staying informed

This is probably not relevant to any of those who actually read this site, but I’ll write it anyway. I don’t think I’ve written about this yet. The MTA does maintenance on the lines on weekends, late nights, and weekly. They have had an email alert (similar to straphangers alerts) for a while now, but that was only for weekend changes.

They recently added weekday alert notices. These are only for planned outages and which does not help for sudden work or train malfunction or whatever else is happening during the week.

I used to get the straphanger notices. I stopped reading them as I get too much email (I’ve been paring down. It’s a work in progress). I mentally think of these mta notices as “new” and I changed my mangement of that sort of email so it is a little more “in my face” and hopefully I’ll start paying more attention. As some track work was recently conducted on my portion of the F line, I was pleased to find that I actually read these, found them relevant, timely, and easy to read. I think that all of these are useful and I look forward to when I can put in the lines, stations, and times I routinely travel on and receive incredibly customized reports. It would further be awesome to be able to query the system and say “I’m at station X now, what’s doing between here and there?”

I’ll keep dreaming.

Also, if it is relevant to you, did you fill out a report card? I admit that the interface is nasty, but maybe the results will end up useful. What was that about the dreaming? ;)

a holiday

at Horseshoe CurveMy Uni is on a two-day fall “holiday” so that the undergraduates go home and vote. It also means that my schedule has been slightly altered. Has that enabled me to get all the items (work, work, school, home, knit) completed I planned on? Of course not.

This photo is from the HorseShoe Curve in Altoona, Pennsylvania and was taken on 04 July 2005. I had only had my camera a short time when I took this photo. I hope that one day we return and I can try again. :)

Train!

Boston & Maine RR Engine #4268The first day back after a three day weekend is always rough. With the grey and drizzle outside, not to mention five days, it’s been a douzy. Thus I’ll be a bit brief in the writing and dazzle you a picture. While on our holiday this past August through Maine and a bit of the North East, we swung (very briefly) through North Conway, NH and looked at a few penguins and trains. As I recall that was a grey and rainy day too so it was nice to see two of my favourite things. I’m slowly slogging through all the email, rss feeds, and even photos from that trip. It’s been a long month and I hope to catch up on things before next year (choose your calendar wisely). ;)

getting to the plane on time…

We often have odd conversations at the yontif dinner table. My inlaws will soon spend a few days in Iceland (I’m jealous) so the discussion somehow degraded into how difficult it is in New York to get to the airport by train.. as in my FIL commented how amazed he was that in London he disembarked and got right on the Tube.

Tonight I overheard a girl debate how to get to JFK. Taking the A all the way or taking the AirTrain from Jamaica. She complained how expensive both were. (For the record I didn’t think it was super cheap to Heathrow, but definitely better than a taxi!)

As I am sitting down now (more or less) for the first time in a few days … here is a link to the AirTrain .. (I’m too tired to look up bus schedules for LGA or remember how to get to Newark) What do you think? Is NYC a pain to get to the airport? My inlaws always insist on driving us if they’re available. From where we live in Brooklyn it is a royal pain… if you want to go by public transportation. Maybe one day I’ll rant on how Robert Moses helped to create this wonderful car-laden mess we’re in. One day. I wish it were today, but I have another paper to write…

Lastly apparently the MTA has launched a trip planner all their own. http://tripplanner.mta.info/ will hope to compete with HopStop and the maps/schedules/transfer routes I keep in my brain. One day I’ll share that too… darn it, this paper isn’t writing itself … BTW hopstop added route for LONG ISLAND. In that I can put addresses such as my high school and my old house and get walking directions. That it knew my home address is so wonderful for me… Ok back to that paper, oy, what happened to better written posts here? Oh well….

Montreal metro

Just a short post about the Montreal Metro. I liked it. Lots. We stayed in Laval so it was very convenient for us to park at the newly opened Montmercy station and take the train into “the city”. It was incredibly quiet (due to the rubber wheels) and made for very pleasant knitting (much to E’s chagrin).

I only have three un-blurry photos to share.
[photopress:monkey_metromontreal.jpg,thumb,pp_image] [photopress:pg_metromontreal.jpg,thumb,pp_image] [photopress:train_montmercy.jpg,thumb,pp_image]

E took several very wonderful photographs (with his new fish eye lens) and when he actually uploads them (and restarts tomcat on his server) I will link to them here.

In drafting this very short post I discovered the Montreal by Metro site and wish I had seen it before we left!