Garl Latham

I’m saddened to report that long-time passenger rail advocate, Garl Latham, has died.

Although it would be presumptious of me to say that I was his friend, I met him several times at various TXARP meetings in both Dallas and Fort Worth; and I was looking forward to seeing him again a couple of weeks ago at a conference in Fort Worth that I couldn’t attend.  Garl greeted me personally on my first arrival at the current Amtrak station in Fort Worth, and I met him on his first arrival at the current station in St. Louis.

Garl was a deeply religious person, but apparently one who took Matthew 6:5-6 to heart.  I knew him as a very humble and caring person who never threw his religion in your face.  Our discussions were all about trains, and I learned a great deal from them.

My heart goes out to Garl’s family and close associates.  I know he’ll be missed…heck, I miss the thought of his being around, and I was never more than on his periphery.

It Never Changes

I read this morning:

… wisdom and virtue are by no means the sole objects of respect; nor vice and folly, of contempt.  We frequently see the respectful attentions of the world more strongly directed towards the rich and the great, than towards the wise and the virtuous.  We see frequently the vices and follies of the powerful much less despised than the poverty and weakness of the innocent.

— Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, p.74

No change for almost three centuries, and I’d guess much longer than that.

I Voted

This boomer always votes in every election, even for the mythical “dog catcher”…civic duty don’tcha know.  Today was easy since there were only two items on my ballot.

1. An additional 3% sales tax on recreational, not medical, marijuana.

I have nothing against marijuana; indeed, I used it myself when I was much younger; but I often vote for taxes just to counter the votes of folks who automatically vote “no” on any question that has “tax” in it.  Yeah, sales taxes are regressive; but folks who have actual prescriptions won’t have to pay it.

2. Lindbergh School Board — five candidates for three positions.

School board elections are important, and not entirely because we want to keep fundies off of them.  I voted for an actual teacher who has endorsements from organizations with “equity” in their names, a guy who uses various versions of “inclusive” among his issues, and a guy who likes teachers and thinks that they should get a raise.  I declined to vote for a “human resources” manager (don’t get me started) and a guy with “parental rights” as one of his issues (possibly a dog whistle about cancelling non-cis-het folks and removing from the history curriculum any mention of race).

More on My Aborted Trip

We can’t blame Amtrak for this one.  The storm damage in Little Rock would almost certainly have caused the Union Pacific Railroad, which owns the tracks that the Texas Eagle uses between Joliet, IL and Dallas, TX, to tell Amtrak not to send the train.  (Superliner rolling stock has a pretty high profile and can be blown over in extremely high winds more easily than single-level equipment can.)

I had actually shown up at the Amtrak station way early to beat the rains that were headed my way.  I had a sleeper ticket on the train, so I had access to the first-class lounge; and I wrote what would have been my day-zero trip report while I was there:

2023-03-31 13:20

Now begins my trip to Hurst, TX for the Southwestern Rail Conference 2023.  Although the venue is called the Hilton Garden Inn Dallas, it’s actually closer to Fort Worth.

itinerary

I’m way early for 21’s departure, but the storm that hit California the other day is now bearing down on me, and I wanted to beat the rain.  There’s still over six hours until we start boarding; but since I’m in the sleeper, I get to use the first-class lounge.

I’m leaving a day early, and returning a day late, because I couldn’t get sleeper space on the Texas Eagle on the days that I wanted to travel, probably because other conference attendees were quicker making reservations than I was.  Fortunately, the folks at the meeting hotel gave me the conference rate for both extra days.

I finally got my BU-353N GPS receiver that plugs into a USB port on my laptop, and I’ve verified that I can see my current location using mapping software called Maptitude, but I haven’t tried it out while moving yet…we’ll see how well it works.  Like on my recent trip to Seattle, I also have my Oticon TV Adapter 3.0 which will plug into the earphone jack on my scanner and generate a bluetooth signal that feeds my hearing aids, so this train geek will be able to listen to the conversations between the conductors, engineers and dispatchers without disturbing any other passengers.

