Archive for the ‘rant’ Category

Nov
19
2010

November 19th, 2010 was a bad night on the 358 bus

UPDATE: I just learned the Seattle Times wrote a story and posted a video on this.

Here’s a letter I wrote to the King County Metro transit department regarding a nasty experience on the 358. Man, this was totally insane. So here’s the letter I sent them:
—-
Metro,

I would like to tell you about a miserable experience I had on the Metro bus this evening. But more importantly, I’d like to tell you how one of your employees seemed to lose control of a particular situation.

Just before 7:00PM, the Northbound 358 pulled up to 3rd and Virginia. The bus was absolutely packed, so I paused and checked my phone. There was another right behind it. Excited to be on an almost-empty bus, I held back and decided to wait. As the packed 358 was closing the doors and pulling away, I caught view the middle of a violent fist fight in the very back of the bus. It was between about 4 or 5 teenage girls, all unarmed, arguing and punching each other, screaming loudly. I watched one girl land a very hard punch and cut the other girl’s eye. She was bleeding pretty badly. Just before the bus pulled away, a man jumped out the door in a hurry. He told me he was exiting the bus because those girls were fighting and it bothered him. He said the driver didn’t seem to know it was happening and the fight had been going on for a few stops.

We spoke about the soon-to-arrive bus just behind this one and both agreed it was the right choice to try and get on that coach. Not more than 4 minutes later, the bus pulls up and we board. The bus is almost empty and everything seems normal. Except the driver seemed to be a new hire because another more experienced metro driver in uniform was sitting in the seat close to the driver instructing the new driver how to do his job. I looked up at the 4-digit coach number. I was on coach #2355, route 358 Northbound now. It was approximately 7:00PM.

We pulled away from 3rd and Virginia and when we stopped at 3rd and bell, the 358 bus in front of us was emptying completely and all the frustrated riders were trying to escape these mad girls. The large group of riders flooded the bus I was on, filling it completely. This was not ideal for me, but it got worse very quickly. A large subset of the fighting girls were the last to board! They all sat in the front of the bus near me, the driver, and the trainer driver. A few passengers immediately started yelling at the girls to leave.

The bus pulled in to the stop at Denny avenue and one of the girls decided to try and exit the bus. Then she turned around and argued with the girls on the bus and promptly turned around and boarded again. She repeated this quickly a few times, blocking the doorway and all the riders attempting to board. Frustrated by this, the trainer (not the driver, his trainer/mentor) stood up and told her to make up her mind and quit blocking the door. She scoffed at him and he grabbed her by the shoulders, shaking her violently and forcing her out onto the sidewalk. He quarreled with her for a few seconds and boarded the bus. She followed him, yelling and screaming. He turned around and used his foot to push her chest and get her out the door. By this time, all the other riders were starting to become very uneasy and were trying to get off the bus to escape the mayhem. She somehow managed to get back in the door before it closed! The bus pulled away, leaving the trainer eye-to-eye with this insanely irate teenage girl and all her screaming friends. They teamed up, lashing out on the trainer with typical disgusting language and insults. The trainer just shook his head and tried to ignore them. This was EXTREMELY annoying to myself and most of the other passengers. It was disturbing to know he had lowered himself to the level of these bickering, inconsiderate teenagers and used violence to try and get the point across.

The bus continued until 85th street, where the (still yelling) girls left the bus. They were screaming about charging the trainer with assault. Everyone on the bus let out a collective sigh of relief.

Here’s what I would like to let you know. The way that trainer conducted himself was by no means what I would have expected from a Metro employee, let alone a responsible adult. He snapped and resorted to a violent conflict that could have been avoided by keeping those girls off the bus as soon as possible. I hope the new driver whom he was mentoring can learn the right lesson from that situation. I hope he can understand that it is completely unacceptable to escalate a situation like that.

Posted in life, rant | Comments Off

Apr
14
2009

If you think The Pirate Bay is a problem, you’re wrong.

Over the last few years, a few large torrent sites have been dragged through the mud.  The Pirate Bay is one of them, and people seem to think that site is a problem. You’re so wrong, it makes me laugh my ass off. I’d like to prove a point.

Reality

Do you even realize that GOOGLE can be used as a search engine to find copyrighted (everything)?? I can prove it. Enter this into a google search and see what you get.

-inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:”index of” +”last modified” +”parent directory” +description +size +(m4a|mp3) “radiohead”

Wow! funny thing! When I enter that, I get some guy’s public-facing webserver just sitting there with the new album. He could take it down tonight and I’d still have 934,000 other results. I’ll even post the link in case the google borg quits indexing it. If he complains I’ll take this off, but for now he’s #1 to the friggin world and needs to take it down.

http://www.looptvandfilm.com/blog/Radiohead%20-%20In%20Rainbows/

Well shit, if Google is so powerful that they allow me to search this specifically, why the hell isn’t google on trial too? Furthermore, you can make life even easier if you have a mac or linux. Use wget to do the work! Open a terminal and…

wget -r -l1 -np -A.mp3 -N -erobots=off http://www.looptvandfilm.com/blog/Radiohead%20-%20In%20Rainbows/

and there you go. You now have the new album on your hard drive, ready to do whatever the hell you want with it. Google, you are such scumbags! ick!

Wait a sec. I just shot the messenger. OH YEAH. What about the guy who leaves his webserver open to the world, let alone the Google web spiders? He’s committing an act of passive terrorism and what are we going to do about it? Who knows, but it happens. Get over it.

