I’ve written before about the sometimes-illogical behavior of crossing gates near Caltrain stations. On the way home from work today, I witnessed a series of events of which I am still amazed no one was injured.

As a northbound train was at the Mountain View station loading passengers, a southbound train approached the Castro Street crossing. As the crossing arms dropped, the train slowed and stopped, maybe a hundred feet north of the street. The gate remained closed for maybe five minutes, the train not moving. Finally, the crossing gate gave up on the train, and the arms began to lift. This is the exact moment the train began to move. By the time the arms began to lower again, the locomotive was already half way through the intersection. The train moved slowly across the street, blaring its horn. As it finally cleared the intersection, of course, the northbound train had just begun to leave the station, and the crossing gates remained down, no train present, for another minute as that train approached the intersection, until finally it passed by and the gates opened, allowing the traffic to flow again.

This was just before six o’clock, and cars were backing up in at least five directions on Castro, Evelyn, Central and Moffett. And, of course, on the first workday after ending daylight savings time, it was an hour darker than usual, which I’m sure didn’t help. I kept expecting a car, pedestrian, or both to dash across the street and be struck by one of the trains. Luckily, that didn’t happen, but witnessing the scene made me acutely aware of how dangerous these sorts of things are.

Remember: Look, Listen…Live!

Biking home this evening in the pitch black at six o’clock, it occurred to me that it’s rather convenient to have daylight savings time end just before Halloween: I can’t imagine trick-or-treating before it’s dark out, and being able to start an hour earlier means the kids aren’t out as late.

Spoilers for the major plotlines of recent seasons of The West Wing:
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I bought Myst V: End of Ages a few weeks ago, and I’ve been playing it since (alternating with the advanced levels of Marble Blast Gold, which I’ve been slowly working my way through for about a year). Very minor spoilers below.

If you recall my entries on Myst III and Myst IV, I have yet to finish a Myst game without help. I’m trying to solve Myst V myself, although technically I may have already failed: I was unable to get past the very first door in the game (not even a puzzle, really), without Laura’s help. That’s less help than I used for the previous games, though, and I’m trying to get it done by myself. What makes this both very hard and very easy at the same time is that I already own the Official Strategy Guide. For some reason, the standard retail edition of the game is Windows-only; to get the Mac program, I had to buy the Limited Edition, which includes the strategy guide along with some other extras. So if I wanted to cheat, it would be oh-so-easy, and in part, the ease of cheating makes it easier to resist.

I’m now about half done, or at least I’ve completed half of the items necessary for the task the game has given me. I don’t know how this equates in terms of time spent, or even of actual gameplay. But I feel like I’ve accomplished something. Of course, it gets harder from here, since Myst V is non-linear, and I’ve solved the half that I found easier. I’ve actually been stuck at pretty much the same place for almost a week now, but I finally made a breakthrough earlier this evening, which was very exciting: I decided to look at everything again, deliberately and carefully, and noticed a clue I hadn’t seen before, which made everything click into place. That’s what I love about the Myst games; when suddenly it all makes sense. The part I don’t like is the hours of frustrating madness leading up to that point.

I like the world of this game a lot, and the puzzles are closer to Myst and Riven than Myst III and IV, and that’s a good thing. But the game mechanics are a little challenging. The new exploration modes are cool, but I switch between them a lot, since none of them seems to be better (maybe that’s intentional). There are also some bugs in the game, and it’s much slower on my PowerBook than it ought to be. And in the height of frustrating, I once accidentally solved an entire age far before I was supposed to; I was frustrated and doing essential random things, and accidentally got close enough to the correct action that the game thought I had solved it. Luckily I had saved recently, and was able to immediately quit, reload my saved game, and try to forget what I had done. But that was rather upsetting.

Minor problems aside, I am very happy with Myst V so far. We’ll see how I feel when/if I ever complete it.

I previous detailed my experience with my first Cingular bill after getting the Treo. I’ve gone through two billing cycles since then, and although I have technically yet to receive a bill, there have been plenty of problems. The first one, of which, of course, is that I have yet to receive a bill.
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It’s now becoming that annoying time of year where it’s warm and sunny when I bike to the train station in the morning, but cold and dark in the evening on the way home. Invariably, this means I choose the wrong clothing and am uncomfortable during at least one of the two trips.