The world's best hot dog
Nov 10th, 2008

Well, I just got back from Iceland on Saturday. It was a great trip, and I'm definitely planning on returning in the not so distant future with Jessi. As promised I kept a photo blog with my iPhone, still available here: http://gallery.me.com/josh.ourisman#100051. Unfortunately, even though I was able to get WiFi nearly everywhere, for most of the trip I had trouble sending emails, so I didn't take as many pictures as I otherwise would have on my iPhone. I do have a ton on my camera, however, and I'll be putting those online soon.

Our trip was definitely an interesting one. It was put on by Abercrombie & Kent, a luxury tour company, for a handful of travel agents such as my dad and a few other professionals in the travel industry. The flight over was on A&K;'s private jet, a 757 leased from Icelandair and fitted out for total luxury. It seats, I believe, about 50 passengers, and has a lounge area where we were served a fantastic dinner consisting of caviar served in the Russian style followed by our choice of lamb, red snapper, or, I think, chicken. Needless to say, this was not your typical airplane dinner. Nor, unfortunately, is it anything that I'm likely to experience again anytime soon.

After landing we, along with two A&K; guides, were handed off into the capable hands of Luxury Adventures who spent the week taking us on a whirlwind tour of all the attractions that Iceland has to offer around Reykjavik including the Hellisheiði Geothermal Plant, the Blue Lagoon, the Eyjafjallajökull glacier, the Geysir geyser (the root of the word geyser), the East-Ranga river (purportedly one of the best salmon rivers in the world), the site of the first Icelandic parliament (from around 972 C.E. or so), and a dizzying array of other beautiful and amazing sites which I'll try and post more specifically about once I get the pictures off my camera.

I also got to check off an item that has been near the top of my to do list for years: eat whale. While at the Hotel Ranga we had a fantastic dinner in which I got to sample not only whale, but also puffin (which tastes, unsurprisingly, a lot like duck) and reindeer (which also unsurprisingly tastes a lot like regular venison). I did not, unfortunately, get to check off the other food item that I was hoping to while in Iceland: kæstur hákarl, though I plan to on a future trip.

Anyway, on to the hot dog.

It turns out that Reykjavik is home to the world's best hot dog in the form of Bæjarins beztu pylsur (which translates as 'best hot dog in town'). It's a small stand on Pósthússtræti, which just so happens to be the same street as the hotel we were staying at: the Hótel Borg. I had mine 'ein með öllu' (with everything), at the suggestion of a friend of mine from Reykjavik, and it was truly fantastic. Apparently the hot dogs in Iceland are mostly made of lamb, but also with some pork in them. It was absolutely delicious, and quite affordable at only 250 króna which, last week, was about $2, though this week is about $1.

Which brings me nicely to my next topic: the exchange rate. This past week, it was about 125 króna to the dollar. However today the króna was put back on the international currency market at a reduced value and is currently at 225 króna to the dollar. As a result, Jessi and I are seriously considering going back for a long weekend this coming weekend. Thanks to Icelandair's vacation packages it would only cost $799 per person for two round trip tickets and two nights at a hotel in Reykjavik, and only another $55 per night to extend the trip. It's kinda hard to turn that sort of deal down, especially for a trip to a place as amazing as Iceland. They have a number of other packages as well, and I'm looking forward to taking advantage of them for both a winter trip to experience the darkness of arctic winter, and spring and/or summer trips for some hiking and backpacking across volcanic plains and glaciers.

Long story short: I love Iceland. I don't think a single day went by when we discovered some new thing about the island nation that inspired me to declare my intention of moving there. However by far one of my favorite things about the country has nothing to do tourism or even really our trip at all. While we were driving around the country side we saw tons and tons of what we were told were summer homes. When we asked what Icelanders do in their summer homes the answer was: read. Apparently Icelanders are amongst the most prolific readers in the world and, as evidence, there is a three story bookstore on Austurstræti (I think I spelled that right) in Reykjavik that was open, and filled with people sitting down reading, well after all the other shops had closed up for the night (6pm on non-summer weekdays). If you've been reading my blog for a while you might know that I find the US' abysmally low level of reading to be be very depressing, and the idea of a country where the national pastime appears to be reading is quite appealing to me.