I have room D in both directions, so the electrical outlet will be near the window, and I’ll need only the power strip with the surge protector and four-foot cord on the train; but I’m bringing along the power strip with a longer cord just in case there’s no place to plug in the laptop near the desk in the hotel room where I’ll be using it.  (That was the case with the the first place I stayed in Seattle which seemed like it was designed by marketeers instead of hospitality folks.)

Even though we should depart with about four hours left in day zero, I’ll use the day-one report for the whole train trip.  I expect to be in my hotel room by late afternoon tomorrow, or maybe early evening, depending on how late the train is.

According to juckins.net, so far this year train 21’s arrival into Fort Worth has averaged a bit less than half an hour early.  Here’s my own analysis with some abecedarian statistics.  Three no-data days are probably due to Amtrak’s server failure.

It turns out that the train actually made it as far as St. Louis, but terminated there.

I suppose that there are other ways that I could have gotten to Forth Worth, but taking an overnight bus trip (St. Louis’ Amtrak and Greyhound stations are in the same building) didn’t seem like something I’d want to do, and lots of flights would probably have been cancelled as well.  The very nice woman at the Amtrak ticket counter offered me a family room on today’s (Saturday’s) train; and since I was a day early anyway, I still would have made it to Texas in time for the meeting; but I declined because I worried that that train would be cancelled as well, although it appears that it’s running.  (21 is sitting in St. Louis as I write this, and Amtrak’s status page shows an estimated arrival in Forth Worth for tomorrow…no service disruption yet.)

Oh, well.  There’s a chance that the conference might be just feel-good speeches with not a lot of data anyway.  Attending it was mostly an excuse to ride the train.

Non-Trip Report

Well, that was a revoltin’ development.  Because of the storm that hit California the other day and is now around eastern Missouri and southern Illinois (at least that’s the reason I was given), Amtrak decided to just cancel today’s westbound Texas Eagle with no alternate transportation.  The woman at the Amtrak ticket counter was very nice, but the best that she could offer me was the family room on tomorrow’s train.  I decided to just cancel the whole trip.

So I won’t be attending the Southwestern Rail Conference after all.  My next trip that includes some train rides will be to Varna, Bulgaria the second and third weeks in June.

Travel to Japan

It turns out that there will be some meetings in Tokyo next March that I should probably attend somehow.  At present, I expect that I’ll just Zoom in because I wouldn’t want to sit in an airplane long enough to get there:  what seems to be the shortest flight, from Vancouver, BC to Haneda Airport, takes a bit over ten hours.  It’s too soon to be making firm travel plans since the trip is still almost a year away; but I’m wondering whether anybody can suggest some other options that I can mull over for a while.

I’m retired, so I don’t care how long the total trip would take.  I see that there are cruise ships between North America and Japan.  Another option might involve taking trains from Western Europe to the east coast of Asia and flying from there; and maybe I should ride the trans-Siberian train before I die. 😎

Hmm…

Bad Server!

I’ll likely be taking my next Amtrak trip starting on Friday; but a few days ago, a server for Amtrak’s Positive Train Control system crashed and stayed down for at least three days requiring that, basically, all trains except on Amtrak’s own Northeast Corridor were cancelled.  Scuttlebutt has it that the server is back up, and it seems that trains are departing from Chicago again.

But what really amazes me is that, apparently, there wasn’t a backup.  The system I worked on before I retired was actually four complete systems, one for development, one for system integration testing, one for customer acceptance testing, and one for production.  Each of those had three servers:  one for the Web component, one for the database, and a third for running background tasks.  Each of those servers had at least one backup.  The DEV and SIT systems had one backup for each server; the CAT and PROD systems had four of each server constantly sharing data back and forth so that they were pretty much exact copies of each other.  That’s the way you do it.  It’s really old news and well understood.

