It's Ozone Day!

Someday I need to write up in detail what a total disaster transit systems are. I've had issues trying to figure out where I am going in other cities, or pay the fare, but assumed the system had some sensibility, and communications was the issue. Now that I have used my local system for a while, I assume they are all this bad, and are totally inexplicable. You pretty much cannot tell where anything goes, unless you already know. No one really wants to help, and the system is full of internal process and jargon, so communicating with any staff is difficult. But my favorite is that there are something like five different payment systems:

• Drop cash or coin in a fare box.
• Get change as a paper magstripe card, which you can then use in those fareboxes
• Get monthly ride cards, which are RF, so have a different system than the farebox
• 10-ride cards, which are paper, pass through no electronic system at all, and are hand punched by the driver
• Transfers work in yet another way, which I still do not understand

And the best part is that they are mostly incompatible with each other. If you have money on a change card, you cannot apply it to a 10-ride pass, for example. Today, all the busses say "Ozone alert" in addition to everything they usually say. You get on the bus and the driver says "you have 50¢?" To which most folks say "um..." See, there's an enviro/promo thing where if the city has an inversion or other conditions, they declare an ozone alert and try to get you to fill up your car after dark, and ride the bus. To encourage bus riding, they reduce fares to 50¢ across the board. Simple. Except for two things:

1. Not one person I watched board the bus seemed to understand what "ozone alert" or "ozone day" meant, when the driver said it to them
2. The 50¢ fare is, again, totally incompatible with most other systems. Your 10-ride cards and, apparently, monthly passes won't work. You MUST give them 50¢ or nothing else.

Turns out you can give them more than that and get a change card, or use the card, but the driver didn't seem to know that. Their internal process seemed to assume everyone in the city knows about this, and will being a pocket full of quarters to ride the bus on this, the most special of days. What assumptions are you making about how much your clients or customers understand your process?

Please be consistent with your pointless fears

Once again, and despite no solid evidence to support it, there is a well-publicized fear of mobiles causing cancer. So what to do about it, aside from not using phones at all?

He went even further and urged his colleagues to use whenever is possible the speakerphone mode or a wireless Bluetooth headset in order to keep he mobile phone away from the head and in general away from the body

Bluetooth is also a radio system. Why not fear that? So you say that it's a different frequency, and very low power? True, and irrelevant:

• Studies that came even close to proving any danger were with AMPS devices, at much lower frequencies; modern phones are quite high frequency
• Modern phones are also much, much lower power than old ones, and adjust power in general to use as little as possible. We're talking milliwatts.

I say, if you want to fear things, fear everything untested in a consistent manner. So, since no one has said otherwise: Bluetooth? It's a deadly killer!

Why is it so hard to recycle?

I mean hard. Like, it makes me tired to recycle. When we do go ahead and just throw things out, more often than not the item will end up in the recycling bin. Mission has a good contract, so there's no separating and they take everything. Well, not glass anymore, but we keep that and take it in when it's overflowing. So, every week I take out a nice big, professional Rubbermaid bin with 1-2 small trash bags in it. And, lug a lame, low recycling bin that is always totally overflowing with products. Usually, some is left in my yard when the truck leaves, and I have to put it back for next time. I called the trash company (who provides these silly recycling bins) and they have nothing bigger, even for purchase. I go to a variety of hardware stores, and they have... nothing. Maybe a tiny sorting bin set good for old women and their cat food tins. Big wheelie bins exist, but only on the internet. I have yet to find anyone who carries them anywhere in town. Not to mention they are like $100. My real point is this: everyone has these PR campaigns for being greener, but hardly any of them do anything I care about (much less, often, anything that really helps). Google around and you'll find Lowe's has some vague initiative to buy more sustainable woods, Home Depot gives away compact fluorescents, but how about simple, steps? How about concrete, specific things I can go into one of their stores and see with my own eyes any time I want to? How about carrying useful recycling bins, instead of just trash cans?

Why are aircards so hard to use?

Aircards is my vernacular at least for a "cellular modem." A data connection device that uses a mobile phone network to connect to. Usually, you plug them into laptops. For a long time, they were in the PCMCIA format, and some are now in Express Card or whatever that is called, but increasing numbers of cardless laptops (like mine) mean people are using lots of USB aircards now. But despite the cable nightmare, that's not the issue. Hell, I used one that required a dongle to go from USB to serial, and the adapter cable was 6 ft long! That was sub-optimal, but it's not the problem. The problem is drivers. They are harrowing. Terribly difficult to install, often requiring multiple restarts. Arbitrary support of different platforms. Setup is basically impossible unless you already know what you are doing. They are too feature packed, so try to take over your WiFi and other connections that work fine. And often, they just don't work. Is it the driver, the hardware, the account? No one can tell. And the best part is that I have a solution. I cannot implement it as I do not have a giant electronics factory. But anyone who does is free to fix it. Here it is: make it an ethernet bridge. I might have used the wrong term. What I mean is, you plug the card into an ethernet port. No drivers at all. It says "I am an ethernet cable attached to a DHCP server, attached to the internet. Anyone care?" The computer sees... a wired ethernet connection. These exist in some forms; I use a wifi ethernet bridge to get an iMac Rev D (driver issues, with WiFi this time) onto the network from the second floor. Yes, you'd need to be able to set it up. Easy. Just make it like your router, and talk to it on a specific IP address. And it cannot charge over ethernet. So? Put a battery in it, which some aircards already have, and charge over USB. Leave it plugged into USB if you want. Cannot be a lot more expensive, if ANY more expensive, than the current hardware, plus driver development costs run to zero. Fire 90% of those guys tomorrow (gotta keep supporting old products). The issues I pointed out above are killing this market. There is no one I know who has seen it (even "I'll never carry a cellphone" types) who is not totally impressed. At least a dozen people I don't know at all have approached me to ask what it is (on the bus, in airports) and apparently are so interested they might have bought one. Etc. Embedding, which they are working on, is plausible but the driver and setup issues make them so hard to use that I cannot see them going really mass market till that's fixed.