Iceland, ho!
Nov 4th, 2008

Today I get to add another entry to the fairly long and growing list of countries I've visited: Iceland. In about 4 hours my dad and I are hopping a plane from Boston to Reykjavik. It's going to be a short trip, only four days, but Iceland has long be high on the list of places I want to visit, so I'm excited to get a taste of what will someday become a destination for a longer trip (not to mention whale, and maybe even hakarl). As I did with my Europe trip last April, I'll be taking advantage of my iPhone's ability to not only take pictures but also upload them directly to a MobileMe gallery, though this time I'm also taking my nice camera as I won't be staying in hostels and aren't worried about it getting lost stolen, so there will be a second gallery of higher quality pictures after I get back. The only downside of the trip is that I'm going to have to wait to Wednesday morning to hear about the results of today's election. We're landing at 11:30 local time, which is only 6:30 Eastern, so the polls won't even be closed yet. I might stay up for a while to watch the returns, but apparently everything closes at 1, so I'll just be sitting by myself in the hotel room... Oh well, I get to go to Iceland.

The gallery for this trip will be at: http://gallery.me.com/josh.ourisman#100051

A brief update and some thoughts on the future of eBooks
Mar 13th, 2008

It's been far too long since I've written anything. A whole lot has happened since the last post, much of it work. I'm on track for my biggest project yet to go live pretty soon, and I've got a number of other smaller projects that should be released even before then.

In the mean time Jessi and I spent 10 days on the west coast at the end of last month. It was a fairly busy travel schedule: fly from Boston to San Francisco on Friday so Jessi could host an OurStage.com sponsored Yelp party, then Saturday morning fly from San Francisco to San Diego where we spent a relaxing weekend with some very fun members of Jessi's family I hadn't met before, the Monday Jessi took the train to LA for some meetings and I flew straight back to San Francisco (LA's just not my town) to hang out with friends and see my dad until Jessi came back up on Wednesday for NoisePop (also sponsored by OurStage), then back to Boston on the following Monday. It was definitely very nice to be back in the Bay Area, although I learned that it's never a good idea to plan on relying on the free WiFi in a hotel. Though our hotel (the Civic Center Holiday Inn) had it, it was pretty flaky and seemed to have some policy in place that prevented outgoing traffic, which meant I couldn't SSH into my server, which meant I was severely limited in what I was able to do from the hotel. Fortunately we were right across the street from the absolutely amazing San Francisco Public Library main branch which is probably my second favorite public library after Boston's Copley Square branch, and provides pretty fast free WiFi. All in all it was a very good, but very exhausting trip.

Since getting back, my focus has been pretty much all business. I've gotten a lot of work done, though I still have a lot of work left to do, and hopefully I should be able to make some pretty big business-related announcements over the next couple months. I did, actually, have one small business milestone while in San Francisco: I hired my first contractor for a small job. Jesse Legg helped me out with a quick project so that I would have the free time to work on another that had a looming deadline. Not really that big of a deal, but I think it's still an indication that I'm on the right track and my business is continuing to grow.

In other news, I just saw on Gizmodo a story about a new eBook reader from Netronix. It's basically like they took Amazon's Kindle and made the changes that I would have wanted made: they added a touchscreen interface and gave it WiFi instead of EV-DO. While the lack of EV-DO obviously limits it in terms of being able to get content no matter where you are, I think it will prove to be a more useful direction for eBook readers. What I would like to see, similar to Amazon's always-on eBook store, is some framework by which people with a WiFi enabled eBook reader can walk into a brick and mortar bookstore, browse through the books, and, when they find what they want, but it electronically and download it directly to their reader via the store's WiFi network. In some ways this would be less convenient than Amazon's store, but it would also be vastly more flexible and give people the option of still supporting their local bookstores. I would also really like to see this sort of technology extended to libraries, although the whole premise of the library is predicated on the limited time that you have access to the materials, so it would probably require some sort of DRM in order to be workable. Hopefully, with the popularity of the Kindle, eInk technology and the whole concepts of eBooks will start to advance more quickly and we'll start seeing better and better reader technology. I know I will definitely own an eBook reader of some sort in the next few years. I just hope it has some mechanism for both the sort of WiFi store described above and some note taking capacity.

