The traveller’s lament

In 2007, I visited many cities — including Los Angeles, San Diego, Austin, Boston, Washington, DC, New York and Toronto. I used the transit systems in the last four and, of course, the San Francisco bay area. Over time, a few questions emerged:

  • Why do I have to have a different card for each city?
  • What transit systems offer good deal for visitors?
  • How do the prices and features compare, generally?

Transit cards

Continue reading “The traveller’s lament”

TenEleven things to do in San Francisco

San Francisco* has all kinds of interesting events going on. Here are some of my favourite off-the-beaten-path activities:

Storytelling

Porchlight

Science

Ask a Scientist
Down to a Science [on hiatus]

Music

Paul’s San Francisco House Concerts
Drew Pearce’s House Concerts
Songwriters in the round, hosted by Heather Combs

Literature

Writers With Drinks

Talk Show

The Heather Gold Show

Tech

SuperHappyDevHouse
BayCHI

* Okay, so a few of them are just out of town.

I somehow forgot the Long Now‘s Seminars on Long Term Thinking. These are excellent, and I’m even a Long Now charter member.

Homeland insecurity: Customs delays ambulance

Two weeks ago, US customs held up a fire truck, and a hotel burned to the ground. How do you top that? Delay an ambulance with a heart-attack victim.

The incident happened last Monday, when 46-year-old Rick Laport needed emergency angioplasty — a procedure that couldn’t be performed at his Windsor, Ont., hospital.

Medical officials rushed Laport to the border, expecting to be waved through so they could take him to Detroit’s Henry Ford medical facility

Instead, U.S. customs asked the male driver to exit the vehicle and show his identification card. Another border official opened the back of the ambulance to confirm a patient was inside, and asked Laporte to verify his name.
…
The ambulance workers were only delayed by five minutes, but Laport’s heart had already been re-started twice by paramedics.

Math is hard

The Manchester Evening News, a British rag is reporting a lottery scratchcard has been withdrawn from sale “because players couldn’t understand it.”Apparently your average Brit is well-qualified for a job at Verizon:

Tina Farrell, from Levenshulme, called Camelot after failing to win with several cards.The 23-year-old, who said she had left school without a maths GCSE, said: “On one of my cards it said I had to find temperatures lower than -8. The numbers I uncovered were -6 and -7 so I thought I had won, and so did the woman in the shop. But when she scanned the card the machine said I hadn’t.”I phoned Camelot and they fobbed me off with some story that -6 is higher – not lower – than -8 but I’m not having it.”I think Camelot are giving people the wrong impression – the card doesn’t say to look for a colder or warmer temperature, it says to look for a higher or lower number. Six is a lower number than 8. Imagine how many people have been misled.”

Homeland insecurity: Customs delays firefighters while hotel burns

Some Québec firefighters tried to help save a burning building. They didn’t get there in time. Why? US customs.

Six volunteer firefighters rushing to assist a small-town fire department in upper New York State, part of a long-standing mutual-aid agreement, were held up while being grilled about their identification by a U.S. Customs official this week….Meanwhile, the landmark Anchorage Inn in Rouses Point, N.Y., burned to the ground.“I’ve been crossing this border for 30 years, and the only question we were ever asked was: ‘Where’s the fire?’” Lacolle fire chief Jean-Pierre Hébert told The Globe and Mail Wednesday.