May 11th, 2010 ravi
The new year brought with it a new job, new apartment, and new car. As a result of the former 2 I was completely in the weeds with any projects like this service. Thankfully it runs on its own however being in the weeds meant nearly 100 key requests sat unanswered. Part of the problem was how I input the data to the DB. It was anything but graceful.
A friend of mine has been coaching me to learn Ruby for some very specific reasons (so please don’t tell me I should learn some other language). I took the opportunity to write a script that will speed up the data entry and parsing. After actually successfully doing that I was able to plow through the pending requests.
The new car means I haven’t been taking Caltrain for the last several months. This is in part because I’m no longer within a reasonable biking distance to 4th/King and I would have to either bike from Mountain View or take VTA to my new office. I have a rule that excluding walking I will not take more than 3 modes of transportation to work. That said I need to really need to figure out timing to drive to Millbrae (with or without my bike) and take Caltrain to Mountain View where I either bike or take VTA. but of course Caltrain has been about as reliable as MUNI so I’ve scrapped the whole idea of taking Caltrain all together for the time being. I’d really like to use it again as I’d be gaining at least 1h30m of work time.
Anyhow things are back on track and its a good thing too because Twitter is discontinuing support for basic authentication. That means unless I get moving it will outright break. I better get cracking!
Thanks again to everyone who continues to make the service the success that it is.
Posted in Commentary | No Comments »
March 2nd, 2010 ravi
It is March already and I am 2 months behind in generating update keys for people. I am very sorry for not getting to it, but I started a new job in early January which has been consuming 97.45% of my time and then in February I thought it would be a great idea to move. Now that I’ve moved in I will spend a little time going through all the emails and generating those keys.
Thank you for your patients.
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
December 8th, 2009 ravi
…public transit providers in the U.S. had a similar campaign.
Also I know I’be been slacking off quite a bit with issuing new post keys and I am sorry. I have no excuse other than being very lazy. Perhaps I will do them tomorrow.
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October 22nd, 2009 ravi
Jennifer Van Grove wrote a piece about BART partnering up with a location-based social network site Foursquare. One person tweeted that Caltrain should also embrace the service and a few more shared the feeling. I can’t help but to wonder how this partnership will help Caltrain or Caltrain riders any more than the BART partnership does. Am I missing a bigger picture here? Can someone clue me in, please?
Posted in Commentary | 3 Comments »
September 24th, 2009 ravi
I think I summed up things in my previous post. Unfortunately I was ignored and while I would love to see how the dust settles I fear taking inaction would irreversibly hurt the service and the work I have invested into making it as good as it has become.
Spock said it best with, “[...] the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”
That being said I am now doing pre-processing of all updates globally. This will actually only impact a very small subset of the user base (<1%) so many of you won’t even notice. This will be a temporary solution until I can add in a bunch of other features people have been requesting.
Posted in Announcement, Commentary | 2 Comments »
September 21st, 2009 ravi
When I created the service 3 years ago I tried to think of what I as a commuter (with or without a bicycle) would find useful in a tweet. Talking with fellow riders I came up with the current Updating Guide because it seemed to just make sense. Since the inception of the service the nomenclature in the guide has worked without issue up until recently.
As you may know I don’t alter the content of tweets other than limit to a certain length to be able to append time stamps. I believe that the community should be able to take my idea and initial set of guidelines and mold them to what really works. It is with that belief I felt the service would evolve in a positive and useful way as Caltrain changed its service. That is why I called them guidelines. As it turned out everyone embraced them and felt they met the needs of the majority and as a result essentially became the rule more than a guide.
Recently the use of ‘bombardier’ and ‘gallery’ for car type and ‘limited’ and ‘bbullet’ for service type have been used with greater frequency to the frustration of many people. This frustration has taken form in emails directly to me and to what amounts as a flame war on the public feed where hundreds of people follow. Also it appears users have been editorializing, not consolidating multiple status in 1 tweet, and updating with no useful content.
It is because I received multiple direct emails from users saying, “decreasing the usefulness of the service”, “poor low signal to noise ratio”, and “tweets have taken over my twitter feed on a number of occasions [...] tweeting at length and uselessly about train type, sometimes with editorial comments, and doesn’t use the established conventions” that I realized I cannot take a complete laissez-faire attitude if I have any expectations of the service remaining useful.
It is because of this that I must now insist people adhere to the Updating Guide for updates. The community has embraced my vision and has been very vocal about sticking with it. Also the Updating Guide says at the very top,
What makes an update useful or helpful? No matter what, updates need to be newsworthy and concise. If things are normal or how they should be there is no reason to announce it. Think of this service as a EAS for Caltrain. Too many updates could cause frustration or desensitize users who may stop following or updating which hurts everyone in the long run.
I cannot help but to wonder why people insist on ignoring this fundamental belief.
One approach moving forward I had was replacing any instance of ‘bombardier’ with ‘new’ and ‘gallery’ with ‘old’ before sent to Twitter. ‘Limited’ and ‘bbullet’ would also be removed because the service type is encoded in the route number itself. As stated before:
1 = Local
2 = Limited
3 = Baby Bullet
In fact the direction (NB and SB) is also included — odd routes are Northbound and even routes are Southbound, but I am willing to allow the extra notation there.
But Ravi, you’re being hypocritical!
Yes, but this is why — I want the service to be easy for everyone. It wasn’t until 3 years did I find out the direction and service encoding and it was because someone told me. I suspect I’m not alone. Also I know countless people who outright refused to “ride the old trains.” Not my words but theirs. What is an old train here? Yep, a gallery. I didn’t make it up. It is what it is.