The joys of air travel
Dec 28th, 2007

For the week leading up to Christmas, Jessi and I were in New Mexico with my mom. Flying to New Mexico is a somewhat ridiculous affair, because there aren't all that many direct flights to Albuquerque. In general, the best bet has always been to fly Southwest. I've never been a particularly big fan of Southwest, but it wasn't that big a deal because I was only ever taking short flights (Oakland to San Diego, Oakland to Albuquerque, and Oakland to Los Angeles, were about it). Now, of course, I'm living on the East Coast again, so not only did I have to drive an hour to get to an airport that Southwest operates out of (they fly to Providence and Manchester, we chose Manchester for this trip), but there weren't any direct flights. It wasn't really all that bad though, as long as I have a book and an aisle seat so I can stretch my legs every so often I can deal with it.

The real problem arose after we got back to Manchester. We came back with an extra suitcase that we hadn't taken with us, so had 3 checked bags instead of 2. Unfortunately, only 2 of them actually made it to Manchester—the two that had only my stuff in them. Jessi's bag was nowhere to be found. So we filed a claim in the baggage office and they assumed that it was just stuck in Chicago (where we had caught our connecting flight) and would come in the next day (yesterday) at which point they would send it to us by courier.

So yesterday I spent the day waiting for the courier. He finally arrive in the early afternoon and brought in a suitcase. Unfortunately it wasn't ours. It wasn't even the right color, although someone had thoughtfully tagged it with our baggage claim number. The courier was very apologetic, although also very happy when I didn't blame him for the problem; apparently he gets yelled at a lot when that sort of thing happens even though all he does it take the bags where the airlines tell him to take them. We figured what probably had happened was that the tags on two bags got switched some how, so he had dropped our bag off at someone else's house (if it's not an apartment you can have them just leave the bag for you), so I figured we'd get a call about it that night when the people got home from work and discovered the mistake. No such luck.

So last night I got a call from Southwest. They confirmed that the bag that had been delivered was the wrong one, and then basically just said that they have no idea where our bag is. I repeated the description of the bag that I had given them before and let them know that it had one of Jessi's business cards in the name tag holder and that all the contact information on it was valid.

Now we're essentially just waiting for Southwest to conduct some sort of national search for our bag. Maybe it's still in Albuquerque, maybe it's still in Chicago, maybe it's still in Manchester somehow. Maybe it got put onto the wrong flight at some point and ended up somewhere altogether different. Maybe a baggage handler stole it. Maybe the TSA stole it. Who knows (although I'm leaning towards the TSA being to blame just because).

I've never actually had a bag get lost on a flight before, it's not a very fun experience. It also does little to improve our perception of Southwest. We don't really plan on ever flying with them again, although New Mexico is the only destination of theirs that we'd even have considered them for anyway.

US Border Security
Nov 12th, 2007

Never fear, my fellow Americans, our borders are secure! So secure, in fact, that a law abiding US citizen traveling home from a friendly nation with which we have very good relations can barely get into the country. Ok, that's a bit of an exaggeration, but that's what it felt like. I had a great business-related post all planned out for when I got back, but now I feel inclined to post about this instead.

As you should know if you've been paying attention, I've just come back from Jamaica where I was for my uncle's wedding. I've been to Jamaica tons of times; I started going from before my memory starts, and there are pictures of me there in diapers. I've had plenty of annoying trips going through customs and immigration (usually in Miami), but this time definitely takes the cake.

There aren't, apparently, any direct flights from Boston to Montego Bay, so instead I flew JetBlue to Ft. Lauderdale where I caught an Air Jamaica flight to Montego Bay. Coming back I simply reversed the trip.

As an interesting aside, when I was buying my tickets I discovered this:

Apparently the USSR is still alive and well, but you can only get there through Jamaica.

Anyway, back to the point. My schedule gave me an hour and a half between my two flights in Ft. Lauderdale. I have never had immigration take that long (except maybe going into Manchester this past spring...), even going into China has always been a breeze when I've done it, so I figured I'd be fine.

