Indeed!

Commuting and the Mariners

2007-06-23T20:37:00-07:00

As I’ve mentioned before, biking is my preferred way to get to work. Sometimes, however, biking isn’t practical due to weather (I have no problem biking in typical Seattle rain, but if it’s windy and rainy, biking can be pretty miserable) or because of after-work plans.

Yesterday, I was due to stop by a party after work in West Seattle’s Admiral district, a few miles from my house. I didn’t really want to hang out at the party in bike clothes, so I had a couple of options. I could have biked to work, then taken the water taxi and the water taxi shuttle to Admiral, but the water taxi is slow, and I’ve got to deal with getting my bike into the car at the same time as the baby seat (Megan was due to meet me at the party with Maggie in tow), which is a bit of a challenge (note: I need to step up my efforts to get a bike rack for our car…). So I wound up deciding to take the bus to work and then to the party.

On the way into work in the morning, I arrived at the bus stop exactly as both the route 55 and the water taxi shuttle showed up. I figured the 55 would get me to work faster, and since I was leaving work early to visit the party, that made my decision easy. All was well until the bus reached the south edge of downtown, at which traffic slowed down considerably. Still, by the time I got off the bus at the Seattle Art Museum, the water taxi hadn’t even left the dock at Seacrest park yet.

So I waited at the bus stop next to the museum for a number 15, 18, 21, or 22. In theory, these buses come at 10 or 20 minute intervals during commute hours, so with 4 different routes to choose from, I should have been able to hop on a suitable bus within 3-5 minutes. Unfortunately, Metro has a number of time warps planted along 1st Avenue, it seems, and I wound up waiting about 14 minutes for a bus to pick me up, by which time the water taxi was pulling up to pier 55—in the end I could have taken the picturesque water taxi route and probably gotten to work at exactly the same time and in a noticeably better mood. Fortunately, it’s Friday, so my mood is bound to recover soon anyway.

My bus route to the party in the afternoon was the number 57, which picks me up (on time!) and whisks me to the north edge of downtown, at which point it stops to smell the flowers. Noticing the flowers smelled a lot like exhaust fumes, I looked up and discovered the traffic I normally expect to see on 1st Avenue around 5:15pm, but it’s only 4:40. Usually, when this happens, I get off the bus, walk past half a dozen buses, and get on a 54 or 55 near the highway 99 onramp. Today that’s not an option, so I just have to wait it out.

It turns out that the early traffic is due, of course, to the fact that there’s a Mariners game at Safeco Field. I’ve noticed in the past that Mariners games pretty much cause terrible traffic from the north edge of downtown all the way past the stadium (which is past the south edge of downtown), but I never realized that this traffic started 2 and a half hours before the baseball game. In the end, it took 1 hour and 5 minutes to travel what was scheduled to be a 35 minute ride. Once again, I’d have been better off taking the slow but beautiful water taxi, which has the distinct virtue of not getting stuck behind all of the baseball game traffic.

Is there some other way to avoid the Mariners traffic? I haven’t figured it out. If you need to cross downtown on a game day (which seems to be about every other day during the summer), you’re screwed. Given the frequency with which games snarl downtown rush hour traffic, I would have expected Metro and the city to figure out a way to keep the buses running smoothly, at least, but on-time performance during the evening commute is simply abysmal, so maybe they don’t see the point in even trying. Sadly, this makes me hate taking the bus, and I’m a long-time bus commuter (I’ve been taking the bus regularly since high school, except for a few years working in the Silicon Valley where my daily bus commute would have taken roughly as long as standard work day).

Come on, Metro, figure out a way to keep your buses on schedule through traffic events that are 100% predictable.

Oh yeah, the party was great. All 15 minutes of the time I got to spend there, due to my insanely late arrival on the bus.

Mac OS Leopard feature news

2007-06-15T18:57:00-07:00

Following Apple’s WWDC announcements about the features in their upcoming operating system release (dubbed “Leopard”), I have to say that most of the new features are pretty ho-hum.

Here’s the rundown of what’s new or significantly improved:

New Desktop
New Finder
Quick Look
Spaces
New iChat
iCal scheduling
Time Machine
Safari 3

Of these, most are merely incremental. The changes to the Desktop are so minor that most users probably won’t notice—the are pretty much entirely cosmetic. The new “Stacks” feature is not substantially different from putting a folder in the Dock. The transparent menu bar is cute but it’s not going to change the way you work.

The new Finder offers a Cover Flow feature which looks cool, but isn’t exactly a practical way to find your files. However, there is mention of the ability to control other computers on the network through some of the Finder’s new networking features. This could be immensely useful for multi-Mac households and possibly even for remote tech support for mom & dad—if it works between computers on different networks (many of Apple’s network features operate only on a local network).

Quick Look is a welcome improvements that allows you to see the content of files within the Finder (and, presumably, Open/Save dialog boxes) but images and movies already have this feature, and on my computer, most word processing files and spreadsheets are easier to distinguish by name than by the visual appearance of their contents.

Spaces is Apple’s version of a feature commonly known to Linux users as “Virtual Desktops” and I don’t really think the average user will find it very compelling. I’ve used virtual desktops before, and I know a number of people who find them indispensable, but I don’t think a majority of Mac OS users are going to do so. Of course, since the Mac OS is converting so many Linux users these days, Spaces isn’t a bad feature for Apple to add.

