Author Archives: Ted

Paddling to Pomham

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When I was working in Providence, I often rode the East Bay Bike Path after work. It was close by, relatively flat (except for one killer hill) and scenic. One of my favorite pieces of scenery is the the Pomham Rocks Lighthouse, which sits on an outcropping of rock quite visible from the path. I’ve been wanting to see it up close for a long time, and now that I have my own kayak, I can. Saturday, I finally made the trip.

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Hyphenation

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I’ve been re-reading Waiter Rant the last couple of days, and noticed something cool in one of his posts — some of the words at ends of lines were hyphenated. Justified text can cause large amounts of space between words; one way of reducing this is to break long words that fall at a line boundary between syllables so they fit better. So I fired up the Web Inspector, and sure enough, there was a -webkit-hyphens property on <p> tags that I hadn’t known about.

In print, hyphenation is not uncommon. On the web, it’s quite rare, because you never know exactly how a user agent will render text, or whether the user has resized the window, and up until recently, there was no way to automatically insert the hyphens where they belong.

So, I thought, “This looks cool, let me try it on my site,” looked up the syntax, added it to my stylesheet, took a look at one of my posts, and immediately decided it was a distraction.

It did even up the right margins somewhat, but I also found my eye sticking at the hyphenated words, and pausing there, in a way I don’t remember doing in print. Either the browser was applying hyphenation a lot more than a typesetter would (there were three or four hyphens added to my Thoughts on the Bombing post) or it’s a lot more intrusive on screen than it is on the page. Either way, it was taking me out of the post, and I immediately backed the change out.

For the curious, here are the styles I briefly added:

hyphens:auto; /* CSS3 standard */
-webkit-hyphens:auto; /* Target Webkit */
-webkit-hyphenate-character:"\2010";
-webkit-hyphenate-limit-after:1; /* rules to try to minimize widows and orphans */
-webkit-hyphenate-limit-before:3;
-moz-hyphens:auto; /* target Mozilla */

It was a lesson — cool new toys should always be tried, but they also should always be evaluated for suitability.

The Olympics

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I’m very relieved to see that Boston’s Olympic bid is over. Personally, I’m not a sports fan, and have never cared about them, but I’ve also felt that it would be like the 2004 Democratic Convention – great for the money folks, but a huge inconvenience for anyone who actually has to live or work in or around the city. Lots of construction, lots of restrictive security, lots of disruption, lots of money spent on infrastructure with a very short active life.

Given the huge outlays needed to host modern day Olympic Games, I’ve long thought the idea of rotating cities needs to be re-examined. The Olympics need a permanent home. One where they can set up shop with all the facilities the Games need, in exactly the form they need them in. The expense of the infrastructure could be amortized over several sets of Games, and could be gradually grown and improved. Facilities could be custom built for the events they’re designed for, without worrying about winding up with an expensive white elephant that serves no purpose.

The permanent Olympic site would obviously be a draw during the Games, but I also think they would draw tourists during the off years, and facilities could host other events as well.

So where to put the permanent Olympic Games? To my mind, the obvious choice is Greece, their ancestral home, assuming the cost of building it was borne by the International Olympic Committee, and not the Greek government. It would have the added benefit of increasing Greek tourism, which would, hopefully, help the Greek economy dig out of the hole it’s in.

Beta Testing

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I was reading a couple of articles this morning on C|Net about beta testing iOS 9 and OS X El Capitan. Both articles recommended being wary of beta testing because of the chance of running into bugs. There’s more to it than that though.

I used to beta test software, but stopped doing it quite a while back, mainly because I felt it was too much work for too little reward. I beta tested a couple of games and paint programs for the Apple IIGS, and AOL 3.0 and 4.0 for the Mac. It was nice getting early access to software, but to my mind, if you’re going to be a beta tester, you owe it to the developer to really put the software through its paces, note where something is going wrong, and report what you found. This can take quite a bit of time.

