

    Either that, or some of the Great Old Ones are working in road planning.

    Junctions like that one in Colchester are actually there because they are, to an extent, a really nice idea... sadly someone neglected to consider the effect had on the minds of the drivers trying to go through there. :p

  • Jasper (unregistered)

    I'd just call the phone number on the screen and ask them if they can please yo-yo the rrm. It'd be interesting to hear what they would answer.

  • (cs) in reply to Nazca
    Nazca:
    There are some truly mad junctions about on both sides of the Pond, such as this (south of Manchester), this (north of Birmingham, commonly known as Spaghetti Junction) and this topologically-interesting beauty near Baltimore. Beyond proving that highway engineers definitely love funny mushrooms, I'm not sure what this demonstrates...
  • YAFIYGI (unregistered) in reply to dkf
    dkf:
    Another good one is this one from Swindon.
    I think you mean this one?

    See Wikipedia for pictures:-)

  • Barry (unregistered)

    No-one's posted this yet? [url]=http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=swindon&t=k&om=1&ie=UTF8&ll=51.562819,-1.771352&spn=0.000862,0.002167&z=19&iwloc=addr[/url

  • Barry (unregistered) in reply to Barry

    Oh goddam. Ignore me plz

  • Trish (unregistered)

    Actually, the roundabouts seem a lit saner than the junctions to me... looking at them, I usually see SOME pattern to get in at A and out at B. The junctiosn just loose me. I strongly hope they are less confusing from ac ar than from the air ;).

  • (cs) in reply to Trish

    I didn't realise there were so many people from Colchester on these forums.

    Maybe we should all get together in the pub one day and talk about how WTFy the roads are round here, and other generaly WTFery.

    That 'roundabout' is TRWTF (TM), although as has already been pointed out my favourite is the "Magic Roundabout" (as the students call it) - one big roundabout made up of five mini-roundabouts.

  • Mike Dimmick (unregistered) in reply to Phil
    Phil:
    I live near Colchester, and I have to say, that road sign is actually pretty accurate. That is one weird roundabout...

    You can kind of see the thought process. I'm guessing Mile End Road was previously designated A134, but the only alignment they had to upgrade it was the new Northern Approach Road. But you can't shift the railway bridge (which appears to also be the railway station) so you introduce a new section to the right going north of the bridge.

    I assume that the roundabout already existed, as a previous upgrade to a free-flowing junction from a former cross-roads. Now with the bypass in place, the majority of traffic going north will have to go around the roundabout a further exit, taking the fourth exit. Traffic going north will have to wait for anything going east-west or from the north to the west - perhaps there was a lot of congestion here. So they decide they need to put some new roadway in for traffic going north on the A134. The logical option for free-flow would be to add a flyover, but they don't have a budget, so they stick traffic lights on the roundabout and break it in two places.

    Whoops.

    Now traffic going north has to queue to cross the roundabout twice, and traffic going around the roundabout potentially has to stop twice for the A134. Likewise the eastern roundabout is broken. Synchronize the lights so you don't have to stop twice? Not possible. For the A134 flow, the eastern lights must change before the southern ones - for the other flow, they must be the other way around.

    Also, the yellow hatched boxes indicate that you shouldn't enter the box unless you're sure that your exit from the box is clear (or unless you're turning). The number of drivers who do this is approximately zero. In my experience, when traffic is queueing, these boxes are always blocked with cars who passed the lights when there was no exit available.

    The lesson for developers is that sometimes you can't build what you want because there's already some other building in the way. Razing the whole area to the ground is generally considered inconvenient.

  • (cs) in reply to PhillS
    dkf:
    Nazca:
    There are some truly mad junctions about on both sides of the Pond, such as this (south of Manchester), this (north of Birmingham, commonly known as Spaghetti Junction) and this topologically-interesting beauty near Baltimore. Beyond proving that highway engineers definitely love funny mushrooms, I'm not sure what this demonstrates...

    I've not actually driven through the M60/M56 junction, which is strange since it is in my area ... spagetti junction on the other hand I've driven over (on the M6) many times ... it's actually rather more interesting from ground level heh.

    That one in Baltimore looks really pretty actually.

    Trish:
    Actually, the roundabouts seem a lit saner than the junctions to me... looking at them, I usually see SOME pattern to get in at A and out at B. The junctiosn just loose me. I strongly hope they are less confusing from ac ar than from the air ;).

    Sadly not ... the Colchester one is actually far less sane when trying to drive through it, esp if you only visit it a couple of times a year like myself.

    The roundabouts tend to make sense once you know what they're actually about, the first time they're just plain evil. There is also the problem that larger roundabouts tend to make you lose your sense of direction from turning without usable landmarks ... motorway junction roundabouts are a classic example, since they tend to have 2 exits for each road and ridiculous signing.

    PhillS:
    I didn't realise there were so many people from Colchester on these forums.

    Maybe we should all get together in the pub one day and talk about how WTFy the roads are round here, and other generaly WTFery.

    That 'roundabout' is TRWTF (TM), although as has already been pointed out my favourite is the "Magic Roundabout" (as the students call it) - one big roundabout made up of five mini-roundabouts.

    I hail from Manchester, my fiancee from Colchester, which means a lot of trips down the M6, A14 and M11. Though I must say the A1/M1 does take the cake for the most messed up road in existence.

    The strange thing about the "Magic Roundabout" is that most of the time it really does work... most of the traffic is usually on the supermarket side of it, so you can go round the other way when it's busy.

    Students eh ... Do you work at the uni by any chance? It's a bit of a wtf of road engineering in itself.

  • LEGO (unregistered) in reply to tom
    tom:
    Who is General Failure? Why is he writing drive C?

    Isn't he the guy in charge of the allied forces in Iraq?

  • Tom (unregistered)

    I'm also from near Colchester (which is clearly the Silicon Valley of East Anglia - screw you, Cambridge!), and i should mention that, freaky as that roundabout is, it's not the worst one in town - that honour goes to the one down in the Hythe, near the new Tesco.

    Gogol maps links for the truly spoddy:

    http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=51.900945,0.89501&ie=UTF8&ll=51.900945,0.89501&spn=0.000991,0.002167&t=k&z=19 http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=51.884445,0.932636&ie=UTF8&ll=51.884445,0.932636&spn=0.000992,0.002167&t=k&z=19

    facilisis - the effect that Colchester's roundabouts have on the experience of driving there

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