Kill one – another just pops up

It’s the hydra concept. If you cut off one of its heads, two more grow back. See also: the Streisand effect. To add to this, trackers can be fired up and run by any old plain user. Then we have the concept of the content in said tracker -which could be legal or not. It takes way more digging than it’s worth and that is a fact.

Perception – you are all wrong.

The problem here is that TPB are using a completely practical and efficient protocol to move large amounts of data – bittorrent. It’s brilliant. I use this frequently for completely legal purposes. One example would be downloading a linux distribution. I do this all the time and never will I download from a single source again when I know I can use bittorrent to download it instead.  It’s fast and efficient – both on my end and the hosting systems’ ends.

The reason the pirate bay is getting the shaft is because they stuck their head out. They are also real pricks when dealing with anyone trying to shut them down. It’s actually real cheap entertainment to read their responses, but it gets them nowhere. In fact, they get shitlisted even more. It amplifies the situation and now here we are – waiting for a verdict in a Swedish court.

While it’s not agreeable that you treat people like that, it’s bad from both sides. The recording industry is dying a slow death due to one very important fact – information wants to be free. Once one copy gets out, it’s piss in a pool. You can’t eliminate (as they think) you can only mitigate the damage. They need to get real smart and just quit signing artists or start getting people to buy tangible goods or attend live shows.

The things people worry about. Is it a surprise? I think not.

Posted in editorial, rant | Comments Off

Apr
06
2009

My big rant about planning alpine climbs and avalanche danger

This trip report bleeds from the normal banter and into a rant. As bad as it sounds, I’m trying to be constructive with my criticism.

Just to put it in perspective, on an outing that normally gets a location assignment with no issues, it boiled down to a flip of a coin in the parking lot of the Northgate Park and Ride at 6:00 AM on the morning we were leaving!

What went wrong:

  • An avalanche expert spoke in class the earlier that week and proceeded to scare the shit out of all the students.
  • I gave the students the ability to choose the locations for plan A as well as plan B.
  • I asked everyone to pay close attention to the weather data for the area and base their decision on it. Everybody read the NWAC report and went solely off that.
  • Because nobody could make a decision, we resorted to flipping a coin at 6am Saturday to find a location.
  • I failed miserably to re-apply sunblock and now look like a lobster.
  • I put my bindings on backwards TWICE.
  • We opted to make this a ski touring outing, which compromised members’ ability to realize the importance of *just covering the class material*

What went right:

  • The weather was BEAUTIFUL.
  • The snow cave was plush
  • The students are competent mountaineers on their way to becoming good at what they do.
  • The local avalanche danger was much lower than anticipated.
  • The beer was cold when we got back to the lot.

Planning – why you shouldn’t wait until the last minute

None of us are as dumb as all of us.

-from a demotivators poster

I’ve worked in groups all my life. The one thing I know is that the size of a group is inversely proportional to the group’s ability to make quick and informed decisions. We made a decision on Artist Point outside Mt. Baker Ski Area as plan A and plan B was up in the air. Members were told to disqualify plan A on factors such as avalanche danger and weather.  The weather was beautiful everywhere, so that didn’t discredit any one location. The relative avalanche danger was estimated to be similar all the way down the cascade crest. It turns out that there were actually other factors group members were basing their decisions on including, proximity to Seattle, familiarity, and skiability of terrain. This is fine, but it wasn’t mentioned up-front, hence we have a 49-thread email on the matter. All we had to do was make these concerns prioritized and known up-front.

There is a mutually exclusive relationship between those who define their own work and those who have their work defined by someone else. Falling halfway between is a recipe for disaster, and it is sprinkled all over the human decision-making element of the climbing world.  This is what kills people on alpine climbs.  They fuck up the planning and wander out into the wild with unsound minds and no backup strategies.  We observed that here, where no single person took the lead and challenged assertions. Instead, everyone threw out a suggestion (often with little or no explanation) and argued over it. This is not only bad style, but bad leadership on (I believe) my part for not just stepping up and forcing people to just trust me. That’s hard though, when you don’t know me and I understand that.

It is not only bad style, it is annoying to not know the location you will be climbing! We have to buy maps. We have to watch the weather. We have to tell our girlfriend where we will be going. If you want to make a decision in the parking lot on the morning of the event, please realize you are throwing most of your planning time and money out the window. In my book, that isn’t acceptable solely based on these facts.

relative avalanche danger – qualify your assertions!

I think my biggest problem is getting people to qualify their assertions. This tendency manifested itself in this outing. We had a 49-page email thread that ultimately went nowhere. Here are some things I heard.

we just need to watch the avvy conditions

OK. Yeah we need to watch the avalanche conditions. What do you mean? Checking NWAC, trip reports, personal experience, direct on-site observation, or all of the above? What is your specific concern?

There’s no way I’m getting on a slope this weekend.

“a slope?” Quantify that. Do you mean traveling on one or below it? What angle or range of angles is most suspect?

It’s going to be unsafe on open slopes everywhere.

Everywhere? Really? That is an all-inclusive word and its connotations lead one to believe that there is *no alternative*, which isn’t always true. What other places might it be unsafe and why?

Let’s build a pit to see if it’s dangerous or not.

It’s a sliding scale; There is no “completely safe” or “dangerous” condition. It’s a mixed bag and it’s not whether it’s dangerous or not. It’s how bad it could possibly be and the relevance to your planned use of that terrain. I know what you meant, but the concept of a sliding scale and the amount of uncertainty need to be taken into consideration.

If you can qualify your assertions and convince me, I’ll think hard about changing my mind. Otherwise, it’s always an option *not* to climb with the people you find dangerous.

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Posted in climbing, rant | 3 Comments »