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It turns out that many of the driving guidelines that we were taught in drivers' ed class have changed, including the old standby of keeping our hands on the steering wheel at the 10 and 2 positions on a clock.
The new take: AAA, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and driving instructors teach that you should keep your hands lower, at 9 and 3 o'clock, or even lower, at 8 and 4. MSNBC says this change is partly to protect our hands and head, because if airbags go off, they're more likely to injure your hands that are higher up on the steering wheel and then slam your hands into your head. So apparently it's a "stop hitting yourself" adjustment.
You may also have more control or improved stability in that "parallel position", another term for the 9 and 3 steering wheel position, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety's guidelines for new drivers (PDF).
Finally, that "hand over hand" turning maneuver you were taught? Also out. Now:
Instead, you're supposed to "push-pull" — that is, push the wheel up with one hand and pull it down with the other, without crossing over.
This, too, is for safety reasons to avoid the perils of a deploying airbag. So there you have it. News to us. How about you?
Get with the times: You're driving all wrong | MSNBC via NextDraft
March 2012 marks my fifth year working for Unclutterer.com. My first post didn’t appear on the site until April 6, 2007, “Solving the Imelda Marcos Problem,” but I actually started a few weeks before that doing work on other areas of the site. Honestly, I’m shocked it has been five years. It is amazing how quickly time flies when you have a job you love. I am truly blessed to have the opportunity to write for such an amazing site and such a terrific group of readers.
I already knew a fair amount about uncluttering and organizing before I started working here, but over the past five years I’ve learned so much more from our readership and researching the topic. The following are a handful of things I have learned about the world of simple living and writing about this topic every week day for five years that I thought you might enjoy:
Paper is the gateway issue. More new readers come to the site seeking advice on how to process paper than any other topic. I would have thought in the digital age that paper wouldn’t be such a priority, but it is. Search after search after search drive people here who are looking to get rid of the stacks of paper in their homes and office. But, while paper is the gateway issue, our “Creating a Weekly Meal Plan” post gets more hits than any other single page on our site.Relationship advice. The most common question asked of me in emails is along the lines of “How do I live with someone who is cluttered?” The second most common question concerns dealing with clutter kept by elderly family members — fears that the family member will die and leave the mess or worries about how to help the family member downsize to a retirement home. When people are frustrated with their family members, they turn to email.Fear, conflicting priorities, and lack of good time management and decision-making skills are significantly more likely to be the causes of clutter than laziness or lack of motivation. As a former clutterer, I knew a lack of organizing skills was to blame in my case. However, I wasn’t exactly sure why so many others fought clutter, too. Writing for the site has taught me physical disabilities, attention disorder, sentimental personalities, a desire not to be forgotten, structural prohibitions, death of a loved one, shopping addictions, and dozens more reasons also cause clutter.We keep a list of topics to avoid because of the awful comments people leave on the site in response to posts containing them. We have written about these topics a few times after they made the “do not discuss” list, but we always do it when we know we’ll be at our desks all day to monitor the comments. In case you’re curious, this list includes Sandra Lee and her show Semi-Homemade Cooking, Pottery Barn, baby formula, and Saran Wrap. The list is longer than these four items, these are just the four that baffle me the most and I never knew they were hot-button issues before writing for the site.A good number of readers buy unitaskers after we feature them. Numerous manufacturers, after we featured their products as unitaskers, have reached out to us to say thank you for spiking their sales with links from our site. I’ve even received emails from manufacturers asking if we might feature their items as unitaskers. We’ve never featured a product a manufacturer wanted us to, but I admire the risk they take for reaching out to me. This all speaks to the adage that all news is good news. I don’t have any issues with people buying the unitaskers (as I’ve said before, I have a few of them), but I just find it interesting that our unitasker posts increase product sales. I never would have expected this when we started the feature. After learning this information, we stopped reviewing products that we don’t recommend because we would rather nothing be said about them instead of drawing attention to bad products.A few people have asked me over the years about the systems I use to