Last night I went for a walk down to the confluence of the Delaware and Lehigh Rivers. It’s a remarkable area. First, it’s bracketed by public parks: Scott Park (northwest) and Hugh Moore Park (southwest) on the Easton side, and the Delaware River Park on the Phillipsburg, New Jersey side. Second, it hosts no less than three railway bridges which stand as a reminder to Easton’s past importance in that trade:

• Lehigh and Hudson River Railway Bridge (northernmost)
• Central Railroad of New Jersey Bridge
• Lehigh Valley Railroad Bridge (southernmost)

The Lehigh Valley bridge is I believe out of service but the other two see daily use. This evening I was fortunate enough to catch some Norfolk Southern maintenance-of-way equipment on the ex-CNJ bridge, followed about 20 minutes later by a grain train grinding slowly across the ex-LHRR bridge and into Phillipsburg.

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This coming Monday I’m giving at talk at HighEdWeb New England about collaborative development in open source, focusing on liberal arts colleges. If this were one of my movie reviews that would be the “A plot.” The “B plot” is that I’m taking the train to the conference, and that unusually for me it’ll be 100% new mileage.

The conference is Mount Holyoke but I’m taking the Vermonter from New York up to Brattleboro. There are two reasons for this. The first is that my friend who’s picking me up lives closer to Brattleboro than Amherst. The second is that this train will be rerouted to the west bank of the Connecticut River in a year or two, and I want to ride the old route before that happens. Again, I’m that guy.

The ride in from Easton to New York was uneventful. Trans-Bridge Lines does a good job. Its buses are comfortable (for 90 minutes anyway) and the free wifi gets the job done. I-78 was remarkably empty. The only hiccup was finding New York Penn overrun with mouth breathing collegians dressed in green. Sigh. Amtrak Police finally showed up with a bullhorn and cleared them out. Yay!

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I keep track of all my train mileage because I’m one of those people. By my reckoning I’ve done over 41,000 miles on Amtrak alone and another 10,000+ on other systems, mostly in Europe. A full quarter of my Amtrak mileage is on a single train: the Lake Shore Limited, which operates between Chicago and New York, with a section to Boston. I’ve taken it to three Moodle Hack/Doc Fests: Summer 2009 at Smith College, Winter 2010 at Lafayette College, and Summer 2011 at Hampshire College. I’ve ridden it to a pair of weddings. I took it to HighEdWeb 2012 and B-Fest 2013. I’ve made three trips on it in the last eight months. This makes writing the following all the harder: Lake Shore Limited, I’m afraid that we may have to break up.

Here’s the situation. I have cause to make the trip between New York and Chicago at least once a year for the B-Movie Festival in Evanston, Illinois. I’m likely to make it another time for business related to the German Studies Association, and it’s a fair bet that I’ll make at least one trip for pleasure to the Midwest. I’ve never made less than two round-trips in a calendar year since 2009. I’ve done one already this year, another is booked and at least one more is on the horizon. I’m just not sure I can do it on the Lake Shore Limited anymore. I think my future lies with the Capitol Limited.

7 things I don’t like about the Lake Shore Limited

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Here’s the pitch: it’s an Alien rip-off set on an oil rig. No, not Proteus. That’s the one with the heroin smugglers. No, not Leviathan either. That’s the one with Peter Weller. This one stars William Forsythe (Stone Cold).

This looks like it was shot for TV. The color is washed out and almost Matrix-like in the use of green. It’s really unpleasant to look at. The CGI is used sparingly but it’s not very good. I swear the helipad looks like an optical drive.

Oh boy are we in for a long haul. There’s a decent ambiguous opening involving a robotic submersible, somewhat undercut by an onscreen reference to the “Weyland Corporation” (groan). This is immediately destroyed by a cringe-inducing “family discussion” between the Karl Urban Experience and the Kid (Who Can’t Handle Line Reads). We soon also meet our other tropes: the Foreigner, the Black Guy, the Woman, the Expendable Roughnecks, and the William Forsythe (played in this case by the actual William Forsythe).

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Roger Ebert is a sucker for old-school adventure movies. He copped to this weakness in his review of Congo, which he described as “a splendid example of a genre no longer much in fashion, the jungle adventure story.” Perhaps this explains his otherwise inexplicable decision to award 3 1/2 stars to Anaconda, a film not otherwise honored by posterity. It’s a good, even great, B-movie, but I have to ask what curve he graded this on.

