Author Archives: John

Another Week, Another Incident

Posted on by
2

No LightsHeading home last night on BART, we pull into Glen Park. After a longer than normal delay, the train drops to emergency lighting. Then we get an announcement from the train driver telling us he’s lost power and it should be back in a second. Next it will be back in a couple of minutes. Then we are told that they have an incident at Balboa Park (the station behind us), and power will be back on soon.

Then he announces that he has to power down the train completely. So there we all are, sitting in total darkness on a train in Glen Park station (with the doors closed). Trains on the other side, heading towards Balboa Park, are moving. Finally he announces “Passengers we are just waiting for the word to er power this train back up” – something I’ve never heard on any train before.

Once power is restored, the doors open to allow people who have been waiting on the platform to board, and he makes another announcement: “Due to the problem at Balboa, board this train wherever you’re going.”

The end result of this was that I missed my ferry (it was just casting off as I arrived at the dock), so I had an hour’s wait at the Ferry Building. More on that in subsequent posts.

One final BART related note though, since the end of 2001 BART has had all of its station toilets closed (for security). Judging from the smell of the carriage I was in on Friday night, I’d say some of their passengers are simply using the trains as replacements. I also managed to capture one of the “Number 1 Transit System in America” stickers.

Doug Lloyd

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve been looking at Doug Lloyd’s photos on Flickr for a while now, having found his stream one day while wasting some time surfing photos. In addition to some of the most amazing shots of bald eagles I’ve ever seen, he also has some beautiful landscape photos from Alaska, and photos of other animals & plants from Alaska.

If you get a chance to visit Alaska, do so. If you cannot visit, or you don’t believe me that it is one of the places in the world that you have to see, spend some time looking at Doug’s photos, either on Flickr or on his own site: Doug Lloyd Photography.

Commute Update & Train Announcements

Posted on by
1

BART was doing pretty well last week… until Friday evening. It was raining on Friday, as it had been most days last week here in the bay area, but on Friday the rain was causing a 5-10 minute delay on BART according to the indicator board. Just as I was wondering how the rain on Friday could be that different, the train came flying into San Bruno… and overshot the platform by about two thirds of a car!

OK, not a big deal really, but the doors did not open for about 5 minutes, explaining the delays. Eventually, they worked out how to open the doors, even though they were not aligned with the little black sections of the platform, and the ride from there to Powell was normal.

At Powell though we had another delay… this time because somebody had dropped something in front of the train (guess it didn’t overshoot that one). After the announcement that the driver needed to clear whatever it was that had been dropped in front of the train, the lights drop to the emergency lighting. Once power was restored, the doors had some problems closing, then finally we were on our way again. I did make the connection with my ferry, but only just.

Today, while catching up on some blogs, I noticed a link in Annie Mole’s Going Underground blog to a page collecting amusing announcements from the London Underground. I wonder if any of the BART announcements ever contain any of this humour… I’ll have to listen more and see if any are worth reporting! A few of my favourites:

also, I would like to apologise for the delay to your SO CALLED Victoria line service, this was due to … errr the wrong kind of rain!!

Hello this is xxx speaking, I am the captain of your train, and we will be departing shortly, we will be cruising at an altitude of approximately zero feet, and our scheduled arrival time in Morden is 3:15pm. The temperature in Morden is approximately 15 degrees celsius, and Morden is in the same time zone as Mill Hill east, so there’s no need to adjust your watches.

This is Knightsbridge Station… All change here for Mr Fayed’s little corner shop…

[ed. for those not familiar with the area, that little corner store would be Harrods 🙂 ]

Next time, you might find it easier to wait until the doors are open before trying to get on the train.

Ladies and gentlemen we will shortly be arriving at Waterloo, then I think we will carry right on through the channel tunnel and spend the weekend in Paris.

This is a customer announcement, please note that the big slidy things are the doors, the big slidy things are the doors.

Ladies and gentlemen this train has 22 doors on each side, please feel free to use all of them, not just the two in the middle.

[ed. I hope he just meant people to use all the ones on the side facing the platform 😉 ]

Welcome aboard the Flintstones railway, once I get my feet on the floor and start running we should be on our way.

May I remind all passengers that there is strictly no smoking allowed on any part of the Underground. However, if you are smoking a joint it is only fair that you pass it round the rest of the carriage.

Ladies and gentlemen, upon departing the train may I remind you to take your rubbish with you. Despite the fact that you are in something that is metal, fairly round, filthy and smells, this is a tube train and not a bin on wheels.