write. Every post I’ve ever written has been constructed in TextEdit, I hand code or use preset snippets I’ve logged into TextExpander for all the links and formatting, and then I import the whole thing all at once into our content management system (WordPress). All images are edited in PhotoShop and I use a MacBook Pro. In addition to the MacBook screen, I also have a second Dell flat-screen monitor that looms over the left edge of my laptop. I type about 105 words a minute. I get ideas for posts from our staff, professional organizers I talk to at industry functions, and questions or suggestions from readers. Very, very few ideas come from press releases that constantly bombard my email account (maybe four or five a year).Routines are the answer for chores you hate to do. I’m someone who hated routines five years ago — I thought they killed creativity and stifled my life enjoyment. What I have grown to learn from reader suggestions over the past five years is that putting daily chores into a set routine actually provides me with more time to focus on the things I love to do and I enjoy the fun stuff more because I don’t have any responsibilities weighing on me. Routines are amazing and save me incredible amounts of time. I hope they work for you, too.Life is short, even if you live to be 102, and clutter shouldn’t keep you from enjoying the adventure. If something isn’t distracting you or causing you worry or frustration or making life unnecessarily complicated, it’s probably not clutter or disorganized. There isn’t a single standard for what is uncluttered and what isn’t. Only you know what is in the way of you achieving the life of your dreams.Posted by Erin on Mar 15, 2012 | Comments
Even as the company redirects efforts to HTML5 and narrows Flash's scope, it's also promising investments in Flash for 5 to 10 years.
Last year, Adobe Systems narrowed Flash Player's scope. It canceled the browser plug-in for mobile devices. It shifted development resources toward competing Web standards.
But it's not giving up on Flash.
In an attempt to patch up communications with Flash programmers, Adobe yesterday published a Flash Player road map that promises many improvements this year, with versions code-named Cyril and Dolores. Then the document adds, "We are also modernizing the Flash Player code base in order to ensure that the Flash runtimes meet the needs of developers over the next 5 to 10 years."
"Runtime" refers to the software foundation that executes programs written in Flash's ActionScript language. Flash Player is a browser plug-in that runs those programs on Web pages, but the same foundation built into Adobe's AIR software accommodates standalone programs, too.
That runtime has had a long run. In its heyday, Flash had a lot to offer. It eased cross-platform programming, spanning many browsers so programmers didn't have to worry about their differences. And it popularized features such as streaming video, vector graphics, Webcam and microphone support that were immature or missing from browsers.
The W3C's new HTML5 logo(Credit: W3C)
Now, though, two of its core markets -- gaming and premium video -- are the only areas where Adobe is pushing Flash hard now. That narrowed scope arrived last year as Adobe redirected Flash work toward competing Web standards such as Hypertext Markup Language, Cascading Style Sheets, and JavaScript programming.
Balancing act As Adobe expands beyond Flash, it's become active in standards development, begun adding products such as Edge and Muse that cater to Web programmers and designers, and acquired PhoneGap and TypeKit for a better collection of in-house technology.
It's a tough balancing act for Adobe. The more territory the company cedes to other programming methods, the less cross-platform leverage Flash programmers get.
Mobile apps for iOS and Android can be packaged with AIR, and Web apps often can't match the abilities of Flash apps and native apps. But Flash already has overstayed its welcome for many developers, and scaling back its future scope could well accelerate programmer defections.
Here's Adobe's current view of the balance between Flash and Web standards, according to the road map:
Increasingly, rich motion graphics will be deployed directly via the browser using HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript and other modern Web technologies. While the primary role of Flash Player on the Web remains the same, what it is used for will change.
Adobe believes that the Flash runtimes are particularly and uniquely suited for two primary use cases: creating and deploying rich, expressive games with console-quality graphics and deploying premium video.
A big part of the future Flash investments will come with an overhaul of its programming language, ActionScript, which is based on the EcmaScript standard that also underlies the Web's JavaScript.
Language changes Big changes coming with ActionScript "Next" govern how it will handle variables -- specifically, a shift toward the more formal "typing" direction that requires programmers to declare whether a variable is an integer, floating-point number, or other specific types of data. Typed variables are more of a hassle for programmers, but they enable programming tools to produce faster software.
