Cheery Vitriol

Found this looking for something else. It’s a Google Maps mashup that has all of the T stops as markers. It’s particularly cool because the MBTA’s maps are never to scale - they compress them to fit since the system is somewhat spread out. Very clever idea.

Last week was my first week at the new job. I’m finally working in the area, having purchased a condo on the Red Line for the convenience of taking the T to work. I was commuting to Mansfield, and while it was a productive commute, it was a 3-hour round trip.

Now however I’m working in Kendall Square. Four stops on the Red Line. Or, a 4.1 mile bike ride. Pretty cool.

My Comcast internet connection has sucked for quite a while. The signal is usually pretty fast, with regular significant dips in speed that usually come back after 30 seconds or so, sometimes as long as a couple of minutes. This is usually not a big deal, but once in a while there’s a significant noticeable lag.

For the past couple of weeks though, it’s been extremely slow (<30Kb!) in the mornings for some reason. It always comes back by around 9am, so by the time I'm at work it's ok. But Friday it pretty much died, with download speeds around 6-20Kb. Just like 1994 all over again. I called Comcast but they couldn't send someone out until Monday morning - ugh.

I'd purchased PdaNet for my Treo 650 for when I was travelling, and it worked pretty well. But that version doesn’t work on the 700, so I upgraded to the latest version. I figured that it would be faster than what I was seeing with the cable modem, and probably a lot faster since I have EV-DO. I was pleasantly surprised.

It’s quite fast - 300-500Kb or so - and I’ve been able to do regular internet stuff all weekend. This would have been a bad weekend to have no internet access since I’m working on a Google Maps mashup, and that would have been impossible to work on locally.

Midterm election day 2006 is finally only three days away. Should be interesting, if only for all of the vote fraud and Diebold “bugs”. electoral-vote.com is projecting a 51/49 Senate (unfortunately not Lieberman-proof) and a 240/195 House. Several Senate races are very close but it’s clear that the House will be a blowout, regardless of the ability of the Rethuglican party’s willingness to troll the depths of electoral depravity.