Well, that was certainly an eventful trip.

I took Tobias for a nice nourishing refill, which went quickly and smoothly, dropped Basic Instinct off at the Block[buster], and plotted a course directly to Boulder for Tobias's bath. (There's just this one wash on Canyon that I really like. It's manually operated, but I find that I prefer the aesthetic of spraying with the hose myself to simply driving it through a machine.)

Intersection of South Boulder Road and the Table Mesa Park-N-Ride: Car directly in front of me... driving through intersection. Car from freeway exit ramp, turning left. Car directly in front of me, headed directly on a collision course into turning car.

Cheesy attempt at ASCII graphic:

        |    |     N -->
        |    |
Park ---      ---------
N            /<--Turning car 
Ride        /      I-36 exit ramp
           v   
     ---    ^  ---------
        |   |<--Car which hit turning car
        |     |
        |     |
  S     |     |
 Bldr   |   ^ | 
 Road   |   |<--Tobias
        |     |

Ok, so that's one pathetic little ASCII picture. But at least I tried! :)

Car in front of Tobias enters intersection, BANGS into car which is turning left, leaving both cars in the middle of the intersection, blocking both lanes of westbound traffic.

Tobias comes to a complete and semi-permanent stop. Bitscape brain: "Whoa. Totally unexpected, man."

The white care (the one making the left turn) took more major damage than the one going straight. White car's door was bashed in on the driver's side. Brown car (which was going straight), appeared to have taken minor bumper damage.

Bitscape's brain still in a state of: "Holy shit! I am very glad that wasn't me!"

Driver emerges from brown car. Driver in white car, an elderly woman, appears to be definitely shook up emotionally, and possibly injured. Does not exit from vehicle for the duration of Bitscape's presence.

Bitscape's next thought, as his mind begins to re-stabilize: "Great. Now is the time a cell phone might be useful."

Almost immediately after that thought passes through his brain, someone emerges from one of the cars to the rear with phone in hand, speaks briefly with those involved and makes a call.

At this point, Bitscape is still sitting in his car, slightly dazed by the whole experience. Individual with the cell phone approaches Tobias, hails Bitscape, asks if Bitscape is in a hurry to be anywhere, and if not, then it would probably be a good idea to stick aronud and be a witness. Well, given that all potential avenues of exit were obstructed anyway, it wasn't like I was going anywhere anyway. Besides, I had no hurry.

A witness. Right. A Witness! A witness? "What the hell did I just witness?" Of course, it made perfect sense. Since I was the one most directly in the line of sight of what happened, I should have been the perfect witness. Of course, I knew what I had just seen happen. But upon realizing that I was going to become a witness, the question I knew would be the most relevant had already gone blank in my brain: What color was the traffic light when it happened?

Doh! I honestly didn't remember. I didn't even think to look. I had just been driving along, letting my brain go on auto pilot, the "driving the car" process running in the background. Somewhere along the way, the driving daemon had terminated abnormally, but failed to save to the hard drive any information about its state upon exit. The memory which had held the crucial variable was no longer allocated.

It didn't take very long for a cop to arrive. He surveyed the situation, spoke with the drivers of both vehicles involved, and collected some information from them. At this point, Bitscape was standing next to his own car, having taken cues from everyone eles involved, who implicitly marked their respective roles in the situation by standing next to their own vehicles.

As expected, the officer came to me, and asked what had happened. I described the sequence of events as well as I could remember them. Then, the question I knew would be coming: "What color was the light?"

I told him I honestly didn't remember. He was like, "How far away were you when this happened again?" I estimated that I must have been 30-40 yards, somewhere beneath the freeway overpasses. The light would have easily been within my visual range. I felt like an idiot.

The officer took down my name, address, and phone number, thanked me for sticking around, and proceeded to go and interview the other bystanders.

Paramedics were arriving on the scene. The officer directed the driver of the less damaged vehicle -- the one directly in front of me -- to move her car out of the way into the nearby park n ride. He said I could go ahead and go through the intersection, and be on my way. I did so without hesitation.

What a lousy witness I must have made.

The driving daemon was restarted, and I drove Tobias to the car wash without further incident. The car wash was relatively busy when I arrived. All but one of the alcoves were in use. I took the remaining one, but its vacuum was broken. I decided Tobias could forego the vacuuming this time, and proceeded immediately with the exterior wash.

I think I'm getting slightly more efficient at it. I end up inserting less extra quarters each time, I think. I haven't kept detailed accounts of how much I've spent each time.

I returned home, passing the same area where the exception occurred. I looked for traces of the event, but could see no signs of the unfortunate mishap which had happened just a short while before. Everything had been cleared away, and traffic was flowing normally.

I cursed myself for the Nth time for not bothering to note the state of the light. Next time, the daemon should at least do a core dump when it exits abnormally. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

As I drove home, I thought and thought about it, trying to replay every detail in my mind. I still couldn't remember the exact state of the light, but the more I thought about it, the more I believed it must have been red.

Even though I couldn't remember the light, I was able to recall the last few conscious thoughts which occured to me when my brain realized the immanent collision just before it happened:

Why doesn't that car stop. I'm slowing down. I'm stopping. The car in front of me should be stopping too. It isn't stopping. Why isn't it stopping? Stop the car. Stop the car. White car entering intersection. Turning left. Stop the car. Why isn't that car stopping?!?

Segmentation fault.

I deduce from these last semi-conscious thoughts, that the light was most likely red. The red light being such a routine occurance that my brain did not even think of or process it as such. The signal went directly to my nourons, making my foot hit the brake, without my brain even realizing it was doing so. The drived process was not logging verbosely.

This would corroborate my memeory of not needing to make any extra effort to slow down or stop after it happened. If the light was red, then I was already stopping. I think that was the case, anyway.

I suppose this last recollection would be something analogous to grepping through /proc/kcore in search of relevant bits of information. Possibly there, but certainly not very reliable after the memory has been freed.

Oh well. There's my big adventure for the day. Eat it up, content vultures.