It's not clear just how far Adobe will go, especially since it's evidently weighing the merits of strict typing requirements versus type inference, in which Flash would have the job of making its best guess and optimizing software from there. Either way, it's potentially a big change for programmers, though Adobe promises it shouldn't be as disruptive as past ActionScript changes.
Adobe also announced in the roadmap that it's scrapping Flash Player for Linux when using the NPAPI (Netscape Plug-in Application Programming Interface) mechanism. Flash will still be available through Chrome for Linux, which uses the Pepper API that Google developed.
Adobe's change means, for example, that Firefox on Linux, which supports only NPAPI, won't be able to use the Flash Player plug-in. Adobe ditched AIR for Linux last year. Flash Player using NPAPI will be available on Windows and Mac OS X.
Adobe released the road map in part because the company wanted to do a better job handling developers who've been whiplashed by recent Flash changes.
"We understand that we have damaged our trust and credibility with the community over how we have communicated some of the recent changes around the Flash platform and that trying to regain that trust is a long term process," said Flash evangelist Mike Chambers in a blog post yesterday. "We have to be clear and open around our plans around the Flash runtimes, and then demonstrate that we can follow up those plans with actions."
New Flash versions Adobe has a long list of features for Flash Player 11.2, due this quarter, for Cyril, due in the second quarter, and for Dolores, due in the second half of 2012.
Here's the list of features for Flash Player 11.2:
• Mouse-lock support
• Right and middle mouse-click support
• Context menu disabling
• Hardware-accelerated graphics/Stage 3D support for Apple iOS and Android via Adobe AIR
• Support for more hardware accelerated video cards (from January 2008) in order to expand availability of hardware-accelerated content.
• New Throttle event API (dispatches event when Flash Player throttles, pauses, or resumes content)
• Multithreaded video decoding pipeline on the desktop which improves overall performance of video on all desktop platforms
Here's the plan for Cyril:
• Keyboard input support in full-screen mode
• Improved audio support for working with low-latency audio
• Ability to progressively stream textures for Stage 3D content
• LZMA compression support for ByteArray
• Frame label events
And here's the plan for Dolores:
• ActionScript workers (enables concurrent ActionScript execution on separate threads)
• Support for advanced profiling
• Support for more hardware-accelerated video cards (from 2005/2006) in order to expand
• availability of hardware accelerated content
• Improved ActionScript performance when targeting Apple iOS
• Performance index API to inform about performance capabilities of current environment
• Release outside mouse event API
After that, things get vague, but Adobe promises performance increases, better hardware utilization (a longstanding gripe from Apple users), and better code features for those who must with complex programming projects and requirements for long-term support.
Adobe also released white papers on Flash and AIR security and its open-source Flex tool for developing Flash apps.
John Glenn, the enduring face of America's early space program, blasted off and into history 50 years ago today, kicking off NASA's bid to catch up with the Russians in the Cold War space race.
John Glenn climbs into the Friendship 7 Mercury capsule on Feb. 20, 1962, to await launch on America's first orbital spaceflight.(Credit: NASA)
Seconds away from liftoff, astronaut John Glenn monitored the instruments in his cramped Mercury capsule, listening intently as fellow astronaut Scott Carpenter called out milestones in the final moments of a tense countdown.
Earlier attempts to launch Glenn on America's first orbital spaceflight had been scrubbed by technical snags and bad weather. But this time around, the Atlas rocket, the Friendship 7 capsule, and the weather cooperated, clearing the way for the long-awaited, high-stakes attempt to reach orbit.
Millions across the nation and around the world hung on every word from mission control, gathered around black-and-white television sets and radios. Daily activity virtually ground to a halt while the drama played out in Florida.
In a blockhouse near the launchpad, legendary test conductor Thomas "T.J." O'Malley pushed a button to start the final launch sequence, saying softly "Good Lord ride all the way."
Carpenter famously added "Godspeed, John Glenn," and counted down the final 10 seconds while the nation held its collective breath.
"...five, four, three, two, one, zero," Carpenter said as the Atlas rocket, its main engine roaring and belching a brilliant plume of fiery exhaust, climbed away from Cape Canaveral.
"Roger, the clock is operating, we're under way!" Glenn called out, his heart rate climbing to a relatively modest 110 beats per minute.
