Irony, defined,

published at 2:08am on 08/16/06, with No Comments

Let it never be said that the US government doesn’t have a sense of humor:

Such were the personal items seized from the remote Montana shack of Theodore J. Kaczynski, known as the Unabomber, that will be sold soon under order of a federal judge in an effort to pay off a $15 million restitution order.

[…]

Last month, the government proposed an online auction of the personal items, with the proceeds going toward the restitution. Judge Burrell approved that plan on Thursday, despite some objections from Mr. Kaczynski.

Filed under: Observations, with No Comments

From Point A to Point B,

published at 9:08am on 08/14/06, with 5 Comments

I love traveling by train.

I love travel in general, and I love airports (the latest brouhaha in the airports notwithstanding) and I love the feeling of knowing that you are in the process of getting to where you’re going almost more than actually having gotten there, but in any event, I really do love to travel. There is something about traveling by train, however, that I find so much more relaxing and fundamentally more intimate than flying, that I will wax on and on about it to anyone who will give me the time to open my mouth.

So it is with great bewilderment right now that I see that Amtrak has done nothing in the past several years, as fuel prices have gone up and as air travel has gotten more and more frustrating, to try to lure more people away from the skies. There is the argument that their Acela service was trying to do just that – by catering to business people who want to bop easily between Boston, New York and DC – but I am talking about trying to make it significantly cheaper than flying between any of those cities and actually trying to make some kind of end-run around the commuter airlines, rather than just sitting back on a sagging infrastructure with an on-time rate so abysmal that even I, the biggest proponent of rail travel around, am tempted to suggest that people fly because really, it’s a crapshoot when your train is actually going to show up.

We are, of course, talking about the short, inter-city trips such as are popular in the Northeast of the United States, or perhaps down the coast of California. Nobody is suggesting that we all hop a magic train from New York to London, because as cool as that would be, I suspect that it would be rather difficult to build (though maybe someone can do a hydrofoil, a la the QE2 on drugs). No, what I’m talking about is the fact that in order to get from one city to another in the 3-5 hour range, it is often more expensive to take the train than it is to fly. Take the one-hour flight from New York to Boston, for example. While the flight itself is only an hour, it will take about an hour of travel time to get to the airport, and an hour waiting around at the airport as someone sniffs your shoes and makes sure that you’re not carrying any shampoo. With another hour on the other end for travel from the airport, you’re talking about a four hour ordeal to get from point A to point B. Compare that, with train travel, which features approximately the same amount of travel time, where almost all of the travel is a serene voyage up the coast (serene other than the large man who spent most of the last trip sleeping on my shoulder, but I feel like that is a peril of any modern day travel, save the private jet or what have you), and it’s a wonder to me that anyone would voluntarily take a plane between these cities. Except of course, for the price, which is always, always, always a consideration, alas.

And then there is the bus. Oh the bus. I refuse to take buses any more, ever since my last experience on a Greyhound where, 20 minutes after getting on the road we pulled off into a Greyhound repair depot and had to wait to switch buses because “the brakes aren’t working too well.” Which is probably to Greyhound’s credit, since I’m sure that if we were on the Chinatown bus, we would probably have just barreled up the highway in hopes that we would lose enough momentum to run gently into the curb by the time we hit the city. The bus is, however, cheaper than dirt and is thus the de facto option for the budget-conscious among us.

Indeed the problem is that there really is no mid-range cost option for inter-city travel. There is the bus (cheap and horrible) and there is Amtrak or flying for six times the cost, and there is nothing else. Here is the perfect opportunity for Amtrak to fill a void in travel and probably pack every train that they run up and down the east coast. To be purely opportunistic, they can even take advantage of the recent air scares and pitch themselves as the safer, more relaxing alternative to all that bullshit you have to deal with at the airports – I’m thinking something like “Amtrak, bring all the shampoo you want.”

In fact, the one leg that I have found to be the perfect travel corridor in the Northeast is the trip from New York to Philadelphia. It has three differently priced ways to get you between the two cities, spaced somewhat appropriately (though as always, Amtrak tops out the high end of the range that I think they should be offering). At the low end, again, is the bus, always a ridiculous option, but cheap at $10 each way. At the high end is Amtrak, the comfortable option that knocks an hour and a half off the bus travel time, but includes a six-fold price increase. And in the middle, coming in at the lower-end, but still twice the cost of the bus, is the regional commuter rail service that takes exactly the same amount of time as the bus but features a city-to-city rail-only comfortable ride for not nearly the premium that Amtrak demands.

