(no subject)

[zwol]

The summit is going well so far. I'm currently at a demo scene for far-out UI concept videos, which I would link to, but they're not up on the internets yet. Tuesday, they say. I'll check back.

In other news, the Sea-to-Sky Highway has been blocked by a rockslide, which is bad, because there's no other good way to get from here to anywhere with an airport. The road authority says to assume it'll be closed for at least five days. The worst-case scenario here is that I get to spend the entire of Friday on a bus (the next best alternate route is a seven-hour drive) which is not that bad in the grand scheme, but I rather hope something faster gets worked out with boats or helicopters.

[EDIT: The comment thread on the above-linked CBC article is mostly a cesspool, but I like this comment, impractical as it is (quoted in entirety because there doesn't seem to be any permalink for it):

“ ‘Why can't they hire someone to build roads?’ posters have asked.

“It's not that simple. Hwy 99 was built long before the government discovered in the 70s that portions of the highway are built on and under geotechnically unstable areas. Large portions of the hwy sit under volcanic rubble. Basically, some of the mountains you look at while driving to Whistler are extinct volcanoes. Much of the mountainside is volcanic rubble that one day will slide. There's evidence of a massive slide in the area that wiped our native communities in the 19th C.

“This means you just can’t go and blast straight roads. You have to be very very careful when planning and blasting because you could trigger massive landslides.

“Yes, they could do this safely, but it would cost billions and billions of dollars. So would building an alternative route. And then after you build it, the mountain will one day slide into the sea. It could be tomorrow, it could be hundreds of years, but it will happen. This is why part of the highway was once designated the Garibaldi Civil Defense Zone and the BC gov bought out a developer that was going to build there in the 70s.

“This has nothing to do with gov incompetence. This is about maintaining a hwy that should have never been built at all, but built at a time when no one could have realized this.

“So the real issue isn’t building a better highway. It's moving Whistler to somewhere people can build a road safely.”

 — seanjones, 2008-07-30, 3:05 PM PDT

]

Comments

[kaolinfire.livejournal.com]

shame about the road, but very cool information :)

[aldren.livejournal.com]

You wouldn't happen to be at Assembly, would you? That would make me jealous.

[zwol.livejournal.com]

No, I'm at a Mozilla summit. What's Assembly?

[aldren.livejournal.com]

It's a demoscene computing gathering taking place in Finland through Sunday where they release far-out visual effects and the like.

Assembly.

The only thing of interest released so far is a 4k demo.