The first problem was that they were simply unorganized. The passport control area was designed have probably about 10 lines all feeding different desks. Instead, they had set it up as one single long line that snaked through the room (because it was way too small to accommodate even a single flight's worth of travelers despite having obviously been renovated pretty recently). They didn't even separate out the US passport holders from the rest, which would have completely solved my problem. 45 minutes later I was less than halfway through the line because, despite it being incredibly obvious to anyone that their setup wasn't sufficient to accommodate even a modest number of people, only about half of the desks were actually staffed. About an hour later I finally made it through, picked up my bag, went through customs (very quickly, thankfully), then got on the shuttle to take me to the other terminal where I'd catch my next flight. At that point there was only about 30 minutes before my flight boarded which essentially meant that I couldn't make it. First off, they won't let you check in less than 30 minutes before the flight (and I hadn't checked in online before, which turned out to be a good thing), and second it's very rare to spend less than a half hour going through security. Fortunately, I had a solution. Since my flight hadn't actually left yet and probably wasn't even boarding yet I hadn't technically missed it yet. That meant that, while I was on the (surprisingly long) shuttle ride between terminals I was able to go online with my iPhone and change my itinerary to a later flight. JetBlue is very good about changing itineraries, and they only charge you the difference in the ticket price (if any) plus about $25 service charge. So when I got off the shuttle, all I had to do was check into my next flight and go through security. Security, as I expected, probably took about 45 minutes to an hour because, again, they didn't have enough people working causing a huge bottle neck so there was no way I could possibly have made my flight.

So I bought some books, and waited 4 hours for my flight. I ended up leaving just a little after I was supposed to arrive in Boston originally, and landed in Boston at around 10:30 at night. Fortunately, Jessi was there to pick me up so I didn't have to deal with the vagaries of the T nor the exorbitance of a taxi.

Despite all that though, I had a great time in Jamaica. I got to spend time with my family that I rarely see, and meet some interesting new people. I also was able to get a few good pictures that I'll be posting online once I figure out how to get them onto my computer (I used to just use the built-in card reader in my monitor which I no longer have, and I'm not sure where the cord for my camera got to).

So, that's my border crossing rant. Stay tuned for that business-related post I promised earlier.

A year's worth of travel
Oct 26th, 2007

So when I first put my computer up on Craigslist to sell I received a very interesting offer: a year of unlimited free travel on US Airways. Being a big traveller this was an extremely appealing offer on the face of it, and I let my imagination run away a bit on the possibilities. I came up with various ways of doing it, from simply hopping from city to city having fun and taking whatever flight I could get out when I was done, to a more commercialized plan of attempting to get corporate sponsorships to pay for places to stay and places to eat (and maybe even the flights as I'd much rather do this sort of thing on JetBlue than US Airways) in exchange for the marketing they'd get from me putting their branding on my blog, writing about their services, having my picture taken using their products and services &c.;

After thinking it over, I decided that the first option is just untenable. At least for right now. I have a business to run and build, and a number of opportunities on the horizon to expand that. I've got a home to take care of an a mortgage to pay. I've got bills. I've got all sorts of responsibilities that, as much as I might sometimes like to, I can't just walk away from (unless I can find a place to walk to where the IRS can't find me, that is).

The second option might very well be doable. With a good enough pitch, I could probably get sponsorship to do this sort of thing. There would be all sorts of sponsorship opportunities as well: national sponsorships from whatever airline and whatever hotel chain I can get, regional sponsorships from state tourism boards and regional chains, local sponsorships from local restaurants, attractions, and what have you. And of course I could sell advertising on the site as well. If you think of the whole venture as a year long online and physical marketing campaign for the various sponsors, it could pretty easily lead to a 6 figure income when all is said and done. So I considered that, and I considered who I could approach, and how much money I could reasonable expect to get, and what I would have to promise in return. And I decided that, while it may be doable, and I might even be able to convince the sponsors that they want me to do it rather than to just steal my idea, fund it the same way I would with sponsorships from other companies, and then just hire some actor to do it better than I ever would and only pay him a small fraction of the money because it's just a job for him, even if I could do all that I don't think it would be worth it. I'd love the opportunity to travel around the country. I'd especially love it if I was not only not paying for it, but was making a lot of money off it. But the things I'd have to do to make that money would, I think, take all the fun out of it. I like to travel on my own, and see things and do things and even write about it, but as soon as it becomes a big corporate thing there's just too much planning and negotiating and crap like that I don't want to deal with. I'd want to be spontaneous and have fun and deviate from whatever little plan I have whenever an interesting opportunity comes up, and I'd never be able to do that if I had and airline and a hotel chain and who knows who else footing the bill.

