Ahead of our trip, most of the conversations around Brunswick involved specifying that we meant the one in Maine, and then turned to some variation of “Oh. Why?” Admittedly, we didn’t have much of an answer for “What’s in Brunswick?” beyond Bowdoin College. We went here because it’s the northern terminus of Amtrak’s Downeaster, and I wanted to scratch it off the list. Besides, we have friends in Boston. Following the philosophy of never spending more time traveling to a place than you’re in the place itself, we did two nights, and I’m now prepared to give a partial answer to the question of “What’s in Brunswick?”

People

Wednesday morning I went for a walk around town, mostly looking at railroad infrastructure. The first thing I noticed, however, is that when you come to a crosswalk as a pedestrian the cars actually yield to you. This kept happening throughout the day. Later, we went to Twice-Told Tales Book Store. It’s run by volunteers, and proceeds go the local library. Everyone there was genuinely friendly and helped an out-of-towner find a book–Terry Pindell’s Making tracks: an American rail odyssey. Before we left I lightened my luggage by dropping off two books that I’d bought and read during our trip and wasn’t likely to re-read, though I’d enjoyed them: Ben Macintyre’s The Siege and Douglas Preston’s The Lost City of the Monkey God.

Read More

The filming locations for Mercury in Retrograde are variously given as Allegan, Fennville, and Saugatuck. All three are towns in Allegan County, Michigan, a corner of Western Michigan known for being on Lake Michigan and for producing your prescription drugs. Saugatuck, on the mouth of the Kalamazoo River, is an art colony and incongrous gay mecca in the middle of Dutch Reformed country. My family rented a cabin there for decades, and I knew the area well even before I went to college in nearby Kalamazoo. Holland, the setting of the recent, eponymous Holland, is just over the county line to the north.

This accounts for my interest in Mercury in Retrograde, which is a movie about three couples in a cabin in the woods for the weekend but is not a horror movie. It’s a low-key drama about three couples who loosely know each other and who spend a weekend together away from the city. There are no creatures, no mysterious forces at play. To misquote Sartre, in this film horror is other people. I don’t usually watch this sort of movie, and I’m really glad I did.

The cabin in question is the Fern Hollow Cabin, which is available for rental. At the risk of a digression, it’s not really in Fennville. To my mind it’s in Ganges, west of the Blue Star Highway and south of the I-196 interchange. Never made it to the What Not Inn for dinner but was always curious. The location is a perfect distillation of cabin life in that part of the state. You’re in dune country, with the trees so thick that the light barely penetrates. Myrtle covers the ground. In the evening rain patters on the cabin’s roof. I was having feelings before the action even got going.

Read More

I keep a list on Letterboxd of what I call my “Saturday morning” movies, so named because I’m a much earlier riser than my wife on the weekends. My criteria for these movies is somewhat loose, but in general they’re crime or heist movies shot on location in Europe in the 1970s. The vibe is this: some recognizable actors went somewhere nice and made a movie.

The criteria are flexible. Harry in Your Pocket was shot in the Pacific Northwest; Gold in apartheid South Africa. Target: Harry was made (for American television, no less) in 1969, and then re-edited with superfluous nudity in 1979. The Day of the Jackal probably shouldn’t be on the list at al–it’s far too well made–but it does a fabulous job of evoking a place and time.

That brings me to Silver Bears, a little-seen Michael Caine vehicle from 1978, which meets every criteria perfectly. Our actors are in Las Vegas, Switzerland (mainly Lugano), Italy, the United Kingdom, and Morocco (standing in for Iran). Our actors include Caine, Louis Jourdan, Cybill Shepherd, Stéphane Audran, David Warner, Tom Smothers, Jay Leno (before he made it big), Joss Ackland, and Charles Gray.

Read More

Back in July/August 2022 I made a circuit of New York and New England (photo gallery). I had a memorable encounter with a a warehouse in Albany on the Ethan Allen Express, drove a boat on Lake Champlain, took my first trip on the Long Island Rail Road, and finally rode the Mattapan Line. About a thousand miles by rail: 913 on Amtrak, 66 on the Long Island Rail Road, and uncounted on the New York and Boston subways. Calculating that number led me on a wild side quest similar to the problem I had with the Raritan Valley Line.

Calculating mileage for commuter railroads can be tricky because they often don’t publish that information in public schedules. Amtrak did until they stopped putting out printed timetables, and those numbers don’t change often. The 2022 version of the MTA website did publish that information for each station. Here’s Huntington, for example. 34.7 miles from Penn Station. If I travel between two intermediate points I can just diff the numbers and I’m good to go, right?

I don’t remember exactly when I realized there was a problem. It might have been when I was looking at Woodside, which the MTA website placed at “3.1 miles” from Penn Station. That felt wrong given that Manhattan itself is about two miles wide, and sure enough, some quick playing with the measurement tool on Google Maps showed that 3.1 miles from Woodside didn’t even get you to the East River.

Read More

I’m working from New York Penn Station today before heading out on the Lake Shore Limited to Michigan. In general this is a positive and productive work environment. My only challenge is that Amtrak WiFi blocks port 22 outbound, so I can’t push my work back to my CI environment on GitHub?

(What am I working on? A Moodle local plugin that exposes the add_instance method of the manual enrollment plugin.)