A good example was a problem that turned up with AOL 3, which was a major rewrite designed to bring the Mac software to parity with the Windows software. There was some sort of crashing bug, which I mentioned in passing on the beta message board. The project manager (rightly) took me to task for both being non-descriptive, and not posting a formal bug report. I ended up spending the entire afternoon figuring out what steps I was crashing on, then writing up a description of those steps, and posting it in both the feedback form and the message board. The project manager was nice enough to reply that the report was exactly the kind of detail they were looking for, and that they had found the cause of the bug.

This is all well and good, but eventually I tired of putting in that kind of work testing, and it’s not fair to the developer to beta test if you’re not willing to let them know what you found wrong. I’m perfectly content to wait until the software actually comes out, especially in the case of an operating system.

The Green Line’s “Great Cavern”

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I first started using the MBTA in 1977, commuting to Boston College. Up through high school, I’d been dependent on either walking, getting a ride from my parents, or the very limited Canton-Mattapan bus line. I still remember my first trip over to BC that summer, checking out the route to school. The rapid transit line wasn’t very rapid, and the very decrepit PCC streetcar to BC was slow, dirty, bumpy and noisy. I distinctly remember being alarmed by the wheel squeal as we went through the curves in the subway.

But the MBTA opened up new worlds for me. I could get around on my own now. And as I learned to navigate it, I became a railfan. The Boeing Light Rail Vehicles were just being introduced, and I loved them. They were modern, clean and good looking, and if they were a little unreliable, well, they were new. Park Street Station was in the middle of renovations.  I started reading up on the history. And at some point, I noticed that the subway widened out between Arlington and Boylston.

I gradually realized this widening was unusual – most of the Green Line is a two track tunnel, with no space between it. This area is quite wide, with some stub end tracks in the middle, and a lot of empty space. Because it’s wide, underground and  unusual, I dubbed the area “Great Cavern”. But why does it exist? The answer starts with the original opening of the subway.

The Public Garden Incline

The Green Line was not originally a “line”, per se. It was simply a short length of tunnel designed to get all the streetcar lines off the street in the heart of downtown Boston. Tremont Street, where all the lines converged, had become incredibly congested. The solution was to put the streetcars underground. Construction started in 1895, and the first section ran under Tremont Street to the corner of Boylston, including Boylston Station, and then down Boylston Street to the Public Garden, where it veered out of the street and up an incline beside the street within the Garden itself. That incline would become the first part of Great Cavern.

The Boylston Street Subway

The original Tremont Street subway was a great success. It was one of those public works projects that really did what it was supposed to do – reduce congestion – and it helped spur a round of additional subway building. In 1911, the Legislature approved the building of the Boylston Street Subway. The subway was to be built from the junction of Commonwealth Ave and Beacon street, under the Muddy River, then going east along Boylston street to the corner of Tremont street… and there things got unclear. The legislation contemplated an additional two track tunnel under Tremont Street, or adding two more tracks to the Tremont Street tunnel. There were proposals from the Legislature to extend the new subway to Post Office square.

The Boston Transit Commission coped with the uncertainty by building the western sections of the new subway first, but by 1913, got permission to suspend work on the Tremont Street section of the new subway, and “temporarily” connect the Boylston Street Subway to the existing Tremont Street subway. That temporary connection remains today.

Keeping the original Public Garden incline would have required a “grade crossing” – outbound subway Boylston street traffic would have crossed over the inbound surface track, something that the engineers of that day sought to avoid at all costs. And yet, an incline was still necessary at that location, because streetcar traffic from Huntington Avenue would still be surface-running, and needed to enter the subway there. The solution was to widen Boylston street at that point, seal off the original Public Garden incline, and build a new incline in the middle of Boylston Street, between the inbound and outbound tracks. Enough of the original incline was left underground to act as a siding for car storage.

