I decided that I was going to take public transport (or, not use my car) to work, for several reasons:

1. Inject a little activity into my life (as I use my bike or a scooter to get to and from the stops, etc)
2. See if I can do anything productive during that time. FYI, I wrote this blog on the bus.
3. My son loves buses and trains. As he gets older we’ll start to use them more on our weekend excursions.
4. Just for fun and to see how long it would take vs. by car.
5. Learn a little about my transportation options as well as roads I never drive down.
6. If I can save a few bucks and help the environment too, why not?

Background

In the suburbs of Long Island, public transportation is mildly useful but totally uncool. It is not acceptable to not have a car, even if it is by choice. Now that I travel back to LI often, I’ve come to rely on PT (or, transportation other than my own personal car) I see how lousy it really is, which is probably due to the fact that only people who can’t afford a car (or can’t drive for some reason) use it for the most part.

Here in the Bay Area, however, that is not the case. People of all types use public transportation. It is definitely better than the bus system on LI, but not as robust and fast as the NYC system. It also gets confusing as there are several different transit systems here and depending on where you are and where you want to go, you may use more than one.

I use VTA as I’m traveling inside Santa Clara county. Plus, it is free for me to ride thanks to Y!.

Planning and Preparation

I used the public transportation feature of Google Maps for my initial planning. It is very cool, but not without its flaws. The VTA website and a paper-copy of the VTA schedule were my best friends during the week. Also, a big thanks to my co-workers for the advice and tips along the way.

My bike had been chained to my storage closet in my complex with the front wheel removed since I arrived here in CA, so on Memorial Day I decided to put it back together, cleaned it up and put air in the tires. The bike is nothing fancy - just a cheap Huffy I bought a few years ago. It has knobby tires that are made for dirt and makes a swooshing noise when I ride. But, I’m not a pro cyclist - I just need something to get me from point A to point B.

VTA fully supports using your bike for this purpose and describe what they offer on the bus and light rail here. In short, up to 4 bikes on a bus, 6 on the light rail.

I’ve already seen lots of bikes on PT - ten-speeds, old clunkers, mountain bikes, pro-bikes, BMX bikes, folding bikes, tandem bikes and even bikes with banana seats. Its all about getting around.

Here are some of the highlights from my journey:

5/27
Bus was 2 minutes late. One other bike in the rack. Bike is simple to put in - just place front wheel in and pull the hook over the front tire (although, I was still worried about my bike falling out). I also had the outer slot, but I saw the other bike owner get his bike out OK. Another Y! got on the bus a few stops later and sat right in front of me, so I thought I’d follow him, but he got off at Great America. Stops are announced which is very helpful, too.

Light Rail and Bike rack - that totally sucks - just hold your bike if you can. Especially if you have a heavy mountain bike like mine.

Ride home was fine - I skipped the plan big G gave me to opt for the route returning home. I goofed, however (see what happens when you cross the big G?) and took a train 15 minutes too early, which left me at the connecting bus stop for 15 minutes. But, now I know.

The only other downside is that I need to cross a major road on the way home, with no traffic light. Argh.

5/28 - signed up for free wifi - a little slow, and doesn’t seem to work on the bus itself, but hey, it is free. It would be nice if just worked everywhere, though, as I wouldn’t need a broadband card. Oh well.

A couple of Y!s were at the bus stop this morning. It seems that people tend to not use public transport everyday but rather just a few times a week. I’ve had conservations with other Y!s and one said he saved $30 a week plus wear-and-tear by just using PT twice a week. Pretty cool.

Had to leave work early on Wednesday because my wife had plans. The public transport schedule accommodated me just fine. I was a little too early for the train leaving Y!, but had the connection to the bus optimized so I only waited two or 3 minutes.

6/2 - rode my scooter to the bus stop. That is more of a workout than I thought! It also shows that I am out of shape.

The scooter is cool because it folds up but I do wish the platform was a little bigger. I bought the “pro” model of the scooter as it supports my weight - you would think that bigger people would have larger feet and hence they would make the platform larger. Not so.

6/3 - missed the bus by 30 seconds - a very nice woman actually took myself and a fellow Y! up the road (about 4 miles) to catch the bus. Never got her name, but thank you!

6/4 - bus was late - missed my train, but Y! shuttle to the rescue!

Lessons Learned

• not all stops are listed in the schedule, pick the one before and add a few minutes
• bus with a bike: when you see the bus coming, look and see how many bikes are on the rack. If no bikes, position your bike so the front tire faces you and put in on the kickstand as you will need to pull down the rack. The bike goes on slot closest to the bus. If there is one bike already on the rack, position the front tire away from you. If there are two bikes, you’ll be taking it on the bus.
• bike and light rail - hold it if you can - the bike racks are a pain and not worth it for a short trip
• my commute with a car - 25-35 minutes. Commute with bike/PT - 55 - 113 minutes (57 on average).
• once you learn where you need to said transportation to, position yourself accordingly. There are benefits to riding the front or back of the train, etc.
• personal pref, but I don’t like the seats in the front of the bus that face each other. However, if you have a bike and the rack is full you may end up here.
• riding a scooter is about 1/2 as fast in my situation but twice the workout. Riding a scooter also confines you to the sidewalk so be on the lookout for cracks, etc.
• Caveat - you are at the mercy of the transit schedule if there is an emergency

Last Tuesday I had the privilege of hearing Mark Shuttleworth speak at the BALUG meeting in SF. The format is a little different than with other groups I’ve attended over the years as it was held in a restaurant in Chinatown. You needed to RSVP and pay for dinner ($13) but it was certainly well worth it.