So lets re-recap:
- Stick with the Updating Gude — drop the use of ‘bombardier’, ‘gallery’, ‘limited’ and ‘bbullet’ from the update.
- Consolidate your tweets.
- Keep your editorials to your blog or own Twitter feed. Some people subscribe to SMS updates of the feeds and some of those people pay for each SMS. Consider checking the feed for recent updates before you send one and ask yourself if it meets the criteria I set forth in the Updating Guide.
I am saddened that I even had to write this post, but I am thrilled it took this long before I had to. As hope everyone understands and realigns their updates with the Updating Guide and the requests of the community. Posts will remain unedited (aside from length) and will remain for as long as people respect the service and others.
Posted in @bikecar, @caltrain, Tutorial | 9 Comments »
August 18th, 2009 ravi
Well not really, but I will be going on holiday 8/21 through 9/12 and will probably be punched in the face when I acclimate back to PST. While I will be checking email I won’t be adding new requests for keys. This shouldn’t be too much of a problem as I typically batch them once or twice a month.
In other news while getting on SB236 I noticed a new sign (left) at the end of the cab car noting how many bike cars were in that train configuration. Am I slow on the uptake or is this brand spankin’ new? I didn’t see a similar sign on the engine but didn’t look very hard. Assuming this is actually updated regularly it should be trivial for someone at a terminal to note the configurations early in the morning and do a mass update.
Hmm, and while reading through the tweet history I found this Aug 11 tweet noting the new signs. I guess I have been in the dark.
Finally a few people have asked me if posting guidelines have changed. No they have not. What do I mean?
Please remember:
- Leave the editorial comments to your own feed
- Please use OLD and NEW notation when referring to gallery and bombardier respectively. Not everyone knows the difference and it will just eat up on the maximum character limit you have. Fellow contributors have asked that people follow this to no avail. I am now asking everyone. Please do this do I don’t have to do message pre-processing.
- Please omit the class of service (e.g. bullet, limited, local). As noted by a contributor this is encoded in the train number. The first digit represents the class where 3 is bullet, 2 is limited, and 1 is local.
- Timestamps at the end of each tweet are inserted by me. There is no need to manually add it as it will eat into your max tweet length and cause confusion for others.
- Please keep the tweet to the account it belongs in. Car configurations belong in @bikecar
- Only update when there is something to say. A train that is on time or even <5 minutes behind schedule is not news.
As always I want to thank everyone for contributing and helping out. Remember this will only be successful if people play by the rules. I don’t have many at all so please stick with them. If you have concerns about them or anything I’ve said please do not hesitate to contact me.
Posted in @bikecar, @caltrain, Announcement | 7 Comments »
July 29th, 2009 ravi
Mike Rosenberg, a reporter of the San Mateo County Times/Bay Area News Group, wrote a nice piece about the service that available at the Mercury News and Inside Bay Area. It should also appear in tomorrow’s edition of the Palo Alto Daily News.
I also have a large (15-20) batch of keys I need to generate and mail out so if you requested one it should be sent out shortly.
Posted in @caltrain, Announcement | 6 Comments »
July 15th, 2009 ravi
I have a meeting at 10AM today and so I hopped on SB232 which would place me in Mountain View with time to spare. This would be true if a train wasn’t disabled near Belmont. Now I’m not a train engineer or know what it takes to route trains around incidents in a safe way, but it seems absolutely ridiculous h0w poorly Caltrain has been communicating the delays.
What is even more ridiculous is the back to back issues Caltrain has had. The constant breakdowns of trains conjures an image of maintenance workers whose voices sound like they have gravel in their throats chewing a stub of a unlit cigar covered in grease. I can imagine them looking at each other as a new repair is pushed into the depot and they dig into what is nothing short of a junk pile of miscellaneous parts and combined with some chewing gum and duct tape mend the poor dilapidated train into a condition where it can leave on its own power only later to gasp its last burst of power.
This can’t possibly be the case, right? I say this because Caltrain spent $140 million dollars on “repair and maintenance buildings, a state-of-the-art control center to direct and monitor train traffic, and storage yards for Caltrain’s fleet of locomotives and passenger cars.”
Actually the same page (which now returns a 404) also says “Caltrain will have on-site fuel storage, which will reduce fuel expenses” yet with the last fare increases they cite rising gas prices. And of a personal annoyance is the announcement of a “new train washer that will allow trains to get a thorough cleaning every day. Currently, crews are only able to give trains a thorough washing and scrubbing twice a year.” This would be great if they utilized this new ability, but just about every train I am on has windows so filthy I can barely see out the window. I even wrote feedback to Caltrain about it and they couldn’t bother to send a reply that they even got the feedback let alone what, if anything, they would do to address my issue.
Well, I’ve gotten to the point of rant fueled by rage and to make matters worse I’m on a conference call I want nothing to do with. And SB332 will end up about 45m behind schedule when all things are done.
What is the lesson learned here? Stop going into the office.
Posted in @caltrain, Commentary, Fail | 1 Comment »
July 9th, 2009 ravi
So on my 1h30m commute home last night I added about 20 new keys to the database. Doing so I was thinking about how many people have actually sent an update so ran some stats (I have also been asked for similar statistics).
There are…
1789 @caltrain followers,
314 @bikecar followers,
2103 total followers (unknown overlap) and
256 (12%) issued keys.
Of those issued keys
146 (57%) have updated at least once,
11 (8%) have updated more than 100 times, and
3 (1%) of you have updated more than 300 times (wow)!
Kinda neat looking back at things over 2 years ago.
Posted in Commentary | 1 Comment »