Admittedly, there’s much to recommend the film. Its cast is top-notch: Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube, Jon Voight, Eric Stoltz, Jonathan Hyde, Owen Wilson, Kari Wuher, and Danny Trejo. Voight gives the most memorable performance as a crazed, Peruvian (um…) swamp-rat. It puts me in mind of Depp’s later performance as Jack Sparrow, in that it’s so bizarre you just have to accept it on its own terms. The individual characters, even the ones just along to be snake-fodder, are given some depth. The production design is sound and the direction competent. The CG effects looked dated, but then so do those from Air Force One. CG was still in transition in 1997 and much of it hasn’t aged well. Conversely, Fifth Element still looks gorgeous.

It’s also worth remembering that we’re only a year out from the dreadful The Ghost and the Darkness, a similar film but set in Africa with lions instead of snakes. You’ll never see a review of that here because I’ll be damned if I’m going to set through that interminable slop again. If you’re not going to make a great movie at least make it entertaining. Also, no film which includes a character inquiring “hey, is that real dynamite?” can be all bad. We’re going to skip over Kari Wuher’s inferior line reads, the waste of Ice Cube and Eric Stoltz, and the general worthlessness of Owen Wilson.

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It’s best to imagine WordPress’s plugin ecosystem as a swamp. Swamps are terrible. You don’t want to be there. You run a constant risk of disease and/or drowning. Anything that sinks into the swamp–it’s not coming back.

I’ve been debugging an odd problem on our WordPress installations involving categories. On some sites, posts which are in have multiple categories don’t display more than one category. That would be strange enough, but the category permalinks are coming out in the format SITE_URL/category/foo with the title baz, where foo is one category and baz a different category:

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Yesterday I showed my phone to gate agent in Chicago and successfully boarded the Wolverine. This morning we boarded the Blue Water in Kalamazoo using only a phone. Our conductor beeped the QR code on the screen without incident.

Folks, I’m here to tell you that e-ticketing works. The only open question is how well these trips post to my rewards account. I don’t expect problems but I’ll check in a week or two to see if the points post. As I said in Part I the only thing missing from the app is my room and car assignment on the sleeper, and that’s only for my benefit.

Previous posts about e-ticketing:

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In yesterday's post I discussed Amtrak’s rollout of eticketing nationwide. I outlined four tasks which required a proof of ticket and which I hoped to accomplish with my phone alone. So far, we’re two-for-two. At the baggage counter, the attendant didn’t bat an eye as I offered her my phone with the eticket displayed. Our bag was ticketed through to Chicago and whisked away. Painless. At the Club Acela, I showed my phone again and the attendant verified that we were ticketed for a roomette on today’s Lake Shore Limited, allowing us access. Two steps to go.

As an aside, the baggage attendant had no problem with ticketing our bag to Chicago even though our ultimate destination, Kalamazoo, has no baggage service. I’m still puzzled by Seattle’s refusal to do the same thing in May 2011 with the Empire Builder, and I have to assume it was because of the endemic delays at that time (those delays will be covered in a future post).

This summer Amtrak rolled out e-ticketing on all its routes. This is long overdue and a step in the right direction, not just in itself but for the efficiencies which should follow. One of the interesting features of the old system is that the paper tickets had cash value–that is, they were important in themselves. I once had to mail my actual ticket stubs via certified mail to 30th Street Station in Philadelphia in order to procure a refund (long story, and Amtrak fulfilled my request). With e-tickets Amtrak’s on the same footing as the airlines–your e-ticket holds no value of its own. This is a huge step forward.

And tomorrow I’m going to find out how well it works. I’m going to try to do all the following with my phone (I do have printouts available as a quick safety):

1. Check a bag through to Chicago
2. Gain entry to Club Acela (Amtrak’s lounge at Penn Station for First Class and sleeper passengers)
3. Board the train (thus satisfying the gate agent, an institution Amtrak can abolish whenever it wants)
4. Get my actual ticket checked.

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I’m a Moodle developer by trade, with some administration duties thrown in for laughs. I see to the care and feeding of Lafayette College‘s Moodle sites. In addition, I handle some development and code management duties for the Collaborative Liberal Arts Moodle Project. All this is a long way of saying I push a lot of code around in a way that requires me to work with dozens (hundreds?) of developers whom I’ve never met. This means I have to document my work and develop against actual APIs. Further, working for an institution with thousands of students, staff, and faculty means that all our maintenances are published and (save emergencies) occur outside business hours. I can’t just shoot from the hip.

Gravatar is an online service which allows you to upload an avatar which will then be populated to other services. You don’t realize how many places use Gravatar until you upload an image and suddenly see yourself all over the web. It’s pretty cool. Gravatar provides a simple API so that you can add this functionality to your own website via web services. Moodle added support for Gravatars in the 2.2 release which dropped in December 2011. We turned it on at Lafayette since it’s easier than making thousands of people upload files.

So far, so good, right? Enter chaos.

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