I have a job. I have to drive to my job.

Pretty simple. But commuting in NJ is a unique form of hell that most people outside of the state are blissfully unaware of. Let me break it down for ya.

I run the gauntlet of bad roads in NJ. I take Route 1 to the NJ Parkway each day. Route 1, while not a fast moving road, is actually pretty enjoyable. I pass a lot of stores, and it's generally stress free driving at around 50mph.

Then I merge onto the NJ Parkway. Which is fast moving death. Cars are in lanes that are the bare minimum in size, 5 across at points, moving along at 80mph. At least 80mph. The Parkway is one of those roads where you seemingly have to have a major accident on a daily basis. It's almost as if the road itself is some sort of primitive god, and it needs a sacrifice in the form of a 3 car pileup to remain happy.

So you get accidents. Some are minor, and may shut a lane down. Then you have some that back traffic up for tens of miles. I was in one of those once, but managed to get the hell out of there and wander around northern NJ until I found my way back home.

But the other morning, I saw one on the opposite side. Traffic was just backed up for tens of miles. And people were outside of their cars, just standing and chatting. For some reason, this really appealed to me.

Ya see, I wonder about my fellow drivers. Like, why is the guy in the Explorer so angry? Why can't he put down his cell phone and stop swerving into my lane. Doesn't he realise that a collision at 90mph would probably be pretty bad for both him and myself? What about the guy in the Durango? Could he tell me why all Durango owners are assholes? That's a proven fact, by the way.

It'd be like a communal highway experience, or something. Maybe we could all band together and attack the toll booths. Speaking of, whoever came up with that particular setup is a fucking moron. 5 lanes expand into 12 for the tolls, then back down to 4. In theory it should work okay, I guess, but how come traffic always piles up and backs up? Surely there's a better way to do this.

So then I get off the Parkway, and drive thru beautiful Orange, NJ. Or one of the Oranges. Which is kinda like driving thru downtown Bosnia, but without the mass killings.

In the 3 months I've been commuting to the workplace, I've seen kids throwing rocks off the bridge once. That wasn't cool. Rocks do bad things. I've seen them throw snowballs once. It's not cool, but it wouldn't do much damage, unless they put rocks in them.

But yesterday, they threw wood. Not sticks. But wood. Lumber, ya'all. Like a freakin 2x4. Imagine, if you will, traffic whipping along a road anywhere from 55-75mph. Imagine it being slightly after rush hour, and it's still fairly congested. Then, into that chaotic mix, throw a 2x4 from an overhead bridge.

So yeah, that wasn't cool. And it interrupted my scanning of the radio for traffic reports. Which in NJ, is nearly a religion if you commute. And if you work in NJ, you probably have a bad commute in NJ to work. This morning I started thinking that the traffic reports would be quicker and much more efficient if they just told listeners which roads aren't congested. I don't think a day goes by when I don't hear "Route 1 through west windsor has delays and congestion". Why not just skip it? We all know it's backed up. Just tell us when it isn't. Wouldn't it be nice to hear, "For the first time in 3 months, Route 1 through west windsor isn't totally fucked"?

So that's where road rage comes from. The guy in the Durango. Blame him.

I've just put out a new 'release' of my java mailer ayuMail, which I'm pretty happy with. I've added threading, and some smarter connection handling in the DB routines. Which means a faster emailing experience.

And I've added inline image viewing, for attached images. Which is pretty cool. And as much as I like to curse the hell out of Swing (go to hell GridBagLayout), it makes that kind of stuff pretty easy. And I know it'll work on *nixes, and Win boxen. BTW, *nixes these days does include MacOSX. And Swing isn't quite the speed bump it used to be. In fact, it's native speed, for the most part.

Which is why SWT perplexed me. In theory, the idea of a native widget kit for Java is not a bad one. In practice it's horrible. Just try Eclipse, built with SWT, on linux. Why they went with GTK (or GTK2) for their toolkit is beyond me. It just looks bad. Awful, actually. Contrast that with Netbeans or JBuilder. They look good, and they respond well.

Not to knock IBM, but they need to lay off the SWT thing, and get their shit in a sock when it comes to their JDK. I've had nothing but trouble getting it to work on some boxen at work, because it doesn't work well with SMP systems (altho I blame this on RedHat as well, some of their kernel mods broke IBM's JDK). Correction, IBM needs to lay off SWT and beat the guys at RH over the head with a sack of rocks.

Anyhow, I know I praised eclipse a while back, but forget that. JBuilder was, and still is, the king.