In Leopard, iChat will gain some interesting features, the most compelling of which is the ability to share your view of a file. Reading closely, though, it appears that this only works for files that support Quick Look, so you’re probably not going to be able to collaborate on a GarageBand composition using this feature. I was kind of hoping for a more robust screen sharing system for the masses (technically, the Apple Remote Desktop client built into the current OS can be used in this fashion, but the challenge of getting it to work through firewalls and home routers disqualifies it from being a consumer-friendly feature).

iCal will get some new scheduling features that are nice: primarily the ability to see who is free when scheduling a group meeting. This is a great feature, but not exactly groundbreaking, since Exchange/Outlook/Entourage have had this feature for ages.

Safari 3, doesn’t appear to offer much new for Mac users—it seems like the big deal with Safari 3 is that it will be available for Windows (and will be included on the iPhone). There are a couple of nice new features but the ability to move tabs is already present in Firefox, and I don’t think most people are going to get too worked up over inline find. Still, the existence of Safari for Windows will make it easier for web developers to ensure compatibility for Mac and, perhaps more importantly, iPhone users. No one will have an excuse for their websites not working on Macs or iPhones any more. This is good for Apple, and good for Apple’s customers, but you don’t need to buy Leopard to benefit from it.

Time Machine is Apple’s brilliant new backup system, and it’s definitely an impressive new feature. It will allow you to retrieve a prior version of any file or folder on your computer, and will handle backup creation seamlessly, so you’ll never have to think about it. Considering how few people keep decent backups, this feature is going to make a huge difference to users.

So at the end of the day, Time Machine is the only good reason I see for most users to spend money on Leopard. For people who support multiple machines, the Finder’s new network computer access features may also be compelling, but the other new features all seem like minor improvements. Normally, I jump on new OS upgrades fairly quickly, but since I already have a good backup system running, I might just sit this one out for a while. There’s just not much exciting in this upgrade. At least, not yet.

Bike commuting

2007-06-09T23:05:00-07:00

I biked to work all week, and I have to say it’s my favorite way to get to/from work. I hardly ever drive — driving oneself to work is such a waste of energy and pollution — and while I’m a big fan of transit, the bus ride from my home to my office requires 2 busses and is pretty slow, especially in the evenings. I’ve taken the Water Taxi a few times, and it’s a beautiful ride, but not exactly speedy, since I need to take a bus or shuttle at both ends.

Time-wise, all of the non-bike commute options take a similar amount of time:

Ever since my office moved to the north edge of the Olympic Sculpture Park, I have to take two busses: one to get downtown, and another to get to the no-man’s land between northern Belltown and southern Lower Queen Anne (aka: Uptown). It’s a 10 minute walk from my house to the bus terminal, and another 10 minutes walk from the nearest bus stop to my office. If the busses are on time, it’s about 50 minutes door-to-door. Between 4:45pm and 6:30pm, though, all of the busses I take run late and erratic, so it can take quite a while to get home. Add an extra 10-15 minutes due to traffic if there’s a Mariners game.

Although driving might take the shortest amount of time, there’s no place close to my office where I can park cheaply, so it takes me another 10 minutes of walking to get to work once I’ve parked, negating the potential speed benefit (which is often not much to start with, due to traffic on the viaduct). And traffic during the evening commute is even worse.

The Water Taxi (currently only operational during the summer, though there are discussions about running it year-round) requires a 10 minute walk to the bus stop, a 15 minutes shuttle ride to the pier, a 15 minute crossing, and then I still have to get from pier 55 to my office. It’s about a 25 minute walk, and so far, the timing has always been wrong for me to catch the route 99 (the replacement for the Waterfront Streetcar while a new maintainenace facility is built to replace the one displaced by the Olympic Sculpture Park), which only seems to run every 30 minutes in the morning.

Biking, on the other hand, takes about 35 minutes, depending on whether I get caught at the Spokane Street Drawbridge or a train crossing. Since there’s a shower at the office, I just pack some clothes and once I get to my desk, I’m freshly showered and energized for work. There’s also the bonus of getting some exercise in at the same time as my commute (coming up Avalon Way is a bit of a workout)—and let’s face it: I could use the exercise.

Naming is difficult

2007-06-01T10:18:00-07:00

It’s so hard to pick names for things. Names convey identity, and how can you know the identity of a thing before it’s even begun?

Megan and I had this problem when we were trying to come up with names for our daughter before she was born. We didn’t even know that she was a girl at the time, so we had to come up with several names for boys and several names for girls. After she was born, it was clear to us which name was right, but we simply could not have picked the right name for her before we actually met her.

When creating any new piece of software, figuring out what to name it is the hardest part of getting started, because once you’ve decided what some code is called, you’ve effectively defined what it’s going to be. Often, you don’t really know what it’s going to be until you start using it and building it into things.

Really, any creative project encounters the same issue. You pick a name at the beginning of the project, before it has really taken shape, and ultimately the name you picked will probably influence the shape of the project down the road.

Aware of this, I had a hard time picking a name for this blog—and I’m kicking myself for that, because it wasn’t worth all the dithering.

About the title of the blog

When I was half my current age, I somehow adopted the habit of saying “indeed” when people said things to me that begged a response. That one word, when spoken with different inflections could be affirmative, negative, confirmatory, inquisitory, and many other things as well.

“Indeed” turns out to be a very flexible word, and I felt that left me a lot of leeway in terms of what this blog might contain as it develops.

About the domain name

People often ask me how I came up with the domain name outofcoffee.com and the simple explanation is that I wanted something easy to spell, easy to remember, and, obviously, not already snapped up by domain name speculators. Back in 2002, this was the best I could come up with. I happen to like coffee, and strongly dislike being out of coffee, but that’s all secondary to being memorable and spellable.