Amtrak may argue that they’ve catered their offerings to business riders in the past several years, and that is where they are going to make the bulk of their money, and we could probably argue that I’m comparing Amtrak’s business service to the airlines’ commuter service anyway, which is clearly a business-level service. And one could also argue that if I’m such a fan of rail travel then I should be willing to pay the premium for what I say is a more enjoyable experience anyway, and that I should stop my whinging. The thing is, without having looked too much into the economies of running a railroad, I feel like there must be a way to put rail travel somewhere in the category of high-end whim. That is, if it only cost me $40 or $50 to hop on a train to Boston tomorrow, I would be much more likely to do it and head out of town for the weekend. But with costs up at twice that amount each way, it is unlikely that I will be doing this kind of travel just for the fun of it. There must be some point at which the price comes down so much that more people like me will start to ride the train more and will thus make up for the loss ticket revenue in volume.

Now this isn’t to say that I want the railroad to lose money – though since the airlines are getting a bailout and the national highway system is subsidized, I don’t see why everyone gets their panties in a bunch about the railroads getting subsidies as well, and maybe that’s the larger question. I just want to not feel like I’m getting completely ripped off every time I head to Penn Station.

So come on Amtrak, bring me on home.

Filed under: Observations, with 5 Comments

Migrating from Blogger to WordPress,

published at 4:08am on 08/10/06, with No Comments

As a birthday present to our dear friend Dawn, I helped her move her Blogspot blog over to her very own WordPress installation on her very own domain (hosted by the friendly folks over at FictCo, who happen to include me). For the most part, this was a fairly easy operation, especially with the assistance of the two fantastic resources that I found out there that cover just such a migration, as well as the Blogger importing tool that is built in to the latest version of WordPress.

There is one little trick to the WordPress importer, however – apparently Blogger posts don’t have titles, and as such, the title of each of the posts was set as the Blogger post id, which just looked silly. So I hacked up this little script that would, given a tab delimited text file consisting of a post ID and the body of the post, grab the first line of the post and with some magic, spit out a line of SQL that would update that post with the new title (and the appropriate post slug).

Some rules that it uses to build the title from the first line of the post:
– Lines that are in all caps are assumed to be titles already, so keep them in their entirety
– Other lines should be limited to 9 words (an arbitrary number that seemed right)
– If there is punctuation in that first line, everything up to that punctuation is the title
– There need to be at least 5 characters before the first punctuation mark (to avoid things like a “D.C.” in the first line getting truncated to “D.”
– Strip out all HTML from the first line

Anyway, this code is really hacky, and I take no responsibility for it, but I thought someone else out there might be able to use it.

First, the code to get the posts out of the database:

% mysql -u DB_USER -pPASSWORD -e 'SELECT ID, post_content FROM wp_posts' DB_NAME > posts.txt

Next, the script itself, saved as “build_post_titles.pl”

#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w

use strict;

open(POSTS, 'posts.txt') or die('Could not open posts');

while () {
        chomp;
        my($id, $body) = split /\t/;

        $body =~ s/<.*?>//g;

        $body =~ /^(.*?)\\n/s;

        my $firstline = $1 ? $1 : $body;

        $firstline =~ s/\\n//g;

        if ($firstline =~ /[a-z]/) {
                $firstline =~ s/^(.{5,}?)([.!?]+)(.*)/$1$2/;

                my @firstline = split / /, $firstline;
                my $count = $#firstline > 8 ? 8 : $#firstline;
                @firstline = @firstline [ 0 .. $count ];
                $firstline = join ' ', @firstline;
        }

        $firstline =~ s/\'/\'\'/g;
        $firstline =~ s/^\s+//;
        $firstline =~ s/\s+$//;

        my $slug = $firstline;
        $slug =~ tr/A-Z/a-z/;
        $slug =~ s/\s+/-/g;
        $slug =~ s/[^-a-z0-9]//g;

        if ($firstline !~ /^\s*$/) {
                printf("UPDATE wp_posts SET post_title='%s', post_name='%s' WHERE ID=%d;\n", $firstline, $slug, $id);
        }
}

close(POSTS);

Next, running the script:

% perl build_post_titles.pl > update_posts.sql

Finally, running the code against the database:

% mysql -u DB_USER -pDB_PASSWORD DB_NAME < update_posts.sql

And that's that. Hope this is somewhat useful.

And for anyone else looking for musings, on life and such, more of that coming soon.

