All blog posts in the year 2008

Gift ideas for transit riders

Don't know what to get your transit-riding friends for the holidays? Want to convince folks at work that riding transit can be cool? Get them some transit-related gifts!

OCTA has a lot of corporate-logo merchandise such as beanies, visors, water bottles, canteens, squishy stress buses, and even cute teddy bears. I've found most of this merchandise for cheaper than even general stores — the water bottle in my pic came to about around $4. You won't be able to buy these items online; you'll have to stop by OCTA's main headquarters at the OCTA Store, 550 S Main St, Orange, CA during weekdays. I'm sure they have plenty of items in stock.

Los Angeles Metro store has much more trendy apparel, Christmas ornaments, and large toy replicas of their buses. Metro sells posters with beautiful artwork that makes the thought of riding transit pleasant. However, their higher quality products translate to a higher price. The Los Angeles Times even featured the Metro Store a few years back: "Wearing a Los Angeles Metro T-shirt is 'completely counterculture, ... Because L.A. is car culture.'... Enthusiasts say part of what makes transit systems interesting in London, Berlin, Paris and New York – and why people want to buy merchandise from those places – is that they were marvels of their time when they were built in the late 19th and early 20th centuries."

New York MTA's Transit Museum Store sells cool station signs, toys, drinkware, and more. If you happen to visit New York, stop by their museum!

Happy shopping! read more→

OCTA proposes route, sets hearing for Harbor Blvd rapid bus

An update on OCTA's Bravo system on Harbor Blvd: OCTA is having a Rapid Bus public hearing set for Mon, Dec 8, 2008 9:00am at their headquarters. Their description (with my own emphases added)? "Route 543 will operate primarily on Harbor Blvd between the cities of Fullerton and Newport Beach on weekdays only between approximately 5 a.m. and 8 p.m. The purpose of the BRT [sic] service is to provide a rapid transit option to Orange County commuters and visitors as well as satisfying congestion mitigation commitments and regional air quality conformity requirements by the end of 2010 in the South Coast Air Basin. The BRT service will supplement the existing local service in order to maximize operational efficiency and passenger convenience. The BRT service is proposed to be implemented with the June 2009 service change effective June 14, 2009.

It's about time!

I picked up the route map and hearing notice off a 57 bus and scanned it. Take a look at the route.
 read more→

Microorganisms everywhere - a 48-hour experiment

We started microbiology labs this week and it's actually fun to see stuff grow. My friends — Ash, Jonny, Cliff, Jen, and Charitha — and I cracked open a bunch of agars and swabbed various things onto them and incubated them for 48 hours at 37ºC. This particular media has such a weird name: "Brain Heart Infusion agar (BHI) is a complete media used to cultivate a variety of fastidious organisms including bacteria and fungi." read more→

Designing social networking sites with Drupal

I just gave my last talk this Sunday morning at the DrupalCampLA conference. The talk brushed on elements that contribute to effective designs for social networking websites. It's heavily inspired by Joshua Porter's new book Designing for the Social Web, and includes insight on which Drupal modules help support user participation. I also cover my own personal Drupal case study, P=MD, a social networking site made for my friends; with that experience, I learned that recruiting and retaining users is a huge challenge and requires an additional marketing/publicity mindset (beyond design and development) and I learned that all these modules in Drupal provide amazing functionality but it takes additional effort to make them all work together into a coherent, usable website.

The presentation files are here in PDF form and includes bonus slides on (1) how to promote the sharing of with your website as a viral marketing tool, and (2) what modules can harbor the collective intelligence of your crowds (your site visitors). I can upload a Powerpoint or Keynote file if you e-mail me.

I had a wonderful time speaking and I loved meeting new friends in the audience. I hope I can help out again with DrupalCamp and other Drupal promotions in the future, because this was such a valuable experience for me. :) read more→

Get Metrolink updates on your phone

Kudos to Metrolink for testing out sending system status alerts using bleeding-edge SMS text messages. According to Metrolink's post on Twitter,

We've been sending ‘tweets’ to our ‘followers’ since mid-August 2008 as a pilot program and we plan to continue to test Twitter's effectiveness over the next few months but we need your feedback.  But first you have to subscribe.  Visit twitter.com to learn how to set up your free account.  Next, use your cell phone or computer and send the following message to 40404:  follow Metrolink.  You should get a confirmation that you are now following Metrolink.

What kind of messages does Metrolink send out? Take a look at their web feed at http://twitter.com/metrolink and you'll find nuggets such as "Antel. Vall. Line Train 222 is 28 min. late out of Lancaster". This is the kind of quality up-to-the-minute information commuters have been craving for when they've found out their train has been delayed for an ambiguous amount of time, and information that should be on every LED display at every station!

(By the way, this initiative is similar to the Caltrain twitter feed that Ravi Pina, a Tellme, set up, except his feed is user-powered and includes bits of train commentary like alerts for crotchety train conductors: http://twitter.com/caltrain ) read more→

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