Posted by ESP on Wednesday, 28 September 2011
Tags: Garage Door, Garage Doors, Garage Door Opener, Garage Door Repair, Garage Door Replacement, Garage Door Installation, Garage Door Service, garage door prices
The history of the garage door is very much the history of American travel.
From horses to buggies to what was then called the "horseless carriage", mostly jokingly but often tinged with awe, the changes in modes of human transportation in the United States of America are reflected in the buildings and doors that housed these technologies.
Back when travel meant simply walking, or at best, riding a horse, storage spaces for the technology of travel included open fields, a post with some rope, or at best a barn. As people become more sophisticated and often moved to 'large' (for the times) cities, these storage areas changed, too. They became more efficient, often communal, storing many horses for an entire block of inhabitants.
Then the buildings needed to grow again, as people moved from simply horses to horses and carriages. This was the preferred form of travel for many generations, and people stored their 'buggies' in barn-like structures, with heavy doors that swung out, often done in a Victorian or cottage style.
When people finally switched to driving cars, they kept these out of home structures, and maintained the french-derived name "garage". But as the technology for automobiles improved, so did the technology for their homes. Electricity and lights were installed. Eventually, doors worked via garage door openers, which could be flipped on or off.
Then we went to a remote system, where one could press a button and have a garage door open automatically.
As time pushed inextricably forward, so do our technologies. What will come next in the world of vehicles? How will our storage structures change to meet demand? How will opening technologies shift in the coming decades and generations? We will just have to see.
Posted by ESP on Friday, 23 September 2011
Tags: Garage Door, Garage Doors, Garage Door Opener, Garage Door Repair, Garage Door Replacement, Garage Door Installation, Garage Door Service, garage door prices
The garage door opened. She rolled down the window, letting the moist air seep in. She leaned a little forward and breathed deeply, but the air was so heavy, so humid, it was work to breathe it back out again.
At this time of night, a warm, pink haze melted everything out of focus. She thought the car next to them in the parking lot was pulling away, until she realized they had started to drive. Disoriented, she looked over to him to situate herself.
He was young, with wavy brown hair that rippled away from his face. He seemed uncomfortable in his faded jeans and green track jacket, collar folded upward, as if someone else had dressed him. She noticed his worn, black Converses, and then noticed how his long foot almost eclipsed the pedal.
“So you don’t like driving much, then?” he asked, before he pulled out onto the highway. A bent, yellow metal sign next to them read: “HEAVY MERGE AHEAD.”
I’ll say, she thought.
“No, I don’t. Especially not over the Bay Bridge.”
very pretty. I loved it, from open to close. The descriptions are all wonderful and vivid, I felt many of the descriptions had symbolic meaning, that they were doing the work of telling the story.
I wished for a tiny bit more about the protagonist, if only to get a slightly more clear picture of why she didn't exactly want to go home. One sentence, one clause would have done. I'm guessing her reluctance to talk about the bridge means something traumatic happened on it, but I'm not sure. I bet you want that ambiguity, but it frustrated me, a little.
I really liked the driver. He seemed so wise. Also- who know's what's down there? His cheek twitched.
Funny.
A lot of really great lines like that. "The seagull was still another conversation away." Great.
Thanks for writing this, I really enjoyed it.
Posted by Erica on Thursday, 22 September 2011
Tags: Garage Door, Garage Doors, Garage Door Opener, Garage Door Repair, Garage Door Replacement, Garage Door Installation, Garage Door Service, garage door prices
What do you believe are the best ways to reduce
stigma against persons with mental
disorders? How might the belief that mental
disorders are genetic, biological disorders
help to reduce stigma? How might this belief contribute to stigma?
The ability to ascribe a person’s actions to their
own conscious desire and decision to act that way is one of the cornerstones of
feeling able to blame that person for
their bad behavior. As Hinshaw and Stier point out, much of the stigma regarding people with mental illness
stems from others blaming them for their deviant behavior. If more people
became aware that many severe mental illnesses are genetic, biological
disorders, and therefore beyond the sufferer’s conscious decision, they may be
less likely to blame the sufferer for
their behavior.
However, increasing awareness of the biological
factors of disorders may have ill effects on the public’s perceptions of the
mentally ill, as well. They may then perceive patients as “unfixable”, unlike a garage door which can undergo garage door repair, and
therefore permanently dangerous, and thus less deserving of time and effort to
treat them.