Another possibility, which also wouldn’t surprise me, is that security was so lax that a hacker could have brought the whole thing down for a ransomware attack.  If that’s what happened, they probably won’t admit it.

In any event, Amtrak could have done better by getting a server from the folks who set up my own little website.  They’re much more professional, it would seem.

Am I a Thief?

Although I don’t watch enough TV to make having cable worthwhile, I discovered last night that I could watch the World Baseball Classic on Fox Sports’ website where one can watch one hour for free.  When the hour expires, you’re supposed to “log in to your TV provider”; but I also discovered that, by deleting my history and cookies, I could get additional hours indefinitely.

I don’t think I did anything that the website doesn’t allow, but we H. sapiens are really good at rationalization.  Would anyone care to argue that I’ve stolen intellectual property?

PLATO and Me

Wow, that was a blast from the past!

Mike the Mad Biologist links to “an excellent article about the PLATO computing system”.

I didn’t know all the early history.  My own involvement with PLATO begain in the ’80s when I was an instructor at Control Data Institute in St. Louis.  The courses were basically all PLATO, although the students had some projects to complete as well:  on the tech. side, it was mostly building circuits; on the programming side, students had some programs to write.  The instructors were there mostly to assist with the projects.

We eventually replaced the stand-alone PLATO terminals with CDC-110s which had a CRT terminal with a built-in keyboard and a separate double-sided, double-density eight inch floppy.  In PLATO mode, a Z80 microprocessor in the terminal was the boss, and another Z80 in the floppy drive just did the disk I/O; but it could also run CP/M in which case the Z80 in the floppy drive was in charge and the Z80 in the terminal ran the CP/M BIOS.

They also had a text editor called MINCE which the programming students used to write their programs instead of punching cards.  One of the languages we taught was RPG II which required codes to be “punched” into particular columns, so I wrote an RPG mode for MINCE that expanded tabs to the appropriate columns.

MINCE was written in BDS C, an early (and incomplete) C compiler for CP/M systems; and it came with source listings for much of the editor.  I didn’t know C at the time, so I went to a bookstore to get a book on C; and as luck would have it, the book I selected was the first edition of K&R, so I got off on the right foot. 😎

My first home computer was a CDC-110 with a dual floppy drive and a modem that ran at the phenomenal speed of 1200 baud!  I got all that for half price (around $5k IIRC) because I was a Control Data employee, and I eventually sold it for about what I’d paid for it. 😎

CDC eventually got rid of all the land lines and rotary switches for communicating with the PLATO mainframe in Minneapolis and switched to something called the “shared network” that used satellites.  This had the unfortunate effect of increasing the turn-around time for each keystroke to a large enough fraction of a second for H. sapiens to notice.

To the tune of Alabama Bound (with apologies to Lead Belly):

I’m input/output bound.
I’m input/output bound.
If them bits don’t stop, Babe, and turn around,
I’m input/output bound.

Hey listen all you hackers,
Now don’tcha be like me:
You gotta stick with that old PLATO rotary
And let that shared net be.

I’m input/output bound.
…

Ride Share Services

Returning from my recent trip to Issaquah, WA, I wanted a taxi from the hotel to the Amtrak station in Seattle.  The hotel clerk told me that taxis weren’t vary reliable in Issaquah and called me an Uber instead.  The driver showed up within five minutes or so, and it was less expensive than a taxi would have been; so I guess this old dude needs to get with the program.

I checked out the websites for both Uber and Lyft, and it looks like you can’t use either one except through a cell phone which I find annoying, principally because of the difficulty of typing readable text on the phone’s make-believe keyboard.  I’m also guessing that you can’t pay with a credit card but need to set up some kind of PayPal account or something.

Can anybody suggest any alternatives to Uber and Lyft? Or maybe explain to this old fart why it’s not as difficult as he thinks it is?

Thanks.