This Blog Is Dead
I have finally given up on this blog. R.I.P.
In its place I would like to introduce my new site, citrusboy.tumblr.com. I have been publishing for the past month “in beta,” and now it’s time to take off the wraps. It’s my very own tumblelog! Hooray!
What is a tumblelog, you ask? In essence, it is a blog without the hassle. It means posts that are shorter, but more frequent; mixed media rather than plain text; hyperlinks instead of personal rants. In other words, more fun for me as a publisher and you as a reader.
To learn more about the tumblelog concept, check out this outstanding introduction and tutorial over at Lifehacker.com. To set up your own, head to tumblr.net and choose a URL and a password. You’ll have a tumblelog up and running in about 10 seconds!
It’s so easy and addictive. In fact, Lilacmoon and George have frequently-updated tumblelogs as well. Add us all to your RSS reader, and enjoy!
MUNI goes from bad to worse
San Francisco has two* major public transportation systems: BART and MUNI.
BART is a commuter train that shuttles passengers along elevated tracks and through subway tunnels to and from the East Bay (Oakland, Berkeley, and several other cities east of San Francisco across the Bay Bridge), the San Francisco financial district, and the two major airports. It is remarkably on-time, fast, and–if your destination is downtown San Francisco–very convenient. These benefits come at a high price, though: some trips are over $7, and most trips across the Bay Bridge (the bulk of the commute) are over $3 each way.
MUNI is an all-pupose fleet of buses and streetcars that provides transit throughout San Francisco itself. A subway runs through the downtown stations; as trains exit the subway they become streetcars bound for various residential neighborhoods. Gas and electric buses run along a grid of routes that covers everything else. The fare is a flat $1.50 to go anywhere on any combination of routes, good for about 2 hours.
I’m generally happy with BART, but I tend to avoid MUNI at all costs. Its buses and trains are crowded and slow, and breakdowns and congestion in the subway cause huge delays. During one of my recent commutes, it was often faster to walk 2 miles home along a major street than to wait for a bus during rush hour.
MUNI apparently never recovered after the ridership decline that accompanied the dotcom crash in 2001. The frequency of buses and trains has been cut; fares have been increased twice in the last five years: first from $1 to $1.25, and then to $1.50. You’d think that after these drastic changes, and with a rebounding economy that the situation would be improving. But as the Chronicle reports today:
San Francisco Municipal Railway officials revealed Tuesday that service continues to slip and that the agency faces a $40 million-plus deficit next year… A year-end service report shows a troubling trend in which buses and streetcars missed their scheduled arrival times more frequently and were more crowded, forcing drivers to pass people up.
If you live in San Francisco you experience these problems with MUNI all the time, but it is sad to read that things are getting measurably worse. For a typical MUNI horror story, check out this Municide rant.
* Two useful transit systems, that is. I didn’t include CalTrain.
Psst — don’t tell anyone
Sound Money Tips has the inside scoop on the best time to buy airline tickets:
What’s the absolute best time to purchase a ticket directly from the airlines? Turns out it’s Wednesday from midnight to 1a.m. in the time zone of the airline’s “home base.” (For instance, Delta is headquartered in Utah and United currently calls Chicago home.)
via Lifehacker
United.com hates my computer
The United Airlines web site in general drives me nuts. The navigation is terrible, pages load slowly, and I can never find the flights I want. But this latest problem takes the cake: the entire site just doesn’t work, period. Well, sometimes it works. It’s a little complicated.
I’ve run into this problem again and again over the past couple weeks. Yesterday afternoon, for example, whenever I would try to log in with my Mileage Plus number and password, Safari would complain “cannot connect to server”. But the weird thing is that it was only my computer. On Richa’s computer the site worked fine. Why would only my computer fail to connect to this one particular web site? Switching to Firefox didn’t help. Restarting didn’t help. It made absolutely no sense.
Last night after some experimenting I discovered the cause. Safari would not connect to the server www.ua2go.com. Running “host” on the command line reveals a DNS problem. The host name resolves to two different IP addresses seemingly at random:
% host www.ua2go.com
www.ua2go.com has address 209.87.112.41
% host www.ua2go.com
www.ua2go.com has address 209.87.113.93
So when my browser tries to connect to www.ua2go.com, it looks for the corresponding numerical address and gets one of these two at random. Thanks to some caching by the operating system and web browser itself, this numerical address then sticks around for a while.
To make a long story short: one of these numerical addresses points to the correct server. The other address is wrong (perhaps an old server United migrated away from a few weeks back). By luck of the draw, my computer had referenced the bad address, cached it, and could not connect. Richa’s computer got the good address.
It’s hard to tell who is at fault here. As much as I’d like to blame United, I’m guessing it’s Comcast, my ISP. Comcast in fact has a history of DNS problems. A quick call to Comcast went nowhere: the rep actually tried to blame Apple for the DNS issue (“we don’t really know how to support Macs”, he said).
Arrrgh.
I guess I’ll just manually set the correct IP address in my /etc/hosts file and be done with it.
Subterranean rice field
Here’s an interesting tidbit from the latest Economist Tokyo briefing:
A converted bank vault deep beneath the heart of Tokyo’s financial district has been revealed as the unlikely site of a big agricultural breakthrough. In January Pasona, the company that owns the vault, announced that farmers had used it to cultivate the world’s first crop of hydroponic rice, grown without natural light, fresh air or soil.
The entire story is currently about halfway down this page.
Motorola SLVR released
What happens when you take Motorola’s astronomically popular RAZR and pack it into a tiny candy-bar chassis? You get the aptly named Motorola SLVR. After some delay it is now available in the US, with this exclusive deal from Cingular.
I’m tempted to upgrade, but only if Motorola has finally fixed its poor phonebook UI.
Christmas travel
After reading about Richa’s airport nightmares, my travel story is going to sound tame in comparison. But this one has a happy ending.
I arrived at O’Hare on what was a very busy Thursday night after Christmas. Luckily the weather was cooperating. But here’s the thing: I swipe my credit card at the ticketing kiosk, and the machine says, “You cannot check in. Would you like to be added to the standby list of a later flight?” Say what?
Turns out I had arrived at the airport just after the 30-minute cutoff. It was 4:55, and the departure was scheduled for 5:20. The security line was moving quickly, I had no baggage to check, and my gate was literally 10 steps past the x-ray machine. Plenty of time, right?
Nope.
My flight was overbooked and they had given away my seat! Apparently all bets are off if you arrive less than 30 minutes prior to departure. I got stuck on standby for the 6:30 to Oakland. And as luck would have it, this flight was also overbooked, and the standby list was already 10 deep. I joined the group of people that migrated from standby list to standby list, hoping to get a seat.
After a few failed standby attempts, a United employee took pity on me and issued a brand new ticket with a seat assignment. She even put me on an SFO flight, which was much more convenient than my original Oakland itinerary. Not a bad seat either: row 18 on a 757. I was her last customer before the end of her shift. A Christmas present, perhaps?
Thank you, Miss United Employee! (And really, how often can you say that?) And it gets better: I earned mileage on this new mystery ticket, pushing me over the 25,000 mark and into Premier status for 2006. Outstanding.
I was so happy to finally have a boarding pass that I didn’t mind the baggage delays that kept our plane stranded on the tarmac for over an hour. At least I was going home. All in all, I lost about 4 hours.
Moral of the story: check in online and arrive early!