However, I believe that stigma is not only a
cultural problem. As Hinshaw and Stier briefly mention in their discussion of
the origins of stigma, many people consider the mentally ill outside their
‘ingroup’, that is, the people they are morally obligated to treat with
altruism. They point to the evolutionary tendency to dehumanize people we do
not consider “like us”. And not only are such outsiders not bestowed with
altruism, humans also have a hardwired tendency to want to outright punish anyone who violates the norms of
the customs of their ingroup. Such a tendency makes sense from an evolutionary
standpoint –cheaters and non-cooperators in a group who violate the rules must
be punished in order to maintain a culture of non-cheating and rule adherence,
and therefore mutual benefit from cooperation. But in this day and age, this
tendency to make moral judgments in such a way often leads to unnecessary bias
and stigma against people who cannot help violating the norms of society.
So not only are the genetics and biology of the mentally ill
contributing to the stigma problem, everyone’s
genetic tendencies are exacerbating the problem.
Posted by ESP on Wednesday, 21 September 2011
Tags: Garage Door, Garage Doors, Garage Door Opener, Garage Door Repair, Garage Door Replacement, Garage Door Installation, Garage Door Service, garage door prices
West is on his bed, in the garage behind the windowful garage doors. listening to music for the spare minutes he has between shifts. He’s barely gotten a moment’s peace since the MSS 245 three cycles ago, and any downtime he has is spent collapsed in bed, dozing with his headphones on so he doesn’t miss the next shift. He hasn’t read anything fun at all since the 245, and Doc Kaas is refusing to even acknowledge his presence at all, let alone talk about what neural atypicals are or what kind of danger West could be in.
“Shut up,” was the only answer he’d gotten. And a lot of getting kicked out of the critical care unit. When the cycle change notice blares in his speakers, five minutes to Charlie, he opens his eyes and quickly hides his best projects under the mattress before slipping out the door. He’s decided to keep working on the watch, and doesn’t want it to get messed up. Some of his shipmates have broken in before. It used to be his birthday present every year, and Republic Day, and First Mission weekend: break into Baby Cocksucker’s room and mess with his stuff, leave him old high-freq guns and condoms “for his own good”. Someone once rigged a bit of putty explosive to his desk drawer.
They can razz him all they want, but the day T-Wing broke his homemade glass-ops telescope (and his nose) was the worst day of his young life. He pitched such a fit that Bridges iced his maths and reading tutor as punishment, and it was the last day West ever had lessons. And it was the beginning of a new era, when all the poxy engineers and marketeers and dipsticks on the Zeester realized: they could take off the kiddie gloves and really fuck with the little kid cause nobody was going to say anything about it.
So he keeps his stuff locked up and hidden, and has extra hack-proof protection on his garage door. First Mission weekend was just around the corner, after all.
Posted by esp on Friday, 16 September 2011
Tags: Garage Door, Garage Doors, Garage Door Opener, Garage Door Repair, Garage Door Replacement, Garage Door Installation, Garage Door Service, garage door prices
The Sagara family Springsun Equinox Celebration transcends its reputation within the first minute, and Hoshi grows more self-satisfied in each minute thereafter. Such effort to reach the opportunity of this most consequential stage, and already such visceral (if nonessential) payoff. Lady Effie Sagara, for all her underhanded machinations, is peerless in the creation of perfect atmosphere. This may prove to be the best sunrise of Hoshi’s life.
The manse is immense, of course, but the celebration is being held entirely in the foyer of the East wing: a garden-like room of many levels, fountains, and flowers; twin sweeping staircases lead to what must be small entertaining rooms along the balcony. The surfaces of the room are smooth, almost soft in the green and yellow light. Clean rectangular lines and circular windows prevail; the decorative patterns along the ceiling and moulding are delicate and complex, but orderly. The garage doors match the motif of the house splendidly.
Drinks float across the marble floor beneath tawny, adolescent servers. The music is inescapably rhythmic, but also richly melodic: driven by the sweet falsetto of a live Nightengale youth, violins, bowed guitars, chimes, and lightly plucked piano. A few married couples orbit around the floor, and the chandeliers seem to rotate in tandem, sending bars and discs of prismed light slowly drifting across the partygoers.
And what partygoers. Hoshi’s face grows tense with the excitement of it. The Sagara family is precisely tasteful in demonstrating its enormous wealth, but no pretense is made with regards to their political influence. The Lord Commander’s Deputy himself is present; Lord Ojai is a crisp, extremely good-looking man with a charming laugh and undeniable stage-presence, and seeing his interactions with various lords and ladies of the court cements Hoshi’s impression of him as the real seat of power on Imperial Ryujin.
