Caltrain has posted their new schedule. Beginning August 1st, the number of weekday trains increases from 88 to 96. The idea is to run more trains, but since more of them are express trains, which both attract more passengers and cost less to run, it will save Caltrain money. Among other changes, this new schedule cuts service to less frequently used stations, including the one closest to me (San Antonio).

With today’s (effective May 2nd, 2005) schedule, 31 northbound and 32 southbound trains stop at San Antonio each weekday, approximately one every half hour. The new schedule has 26 trains stopping there in each direction. What’s interesting is the schedule: For example, between 7:00am and 10:00am, fourtheen northbound trains will come through San Antonio, but only three will stop. Similar numbers hold during evening peak hours and in the cross-commute direction. But during non-peak hours (10am to 4pm), when Caltrain runs two trains an hour, all of them still stop.

In other words, during mid-day, I can catch Caltrain every thirty minutes. But during the morning and evening commute hours, only one train per hour stops at San Antonio station, even though more than twice as many trains are running.

I understand the reasoning behind this schedule, but I find the way it turned out a little amusing.

I’ve been wanting to get a Treo 650 every since the Treo 600 was announced almost two years ago. The Treo 650 adds my missing feature—Bluetooth—and the high-resolution screen and faster processor helped clinch the deal. PalmOne announced the 650 last October, but my wireless plan is with Cingular (formerly AT&T Wireless), who just started carrying on February 2nd. Ever since then, I’ve been trying to get one. Each attempt yields less success than the previous attempt, and mainly seems to have the affect of wasting my time and raising my stress level.

I currently have a multi-line AT&T Wireless voice plan, with two phones. One of them (mine) has an $8/month data plan. Ideally, I would just replace my phone with a Treo 650 and be done with it. My employer has a deal whereby I get a discounted monthly rate with Cingular, so the first thing I did was call the Cingular “Formerly AT&T Wireless” National Business Ordering center. I got a helpful sales rep who informed me that they had the phone available, but I couldn’t put it on a multi-line voice plan. Not only that, but I would need a data plan at a minimum of $20/month. In other words, they won’t sell me the phone without my giving them an extra $40 each month. This is the point where I have to restrain myself from yelling at the phone, and politely hang up.

So much for “Premier” business service: after three nearly identical calls to the NBO over two weeks, I gave up that idea. I was never really comfortable with the idea of buying the AT&T Wireless (“Cingular Blue”) version of the Treo 650 anyway, since it would be locked to AT&T Wireless SIM cards, and if I ever needed to change my plan in a way that would require a Cingular SIM, my smartphone would become an expensive paperweight.

One of my co-workers suggested that instead of getting the phone through the NBO, I could walk into a Cingular store and get one: Cingular lets you put the Treo on a multi-line plan, I would still get my company discount, and I’d have a future-proof “Cingular Orange” version of the Treo 650. The Cingular Web site even offered the 650 with the voice plan I wanted, and a $25/month unlimited data plan, which I established years ago as the price at which I’d spring for one. The only downsides are that since I’d have to switch my plan to Cingular, Laura would have to get a new phone too, and that I’d have to find a Cingular store with one in stock. Those are both manageable problems.

Earlier this afternoon, I called the Palo Alto Cingular store—the former AT&T Wireless location where I bought my current phone—and discovered that they had the Treo 650 in stock. I drove over immediately. The store was packed, I waited about half an hour for a salesperson, who finally told me that the cheapest data plan I could get with the Treo 650 was $29/month, for a paltry 5 megabytes of data. She insisted the plan I saw on the Cingular Web site was not for smartphones, despite the fact that it was specifically offered to me when I priced the Treo 650.

So I give up. Cingular has managed to make it far too difficult for me to give them money. There are still ways for me to get the phone, I suppose. I could give in and pay too much money a month for a data plan I don’t need. I could spend an extra $300 and buy the unlocked GSM version of the phone from PalmOne (I had almost decided to do this a few weeks ago, just before reading that PalmOne had raised the unlocked price from $599 to $699.) I could even switch to Sprint. Right now, though, I feel discouraged enough that I’m not sure I want to bother trying anymore.

I know next to nothing about economics. Let me make that clear up front. So I get fascinated by what I’m sure are very basic concepts. In his recent article Camels and Rubber Duckies, Joel Spolsky talks about “consumer surplus,” which he describes as “the extra value that those rich consumers got from their purchase that they would have been perfectly happy to do without.” He says that “capitalists want to capture the consumer surplus” by trying to make customers who can afford it pay more for the exact same product than those who can’t.