1914 Boylston Street Incline

1914 Boylston Street Incline. From the 1915 Boston Transit Commission Report.

 

The Transit Commission chose to deal with the Post Office Square question by deferring it; the Dorchester Tunnel (Red Line) was already under construction and the commission felt that the new tunnel would change traffic patterns; instead it was decided to enlarge Park Street Station.

The final part of the story came in 1941, with the building of the Huntington Avenue Subway. Streetcar traffic was rerouted from the surface of Boylston Street to the new subway, rendering the Boylston Street incline unnecessary. It was sealed off, leaving the large cavern we see today. The MBTA still uses the stubs of the tracks that once led to the surface for equipment storage.

 

 

Crossing the Santa Threshold

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I’ve almost always had facial hair since my mid twenties. While I had hair on top, it was most often a mustache or full beard; once I started shaving my head I generally had a goatee. Every now and then I’d go clean shaven, just hate it and grow it back as soon as I could.

One style I haven’t done until now is a long beard. I first tried it a couple of years ago, but gave up on it after four months because it’s such a nuisance. I’ve found myself regretting giving up on it, though,  so I’m trying it again this year. I started growing it in January, and aside from a couple of snips to even it out a bit, and make it easier to eat, it’s been growing ever since.

It’s still a nuisance; messy while eating, and it tends to curl. It would look better trimmed, but at this point, I feel like I have an investment in it, and I’m curious to see how long I can let it grow. I’m hoping to last the year. Eventually, I hope, it will even out and I can neaten it up a bit.

I wish I’d done this when I was younger. I’ve seen guys with long dark beards, and on some of them, the look works. Unfortunately, my beard is nearly white. This week, I seemed to have crossed the Santa threshold – suddenly, I’m getting comparisons to Santa from everyone.

The first one was from some random guy on the subway Wednesday night. I had an empty seat next to me, and some father was asking his son if he was afraid to sit next to Santa. Next up was one of my co-workers. Then this weekend, I saw a bunch of family members for the first time in a few months, and heard it again over and over again.

It isn’t a surprise, of course. I know what color my beard is. I did expect it to take longer, though, and I think it’s kind of funny that the change in reaction was so binary– last week, nothing, then this week, everyone is noticing it. So far, I think I’m fine with it.

Me with a 5 month beard

Me with a 5 month beard. Photo by Michael O’Hara

Actually, I think at this point, I look more like Poseidon than Santa – it’s not quite long enough, or quite white enough. But who knows what it will look like in December?

Special Effects, Then and Now

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I saw the new Avengers movie a couple of weeks ago. It wasn’t my cup of tea. While I’ve seen a lot of comic book movies over the years, and in fact, did see the original Avengers movie a few years back, it’s been a while since I saw it, and haven’t seen any of the other Marvel universe movies in the meantime, so I had a devil of a time figuring out what was going on through the first part of the movie.

I also got very impatient with all the special effects. After you’ve seen a city trashed one or two times (or three or four) it gets very repetitive. I’m not a fan of visual action (which, come to think of it, is probably why I don’t care for spectator sports either). For me, the best parts of the Avengers movies are the jokes and the banter between the characters, not the action scenes.

Last Saturday, I caught the end of the original Star Trek episode “By Any Other Name”. In it, invaders from the Andromeda Galaxy take over the Enterprise for the trip home. At the end, Kirk convinces the alien commander to release control of the Enterprise and turn back. I was watching the remastered version, and there’s a longish shot of the Enterprise making a long swooping curve and turning around, and it felt vaguely wrong.

I was able to put my finger on what was bothering me yesterday. The original producers did not have a big budget for effects, so they had to exercise restraint. The original version features a stock shot, used in many episodes, of an aft view of the Enterprise. The camera is tight on the rear of the saucer section, positioned above the secondary hull and between the nacelles, which extend past the edge of the frame. We see the ship start to turn, and then dip down and out of the frame.

