Author Archives: Peter

CharlieCard

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***Boston.com reports|http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2004/11/08/mbta_unveils_new_fare_card/*** that the ***MBTA|http://www.mbta.com/***, the oldest public transit system in the United States, is finally ditching its token system and switching over to a passcard system. The system will be called the “CharlieCard”, in reference to the 1940’s Boston political song, ***Charlie on the MTA|http://web.mit.edu/jdreed/www/t/charlie.html***. The song concerns a man named Charlie, who paid ten cents to get on the T, but didn’t have the change to pay the five cent exit fare – a hot political issue at the time. Charlie’s fate is left up in the air, or down in the ground, so to speak – he just keeps riding along on the MTA.

I’m looking forward to the new system. It will be nice to be able to load fares onto a card, and keep that handy, as opposed to needing to buy tokens and have them jingling around in your pocket while traveling. Even better would be if I could use my debit card at a machine to add value to the CharlieCard, as I rarely carry cash. But I don’t know if they have any plans for that. As an aside, our laundromat switched from a quarters system to a smart-card system a while back, and it’s been great just having to slide that card into the washers and driers to do a load or two or three. You even get bonus credits if you add $5 or more at a time.

As for tokens: You might want to buy a stash of tokens before it’s too late – they could be collectors items some day!

ppp||ppp

An Explanation

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For those of you who aren’t named Chad, or aren’t otherwise technologically inclined, I’ll try to put the previous post into layman’s terms. I think this is probably about half of our audience. For the other half (Nikkiana, Mike, Chad, etc), feel free to skip this post. 🙂
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Plugged In

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I’ve been working on writing my first Movable Type plugin. So…

qqq|If this shows up in a ‘quote’ box…|qqq

ccc|And this shows up in a ‘code’ box…|ccc

ppp|
And this shows up in a centered div…|ppp

Then it is working! Cool!

Movable Type Upgrade

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If you’re reading this, it means that the upgrade to Movable Type 3.121 was a success! I discovered that if I signed up for the free Six Apart Professional Network, I could ge a full-fledged five-user commercial license at no charge! This works great for our setup, and being a member of the Professional Network will be very helpful with my work on this site. I’ll have access to online support, documentation, and a library of resources. I might even end up writing some cool software to enhance Movable Type – namely plugins. Plugins are typically written in Perl, which is my “native” programming language, and though I haven’t worked on any yet, I’ve looked over the documentation and it seems pretty easy! All in all, this upgrade should make life easier and more productive for the bloggers hosted at prwdot.org.

Cheap Meds

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As I’ve mentioned before, I am a nasal allergy sufferer. Without my meds, I get sinus headaches, stuffy nose, and on worse days, runny nose, sneezing, and really bad headaches. I take rhinocort, which is a prescription medicine that runs $25 for about a month’s supply. I also take Alavert D-12, a 12-hour medicine which combines loratadine, the active ingredient in Claritin, and pseudoephedrine, the active ingredient in Sudafed. Loratadine controls most allergy symptoms, while pseudoephedrine controls sinus congestion.

Alavert D-12 runs $15.99 for a 24-dose pack, or $0.67 per dose. Each dose has the equivalent day of two 30mg Sudafed tablets and one 5mg Loratadine tablet. For a while, I thought this was the best deal I could get, combining two medicines I needed into one pill. That is, until my last doctor’s appointment, where I found out that I could get generic pseudoephedrine and generic loratadine for much cheaper than even the cheapest store brands, at the medical center’s in-house pharmacy. How much cheaper?

Well, today I picked up a bottle of 100 “SudoGest” tablets, equivalent to Sudafed, for $1.77. Yep. Not a typo. One dollar and seventy-seven cents. That works out to $0.02 per pill. Compare that to name-brand Sudafed, which, at best is $7.99 for a 48 pill pack or $0.17 per pill. Even Walgreens’ store brand, Wal-phed, is at best $8.99 for a 96 pill pack, or $0.09 per pill. Dag, yo! And I picked up two boxes of generic 24-hour loratadine, $4.99 for each 30-pill pack, or $0.16 per pill. Compare that to name-brand Claritin, 30 pills for $23.99 or $0.79 each, or Walgreens’ brand Wal-itin, 90 pills for $19.99 or $0.22 per pill. Boo-yah! In addition to the price advantage, separating the two medicines means that I can take the allergy medicine every day, and then take the nasal congestion medicine only when I need it.

Is it sad that I get so excited about things like this?

Musical Degrees of Separation

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On the drive to work this morning, I let the iPod choose the music. Here are the songs that it picked on my ride in, in the order they were played:

qqq|”Three Doors” by VAST from Visual Audio Sensory Theater
“20th Century Fox Fanfare” from Star Wars: A New Hope
“Little Drummer Boy” from the Christianbook.com 2003 Christmas commemorative CD
“Hey Now Everybody” by They Might Be Giants from Apollo 18
“Elysium” from the Gladiator motion picture soundtrack
“Santa Evita” from the Evita motion picture soundtrack
“Bad” by U2 from The Best of 1980-1990|qqq

I thought that a fun game to play might be to attempt to connect each randomly-selected song together in some way, sort of like playing the Kevin Bacon game, but not really. So, any takers? Can you connect all of the above songs together in some way? For example, did any of the composers or musicians collaborate on any projects, or appear in television or movies together? Or did any of the composers make reference to any of the other music, movies, etc? I haven’t tried figuring it out myself yet, but I’ll keep you posted if I get anywhere.

Update:
I did “Shuffle Songs” again on the way home. Here’s what I got this time:

qqq|”High Speed” by Coldplay from Parachutes
“Airbag” by Radiohead from OK Computer
“Subway Fight” by James Newton Howard from The Fugitive motion picture soundtrack
“Darkwood V: Passage” by David Darling from Darkwood
“When You’re Gone” by The Cranberries from To The Faithful Departed|qqq

Still haven’t made any connections, but then I haven’t put much thought into it…

Four More Years

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Since John Kerry has conceded the election, we now know we’ll be getting four more years of George W. Bush as the United States’ President. At best, it probably won’t be much worse than the past four years. At worst, it could be bad, especially if he makes even more bad decisions than he has in the past four years. At the same time, I don’t think electing Kerry would have been better; we would simply have been exchanging one president with his problems, who only about half of the voters wanted, for another president with his own set of problems, who was also only wanted by about half of the voters. I wasn’t excited about Bush or Gore in the 2000 election, and I wasn’t excited about Bush or Kerry in the 2004 election. I sincerely hope that the 2008 election will bring some more interesting (and more worthy) challengers.

In the meantime, I offer a bit of levity: Mena Trott posted today about Canada 2.0. It’s funny. Laugh. Please?

With love from “New America”…

The Results Are In

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Well, for Beverly at least:

ppp|Beverly Voting Results|ppp

(Data courtesy of CNN)

Beverly’s population was 39,862 as of the 2000 Census. There was a 4.36 increase in population between 1990 and 2000, so I’ll project the same from 2000 to 2010 (I’ve seen a lot of people moving to Beverly and a lot of new housing). So in the last four years, a 1.6% increase would give us 40,500 citizens. As of the 2000 census, 78.49% of the population was of legal voting age, and I’ll assume the same for this year. So that’s roughly 31,788 who should be able to vote. Out of those, I don’t know how many are registered, but let’s be generous and assume that all of them are. So there were a total of 19,480 votes cast for President, which means that about 61.3% of those who were able to vote turned out. Not the greatest, but not terrible either.

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Those of you who are statisticians are probably cringing. I apologize.