Commuting on a Code Orange Day

I Kind a, sort a, on purpose I decided to try taking the bus and metro to work today. I am normally a late riser so don’t appreciate getting up before 8 to get to work, but today and yesterday I have been in training so I had to be at work by 9am. Before my job was moved out to Dulles I used take the metro to West Falls Church and then a reverse commute bus to Reston. This worked out great I left about 8:45 and got to work about 9:30. The Loudoun County reverse commute bus isn’t quite as nice. I have to be out the house by 8am to get on the metro by 8:07 to get to west falls church by 8:25 where I pick up the last reverse commute to dulles.

Overall I have been very pleasantly surprised. The Loundoun County Buses now take the smart trip card and they are lot more comfortable than the bone grinding buses that Fairfax connectors try to run at 65 along the toll road. I didn’t even have to pay today since it was a code orange day for pollution.

After looking at the schedules I notice that they are changing the route to make a stop at the Herdon Monroe Park and Ride in Reston, which will be prefect once we move to reston, this is all assuming we can find a house we like.

So the Loudoun County reverse commute bus gets a b+. I just wish they ran a 9:30 am bus in the morning and a 7PM bus in the evening to give me a little more flexability on my work schedule. Plus one of there buses I see when driving generates huge puffs of black smoke every so often as it drives down the toll road.

Playing with gps

A while back I bought the Palm tomtom gps package for my treo 700p. This works great for traffic and saved our ass recently when traveling in Canada, but one of the things I have been looking for is way to track things like hiking or biking trips. While looking for something else I came across cotogps which can install on a palm. Cotogps connects to my gps receiver over bluetooth and gives various tracking information like lat,lon,direction, speed etc. The cool thing is it also allows you to create tracks then load them into https://www.gpsvisualizer.com which can render them as a google map. I haven’t tried putting the live map on a web site but I used command-shift-4 on a mac to do a screen shot which you can see below.

Walking round work

From one of my Live Journal friends

He posted “In the immediate aftermath of the Glasgow Airport attack, the driver of the SUV was running around inside the terminal building, on fire and fighting with the Police. My fellow countrymen decided this ‘jist wisnae right’ and proceeded to give the guy a ‘good kicking’ (even though he was on fire!).”

I had to translate this for my wife
” Yo’re no hitting the polis mate , these no chance, so I ran straight down, any member of the public would at the same time would have done the exact same as me, we all ran towards the guy, we all tried to get a kick in at him, get a boot, just subdue the guy”

Illegal Immgration in Prince William County

The immigration system is broken in the US. Last week the Washington Post ran an article talking about a peaceful protest by those who had been been waiting many years for visa numbers to become available so they can move to the next stage and finally get a green card.

Then this week Prince William County County in Virginia approved a resolution denying county services to illegal immigrants and ordering police to take a more vigorous approach in checking immigration status. The only problem is the USCIS is slow and primarily paper based, so there is no easy way to verify immigration status. Even if you are US Citizen and never had to deal with the immigration services look at this list of acceptable forms of proof of citizenship in Fredrick Country Maryland. The vitalchek.com website lists over 400 agencies it can supply a birth certificate for. With all these variations do you really think it will be possible for the average traffic cop in Prince William county to quickly verify citizenship?

Immigration and Customs Enforcement raided Swift, a meat processing plants in December 06 and arrested 1,300 undocumented employees. The employees had been run through the federal employment verification system but the system can’t detect stolen social security numbers and birth certificates.

The more that states crackdown on illegal immigration with out a working federal citizenship verification scheme the more risk that citizens or legal aliens will be stopped and held by mistake. Just look at the Security Theatre we have to endure in the name of anti-terrorism. Think about the documentation you might have to carry in the future just to proves you are a US citizen.

China in the news

Maybe it is that I am trying to learn Mandarin, or maybe it is that I am married to someone who was born in China but it seems like China is in the news alot this week.

You might have read about the obvious stuff like tainted food or polution problems in china. Then something comes along and just makes you go waoh. Reuters is reporting that nearly half of the pregnant teens in China’s financial hub, Shanghai, met their partners on the Internet. That just makes me wonder, computers are that common in china that teens are using them for dating, then I think surely they if they find a mate online they can lookup how babies and made and how not to get pregnant.