Pain in the gas (tank)

This would be a really, really good time to think about the way we use gas, cars, and energy in general. Last summer, I joked with some co-workers that if the price of natural gas went up, the price of firewood would, also. (How much wood would a woodchuck chuck... nevermind.) Sure enough, it did, because more people started buying wood stoves, or at least trying to heat their houses with more wood than other means, including gas or oil. Energy prices really are all connected, and the markets do shift together.

And it always goes down the same way. When gas prices ramp up, [insert local TV station here] runs the same list on how to save gas: check your tire pressure, combine trips, carpool, and my personal, all-time favorite: ride the bus.

And here's the problem with that: the bus is just plain broken, in the practical sense. It doesn't work for people who can afford a car and place any value on their time. I ride the bus regularly, but only as a result of specific circumstances, and for only a couple of destinations. The remainder of the time, it just doesn't work for me. And if it doesn't work for me, who does it work for?

One problem I see is that it's nearly impossible to provide adequate service with direct routes: you can't just run every possible route in every possible direction at intervals that constitute a usable system, which most people would consider a ten-minute interval. There's one solution: transfer stations. If you can change buses with minimal delay, transfers aren't that bad.

But the trick is to redesign bus routes around a spoke-and-hub alignment. The cost is that going anywhere means one or two transfers, but the benefit is that you really could go anywhere. Making transfer stations useful and attractive remains a task, but it's possible if we're prepared to rethink the bus. Making bus information available could mean a limited blanket of Wi Fi or other network infrastructure to pass route information where it's needed, down to the users on the street.

What's the alternative? Forecasts of gas at $5 per gallon this summer? The alternatives are not going to be cheap or easy. We're going to have to change the way we travel unless we're resigned to feel more "pain at the gas pump".

Critical Infrastructure

While on the way to class a couple of days ago, an interesting idea hit me, in part formulated out of a couple of class assignments I've given, and what I'm seeing in the list of references from other people. The idea is this: What if WikiPedia ever went down? Would student research grind to a hault?
This could turn into a commentary on the sad state of student research, the inability of "kids today" to differentiate between peer-reviewed journals, pop press, and the countless numbers of ego-driven, self-indulgent blather on millions of Web pages facilitated by access to a Unix box and a simple grasp of HTML. But not here, not now.
In a way, I wonder if WikiPedia could be considered an annotated Google-- it maintains a smaller list of links, but they're collected and commented upon, and in a way helps facilitate a more directed search than just plugging terms into a search engine. I still think it has a positive role, though not as a citation. I won't enter the debate about how accurate it is compared to a desktop encyclopedia, but for the tech articles I care about, it's not bad.
And it serves my other interest: it's the go-to page for synopses, analysis, and frame grabs on the latest episdode of Lost. All and around, it forms a critical infrastructure for geeks everywhere, and it helps out the kids, too.

Creature Comforts is way cool...

From the creators of my favorite plasticine characters comes Creature Comforts, a DVD of courtesy of the Pine Hills branch of the Albany Public Library. The great thing about library DVD's is that it's a relatively low-risk way to watch things you normally wouldn't watch. Or, at least to a full time student with kids, the $5 to rent a movie these days counts as something of a deterrent to experiment too much. If you borrow a dud, you take it out, and try something else (or else just pop open a cold one and make fun of it as it plays), and then there is the occasional gem. Watching this stuff makes me almost want to buy a plane ticket and head to the studio in Bristol.

The "Making of..." on the end of the DVD demonstrates how they match the recorded interviews to claymation mouth movements, via phoneme mapping between recorded interviews and a time index, which is later used to plan the movements of the figure's mouth. One sequence of two talking shrimp had 39 simultaneous movements. It was pretty cool.

Ok, back to work... Still a few dozen pages left to write before May.

Flocking High

I'm mildly annoyed about a couple of things, though that's hardly noteworthy in its own right. But at the moment, one issue is James Bleck and his "You're Beautiful" song. It turns out to be my 5-year-old daughter's favorite song. She often memorizes songs from playing in the radio in the car, and over the course of a couple of weeks, she memorizes the lyrics. (Albany stations have very short playlists.)

But in the course of playing my new James Bleck CD in the car, I discovered a bit after the fact, while my daughter was listening, that the CD version is a little different from the radio version. While on the radio, he's singing about "Flying High", the CD version has him "F-ing High". Naturally, my daughter immediately picked up on the difference, though I never played it in the car again.