I got a first-hand account of this today. Yesterday, our car was involved in an accident, and is in the service shop getting fixed up. My insurance company pays for a rental car, so this morning I went to Hertz to get one. The agent there informed me that my insurance would pay for a compact car, but they were running a promotion where if I paid extra, I could get my choice of car. I said I was happy with the compact car. After consulting the computer, he told me that for only $5 more per day, I could rent a Nissan Altima, which was a nice big full-size car. I told him I wasn’t interested, and he went out to get the car my insurance would cover. When he came back in and handed me the keys, he told me he was upgrading me to the Altima free of charge.

It’s obvious to me that the Altima was the cheapest car he had on the lot, and he was going to have to rent it to me even at the compact-car rate. I’m not sure whether to be annoyed at the sleazy sales tactics, or to admire the gusto with which he tried to get me to pay more for the exact same car I was going to get anyway.

On Usenet recently (I don’t remember where or when), on an unrelated subject, I witnessed someone drop in several derogatory references to The West Wing. They had apparently seen the show a few times, and absolutely deplored it, failing to understand why anyone intelligent could like it. From what I could gather, their own political leanings were in the opposite direction from the shows’ characters, and they were unable to watch the show objectively, without seeing it as an hour-long commercial for politics they disagreed with.

I can understand this. In fact, as I pondered it, I began to wonder how any conservative might enjoy The West Wing. I do align myself more closely with the shows’ protagonists, and I could imagine being too bothered by a series which approved of contrasting values to enjoy a well-produced episode. But in the absence of evidence—does Mister Sterling count? He was definitely far more conservative than Bartlet, and I enjoyed a few episodes of that show—it’s hard to be sure.

One available example does come to mind: I enjoy watching The Sopranos. HBO’s ratings, DVD sales and Emmy wins show I’m not alone. Yet I can’t imagine that any large fraction of that show’s viewers believe that what its protagonists do is moral or admirable. Realistically, I can’t believe I’d rather feel more comfortable watching a show about a mob boss than a Republican. Which isn’t to say that everyone feels that way. I’d imagine there are, in fact, plenty of people who can’t appreciate The Sopranos due to its subject matter, and I can understand that.

On a whim, I picked up a can of salmon at the grocery store yesterday. Now having eaten it, I am somewhat surprised to discover that canned salmon tastes almost exactly like canned tuna. I find this a little strange, as fresh salmon and fresh tuna are very different, but it seems to be true nonetheless.

I haven’t had anything of substance to post recently, so I figure I may as well share something I found amusing in this morning’s paper:

MercuryNews.com | 01/24/2005 | ‘West Wing’ presidential campaign heats up: Alda, a well-known liberal Democrat, says people ask him constantly, “‘How can you possibly play a Republican?’ I was never asked that when I played a murderer.”

Brooks writes about color correcting photos, and so I spent some time with Photoshop Elements 2.0, trying some of the same things he did in Macromedia Picture Editor. Here’s something that confuses me:

In the the Image menu, under Adjustments, is the “Equalize” command. According to the online help:

When you apply this command, Photoshop Elements finds the brightest and darkest values in the composite image and remaps them so that the brightest value represents white and the darkest value represents black.

In the Enhance menu is the “Auto Contrast” command:

It maps the lightest and darkest pixels in the image to white and black, which makes highlights appear lighter and shadows appear darker.

These sound the same to me, and the images I’ve tried look the same if I apply one versus the other, but I can’t imagine why there would be two menu commands with the exact same function. Any Photoshop experts out there who can help me out?

Google Labs is showcasing the Google Suggest beta, which offers search suggestions in real time as you type. This evening, we discovered what Google thinks the best searches are for each letter of the alphabet…
Continue reading →

…but if you take the first letter of each month from July through November, in order, it spells out JASON.

I think it’s an encouraging sign about the quality of Star Trek: Enterprise‘s fourth season that I’ve gotten interested enough in the show to start reading rec.arts.startrek.current again. It’s been at least five years, maybe more, since I last read that newsgroup.

Interesting side-note: I discovered just now that I’m still subscribed to rec.arts.startrek.info. I probably left myself subscribed to it when I stopped reading the others, since it was low-traffic and moderated. You can gauge how even lower the traffic has become by the fact that until I checked, I had no idea I was still subscribed to it. It turns out the last post was on January 1st, 2002.

I just watched the Ebert & Roeper review of Christmas with the Kranks, the movie based on John Grisham’s Skipping Christmas. I haven’t seen the movie, but Ebert and Roeper both hated it (“big big big thumbs down down down”). What I found interesting is that many of their complaints against the movie were exactly the reasons Laura and I didn’t like the book when we read it two years ago.

I’ve still got the book on my shelf, because I keep meaning to re-read it. Last time it came up, Suzanne (who didn’t like it either) suggested that maybe it was supposed to be a farce, and I kept meaning to read it again to see it was better that way. From what I’ve seen of Christmas with the Kranks, it’s definitely a comedy, but of the slapstick variety, rather than attempting any broader social commentary. Either that, or the movie did such a poor job of conveying it that neither Ebert or Roeper got it.