Please allow the doors to close. Try not to confuse this with ‘Please hold the doors open’. The two are distinct and separate instructions.

[ed. I’ve heard tales of BART trains being taken out of service because somebody held the doors open, thereby breaking them. Don’t know if it is true though.]

Finally, I noticed that my “Sign Out of Order” photo, from the third total BART shutdown, had been picked up by the Daily Irrelevant last week too.

Frozen Hard Disc

Posted on by
2

Doesn’t happen often, but for some reason when it does happen it picks the most inopportune moment. Friday morning I get into the office, having done a little bit of coding on the ferry (I’m thinking twice about using the laptop on BART following this article in the Chronicle), and try to copy the updated files onto my main desktop system. But I get an unexpected message about not being able to write the file. A quick check on the desktop system and I see that my whole home directory has vanished. Not a good way to start a day.

Some investigation of the system logs tells me that the drive my home directory is on was somewhat unhappy, and was unmounted. Attempts to remount it proved useless, and the drive itself was making noises that should not be heard from a hard disc drive. In fact, the only time I’ve heard worse was back at school when the heads on a physically large hard disc attached to the schools TI-990 mini computer literally crashed into the very large platter, causing an ear piercing scream from the drive (it was clearly in pain). That was an interesting machine to learn programming on; some very simple programming mistakes could crash the whole multi-user system, making you very unpopular, but I digress.

I didn’t have a lot of source code on the drive that wasn’t already somewhere else in a code management system (checking in changes often is a good thingTM). There were a few documents, most of which are on my laptop too, but there are all those little things like bash setup scripts and preferences for applications that are just so useful to have. So, I thought I’d try something that I’d heard about a few months back: freezing the drive. It spent the night, wrapped in bubble wrap, inside the freezer in our kitchen at work. Today, fresh out of the freezer, it mounted and I managed to get eveything copied off of it. No errors, no strange noises. Now, I’m not going to trust that drive again, but it looks as though the freezer trick might actually work!

As for the replacement… well, it is going to be running with a software RAID-1 configuration, providing some redundancy, so hopefully I won’t need to worry about freezing any future drives that fail.

Pilot’s Launch

Posted on by
Reply

Taken last week on my weekend ferry ride from Alameda into San Francisco, this is one of the San Francisco Bar Pilots‘ launches. It was leaving the Alameda-Oakland channel, entering the bay, around the same time that MV Zalinsky was. From the top deck I got a series of shots of this bright orange boat against the somewhat dull colours of the bay, including one with part of the city skyline and the bay bridge in the background.

Search Light

Posted on by
Reply

Top deck of MV Zalinsky, the weekend ferry between Alameda & San Francisco, has a couple of these search lights, one of each side. The original shot was in colour, but it looked almost black & white. This version was desaturated and then had a sepia filter applied in Photoshop. Combined with the peeling paint on the light itself, I think this gives it a feeling of age.

No Grudge Zone

Posted on by
1

Close up of part of one of the hearts that appeared in the Embarcadero Plaza, San Francisco yesterday sometime. There are more shots of the hearts in my Flickr stream.

Some of the other things written on this heart include:

And in the end, the love you take, is equal to the love you make.

If you’re skating on thin ice you might as well dance.

And a list of recently received spam email subject lines.

BART: Total System Shutdown (Again)

Posted on by
2

Today is the 8th day I have been doing my new commute on the ferry & BART. And in that time BART has shut down completely three times. Tonight was the latest shutdown, caused by another “computer glitch.”

In addition to what was almost an hour delay leaving San Bruno, they also managed to change the destination of the train I was on from a Dublin train to a Baypoint train, having told everybody wanting stops on the Baypoint line to get off two or three stations earlier. Then, as we arrived at Embarcadero they opened the doors of a
packed train, and immediately announced that they were closing them again; I just managed to squeeze through the train doors to get off as they closed on me. You would have thought that they could have worked out that when a train is packed, people might need a little longer to squeeze through the car and exit, but apparently that
is something else they don’t know.

Today is the third day in a row that they’ve had shutdowns, though this was the longest. Yesterday they apologised for the delay and promised the software had been removed. So much for that claim. And, of course, last week they shut the whole system down because of a bomb scare at one station. I have to say, they are proving to be the weak link in my commute.

Normally, after a series of poorly handled events like this, one might expect the CEO or chairperson to step down. But there is no such person at BART, only a board of nine directors
. Perhaps this lack of a leader is part of the problem with BART – there is no one person to take responsibility for the frequent failures. Or should all 9 board members resign?