gonewest

Man, that was one hot Pacific Northwest weekend. It started getting too hot for comfort Friday afternoon (right after I finally got off a bad oncall week and thought I was going to catch up on sleep — silly me) and didn’t let up until Monday night.

It spiked above 95 degrees during the days and didn’t go below 80 at night throughout the weekend. Actually, I don’t think it got below 85-90 in the apartment for several nights straight (making sleep difficult) because the heat wave coincided with a complete break in the usual Seattle ocean breeze. Maybe that’s why we had a heat wave?

I know that you Memphians won’t think much of those temperatures, but when you don’t have a/c — like most of us in the northwest — you feel every single degree when it gets hot. Don’t believe me? Then turn your a/c off tomorrow — and leave it off for the next three days.

Right after work on Friday, in a futile attempt to beat some notorious traffic on I-520, I made a drive out to the Borders in Redmond to pick up several computer books. There is a nice Borders just off my bus route in downtown Seattle, but for some reason all the not-quite-so-mainstream computer books seem to be stocked only at the Redmond store. I wonder why?

I had wanted to do something extra nice this weekend to “decompress”, but ended up spending a lot of the time just driving from store to store looking for portable air conditioners — at least the car has a/c so that was a nice respite from the heat — how sad is it when one of the high points of your weekend is spending time stuck in traffic with the a/c going full blast? :-) I did eat at a few nice restaurants (they all have a/c so why not eat a good meal and linger for a while?) and I also caught a showing of Who Killed the Electric Car? at the AMC Loews Uptown 3 on Sunday afternoon.

The movie was very good and right up my alley interest wise, but I think that I liked the narrative flow of An Inconvenient Truth a little more. Nevertheless, it really made me wish that we didn’t have the most greedy, unprincipled sons-of-b*!ches running the auto industry and more or less dictating what choices we have. Don’t get me wrong, the movie spreads the blame around quite a bit and doesn’t actually pile-on GM, but I think they should have done so.

Oh yeah, I did find a store with some portable air conditioners, but I had never heard of any of the brands and the prices seemed a little too high (and I wasn’t quite miserable enough to forgo my usual pickyness when it comes to electronics), so I made do buying a fan and will wait a week or two for the stores to restock before I buy a unit. From what I understand, it very rarely gets hot enough to need a/c here and even then only for a few days at a time, but since I am guaranteed to be working in the hottest room in the apartment on the hottest part of the day during the week, I don’t think I can afford to get caught without an a/c when the next heat wave rolls through.

I have had comments turned off for a while because of constant spamming, but now that the comments system has a spam filter, I will try turning comments back on and see how it holds up.

Damn, what a miserable oncall week it has been. But at least as of now it is over.

I think I owe it to myself to do something more rewarding than the usual stroll through downtown or nice meal to decompress. Maybe a drive to the mountains would be a nice change of pace?

One of these represents an invitation to those who long to be free, the other a longing to impose a belief upon others.

Can you tell which is which?.

I decided to walk down to the Cinerama to see Superman Returns yesterday afternoon but missed the show time by minutes, so I walked a little farther into downtown to have a late lunch at the Elephant & Castle instead. I took a bus back but that was still about two miles of walking.

Later in the evening, I decided to walk to the north end of Lake Union instead of the south end so that I could watch the Independence Day fireworks from Gas Works Park. I didn’t actually get into the park — it was just too crowded — but I did get to see a really good fireworks show up close.

I checked with the Gmaps Pedometer site after getting back and it turns out that the walk to the park was two miles each way, so I walked about six miles total yesterday. That was good exercise, but judging by my waist line, I could use a lot more of it.

It’s no secret that I am a proponent of pervasive mass transit (my preference is for monorail or grade separated metro systems) and that I would prefer we return to the well defined urban/rural divide with small, walkable suburbs like we had for most of this country’s history (believe it or not, the car-centric culture did not arrive in the US until sometime around 1930, and suburbia did not take over until after WWII). I am not against suburbs per se, it’s just that I believe that the vast suburban wastelands that our recent auto-centric culture has created offer few advantages and have huge downsides.

I have often read that automobiles are the least efficient way to travel (excepting air travel, of course, but this post isn’t about long distance travel), but numbers have been hard to come by. Finally, I have found a source for comparison between some modes of travel that demonstrates just how bad autos really are.

A car is the obvious fastest (and easiest) way for a person to get from point A to point B, but what would surprise most people is the fact that autos are actually a pretty lousy way of moving people from point A to point B. This is because, while a car can get you to your destination at high speeds in little or no traffic, cars and the space between them needed for safety make road ways a very low density avenue of travel; and as everyone knows too well, when you try to increase that density more than a little bit, traffic can quickly grind to a halt.