I (thought) I planned well for this trip: that day I took the free Y! shuttle up the SF office (on Sansome) and worked from there. The meeting was only a few blocks away and I made sure to get there really early. I got a great seat, met some great people and waited for dinner and the talk.

The highlights:

It was a short, but great talk. BALUG seems to get some great speakers so I’ll definitely be going back.

The irony:

So, for all of my planning upfront, I still managed to get home at 2AM. Leaving the restaurant, I got on the right bus going the wrong way, which caused my house of cards to tumble. Missed the train out of SF by 5 minutes, which caused me to miss the connecting light rail to my car. We’ll see if I get this right next time.

PS: Here’s a fun link: Bug #1 for Ubuntu, filed by Mark Shuttleworth himself. Thanks to Jeff Boulter for the link.

So, it is official: Last night at 08:04:54 PM PST I experienced my first earthquake. It had a magnitude of 5.6 and I have to say we were pretty close to the epicenter. Nothing fell off of our shelves and nothing was damaged, but the family was pretty “shaken up” (no pun intended) about the whole thing (Ok, pun intended).

Here are some links:
Recent earthquakes - it is the “big” square.
earthquake.usgs.gov
Moderate earthquake hits Northern California - Y! News

We’re finally settled in and I thought I’d talk about some of the cool things going on at Yahoo, some of which I’ve been directly involved in.

Hack Day

Several times a year (it might be once a quarter) the company sponsors an internal “Hack Day” for company engineers (this is different from the Open Hack Days that the company sponsors which should be coming up at the end of September). Basically, you have 24 hours to come up with something cool and present it to the judges and your peers. To be clear, this is a work-sanctioned event - all work stuffAlthough I can’t go into specifics, I am very proud of my team’s Hack Day project. Admittedly, I contributed a small (but very prominent, I must say) piece to the Hack given my schedule (my cats were coming in from NY AND my furniture was being delivered all within those 24 hours) but we did make the top 25 and were actually singled out by Ramus on an internal mailing list as a hack that he really enjoyed. Very cool. Congrats to the team!

YSlow (no involvement, but we use it all the time)

Hopefully you’ve heard about YSlow. YSlow is a Firebug extension to help with site performance. YSlow scores are taken seriously inside Yahoo and it is a good (but certainly not the only) indicator of your sites performance. Read more about it here.

Yahoo Go for TV (no involvement, but very cool technology and killer release party)

The mashup between TV and Internet is inevitable and Go for TV brings it that much closer. See your favorite Yahoo content while watching TV and also take advantage of the DVR features. Windows only right now (hey, Linux folks, they’re hiring engineers for the Linux port, get me those resumes!). Find out the scoop and download from the Yahoo! Go site.

And for all the latest with Yahoo, you don’t need to wait for me, just check out Next @ Yahoo.

…and some fun stuff….

Great America

The Media Engineering Group (to which I belong) was given the afternoon off and free passes to Great America. We had a great year with some outstanding accomplishments and this was a awesome way of the higher-ups to say thanks to the people who make it happen. Engineers are actually the folks “on the ground” when it comes to bringing a project to the finish line. The idea folks, the designers, operations, customers, special teams have all had their input and requirements, but really, it is the engineer that is given all of this and told to make it work. I’ve seen this quite often throughout my career and it is really nice to not only be recognized for the actual job that is done but to be appreciated in that way. Yahoo is good to us like that.

As many of you know, I’m a big baby when it comes to amusement park rides but I still managed to have a good time with the team.

Camp Yahoo

Also, we just had Camp Yahoo a couple of weeks ago. Camp Yahoo is the company picnic and was held at the San Mateo events center. Lots of food, games and rides, and of course, free for employees and their families. Heck, Elissa and I even got to ride a Segway. Evan? Sorry, kid, you don’t meet the height requirement just yet.

Hello to all of my friends and colleagues at LILUG who are now reading this via Planet LILUG. I’m honored for my blog to be syndicated there and I hope to provide useful and interesting topics to those readers. Otherwise, just skip over my posts.

Well, not really ‘-isms’ and not necessarily only in California, but especially (meaning only) pertaining to roads and food, the only two things that really affect my life at the moment.

The roads and signs - crazy. Signs in weird places or behind trees are standard fare. In fact there are several places I can think of that actually have a sign to turn for a particular road ON the exit for the road, giving you zero chance to read it in time. Other interesting road and sign traits:

• Not unusual for two streets with almost the same name to intersect.
• The designation of “expressway” is meaningless. Roads designated as expressways have traffic lights, intersections, retail stores and maybe exits to get on or off.
• Speaking of exits, it is not unusual for an exit to lead you to another road with exits, but you won’t know this until you’re on that road and really probably won’t know until you missed your turn.

Yes, driving has been fun here in CA.

In other news, I had some interesting fast food over the weekend. I started out with In-and-Out burger. I had this once before back in April and the results where the same. Good burger, OK fries. I opted for the strawberry shake and I’m sorry to say it was gross. I had to throw it away.

OK, here’s the big news. Many people are aware of my dislike for hot dogs, yet I actually ate at a Wienerschnitzel and it was pretty good. Of course, I didn’t eat any hot dogs. As I expected, they had a pretty full selection of non-hot-dog related food. Who eats hot dogs, anyway?




Finally on food front, as native New Yorker, I had to try Noah’s New York Bagels. The verdict? I miss NY bagels.

In other news, My car arrived! I am no longer held captive by the rental car companies.

WooHoo!

Yes, you heard me. I also went to the Kwik-E-Mart in Mountain View. If you haven’t heard, several 7-elevens have been transformed into Kwik-E-Marts as a promotional stunt for the new Simpsons Movie. I have box of Krusty O’s on top of my cube. Too bad they don’t sell Duff Beer.