I got a strange phone call earlier that I just now think I understand. I answered the phone, and the fellow on the other end claimed to be my mailman. He said he had lost the key to the front door, and needed to be let in so he could deliver the mail. This confused the heck out of me, since our mailboxes are outdoors. I thought maybe he meant the door on the back that he opens to put in all the mail, but I wouldn’t have the key to that! I told him I didn’t understand what he wanted, and he repeated several times that he was my mailman and needed to be let in the front door. I checked outside, just in case, but there was no one there. I considered whether this could possibly be some sort of confidence scam or burglary tactic, but that didn’t make any sense either, so I said he must have the wrong number, and hung up.

I think I get it now: Our phone number is the same one that Laura had in her old apartment, and I think she’s never been taken off the security system there. That building does keep the mailboxes inside the (locked) lobby, so I think we must have gotten called by that building’s mailman, who probably picked a random apartment to call, and got me instead, three blocks away.

Ever since I disabled comments due to unmanageable spam a few weeks ago, I’ve been looking for a solution. The latest versions of MT-Blacklist support comment moderation, but require Movable Type 3, and I’ve written before about how I don’t want to upgrade.

So instead I’ve migrated to WordPress. Its MT importer worked fairly well, although I did have to mess with a few entries due to differences in the auto-formatters. I had been using a whole slew of MT plugins, but it turns out that most of them either were built in to WordPress, had easily-found replacements on the WordPress Wiki, or turned out not to be something I cared all that about in the end. Ironically, the latter category included plugins I spent a long time writing, like threaded comments. The only real code I had to write was a WordPress version of MTResolveURLs. Overall, I’m fairly impressed with WordPress as a piece of software, although the documentation is almost nonexistent, especially compared with Movable Type’s excellent documentation.

Admittedly, I haven’t spent as much time customizing the look and feel of WordPress. Mostly, I took a stylesheet I found online and changed it some, and then hacked bits of the WordPress PHP files to move some things around. I’m fairly pleased with the look so far, but I’ll probably tweak things a bit over the next few weeks.

At any rate, things seem to be mostly working. I’ve skimmed through most of the old entries and they look okay. Since comments are now active, go ahead and leave one if something isn’t quite right…

I’ve been playing the Ford Racing 2 demo the past few days. It’s been very frustrating; I’ve been very frustrated at the steering control on this game, and all the other car driving games I’ve tried recently. It’s been making me long for 1998, when I spent many long and happy hours playing Interstate ’76 on a 133 Mhz Pentium.

It occurred to me just now that maybe the problem wasn’t the games or the platform, but the fact that I’ve been trying to play these games using a PowerBook keyboard, and back then it was an original Microsoft SideWinder Force Feedback Pro joystick—that was a great joystick, but had serious heat and power issues; it had a separate AC adapter, and the joystick had a fan louder than any hardware I’ve owned since. It eventually broke, after the onboard electronics literally melted.

So on the theory that maybe an analog control would help my steering control, I went over to the drawer and pulled out a SideWinder Game Pad Pro and plugged it into the USB port on the PowerBook. Beat both of the demo levels on the first try.

I’m tempted to take the SideWinder Force Feedback 2 or SideWinder Force Feedback Wheel out of the closet and give them a whirl, but full-size game controllers don’t work well when you’re lying on the couch—the racing wheel needs to be clamped to a table—which is why they’re in the closet in the first place. It is a little disappointing to find out that I’m probably not going to find a good racing game without using a decent controller. I like to play games on the bus, and there really isn’t room to whip out a gamepad.

As a postscript, I can’t find any indication on Microsoft‘s Web site that they still make game hardware. If that’s true, I think it’s a real shame; I haven’t shopped for them in a few years, but the SideWinder line have been by far the best Microsoft products I’ve owned.

The other day, I happened upon Yahoo! Local, which lets you “find businesses and services near you.” I’m not quite sure how or why it’s a different site than Yahoo! Yellow Pages, which has much the same purpose, but I digress: I was looking for nearby restaurants. According to the service, there are 2530 businesses categorized as “Restaurants” within 10 miles of where I live. I had them sorted by distance, and had read through the listings. After the 150th—the Gelato Classico on Castro Street, 1.23 miles away—I had stopped.

Tonight, on my way to La Costena to pick up some burritos¹, I realized I hadn’t seen it on the list. Sure enough, it’s at number 170, just over 1.3 miles away. This is a place I think of as very close by, and it’s not even in the closest² 150 restaurants. I can only conclude that there are a whole heck of a lot of places to eat nearby.