As I write this, I am for the first time riding a Caltrain Baby Bullet express (I’d been on the trains before, back when they were in regular local service before the express service began). They’ve been running since June, but since my work shuttle is only one station stop away from where I live, the express train essentially doesn’t exist in my limited world. In fact, most of the time I just bike to my destination train station and skip the train part of the train ride altogether. So being on a long-distance train, let alone one of the fancy new ones, is a new and different experience.

No matter how silly the “baby bullet” moniker is, the express trains are a great thing. You can tell that by the sheer number of people onboard, compared to the ridership of the local and limited trains I normally take. People definitely want the faster service. I did. I’m going up to San Francisco to have dinner with Laura and attend an “Understanding the Law School Experience” panel at Hastings. I had been planning to drive up to the City, but at the last minute, I glanced at a schedule and realized that I could hop on the train, transfer to BART in Millbrae, and be at Hastings at the same time I was only hoping I would make driving, if there wasn’t much traffic. With no traffic and guaranteed available parking, I could no doubt make it faster by car, but the guaranteed consistency of the train schedule is a huge plus. As it happens, I’m going to take an extra ten minutes or so, take the train all the way to 4th & King, and then walk to Hastings, but I like the idea that all the schedules—shuttle, Caltrain, BART—worked out that I could make it all the way from Cupertino to Market street with less than fifteen minutes of standing and waiting for connections.

I’m also enjoying the Baby Bullet accommodations, compared to the regular Caltrain gallery cars. I’m on the upper level, sitting at a little desk, with a big window next to me. The upper-level seats on the gallery cars are too narrow and hard to reach for me like them, and the seats are almost all too crowded to use a laptop comfortably. So I like this. Part of it, of course, is that I’m on the train long enough to actually relax and get things the way I like them (which would be true of a gallery car, too, especially if I could snag one of the seats with more space). So I’ve got my computer out, the headphones are unfolded and I’m listening to music, and I have a nice cold bottle of water that I bought at the trackside stand at Mountain View before boarding. Another thing I like about the Baby Bullet trains is that each car has a restroom.

As a technology-is-cool demonstration, I’m going to post this using my phone as a Bluetooth modem, using GPRS to connect to the Internet from the train. AT&T’s data rate make that too expensive for me to do often, although if I was spending two hours on a train daily, the unlimited monthly data plan would probably seem a lot more attractive than it does now, spending half an hour on the bus every day. Of course, it’d be nice if the train had wireless Internet onboard; apparently Amtrak California is experimenting with it on one car of one Capitol Corridor train. But let’s dig out the Bluetooth dongle and give this a try…

(Hey, wow, we’re already at Millbrae. Seems like I just boarded, and we’re more than half way there. I like this train.)

Occasionally, I get the desire to play a new game, and so I figure that rather than pay for one, I’ll just download a demo and play it for a while. Unfortunately, I tend to get hooked and end up buying the game anyway. On Wednesday, I bought XIII, a cel-shaded first-person shooter, after having played the demo last weekend. Finished it today.

Pros: The gameplay was fun. It had the right combination of action and tactics to make it interesting, but it wasn’t complicated enough that it required deep thought or terribly intricate skill (of course, I played it on the easiest setting). The cel-shading was cute, although I stopped noticing after the first few minutes. I did like the “comic-strip” style, though; one nice thing is that all the sound effects had visual cues on-screen, so that it was completely playable with the sound off, perfect for a crowded bus. Finally, it features the voice talents of David Duchovny and Adam West.

Cons: A bit too violent for my taste; the feel of the game made its way into my dreams at least one night. The game didn’t feature enough places where I could save; I felt like I had to repeat too much of it over and over again. There were a few too many spelling errors. From what I can make out from the credits, it was designed in France and Quebec, but you’d think the English translators would have at least double-checked their work a few times. I guess it’s par for this sort of game, but after spending $40 on the game, I was a bit nonplussed to be done after only four days of playing evenings and on the shuttle to and from work. My last game purchase lasted over a month, so this was a disappointment. Finally, the ending was stupid.

Overall rating: B-

What I did find interesting were the subtle differences between the demo and the final game. I’m used to demos that are identical to the final product with most of the levels removed. This one was much more obviously done while the game was still in final development. The demo is missing features like saved games (I was glad to see them after playing the first half of the demo levels a few dozen times), there are more keys, for things like switching weapons or using a med-kit (probably added after game testers complained), and although the gameplay is the same, the on-screen graphics are more polished.

As of this writing, the iTunes Music Store has recordings of “City of New Orleans” by fifteen different singers. There’s Steve Goodman, who wrote the thing; Arlo Guthrie, who first made it a hit; other popular artists like Willie Nelson, Judy Collins and John Denver. Last week, though, the Music Store added a version of the song by a name I was not expecting: David Hasselhoff.

Apparently he’s quite the music star in Europe. He was Germany’s best selling artist of 1989, and this album (which yes, I bought) is apparently doing quite well also; it debuted at #11 on the Austrian charts. Huh.