But the next time it came up on the radio, she sang a slightly different line for the "Flying High" line, which sounded a little unsettling from a 5-year old, not to mention seemed to indicate some really bad parenting on my part. I immediately asked her what she just sang, to which she replied, "...and I was Flocking High..." {Sigh}

I'd like to just download the radio version from the Net and play that in the car from my MP3 player when the mood hits, but then I'd be illegally "Pirating" music, despite that I own a copy of the CD and would be willing to take my car key to the offending tracks (assuming I could locate it). If that isn't "Flocking High", I don't know what is.

AvantGo SucKs

I've been using the newsclipping site AvantGo for my Palm PDA for about 4 years now, and using a similar, OpenSource program Plucker for almost as long in parallel. The problem: there are key articles I like in AvantGo format not otherwise available on my Palm.

You see, I bought my Palm OS handheld in December 2001 after moving back to Jersey City in the post-9/11 days of commuting to NYC. In those days, the bus trip from Montclair increased from roughly 45 minutes per day to about 90 minutes, plus the uncertain subway ride where the train would stop suddenly in the tunnel for no apparent reason. Even after moving to Jersey City and riding on the PATH train, there were still odd events, and of course, the unsettling duct tape over all the old signs marked "World Trade Center". Nerves were on edge. In a way, having some little electronic gadget with me for entertainment did a lot to ease the tension. So I got a PDA.

I quickly learned about downloadable software, including offline web reading programs, and a couple of games. I worked out a way to post content, via AvantGo, from Palm-clipped web pages onto a web server I had rented space on. I used that methodology to edit my online Subway listings from my old TransitCat.com web site. I edited my homemade Wiki via my Palm, often from the subway. I created a Blog site and blog posting mechanism via AvantGo, so I could write my little old transportation blog while riding the subway or PATH train. My job had become so dysfunctional, stale and dead-end that the minutes on the subway and at home I could spend studying online tech articles and mobile computing were the only way to stay up to date and still feel employable in IT.

Then in the summer of 2004, I said the hell with it all, moved to Albany, and eventually committed to getting my PhD. I had written a lot of my PhD application essays on that same Palm PDA (the same one I have now, about 4 1/2 years old).

I use the same PDA as much as ever before, but in somewhat different ways. The Plucker reader is largely for academic and research papers I cut from the web, then into text, but the on-the-fly data compression can churn a 250K PDF into a 30K Plucker file in a couple of minutes, which can be read whenever I get a couple of minutes here and there.

Part of life is knowing when to move on and seek new experiences and new challenges. Living life sometimes means knowing when to move on and what to leave behind. I've shut down that site, because I haven't maintained it in a long time and the transit information is so old it's potentially hazardous to anyone who might try to depend on it. I've finally walked away from AvantGo, because the only thing I read on it is the occasional New York Times article. AvantGo's new pricing schemes have priced out most of the other journals I used to read, and it's a lot of overhead just to get the Times. I'm finding that the BBC is still free.

In a cloud

It's spring break, and I just stumbled across an interesting essay about tag clouds. It makes me think of all the stuff I feel like we should be discussing in our Information Science program in some form or another, be it in class, or over some kind of shared social setting, like Delicious, Fresh Roasted Coffee at Uncommon Grounds (no commercial plug intended, but feel free to contribute to the Upstate NY Wiki.

I'm still trying to type up all my paper notes, or those related to research and other pending tasks. So far, I've chosen the intermediate task of entering everything in OpenOffice documents, and then cleaning them up with spellcheck before posting them in the wiki. It's a huge overhead to retype handwritten notes. I've decided to try just typing notes into doc files to avoid the extra steps, with the assumption that the extra overhead in typing original notes is less than retyping my awful scribbling. So far this break, I'm doing neither. But the week is still young.

Really, I'm back to looking at papers assigned a few weeks ago, about 10% done, and due next week. I have absolutely no idea where I was going with a few of the topics I started writing about in (any of) these works. Heh. My goal is to finish at least two 6-page papers before Friday. That means I should have finished about one page in the time spent writing this. Does this sound familiar?
Seriously, it's all starting to come back, though I think I need the better part of the day to really get productive.

Spring Break!

It's finally here. Otherwise known as "the last chance to catch up before the end of the semester", it's a time to catch up on errands, household chores, papers, research, projects, and maybe get a little extra sleep before the last 3 weeks of the semester closes in. It's a little scary to think about how much work is left.

So far, the first day of Spring Break is half over, with just the start of a realization about how much work is actually needed. I spent a little time converting some of my reading to a Palm e-book format "Plucker". Now time to read it... :)