Title. Pisses me off mildly. I’ve got my earbud in for a reason (quick drive) and Bluetooth decides to connect to the car when it starts. The cars’ head unit takes forever to start and have to manually switch over to Bluetooth mode (while the audio is already playing) and the volume is way down.
And when you get out of the car it doesn’t automatically connect back to the earbuds.
Depending on where you live, you could be breaking the law. In the USA, doing that in some states is illegal. See here.
Bluetooth for audio might be the worst implementation of a specification every devised. Ridiculous lag, no multipoint connection, no ability to manage or negotiate connections from the device, limited ability to define the connection (audio vs headset among the culprits). BT for audio just seems like a cruel joke.
Shouldn’t drive with earbuds in. Might not hear the horn of the oncoming train. Those things are really quiet. /sarcasm
Trains are really unpredictable. Even in the middle of a forest two rails can appear out of nowhere, and a 1.5-mile fully loaded coal drag, heading east out of the low-sulfur mines of the PRB, will be right on your ass the next moment.
I was doing laundry in my basement, and I tripped over a metal bar that wasn’t there the moment before. I looked down: “Rail? WTF?” and then I saw concrete sleepers underneath and heard the rumbling.
Deafening railroad horn. I dumped my wife’s pants, unfolded, and dove behind the water heater. It was a double-stacked Z train, headed east towards the fast single track of the BNSF Emporia Sub (Flint Hills). Majestic as hell: 75 mph, 6 units, distributed power: 4 ES44DC’s pulling, and 2 Dash-9’s pushing, all in run 8. Whole house smelled like diesel for a couple of hours!
Fact is, there is no way to discern which path a train will take, so you really have to be watchful. If only there were some way of knowing the routes trains travel; maybe some sort of marks on the ground, like twin iron bars running along the paths trains take. You could look for trains when you encounter the iron bars on the ground, and avoid these sorts of collisions. But such a measure would be extremely expensive. And how would one enforce a rule keeping the trains on those paths?
A big hole in homeland security is railway engineer screening and hijacking prevention. There is nothing to stop a rogue engineer, or an ISIS terrorist, from driving a train into the Pentagon, the White House or the Statue of Liberty, and our government has done fuck-all to prevent it.