Unfortunately, I came to the conclusion that the traveling idea would either be really fun but impossible, or possible and lucrative but not fun at all. So instead I sold my computer and monitor for cash and ordered a new iMac to replace them.

Expect a write-up of Blogtoberfest 2007 later today.

A very long catch-up post
Oct 10th, 2007

I've been getting bad about updating regularly, and I'm trying to fix that. I have, however, been very busy lately. Here's a quick rehash of what's happened since my last post:

1. It turned out that the work I was expecting to have to do while I was in Illinois ended up getting pushed back by my client. So I never really had to test out my Parallels/Gentoo/Lighttpd/SQLite setup for web development (although I did some very basic tests that worked out just fine).



2. I got to meet Jessi's sister's new daughter, and basically my niece, Maura, just hours after she was born at around midnight on Sept. 28. Here are some pictures of her meeting her aunt Jessi, her grandma, her great-grandma, her mom, and, of course, me, all taken on my iPhone (the one to the right is my favorite of the many funny faces she made).


3. Went to the wedding of some of Jessi's friends from home.


4. Flew back to Boston.


5. Had a whopping 4 or so days before some other friends came from Illinois to visit us, and then got to show them around Boston and expose them to some of our favorite things here (like G'vanni's in the North End and Tacos Lupita in Porter Square). Though in the process it finally dawned on me that since we have a car now the Providence and Manchester airports are within range so we can actually fly on SouthWest and save some money when we go places that JetBlue won't take us (they flew SouthWest into Providence).


6. Finally sold the Mercedes. I didn't get quite as much for it as I wanted, but I still got enough that it was worthwhile having repaired and sold it rather than just junking it when it died.


7. Finally got that project that I had expected to be working on while I was in Illinois. Ended up having to do the whole thing in two days (ah, the joys of sub-contracting).


8. I lived out my 9,125 day, remarkable only in that it's a multiple of 365. This was the same day we ate at G'vanni's, and afterwards got pastries from the North End's Modern Pastry.


9. I put off development of my WiFi database site in favor of a different project. This one will be less flashy, but will have much greater personal utility. It will also probably be useful for a lot of other people too, so my plan is to make it a hosted (free) service and open it up for anyone to use. I'm considering the possibility of maybe some premium features that you have to pay for, but that will have to wait.


10. My MacBook, which I've had for approximately 17 months now, died. I'm fairly positive it's a hard drive failure as when it happened there was no kernel panic or any other sort of error message. The computer was still running, but any processes that were trying to access the hard drive locked up. Then the hard drive started making a pleasant clicking sound. Upon attempting to reboot I sill get the starting chime, but then it just goes to a white screen and clicks. This all seems consistent with a hard drive failure as when it happened most of the system would have been running in RAM and so unaffected, and the startup chime is stored in firmware and so also unaffected.

And that brings us to today. Currently I'm waiting until it's time to head over to the Apple Store in the CambridgeSide Galleria to have them look at my MacBook. The problem is such that they'll spend a few minutes looking it over and then tell me that they'll have to send it in to the service center for repairs (they only do work on desktop locally, laptops are always shipped out). It should be a fairly quick repair though, so I should only be without my laptop for probably a week at the most. Fortunately I bought AppleCare for it, so the repair will be free.