Happily, GitHub has anticipated this scenario and I don’t have to do anything tricky. I added the following to my local ~/.ssh/config:

Read More

Following last week's fun with packaging Lambdas that use Python, here’s a little puzzle with Node.js.

I have an outdated project that uses a Lambda originally built on v2 of the AWS SDK for JavaScript and which ran on the Node.js 12.x runtime. The minimum supported runtime now is Node.js 18.x, and starting with that version v3 is shipped instead of v2. I spent some time digging into migrating the functionality from v2 to v3, determined that the change wasn’t trivial, and decided to buy myself some time by shipping v2 of the SDK with my Lambda function. I didn’t find any guides on how to do that within an AWS CDK project, hence this post.

The root of my project isn’t the Lambda function, but the project’s entire infrastructure, of which the Lambda function and its code is but a small piece. This is the typical structure:

Read More

One of the first things I did with Nix flakes and then Devenv.sh was standardize the Node environment for my AWS CDK deployments. A related issue that I let slide at the time was Python dependencies for when a project has Lambda functions with Python runtimes.

My comfort level with Python isn’t very high, and the variety of Python dependency tooling (pip, Poetry, pyenv, venv) leaves me bewildered on a good day. The Lambda functions that I ship aren’t complicated and don’t need many dependencies, although they need to be compatible with the given runtime. A further complexity specific to Lambda functions is that AWS expects the function and its dependencies to be zipped up together.

My preferred way to handle that pre-devenv was to use pip with the -t flag, which lets me choose the installation directory. This will install the requested package and its dependencies in that directory, which is perfect for my packaging needs. Devenv has excellent support for Python, and getting Python 3.12 is easy:

Read More

The Bridgeview Bed and Breakfast in Marysville, Pennsylvania, is a unique institution. It’s a B&B designed specifically to cater to railfans and their trailing spouses. It’s located on the Susquehanna River, about 700 feet down river from the Rockville Bridge, in the very heart of Norfolk Southern’s operations in Pennsylvania. Norfolk Southern freight trains pass frequently, and once a day in each direction Amtrak’s silvery Pennsylvanian cruises past. Just behind the B&B is the Port Road Branch and Enola Yard. Across the river is the old Pennsylvania Railroad line to Buffalo.

Everything at the B&B is organized around appreciating this location. There is WiFi, but no telephones nor televisions in the rooms. There’s a sitting room-cum-library facing the Susquehanna, packed with comfortable chairs and railroad books and magazines. There’s a display in that room, with a repeater outside, showing active movements in the vicinity. All the rooms bear names (“Juniata”, “Lehigh”, “Lackawanna”) rich in railroading tradition. It’s quiet at night, if train horns don’t bother you. On that note, the Bridgeview is surely the only hotel whose policies state that “Under no circumstances should guests trespass on railroad property, including the embankment across Main Street from the B&B.”

They advertise in Trains magazine, and we finally decided to try them out in June 2023. The operation itself is decidedly low-tech. The website itself is HTTP only, no HTTPS. You make a reservation by emailing or calling Keith, the proprietor. You mail a check for a deposit and pay the rest on-site. This all worked very smoothly but I’ll cop to some trepidation. I shouldn’t have felt any; Liz and I had a blast. The environment is incredibly chill. You sit on the big deck, watch the river, watch the trains go by. You can read a bit. There are plenty of things to do around Harrisburg. We found the Antique Marketplace of Lemoyne, Cupboard Maker Books, and Home 231.

Read More

2009 was my year of discovery on Amtrak. That January, I made my first run on the Empire Builder (as recounted in My worst best trip on the Empire Builder) from Chicago to Portland. In June, I took the Lake Shore Limited to Springfield, Massachusetts, starting a long and somewhat complex history with that train. Then, that October, I made my first trip on the Capitol Limited, traveling from Chicago to Washington and back. I’ve made 34 trips on the Capitol Limited, the most I’ve made on any American long-distance train. 23,622 miles is almost enough to circle the globe.

Today the Capitol Limited disappears from Amtrak’s timetables. This change is meant to be temporary, and is driven by two needs. One, Amtrak is conducting maintenance on the East River Tunnels over the next year and needs to reduce the number of movements between Sunnyside Yard and Pennsylvania Station in New York. Two, Amtrak has an on-going shortage of its bilevel Superliner cars. Amtrak’s solution is to take the Silver Star, one of its two New York-Florida trains, and change its northern terminus from New York to Washington. This new train is called the Floridian, and it uses the Silver Star’s single-level equipment.

I understand the decision and I can’t argue with the logic. The Superliner shortage, whatever its root causes, is real. I have concerns about the timekeeping. It’s a long way from Miami to Chicago–47 hours; 2,076 miles–and there are many opportunities for delays. On the other hand, eliminating the engine change for the Silver Star in Washington probably helps. Running single-level cars on the Capitol Limited may open the door to the long-discussed idea of through cars conveyed in Pittsburgh to the Pennsylvanian.

Read More

I use thumbsup to generate my galleries. That’s worth a whole other post–the short version is that the metadata is written to the images themselves, and then that metadata generates a series of static html pages for albums, tags, and categories. The resulting site is easy to host–no database and a minimum of CSS and Javascript. I’ve used Cloudfront and S3 on Amazon for several years but as I previously mentioned I’m moving my stuff off Amazon.

GitHub pages isn’t suitable on its own: I have about 13 GB of images. The generated site structure looks like this:

1
2
3
4

album/
media/
public/
index.html

Read More