It’s amazing but little old “ditchmond” actually has real bike lanes with a little curb between the cars and the bikes and a smooth transition from roadway to bike lane and back. this all on their prime street: No. 3 Road. Why couldn’t Vancouver do this on Cambie instead of the minimal painted lanes they just put in?

I’ve been riding transit more than usual this fall and it’s been mostly the “Canada Line” subway from Oakridge to Georgia St. and back with occasional stops at most of the stations along the way. It’s a bit of love/hate thing. They’re “real” metro cars, I suppose. Reasonably comparable to the cars on the new line in Munich, for example. There’s been lots of talk. Everyone says it’s scandalous that the station platforms are too short so they can’t expand but that’s a red herring. Modern train systems can run with very short intervals between trains. That’s how they’ll up the capacity.

No, it’s not the short trains, it’s the crappy, cheap, unfriendly station designs that basically say, “you aren’t worth spending the money on”. Look at this metro station in Lisbon. Now *that* is what metro stations are supposed to look like. Lisbon, in little old poor-cousin-of-Europe Portugal can build grand metro stations that tell the passengers that they’re worth something. Us? No, we get the cheapest possible small cramped station with the least possible exits, several of them with no adequate bus transfer zones and no alternate exits on the other side of the street (even though there are *emergency* exits on the far side, but no exits that people can actually use).

To top it off, translink had the brilliant idea of re-routing the busses from South Delta and White Rock so they dump all their passengers onto the Canada line at rush hour. Brilliant, the service is immediately full without  attracting any new transit riders and no cars have been taken off the street. Thanks, BC Liberals, for ramming this through!

I ain’t no kind of design guru but this wordpress theme is really good:

http://basicmaths.subtraction.com/

Very clean and neat and to the point. Hmmm. Even makes me think I might want to change my themes, almost.

Thanks to Jon for tweeting this.

I just handed back my iphone. It belonged to work and I changed jobs and I don’t get to keep it. So, now I’m without a cell phone for the 1st time in ten years. Will I survive?

I’m not sure. However, when I got the iphone in June I kept my old cell number by porting it to a voip provider who have very cheap, pay-as-you-go rates. This provider has a feature that emails me everytime someone calls and leaves a voice mail and, in fact, the email contains the voicemail as an attachment.

So, I’ve carried a wifi-enabled handheld device for years. In fact, at the moment I’ve just re-commissioned my old Palm Lifedrive and that device can usually connect in a wifi cafe and see the emails. Whether it can listen to the attachments, I’m not sure, but there’s also a voip app for the lifedrive which lets me actally make calls. But at the moment the lifedrive microphone isn’t working well and the audio from my calls is inaudible.

Anyway, there’s more work to do on this front and who knows, if I get this all sorted, maybe I won’t need no stinking cell phone!

We’re not the only ones with problems accommodating bikes on our bridges. Here’s an article from the New York Times illustrating the bridge, bikes and pedestrians problem is pinching the Brooklyn bridge.

So I was able finally to try out scoopler. Okay. Pretty handy.

In fact, it taps a thread that I’ve been thinking about for a while: the idea that the “standard” supply of  information content that means something to a given community has to include comments, criticisms, posts, and blogs by the very members of the community. And these posts and comments are now, increasingly, on these social networks that are hard for traditional information-agglomerating tools (website search (google), catalogues (library), listserv archives and digests, and so on.

Last time I tried to use it, scoopler were having some reliabilityi issues. But this time, while I think there’s still a few speed issues, it works pretty well and, in fact, it’s pretty handy to have. Especially for info on events and ideas that are moving fast. It’s worth checking out.

I read an article on a list about Scoopler and how it might be great because it was going to try to catch tweets and status post realtime and let you search for them. But I’ve tried to use it twice and I keep getting a blank search-page that says this:

Hmmm. Even late on a Thursday night. I guess the web never sleeps. But this doesn’t bode well for realtime tweet searching.

This (http://magiclantern.wikia.com/wiki/Magic_Lantern_Firmware_Wiki) is really cool! Now I’m not a videographer, as you might know. But, oooohhh, there’s something about hacking into the camera’s OS to make much more than what was originally intended that just makes my head spin. Who would ever predict that this would happen. If it catches on, film-making might never be the same. Wow!

Thanks to Baden for the tip.

A good camera makes a difference, no doubt. This taken with my Oly E-1, not w/ that iphone. But this camera is also kind of big and conspicuous. I think this guy grumped at me when he figured out I was taking his picture. iPhone doesn’t (so far) seem to get that reaction. Or maybe it’s just messengering on a miserable day is pretty grumpy work.