I'm also working on designing a home theater setup for the condo. Currently the only screen we have to watch the few tv shows and movies we watch is my monitor. This isn't as bad as it sounds, as it's a Dell 24" LCD with greater than HD resolution (1920x1200), but it does mean that we have to sit in the office on our desk chairs which isn't as comfortable as it could be. The other day we tried moving my computer out to the living room to see if the screen was big enough to use as a tv in there. It isn't quite, but it wasn't actually all that bad. However since my MacBook just died I had to move the computer back into the office so that it would actually be useable. So now I'm planning out what will become our home theater system. I'm fairly positive that for the screen I'll be getting the Olevia 342i, a 42", 720p tv without an HDTV tuner. This may seem lacking, but it isn't. At about 8-10' away, the difference between 720p and 1080p on a 42" screen won't really be noticeable. And we dont' need a built-in HDTV tuner, because I'm going to be using the TV with a SiliconDust HDHomeRun. The HDHomeRun is a much better choice for us becaues it's a dual-tuner device, and it's compatible out of the box with MythTV, which is what I plan on using to manage our video library and for it's DVR capabilities. That leaves only the question of how to implement the MythTV system. I've narrowed that down to two options:

1. A Mac Mini. Actually, that's a vast oversimplification. The Mini would only be running the MythTV front-end. The back-end would be running on a Linux box. I already have a suitable machine to use for the Linux box (I built it a couple years ago as a gaming rig, and it's more than up to the task), I just need to reformat the drives and install MythTV. So the only cost there would be the Mac Mini (about $600) and the drives for storage ($330 for a 1 TB drive to start). So the total initial cost of that MythTV setup would be around $1000.


2. A TVease Zodiac. I'd get the $900 base model, because I don't need/want the analog tuners and it's cheaper to use the HDHomeRun than to get a model with HD tuners; also it's cheaper to add more storage myself. This ends up being a little costlier, but significantly easier in terms of setup and usage. It also reduces the number of components the system has by allowing me to put the MythTV front-end and back-end in the same box without significantly reducing my storage capacity (it has room for three drives, so a maximum of 3 TB, but I can always add external drives as well so the maximum storage capacity is essentially infinate). I probably wouldn't get a new HD for it right off the bat. Even though it will only come with a 250 GB drive, I can point it to the 500 GB RAID that I currently store my digital video collection on over the network so I think it will be sufficient for now. Of course eventually I'd probably want to put another TB or more into it. The total initial cost of this MythTV setup is also about $1000, but much easier to accomplish.

So I have to figure out which setup I want to use. The Mac Mini will look better, but the Zodiac doesn't look that bad, and the eventual plan is to recess it into the wall anyway which will look pretty cool no matter which I use. I'm really leaning towards the Zodiac right now, but I want to do a little more research before I make any sort of decision like that. In the mean time, I can at least get the TV and see about hacking it into the current setup (perhaps using KnoppMyth on my PC (the reason I'm not going to just go with a plan like that is it won't look as good and will be loud, should be perfectly fine for a temporary setup though).

Working from the road
Sep 23rd, 2007

This will be my second post written from my iPhone. I'm currently in the middle of nowhere in Illinois at Jessi's mom's house. We'll be here until the 30th, which means I'll have some work to do on the trip. On my previous visits here there was always a wifi network available from one of the neighbors who was kindly sharing his sattelite Internet connection with the rest of the town (it's a very small town and they can't get cable or DSL out here). Sadly it turns out that someone had been using up his monthly bandwidth allotmen so that's no longer available to me. Hence me writing this entry from my iPhone.

Fortunately, I came prepared to work without Internet access. I had planned to do some work on the flight over here, so before I left I created a new Parallels virtual machine and installed a copy of Gentoo Linux in it, and set up a lighttpd server with PHP and Python running in FastCGI as well as SQLite and MySQL so I could do both PHP and Django development without having to only guess at whether or not it would actually work (technically this wasn't necessary for Django since it comes with a lightweight development server built-in, and OS X comes with SQLite installed standard, but I figures I might as well).

I also tried setting up Tinyproxy on my iPhone so I could share my iPhone's EDGE connection with my laptop for browsing, but for some reason it doesn't seem to be working even though I had no problem with it at home.

The end result is that, even though I have no real Internet access to speak of, I can still do my work. I can even keep in touch with everyone thanks to my iPhone and meebo, and, if the need were to arise, I could always set up an SSH tunnel through my iPhone and get SFTP access to my webserver (or any other, for that matter) that way. So even way out here where they don't even have DSL, I'm still fully connected. This is one of those times where, even though I spend pretty much all my time working with technology, I'm still completely amazed by it.