It was 9:47 a.m., Feb. 20, 1962--50 years ago today--and America had a new hero.
Mercury Atlas 6 blasts off from Cape Canaveral, Fla.(Credit: NASA)
The Soviet Union had shocked the world on Oct. 4, 1957, when it successfully launched Sputnik, the world's first satellite. The Russians followed that triumph by launching Yuri Gagarin into orbit on April 12, 1961, the first human in space.
Under enormous pressure to catch up with the Russians on the high frontier, NASA launched Alan Shepard on May 5, 1961, and Virgil "Gus" Grissom on July 21. But both of those flights aboard modest Redstone rockets were suborbital, up-and-down missions lasting about 15 minutes each.
Capitalizing on their role as the early leader in what came to be known as the "space race," the Soviets launched cosmonaut Gherman Titov just a few weeks later on a 17-orbit mission that dwarfed NASA's accomplishments to that point.
"They beat us out. They gave us a double whammy," Carpenter said, recalling Glenn's flight 50 years after the fact. "Not only did they get the honor of the first man in space, but they sent him...into orbital flight. That was a double whammy for them. Who knew that better than Al Shepard? He was very disappointed that Yuri robbed him of the first-man-in-space title.... That only inspired all of us here to do better work."
Enter John Glenn and Mercury Atlas 6.
The clean-cut Marine Corps test pilot, veteran of 59 combat missions in World War 2 and 63 during the Korean War, was selected by NASA as one of the original seven Mercury astronauts.
While many at the time believed Shepard's selection to fly the first suborbital mission put him at the top of the astronaut hierarchy, it was Glenn who ultimately became the enduring face of America's space program, riding the Atlas rocket into American history.
"We needed someone to symbolize that we weren't going to stay behind in space," said John Logsdon, a space policy analyst and an expert on the U.S. space program. "This was after a very bad '61 with the threat of war over Berlin and Kennedy's administration slow getting started and the country's mood was not great.
"Glenn, I think, radiated a sense of competence and, if you want, 'American-ness' that made him kind of ideally suited for the role of the first U.S. person to go into orbit. He carried it off with such style, a combination of humility and grace."
The Atlas rocket, a converted intercontinental ballistic missile, had its share of problems during testing, which added drama to Glenn's flight. Glenn laughed when asked recently whether he was nervous about riding it for the first time.
"I think the first 18 or 20 Atlases that fired, I think they had a 45 percent failure rate, that's the figure I remember," he said. "The first time they took us (the Mercury 7 astronauts) down there to see a booster launch, we'd never seen a launch, and they took us down for a night launch and the thing blew at high Q at 27,000 feet right over our heads. It looked like an atomic bomb going off.
"Anyway, they came back and improved the whole thing and had several straight successes and had the problems worked out before I got on the thing. But it was something we were very concerned about at the time."
John Glenn, wearing a Mercury spacesuit, awaits launch.(Credit: NASA)
As it turned out, Glenn's Atlas performed flawlessly, boosting his Friendship 7 capsule to 17,500 mph in about 5 minutes and 20 seconds. When the capsule separated from the rocket, it was programmed to immediately turn around, putting its heat shield forward, in case of a problem that might force an emergency re-entry.
"Zero G and I feel fine," Glenn, now weightless, reported from orbit. "Capsule is turning around. Oh, that view is tremendous!"
Glenn's memory of that day remains razor-sharp, telling CBS News in an interview that "it seems more like a couple of weeks ago to me, because that fight was pretty well indelibly impressed on my memory back in that time."
Despite the fire and thunder associated with rocket launches, Glenn said the Atlas was "very gentle" at first because the thrust of the booster barely exceeded its weight. But as the propellants were consumed and the rocket got lighter, it steadily accelerated, pushing Glenn into his contoured seat with nearly eight times the normal force of gravity on the way to orbit.
"When I hit orbit up there, I said, I think it was 'zero G and I feel fine.' I think the next thing I said was 'that view is tremendous!' ... It was right after detachment from the booster, from the Atlas, that I turned around and it went immediately into retro attitude, which was nose down a little bit looking back along the flight path. I could look back clear across Florida and along the Gulf of Mexico, and it was beautiful. I couldn't believe the view."