Look at the figures for persons per hour in the link: while someone in a car can get one mile down a road in a minute (assuming little to no traffic and a speed limit of 60 mph), a pedestrian would require 20 minutes to walk the same distance (assuming a reasonable walking speed of 3 mph). That same roadway, however, has a capacity to move over 20 times more people down that one mile stretch each hour if they are walking rather than driving [it would be interesting to calculate at what capacity the travel time for autos and walking converge, but I don't have the time or energy to figure out the math for that right now, maybe I'll post on that later].

Now, while most people (we Americans, anyway) would not want to walk that mile, that isn’t our only option: looking at the reference numbers reveals that auto travel is unique in how bad it is at getting large numbers of people from place to place. The next rung up from auto travel is biking which would be much more palatable to people (especially if using e-bikes) than walking for short distances and would get you down that one mile road in six minutes (assuming a leisurely 10 mph ride, and with an e-bike, you could do 20 mph with little effort) while still moving about 9 times more people per hour than autos. The other choices just get better with metro topping the list.

As bad as cars are at getting large numbers of people from point A to point B, the energy efficiency of auto travel is much more relevant to today’s concerns (i.e. rising energy prices) and autos are the worst of the lot here too. Even buses are twice as efficient as cars (to be fair, we should assume that this figure requires that the bus routes are used close to capacity). And bikes are the clear winners for energy efficiency — can you believe that it is less work to ride a bike than it is to walk?.

With these figures, I think it is obvious that the best way to move people short distances (say less than 10 miles) is with e-bikes (or light electric scooters), preferably models that don’t require pedaling so that even those that are in very poor shape can use them with ease. For any route travelled heavily enough to warrant the investment, a light rail or monorail system should be installed (grade separated if possible so that it does not interfere with other modes of travel) to handle the truly massive numbers that dense urban corridors can generate. This not only increases the capacity of routes, reducing traffic congestion, but saves energy as well. There will always be a need for some auto traffic, so urban centers would keep some of the roadways, but they would be devoted to commuter bus, utility vehicles, and commercial cargo traffic. Personal auto transit would, of course, remain available but it would stay where it belongs: in rural areas where mass transit and alternatives like bikes just don’t make sense.

After reading this, you may think that I have something against car-culture, but the truth is that I am just as fond of cars as the next American. The difference is that, while I always want to have a car handy (my own or easy access to a rental), I don’t ever want to need a car. To me, a car is a symbol of freedom. It is a means to get out of town and away from the rest of the world when I want to take a break from the day-to-day routine. A car that is required to get to work or the grocery store or to handle everyday needs isn’t a symbol of freedom, it’s just another expense.

Finding a good mexican restaurant in the Seattle area has taken longer than I would have expected. Here on the west coast, there is a strong asian influence that ensures a great selection of restaurants for chinese, thai, vietnamese, japanese, indian, and just about any other eastern food style you can imagine. I had assumed that the same would be true for mexican food, but we are apparently a little too far north for that.

Not that you can’t get good mexican food here, of course. In fact there is apparently a strong tradition of taco trucks with great authentic food that I need to investigate; but when I am in the mood for mexican, I usually want to go somewhere with good food and great margaritas. I found out about Luisa’s Mexican Grill while browsing Seattle restaurant reviews on the web and decided to try it for lunch on Saturday.

The restaurant has that typical worn-but-comfortable feel and the service was fast and friendly. The food was not the best mexican cuisine that I’ve ever had, but I would definitely put it near the top of any list. One curious note is that Luisa’s does not serve fajitas — at least not for lunch.

I was surprised that the salsa brought out with the chips actually had some spice to it. They also brought out complimentary guacamole dip which was good, but not as good as the dip at La Guadalapana in Memphis (of course, their guacamole isn’t free). The house margaritas were very good as well, and they seemed to have a little spice to them too which I found quite surprising. They also have something they call a natural margarita which is quite good if you like lime as I do, but it seemed to sacrifice some of the traditional margarita flavor for the fresh lime juice.

Anyway, I had already found a few mexican restaurants around that were OK, but none of them really satisfied my cravings when I was in the mood for a good mexican meal with a great margarita. I am glad that I know about Luisa’s now and I will definitely be back.

The blogs on this server seem to have broken sometime Saturday and I didn’t get them working again until early this morning. I don’t know what broke, but my best guess is that the Apache 2.0.x to Apache 2.2.x upgrade included minor changes to how handlers for PHP are to be set up because fiddling with that portion of my config is what finally seems to have fixed it. I also found that MySQL was down because of a config file issue but that was an easy fix.

Funny thing is that I haven’t upgraded Apache, PHP, Wordpress, or MySQL for at least a month so I have no idea why the blog decided to go down Saturday.