Filed under: Technology, with No Comments

The role of family,

published at 9:08am on 08/01/06, with 2 Comments

Recently, a discussion around the assistance offered by certain family members to one of their siblings (or the relative lack thereof) inspired this addition to an age old adage-

Friends help you move
Real friends help you move bodies
Your family bails you out

Remember that the next time you’re expecting your brother to come help you move that dining room set up a five story walkup.

Filed under: Observations, with 2 Comments

The complexities of modern life,

published at 1:07am on 07/29/06, with 1 Comment

As somebody who is ostensibly good with technology (having spent the majority of my professional career involved in one technology field or another), I find it nearly impossible to have a good experience with my parents’ technology needs.

The current source of frustration in my life as it relates to the computer at the old homestead is the 200GB Seagate Push Button external hard drive that I bought to backup the new iMac that is sitting where the old PC (and before that, the even older Apple //gs) once sat. The problem I am having with this particular hard drive that is that, for some strange reason, it refuses to spin itself down. Ever. In order to see why this ends up being such a source of agita for me, we need to first understand the reasons for buying this drive in the first place. It is important to point out that my parents are reasonably technically savvy – I talk to them more via email and IM than by phone and my mother has recently shifted her attentions away from her twenty year old 35mm camera to a fancy new Canon Digital Elph. But at the same time, I can not seem to get them to understand where files live on their computer and not a day goes by without an email dragging mishap that leaves my cousin’s mail folder somewhere buried amongst the emails from their car dealership.

My parents are, in fact, the very definition of the average personal computer user.

Computers are supposed to help these kinds of people – they are supposed to make mundane tasks easier and give them access to online recipes and weather reports. So what is the problem? The problem is that I have now stuck them with a hard drive that never shuts down. (What’s your point?) A drive that is constantly whirring when it is on, and that never stops spinning at night, which almost guarantees (in a house in the Northeast in the summer without air conditioning) a life span of about a month and a half. (Hrm, yes? And?) A drive that we can not leave powered on and thus a system that can not be scheduled to turn on in the middle of the night, back up their computer and go back to sleep again. (Ah!)

I have, in fact, taken what should be an invisible, automatic system, and turned it into one that requires constant, proactive user intervention.

My parents are, of course, very casual computer users and are much more relaxed about the situation than I am. On a little pink piece of notepaper, my mother very diligently copied down instructions for how to turn on and off the drive and how to run the backups. My father insists that the backups will be run “whenever we put something important on the computer” and I can feel the technologist in me die a little bit when I hear the sheer inelegance of this solution. “This can’t possibly work!” I cry, because it is in my nature to want to apply the supposed right solution to every situation.

Here I am cursing Seagate for building this stupid drive that never spins down, cursing society in general (why not?) for accepting such shoddy engineering in its consumer electronics products, and cursing myself for buying yet another faulty component for their computer (it should be pointed out that the iMac has already been back to the shop once and the USB card reader I told them to buy had to be returned because it too was broken). I am cursing everything under the sun for giving me this component that only barely works, and yet in my parents’ opinion, it is just another set of instructions on a sheet of paper to help them work the computer.

You see, my parents treat the computer as an addition to their lives – they check their email, they chat with their kids, they read newspapers, they watch funny videos – but if they happen to lose their emails, it’s not a big deal and if the web is down for a couple of days, they have better things to do. The computer itself exists in a separate part of their lives, along with other specifically computer-related items and activities. Adding more steps and more activities makes sense because there is already an entire world of actions that need to happen when using a computer – adding a few more can’t hurt.

On the other hand, I see my computer as an integral part of my life. I spend most of my waking hours in front of the glowing screen – it is my town hall, my library, my evening news, my radio; it is my brain. Any additional actions that exist solely to support the operations of this electric extension of my life need to be relegated so far into the background so as to maintain this illusion of this complete man/machine synergy. In the (currently top of mind) case of computer backups, a constant reminder that my entire life lives on a couple of fragile platters would be enough to send me into an eternal state of sorrow and despair. By relegating them simply to automated nocturnal magic actions, I can continue to live in my dream world while still remaining confident that my entire life can’t actually melt away in a freak Diet Coke accident.

While I can’t understand how they can be satisfied with a non-automated, non-daily backup of their files, they don’t see why it’s upsetting me so much that they don’t have one. Somewhere in their house, right now, there is a backup drive that is turned off, waiting to be activated. And this is apparently just dandy.

Lesson learned: sometimes, the most complex solution turns out to be the simplest.

Filed under: Observations, with 1 Comment