Other than a relatively minor but persistent attitude control problem that prompted Glenn to fly the capsule manually, Friendship 7 performed smoothly as it raced around the planet, giving the astronaut spectacular views of the Earth below. He even enjoyed a salute from the residents of Perth, Australia, who turned on their lights as the capsule passed over.
But at the start of his second orbit, telemetry from a sensor indicated the spacecraft's heat shield was not locked in place. If the telemetry was correct, the straps holding the capsule's braking rockets in place were all that stood between Glenn and a fiery death during re-entry.
Glenn was not immediately told about the concern, an omission he believes was a mistake.
"There was some little chatter back and forth about did I hear any bumping on the spacecraft and things like that," Glenn recalled. "I know they were concerned they were going to rattle your cage up there and lead you to do something wrong. The best safety thing I thought was to give the astronaut every bit of information at the earliest possible time."
The shuttle Discovery takes off in 1998 carrying John Glenn on a second trip to orbit. At age 77, he becomes the oldest astronaut in space.(Credit: NASA)
Asked if he realized what was going on at the time, Glenn said "there was only one thing they could be talking about. And so I knew, but it was a little irksome they didn't just come out and tell me until later, just before retro fire."
After completing three orbits, Glenn headed back to Earth. He was told not to jettison the retro rockets in hopes the straps holding them in place would secure the heat shield, if it was loose, during the critical early moments of re-entry.
Approaching the West Coast of the United States, Glenn fired Friendship 7's three braking rockets one at a time and began his descent to splashdown in the Atlantic Ocean.
Flying manually to maintain stability, Glenn could see flaming debris flying past his window.
No one, Glenn included, knew whether the debris was the remnants of his retro rockets burning off or the heat shield itself.
"Seven, this is Cape," Mission Control radioed. "What's your general condition? Are you feeling pretty well?"
"My condition is good," Glenn replied to everyone's relief, "but that was a real fireball. Boy. I had great chunks of that retropack breaking off all the way through."
Glenn returned to a hero's welcome, meeting with President Kennedy at the White House and enjoying a ticker-tape parade in New York. The Mercury program ran its course and NASA transitioned to two-man Gemini spacecraft to perfect orbital rendezvous techniques before pressing ahead with the Apollo moon program.
Glenn wanted to fly again, but NASA management would not assign him to a flight. In 1965, Glenn got tired of waiting and resigned from NASA.
"I didn't know until many years later, when a biography of JFK came out, that he apparently had indicated to NASA that he'd just as soon I wasn't used again, at least not right away," Glenn told reporters at a news briefing February 17. "I don't know what his motivations were.... There had been so much national attention on us at that time that I suppose it could have been bad if something had happened on a second flight."
After a stint in private industry, Glenn went on to a distinguished career in the U.S. Senate and in the mid 1990s lobbied for a flight aboard the space shuttle. Then NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin ultimately gave his blessing and Glenn, then 77, blasted off a second time in October 1998 aboard the shuttle Discovery.
Despite the bigger windows on the shuttle, it was his first view of Earth during his four-hour 55-minute flight aboard Friendship 7 that remains the most vivid memory.
"Oh, I think, yeah, that was the one that was a shock," he said. "It wasn't so much the type of window you were looking out of, which was bigger, of course, on the shuttle, but it was the view you were looking out at. The first time you see that, it's sort of breathtaking."
Corrected at 5:30 a.m. PST: Correcting mission duration.
The W3C's new HTML5 logo(Credit: W3C) 
John Glenn climbs into the Friendship 7 Mercury capsule on Feb. 20, 1962, to await launch on America's first orbital spaceflight.(Credit: NASA) 
Mercury Atlas 6 blasts off from Cape Canaveral, Fla.(Credit: NASA) 
John Glenn, wearing a Mercury spacesuit, awaits launch.(Credit: NASA) 
The shuttle Discovery takes off in 1998 carrying John Glenn on a second trip to orbit. At age 77, he becomes the oldest astronaut in space.(Credit: NASA)