Is it a less ambitious shot than the remastered version? Yes. The shot was probably created very simply, by tilting the camera so the ship falls out of the frame.

Is the image quality pretty cruddy? Yes, especially since multiple generations of copies were needed to create it.

Did they overuse this particular shot? Unquestionably.

But, because the shot is tighter on the ship, the focus is much more on the ship, and not the surrounding galaxy. Because of the necessary restraint used in framing the shot, I feel the original sequence is actually stronger dramatically. I’d love to see a high quality remastered version of this shot, with maybe a little variation between episodes.

You can see a similar situation comparing the old Superman TV show with the Superman movies. The TV show was very cheaply made; to show Superman flying, they’d start off with George Reeves hitting an offscreen trampoline, bouncing into the air, then cut to a medium shot of him in air, in front of a motion blurred rear projection background. By the time the movies with Chris Reeve were made (I haven’t seen the more recent ones), the producers were able to place Superman in a scene with buildings and other scenery more or less convincingly.

Unfortunately, showing a long shot of a tiny Superman flying around a bunch of buildings reduces his importance in the shot. He’s just a part of the shot. While the series definitely suffered from the jump cut from Superman taking off to Superman in mid air – with no shots taking the viewer from the ground to the air, it was obvious that the series was cheating– the inability of the television budget to show Superman over the city meant that the producers had to tighten the focus onto Superman himself. And for most flying scenes, where the point is simply to get Superman from Point A to Point B, it’s probably a better dramatic choice.

I think current day movies could stand to exercise similar restraint. I think they would be improved by tightening the focus on the characters. It’s great that they can do so much photorealistically – but any photographer can tell you a big part of making a picture is deciding what to focus on, what to get close to, and what to leave out.

 

First Paddle of the Season

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I took the kayak out for the first time of the season this afternoon. I’d put the roof racks on the car a week ago, but hadn’t actually loaded the boat onto the cradles, meaning I had to spend a fair amount of time centering them up yesterday. I also discovered how out of shape I am, and how heavy the kayak is.

I’d originally wanted to leave very early in the morning, but ended up going mid-day instead. I decided to go back to the landing in Auburndale, opposite the Newton Boathouse. I headed upstream, and stopped just short of the Route 16 dam; where there are shoals.

Once past the golf course footbridge, the current picked up noticeably; and going past the old railroad bridge, it felt like I was paddling as hard as I could just to stay in place. The payoff came when I turned around and the river grabbed the boat and I flew downriver.

Everywhere I looked, trees and shrubs were leafing out; their brand new foliage contrasting with the dead, leftover branches from the year before.

Near the Park Ave bridge, I saw this swan.

Swan

Swan

Swans can be aggressive and territorial, but this one didn’t seem too much bothered by me.

I’m still learning the ways of this boat. I must have accidentally shifted the pedal positions for the rudder pedals; with the rudder down, I kept recurving to the right. It’s nigh impossible to adjust them while in the boat, so I ended up flipping up the rudder and paddle steering. I’m getting a little better at getting in and out of the boat, but feel that I still have a ways to go.

I’m realizing that the Thule Glide and Set carrier I got to mount the kayak to the roof is not a great match for a Honda Element. The premise of the carrier is that the rear cradle is relatively slippery; you get the bow of the boat into the rear cradle, and then slide it forward. There are two problems using it with the Element: first, the car has factory mounting points, and the rear points are about three feet forward of the end of the car and secondly, it’s a tall car. It’s hard getting the boat up that high, and the kayak ends up resting on the roof until I can get onto the tailgate, lift the rear of the kayak up, and slide it forward. Last fall, I managed to put some fairly deep scratches into the roof paint trying to load the kayak; I’ve since picked up a cheap mat that I lay on top of the roof while loading and unloading. Fortunately, the Element is roomy enough inside that I can take along a small bench to use as a step stool to help me get the kayak on and off. I’m hoping to get faster with the loading and unloading process.