Lately, I’ve been biking to the Mountain View Caltrain station instead of the San Antonio station. I’m renting a very nice bike locker from Caltrain at San Antonio, which is situated perfectly for my commute; the six-month rent is due this month, and since I no longer bike to the station, I don’t think I’m going to renew. I’ve been parking my bike at Mountain View at some of the outdoor bike racks at Centennial Plaza (“Class III Decorative”, according to the city’s bike parking map), but that’s sometimes full, and I don’t really like parking my bike outdoors anyway; my seat’s already been stolen twice. Caltrain rents bike lockers at Mountain View as well, but they’re completely at the wrong end of the station for me, and it’s a very long station to walk the length of.

The other day, I discovered something new: “rent-free bicycle shelter spaces in the new station building are also available.” What’s ironic is that I would never have known about this, except that someone (not me) illegally locked their bike to a nearby tree, and the police attached a note threatening to tow it, along with helpful hints about where to legally park, including this bit of information. Well, it sounded good to me.

This morning, I woke up early, went down to City Hall—you would think, by the way, that the City of Mountain View‘s Web site would tell you the location of City Hall, but it doesn’t—and paid my $25 deposit (what happened to “free”?) to get a bike shelter space. Then, of course, I went down to the depot and discovered that the PIN I was given didn’t unlock the door. It took another ten minutes on the phone (and my not knowing how to operate the lock) with the Department of Public Works, and almost missing my shuttle, before we found a different PIN that would work.

But now my bike is safely locked away in the depot, and I don’t have to worry about bicycle-seat thieves, crowded bike racks, or long walks down the platform.

Back in high school, our U.S. History and English teachers got together and assigned us to write a short story in a well-researched historical American setting. Mine was in Boston of the 1770s. One of my characters was an officer in the British navy, and I really wanted to describe his appearance. But I was never able to find a source to tell me what color the uniform should be. I spent hours and hours in various libraries, poring over books, trying to find some hint, with no luck. It was probably there, but my seventeen-year-old self didn’t know how to find it. In the end, I made something up, and got marked off for having a detail with no source.

For kicks, I searched Google just now for “18th century british naval uniforms“. The very first hit tells me that “the British Royal Navy has been the basis of most of the world’s naval uniforms from the time they adopted their dark blue officers’ uniforms in 1748.”

Now they tell me.

An interesting footnote: The Mac I wrote this story on, nine years ago, is long gone, but I still have a copy, copied from hard drive to hard drive over the years. So I tried opening it just now. I wrote it using Word 5.1, and Word 2004 opened it without complaint, but while it retained all the formatting information perfectly, it replaced the actual characters with little boxes. I was able to recover the text (ironically enough, the Windows version of Word was able to open it perfectly), but this sort of thing makes me nervous about electronic document preservation.

In the interest of completeness, I’ve made a PDF and put the thing online. If anyone wants to read it and find out if I got the color right, feel free. Personally, I’ve been too embarrassed to get that far into it.

The difference between St. Louis and the Bay Area is the little things. Today, I went to the cabinet and took out a slice of bread that’s at least two or three weeks old. It was a little stale, but I toasted it up and it was fine. In St. Louis, bread started to go bad after about three days, and there was pretty much nothing you could do to keep bread from going moldy within a week.