Now, I believe, it's time for dinner.

Slightly disapointing
Jun 30th, 2007

Well, I'm currently at the SOHO Apple Store. My bus arrived at 11:20, well before I expected it to. The trip was almost depressingly uneventful. The bus was clean, in good repair, and well driven. No problems what so ever. The only delay we encountered was a broken down bus, and it wasn't even a Fung Wah!

So far, I have to say that Fung Wah does things far better than the MBTA.

Wish me luck
Jun 30th, 2007

Today I'm taking my life into my own hands. In just 2.5 hours (after I first drop Jessi off at the airport), I'm getting on the dreaded FungWah bus and heading to New York.

We'll see if I make it there alive. The first thing I plan on doing is heading to the SoHo Apple Store (I haven't been to that one yet, and it's located conveniently close to China Town), so I'll check in there. Check back around noon to make sure I haven't died horribly in a freak bus mishap.

Wales
Jun 25th, 2007

I finally gotten the pictures I took in Wales online. (Thanks to recent improvements to Zooomr I was able to upload them all at once instead of having to break it up in to small chunks of photos.) Now that I've got illustrations, I plan on writing in more depth about the trip, but for now, here are some of my favorite shots.

They're everywhere!
May 29th, 2007

Apparently it's not just the MBTA and RMV that are extremely horrible at expediting transportation in Massachusetts. I'm starting to think that poorly implemented transportation is simply endemic to the Commonwealth.

I was at Logan airport earlier, at the E terminal, waiting to pick up some friends who have since flown in. The signage there is less clear than it could be. I wanted to just stay in the terminal E loop, but the only options I could see were Airport Exit and parking to one direction, and indeterminate other things in the other direction. So I went the other direction. It didn't seem quite right, but it was an airport, and they're never laid out logically, so I kept going. Besides, there was no obvious way to turn around and go the other way. Eventually, I found myself in Maverick Square; clearly I had made a wrong turn somewhere.

Having never been in East Boston or Chelsea before I didn't really know where to go. The plus side was that I had, by that time, learned that my friends had missed their flight and wouldn't be coming in until later, so I could go home rather than trying to find my way back to the airport. I had no idea where I was, but I could see the water, and, as I still know very little of the local geography, figured it must be the river and that following it must eventually lead me to Cambridge. So I drove toward the water ...and discovered many large ocean-going ships. Last I checked there are no large ocean-going vessels in the Charles river. This was when I realized that East Boston is on the other side of the harbor.

Still, I figured, following the water would probably be the best bet. Eventually it led me to the Sumner Tunnel where the signs indicated that the normal car toll is $3. I very rarely carry cash, and had been expecting to only have to pay the $1 I'm used to getting on and off the pike, so that was all the cash I had on me. So I decided to keep going and see if I can find a cheaper way to get home. A little while later I saw signs pointing towards the Tobin Bridge. Again, my lack of familiarity with the local geography, cause largely by the fact that I pretty much never drive here, got me in trouble. For some reason I had it in my head that the Tobin Bridge was actually the Bunker Hill Bridge. This idea was reinforced by the fact that the Bunker Hill Bridge is clearly visible from East Boston. So I followed the signs knowing that from the base of the Bunk Hill Bridge I could easily get myself home. The signs, of course, didn't take me where I expected and I ended up on the on-ramp for the Tobin Bridge, hoping that there was no toll to cross.

Of course there is, and as I was in a Zipcar which has commercial plates, that toll was $4.50. Being $3.50 short I had to tell the guy that I had no cash. I figured he'd give me some sort of ticket so I could mail the toll in later, maybe with a small fine. Well, he did give me a ticket, but closer examination leads me to believe that I'm going to have to pay a $50 fine. Plus whatever fee Zipcar charges me for having to deal with receiving the notice of violation and informing MassPike that it has to go to me instead which I think is about $20.

So, just because I don't usually carry cash and am not really familiar with driving in the area I may be out $70. That's just a load of crap. At least they offer an option to appeal the violation. An option of which I am definitely going to avail myself. One advantage to being self-employed is that I actually have the flexibility to deal with bureaucratic nonsense without fear of being fired.