and i'm back

June 28, 2004 by Eric Richardson

Several long days of silence there... Thursday, very early in the morning, Kathy and I flew out of LAX and made our way to Minneapolis. There we met up with my grandparents and headed south, bound for a wedding in LeRoy, MN. I didn't have Internet access for a few days, which really wasn't that big of a deal, but I did have several things that I was going to mention here and now can't seem to remember once I have the opportunity.

Travelling afforded me the opportunity to get started on volume 2 of Neil Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, The Confusion. I'm actually about 600 pages in at this point. I felt like Quicksilver bogged down in the middle, but I haven't really felt that about The Confusion. The reading's been pretty quick and easy to follow (well, as easy to follow as you can be in a 2700 page series).

Yesterday Minneapolis airport conned me into getting excited by WIFI signs, but then it turned out to be a for-pay system. $6.95 got you a day's access, but that wasn't worth it to me since I was only going to be there and using it for a little over an hour. DNS lookups worked without ever signing up and authenticating, though, so if you could hide your data somewhere in there you could eek out a bit of a loophole.

Driving through Minneapolis yesterday we noticed a light rail line from town to (almost) the airport that seemed to be unusually full and well-staffed. I guessed that it had to be an opening weekend. A newspaper front-page in the airport confirmed that this was the opening weekend for the Hiawatha Line. The stations and cars looked really nice, and with the line eventually connecting the airport and the Mall of America, I think it should be able to carve out at least a tourist nich for itself. I don't know enough of Minneapolis to be able to say how it will do for commuters. They're using a fare policy similar to LA's, with no fare boxes but random inspections to ensure compliance. The Bombadier cars they're using seem a little shorter than the Siemens P2000 cars LA uses on the Gold and Green lines, but I can't seem to find length or seat information for either right off.

Lots more I could say about how rural that part of MN is, but I'll refrain for now. Many towns with populations under 1000. 20 miles to go get pizza, etc.

It's good to be back.

which is it Metro?

June 23, 2004 by Eric Richardson

I was just cleaning up my desk some and found a nice glossy bookmark-shaped "Metro Rail Bike Hours" card that Metro employees were handing out on Bike to Work day. When they handed me the card I didn't even look at it, since I'd read their Metro Bikes page online and ridden with my bike plenty of times before. Running across it just now, though, I took a look and found it very confusing.

First, the back of the card includes a "Bike Location Diagram" to help you understand where on the car you can ride with your bicycle. That's good. The first couple times I rode it took a bit to get the hang of where it was I needed to be going, especially on the Gold Line, where the open space is directly next to the driver doors. But look at the diagram. What is that? Are they trying to tell me that bike positioning is the same of the Red and Gold lines? Those cars are very different. On the Red Line a car might look like (excuse my poor ascii art):

[|||   ||||||||||   |||]
[|||   ||||||||||   |||]

A couple rows of seats, open space, more seats, open space, and a final few rows. A Gold Line car on the other hand looks like:

[-   |||||||  -^^-  |||||||   -]
[-   |||||||  -vv-  |||||||   -]

The area in the middle is pretty narrow where the car articulates. The proper place to have a bike is to sit in one of the end seats with the bike across the driver door. Obviously that rules out the front of the front car, but since they run generally two car trains on the Gold Line that leaves you with the back of the front car, and both front and back of the back car.

How you're supposed to infer any of that from the diagram they give you, I have no idea.

Secondly, on the front of the card is a chart of the hours you can't take a bike on rail. Basically it's during rush hours in the commute direction, and you can see the chart at the aforementioned Metro Bikes page. Unlike the bikes page, though, the card puts the bi-drectional arrows on Gold Line as well, making it appear that no bikes can go on the Gold Line between 6:30 - 8:30 and 4:30 - 6:30. That's simply incorrect, and has to be a graphical mistake on their part.

In summary, the card was a good thought gone wrong.

yikes that's fast

June 22, 2004 by Eric Richardson

I just went to download a new kernel and was in shock over how fast it went, so I had to go and download it again. Check this out (wget output shortened because I feel like it):

[JPL (eric@gonzo)-([Tue June 22  3:38pm])]
~: wget ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/linux-2.6.7.tar.gz
--15:39:01--  
Resolving ftp.kernel.org... 204.152.189.116
Connecting to ftp.kernel.org[204.152.189.116]:21... connected.
Logging in as anonymous ... Logged in!
==> SYST ... done.    ==> PWD ... done.
==> TYPE I ... done.  ==> CWD /pub/linux/kernel/v2.6 ... done.
==> PASV ... done.    ==> RETR linux-2.6.7.tar.gz ... done.
Length: 44,006,970 (unauthoritative)

100%[====================================>] 44,006,970     4.62M/s    ETA 00:00

15:39:11 (4.53 MB/s) - `linux-2.6.7.tar.gz.1' saved [44006970]

Ten seconds to download a 40+MB kernel. At that speed it's going at over 1/3 the top speed of my ethernet card. Wow.

movie time

June 22, 2004 by Eric Richardson

Yesterday on the way back from Union Station I made my way over to the LAPL Central Library. I intended to go check out a book, but it wasn't there so I wandered around the DVDs a bit, looking for something to watch. I'm pretty sure there is no unifying principle behind what DVDs they do or do not have. The selection is very random, and all of a sudden they'll have 6 or 8 copies of a movie you've never even heard of.

But anyway, I ran across a copy of In Like Flint. I had seen bits before, but never the whole movie, so I picked it up and watched it last night. Good times. Fully worth the bike ride over. Since rentals are free I'm hoping to start taking chances on their more random selections and go for quantity, if not necessarily quality.

rail classics

June 21, 2004 by Eric Richardson

Pulling out of Union Station on the Gold Line you pass a small rail yard full of classic passenger cars. Today, however, the yard was empty.

Curious, I did a little research.

I'm pretty sure the Rail Excursions car is one I normally see there. Their special itineraries page lists a June 22-23 trip from LA to Seattle, so perhaps it's off getting readied for that.

Another candidate is the Overland Trail, a car which normally runs LA to San Diego, but which Thursday will be leaving on a trip to Portland. I would imagine this trip would include a few other cars as well, so that may be an explanation.